"Despite the enormous investment in biblical studies in our society, there is actually very little public knowledge about the Bible." Prologue, p. 3

"That Christianity emerged just when it did, that it drew now upon some Jewish roots, now upon Greek ideas, and that it eventually found itself infatuated with the thought of Roman power, are all crucial for the story about to be told. " Chapter 1, p. 41

"The common strategy was to attribute the wisdom they had achieved to Jesus, putting it in the form of instruction by him by revising his teachings to match the school of thought they were developing. They did this just as any Hellenistic school of philosophy would have done." Chapter 2, p. 70

"Beginning somewhere in northern Syria, probably in the city of Antioch, and spreading through Asia Minor into Greece, the Jesus movement underwent a change of historic consequence. It was a change that...