The motive cannot be, as Matthew says, he wants money. Well he was in charge of the money ... Thirty pieces of silver – big deal! Professor James Charlesworth
Probably most Jews even those in Galilee would have understood that if you disrupt the Temple at Passover you are in for serious trouble. Professor Byron R McCane, Wofford College
There are some people in the early movement saying, Wait a minute – if you say Jesus died for your sins and God wouldn’t forgive you without that, is God demanding human sacrifice? What kind of God is this? Professor Elaine Pagels, Princeton University
The number of parallels between the Cyclop’s tale and the tale of the demon-possessed man are many and they are unique as well as sequential. Excavating the Empty Tomb
Mark 13:30: I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. ibid.
The Gospels have been heavily embellished and edited over time. ibid.
Verses 9-20 of chapter 16 [Mark] were a later addition to the story. ibid.
Luke 22: 43-44 was never part of the original Gospel … Inserted later: Luke 24:12 and Luke 24:51. ibid.
I John 5:7 [For there are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, The Word, And the Holy Ghost: and these three are one] was inserted into that epistle at a later time ... John 5:4 was never part of the Gospel of John. ibid.
Clear embellishment and later re-modelling. Even entire scenes and chapters. ibid.
Hundreds of years of copying. ibid.
The practice of tomb veneration is ubiquitous. ibid.
There was never a Jesus of Nazareth at all. As I’ve intimated thus far in this series, the historical Jesus did not exist until Mark brought him down to Earth in his Homeric allegory written sometime shortly after the destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 C.E. and only after the Gospel story gained wide circulation in the 2nd century did the absences ... become problematic for the Church fathers. ibid.
The ubiquitous motif of the hero. ibid.
The Ascension doesn’t appear in the original form of the Gospels. Jesus was a Buddhist Monk? BBC 2012
The Bible’s chapter divisions were created in the early 1200s. The Forbidden Book: History of the Bible
Jerome: In 382 he was commissioned to translate the Bible from the Greek into Latin: it became known as the Latin Vulgate. ibid.
The Church in Rome allowed only one language and that language was Latin. ibid.
The Pope was elevated to God’s sole agent to lead the Church. ibid.
The Christian Bible is a symbolic book, not a literal one. The one Christians know as Jesus was actually a symbol for the sun. Ancient sun worshippers believed the sun died at the end of the winter solstice and then three days later it would be reborn at the start of its cycle – December 25. David Icke
Christianity originated in devout Judaism, and yet for Jews, Christianity has all things considered a calamity. Howard Jacobson, Christianity: A History: Jesus the Jew, Channel 4 2009
A Rockefeller-endowed survey, chaired by Harvard’s distinguished philosopher Professor W E Hocking, concluded that Christianity is merely the highest of the High Religions, a stage in the universal quest for ‘righteousness’, a precious component in the religion of the future that will represent the New Testament of every existing Faith and serve the soul of a coming common world culture. Edward Duff, World Council of Churches
I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns, and I could vide myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in the height of Roman fashion. I didn’t so much like the latter part of the Book, which is more like all preachy-talking than fighting and the old in-old. I liked the parts where these old yahoodies tolchock each other and then drink their Hebrew vino, and getting onto the bed with their wives’ handmaidens. That kept me going. A Clockwork Orange 1971 starring Malcolm McDowell & Patrick Magee & Michael Bates & Warren Clarke & John Clive & Adrienne Corri & Carl Duering & Paul Farrell & Clive Francis & Michael Gover et al, director Stanley Kubrick, Alex’s prison vision of Bible
William Tyndale, an ordained priest, was the first to take on the dangerous task of translating, publishing and printing an English version of the New Testament. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Burning Convictions, BBC 2000
The quest to find ancient scriptures in support of the largest religion in the world – Christianity. At stake – the faith of millions and the Bible at its heart ... I'm following in the footsteps of the Bible hunters. Bible Hunters I, BBC 2014
Scholars had the audacity to challenge the very word of God. ibid.
There are 35,000 edits in the Codex Sinaiticus. ibid.
For almost two thousand years they [Gospels] had the monopoly on the story of Jesus. Until the discovery of the New Sayings of Jesus in 1897. In Europe, the introduction of a new Biblical text caused a storm. Bible Hunters II
Curzon’s cache of manuscripts included a surprise: a Christian text no-one had seen before: the Acts of Peter & Paul. ibid.
The text was attributed to the Disciple Bartholomew but was not included in the Bible. ibid.
The Gnostics were increasingly under pressure: their intellectual take on Christianity didn't tally with the official Church doctrine. ibid.
It was the Orthodoxes who would shape the future of Christianity. ibid.
New Gospels, lost Gospels, emerge from numerous archaeological digs. The Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. And even the Gospel of Judas ... The Gospel of Peter claims to reveal the facts behind the resurrection of Jesus. Biblical Mysteries Explained: Lost Gospels, 2009
Those who would argue for the infallibility or the inerrancy of scripture logically should also claim the same infallibility for the churches in the fourth and fifth centuries, whose decisions and historical circumstances left us with our present canon. This is apparently what would be required if we were to only acknowledge the twenty-seven NT books that were set forth by the church in that context. Was the church in the Nicene and post-Nicene eras infallible in its decisions or not? [Formation of Christian Biblical Canon] Lee M McDonald
The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam’s sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn’t exist. Richard Dawkins
Jesus’ family values, it has to be admitted, were not such as one might wish to focus on. He was short, to the point of brusqueness, with his own mother, and he encouraged his disciples to abandon their families to follow him. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion p250
New Testament theology adds a new injustice, topped off by a new sadomasochism whose viciousness even the Old Testament barely exceeds. It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck. ibid. p251
What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? ibid. p251
The simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with. H L Mencken, Treatise on the Gods
Their multiple authors – none of whom published anything until may decades after the Crucifixion – cannot agree on anything of importance. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p111
The scribes cannot even agree on the mythical elements: they disagree wildly about the Sermon on the Mount, the anointing of Jesus, the treachery of Judas, and Peter’s haunting ‘denial’. Most astonishingly, they cannot converge on a common account of the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. ibid. p112
The Christian bible is full of star-predictions (notably the one over Bethlehem) and witch doctors and sorcerers. ibid. p117
If the New Testament is supposed to vindicate Moses, why are the gruesome laws of the Pentateuch to be undermined? ibid. p121
Saint or sinner? To some Mary Magdalene is a repentant prostitute but to others she is Jesus’ closest disciple. Riddles of the Bible s1e12: The Real Mary Magdalene, National Geographic 2012
Her biography is only twenty words long. ibid.
The real puzzle about Mary is why she was following Jesus in the first place. ibid.