Quotes from Bart D. Ehrman

the New Testament is arranged not according to when the books were written but according to genre, with the Gospels first, then the book of Acts, then the letters (of Paul and others), and then the book of Revelation.

these sources were not intending to present what we think of as historically accurate information; that's a modern imposition on these Gospels that they can't bear.

The text goes on to explain that "now the giants who are born from the union of the spirits and the flesh shall be called evil spirits upon the earth. . . . Evil spirits have come out of their bodies" (15.8–9). This appears to be an explanation of where the beings who were later called demons came from. And so here we have a view even closer to that found

Thus, for Reimarus, the disciples started the Christian religion.

John's is the only Gospel in which Jesus is explicitly identified as divine. To be sure, he is called the Son of God in all the Gospels. But to ancient Jews, being the "son of God" did not make a person God; it made the person a human being in a close relationship with God, one through whom God does his will on earth.

Thus the Son who was not, but existed at the paternal will, Is only begotten God, and he is distinct from everything else.

collective memory, is essentially a reconstruction of the past that adapts the image of historical facts to the beliefs and spiritual needs of the present.

Christian followers of Jesus who knew about Apollonius maintained that he was a charlatan and a fraud; in response, the pagan followers of Apollonius asserted that Jesus was the charlatan and fraud. Both groups could point to the authoritative written accounts of their leader's life to score their debating points.

Paul, and all the other authors of the New Testament, wrote in Greek).

The Father alone has existed forever. The Son was begotten by God before the world was created. But this means that he "is neither eternal nor coeternal . . . with the Father." God is above, beyond, and greater than all things, including Christ.

The soul is the "real" person; the body is a prison.

If you get fired from your job, that's outside your control, so you shouldn't be personally invested in your job.

Do they still exist?

study, Alan Segal, a scholar of ancient Judaism, argues that early rabbis were particularly concerned about a notion, which was evidently widespread in parts of Judaism, that along with God in heaven there was a second power on the divine throne. Following these Jewish sources, Segal refers to these two—God and the other—as the "two powers in heaven."14 The Son of Man figure whom

how Jesus came to be considered God. The short answer is that it all had to do with his followers' belief that he had been raised from the dead.

The very first surviving account of Jesus's life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death. That's obviously a lot of time.

For people in power to think that mutual self-destruction has been foreordained in holy writ is not, obviously, a comforting thought.

In it, the man Jesus is showered with divine favors beyond anyone's wildest dreams, honored by God to an unbelievable extent, elevated to a divine status on a level with God himself, sitting at his right hand.

cycle of reincarnations

like all groups of Christians at all times and in all places, understood themselves to be the fortunate heirs of the truth, handed down to them by their faithful predecessors, who received their understandings about God, Christ, the world, and our place in it from people who should know—ultimately from the apostles of Jesus, and through them from Jesus himself, the one sent by God.

a book called the Golden Legend, compiled by the Dominican monk Jacobus of Voragine in 1265. Prior to the Protestant Reformation, this was the most widely read book in all of Christendom

For ancient people, male and female were not two kinds of human; they were two degrees of human.

The exaltation (of Jesus by crucifixion) is not to a higher state than the one he previously possessed, as in Paul. For John, he was already both 'God' and 'with God' in his preincarnate state as a divine being.

When he comes to learn that he is in fact not related to the queen, and so is not the royal heir