Quotes About Ancient

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

In one of my earlier books, Misquoting Jesus, I discuss the fact that we do not have the original copy of Luke, or Mark, or Paul's writings, or any of the early Christian texts that make up the New Testament.

books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world.

We knew about Gnostic forgeries for a long time before we actually had any of them.

most ancient people did not see the divine and earthly realms this way.

The Apology of Socrates was Plato's account of the legal defense that Socrates made at his trial in Athens. The speech itself is one of the great classics of ancient literature. They executed him anyway.

And so Christianity was the only evangelistic religion that we know of in antiquity, and, along with Judaism, it was also the only one that was exclusive. That combination of evangelism and exclusion proved to be decisive

Where do any of the ancient sources speak of a divine man who was crucified as an atonement for sin? So far as I know, there are no parallels to this central Christian claim.

I'm not a Coptologist. Coptic is one of those languages that I taught myself in my spare time over the years, mainly because I wanted to be able to read ancient Coptic translations of the New Testament and some of the Gnostic Gospels discovered in the twentieth century.

some of their texts reappeared by sheer serendipity in modern times.

One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text.

ancient religions were almost never interested in "true beliefs.

Augustus was deified and called "divine

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.

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 scholars have argued that ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods' anger. But this divine anger was aroused almost always because of neglect. he gods—or at least one ofthem—had not been respected and worshiped properly or sufficiently. That was the main logic behind Roman persecution of the Christians. Because this group of miscreants refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay.

Jewish texts known as the Sibylline Oracles.

During the first century after Jesus' death, his followers interpreted his cosmic role—his posthumous descent into the Underworld, his ascent to heaven, and his invisible reign as universal king—in terms that echoed some ancient traditions about Greco-Roman gods and heroes.

It has been said that according to ancient designations, as well as its possession of the Indus River, Pakistan has a better claim to be called "India" than its neighbor.)

This is an upper tooth. As you can see, the tooth has a chevron, or scar, above the root, identifying it as a Megalodon.

Encompassing sixty million square miles, the Pacific Ocean is the largest and oldest body of water on our planet, and with an average depth of fourteen thousand feet, it is also the deepest, possessing some of the most biologically diverse creatures ever to inhabit the Earth. The Pacific is all that remains of the Panthalassa, an ancient

It's a palindrome. Sator. Arepo. Tenet. Opera. Rotas.

What a difference from words on a page, or images on a video screen. Surrounding him was one of the oldest fortresses in England, where men had died defending the walls, and something was happening.

Ancient history is always colliding with the present in the most literal sense: our genes, our language, our culture all stamp the present moment with the imprint of the distant past.