Quotes from Bart D. Ehrman

declaring himself to be divine.

But is he the kind of Christian that Jesus would recognize?

Augustus was deified and called "divine

The political benefactors are considered 'religious' heroes. They have statues and a place in the temple, and sacrifices are made in their honor. In a very real sense they are the 'saviors' and so are treated as such.

It's like what some Episcopalians say about themselves today: get four in a room and you'll find five opinions.

When his body was cremated

Conversion was not a widely known phenomenon in antiquity. Pagan religions had almost nothing like it. They were polytheistic, and anyone who decided, as a pagan, to worship a new or different god was never required to relinquish any former gods or their previous patterns of worship. Pagan religions were additive, not restrictive.

And that's one reason why you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.

the manuscripts back immediately and return the worthless checks.

Religion was all about the proper practices:

If a story is found in several of these independent traditions, then it is far more likely that this story goes back to the ultimate source of the tradition, the life of Jesus itself. This is called the criterion of independent attestation.

Research on conversion has demonstrated that, long after such an experience, a convert tends to confuse what actually happened in light of everything that occurs in its aftermath. That is to say, years later, the accounts people tell, to both themselves and others, have been slanted by all they have learned, thought, and experienced in the interim.

people—wondered why such miracles no longer happened. Augustine had a witty response: "I might, indeed, reply that miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order that it might believe. And whoever now-a-days demands to see prodigies that he may believe, is himself a great prodigy, because he does not believe, though the whole world does.

there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Often their false teachings are said to be matched by their promiscuous lives.

Ancient people, whether pagans, Jews, or Christians, did not neatly differentiate between the religious and the political. They would have had a hard time understanding the difference.

Later orthodox theologians would have found this view completely inadequate. In stressing that the Father was "greater" than the Son, Tertullian articulated a view that would later be deemed a heresy. Theology, in these early years of the formation of Christian doctrine, could not stand still. It progressed and got more complicated, sophisticated, and refined as time went on.

the Sadducees, even though in Jesus's day they were the real power players in Judea.

the worship that is due only to the gods.

The expectation that the End Is Near has never done anyone much good, except perhaps the prophecy authors who have made fame and fortune writing about it.

Because of the open nature of polytheism, there was virtually no such thing as "conversion." Anyone who chose to begin worshiping a new god was welcome to do so and was not required or expected to leave behind any previous practices of worship or make an exclusive commitment to this one deity.

Price says this figure provides compelling evidence of his view. In his words, "I find the possible parallel to the case of Hong Xiuquan to be, almost by itself, proof that James' being the Lord's brother need not prove a recent historical Jesus." That is, since Hong Xiuquan was not really Jesus's brother, the same could be true of James.

There was a scant role for ethics in the paganism. It is not that ancient people were less ethical than people today; it is that ethics had little to do with religion. If it had a "location" in ancient life, it was in philosophy.

Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in the face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2, 27)