The Templar Salvation Quotes

“But the winners chose what we should believe in. They chose which writings were sacred and which ones were ‘heretical.”
― Raymond Khoury, The Templar Salvation

“It was only with Christianity that the idea of what a person believed in started to matter, and matter a lot, because his or her eternal life suddenly depended on it.”
― Raymond Khoury, The Templar Salvation

“together a few hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion. But we know different. We know for a fact that early Christianity was very diverse in its beliefs and in its writings. It was made up of scattered communities of people who had competing interpretations of what Jesus was and what he preached and what he did, communities that based their faiths on very different ideas. And before too long, they started squabbling about whose version was right. Ultimately, one of these groups won by gaining more converts than the others. And the winners decided which of these early writings were the ones their converts should follow, they changed them to fit the story they settled on, and they branded all the others blasphemous and heretical and suppressed them. They buried the competition, along with their beliefs and practices, and then they rewrote the history of the whole struggle. My point is, they decided what would be considered genuine, sacred scripture, and what wouldn’t. And they did a great job. There’s hardly anything left of the texts they didn’t like. The only reason we know they even existed is that they’re occasionally mentioned by early church writers, and the handful of copies we have of any of these competing versions are down to the occasional fluke, like the discovery of that stash of gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi back in the 1940s.”
― Raymond Khoury, The Templar Salvation

“There are two billion Christians out there, Sean, and a lot of them think of the Bible as God’s words. His actual words. They think the twenty-seven texts that make up the New Testament were handed down to us by God himself, to help us lead better lives and achieve eternal salvation. They don’t realize that nothing could be farther from the truth and that what we call the Bible was actually”
― Raymond Khoury, The Templar Salvation

“This battle, this war, between us . . . this ‘clash of civilizations,’ as your people like to call it. It’s a long-term fight. It’s not about who’s got the biggest gun. It’s not about landing one big killer punch. It’s about attrition. It’s about killing the body slowly, with lots of well-placed jabs. It’s about relentlessly chipping away at the soul of your enemy with every opportunity you get.”
― Raymond Khoury, The Templar Salvation