Top 3 Quotes & Sayings by Paul L. Maier

Who set Rome on fire? The man we must admire. For killing his wife, and taking the life of mother and brother and so many others, while plucking his damnable lyre.

If all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according to the canons of historical research, to conclude that the sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, in which Jesus was buried, was actually empty on the morning of the first Easter. And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology that would disprove this statement.

If there were even one spark of evidence from antiquity that Jesus even may have gotten married, then as a historian, I would have to weigh this evidence against the total absence of such information in either Scripture or the early church traditions. But there is no such spark-not a scintilla of evidence-anywhere in historical sources. Even where one might expect to find such claims in the bizarre, second-century, apocryphal gospels...there is no reference that Jesus ever got married.