Gospel Truth Quotes

“Does he who desires the honorable also desire the good?” The older man at the center of the group poses the question. “Certainly,” answers the self-confident young man who initiated the discussion by wondering aloud about the nature of virtue. “Then are there some who desire evil and others who desire good?” “Yes.” The older man looks surprised. “Do you really imagine, Meno, that a man knows evil to be evil and desires it anyway?” “Certainly, I do.” “And does he think that evil will do good to him who possesses it, or does he know it will do him harm?” The young man frowns; he is beginning to lose some of his self-assurance. “There are some who think that evil will do them good, and others who know that it will do them harm,” he replies. “Well, and do those who desire evil and think that evil is hurtful to the possessor know that they will be hurt by it?” The young man is scratching his head now. “They must know it,” he answers. “And does anyone desire to be miserable?” “I should say not.” “But if there is no one who desires to be miserable, there is no one who desires evil, for what is misery but the desire and possession of evil?” The young man is by now tied in knots, undone by the wizardry of his elder. The others in the group are beaming, sighing, relaxing with sheer intellectual pleasure.”
― Russell Shorto, Gospel Truth: On the Trail of the Historical Jesus

“Another, less flamboyant example of this tendency was Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University. One of the great powerhouses of biblical criticism in the second half of the twentieth century and a mentor to many of today’s top scholars, Dr. Smith was rummaging in the library of Mar Saba Monastery in Israel in 1958 when he found an eighteenth-century scrap of paper containing what purported to be a copy of a “secret” version of the Gospel of Mark. Around the scant twenty lines of text, which feature a certain naked youth whom Jesus raises from the dead and who then “remained with [Jesus] that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God,”1 Smith wove an elaborate theory: that Jesus’ free-love society amounted to a homosexual ecstasy cult. This was too outrageous even to become scandalous, and many scholars dismissed the idea outright, but Smith clung to it and continued to develop it until his death in 1990.”
― Russell Shorto, Gospel Truth: On the Trail of the Historical Jesus

“uncomfortably modern sound. With only a little nudging,”
― Russell Shorto, Gospel Truth: On the Trail of the Historical Jesus