Interview with Bart Ehrman, Jesus is just alright with him:
Mark and Luke had radically different attitudes toward Jesus’ death: Mark saw him as in doubt and despair on the way to the cross, while Luke saw him as calm. Mark and Paul saw Jesus’ death as offering an atonement for sin, while Luke did not. Matthew believed that Jesus’ followers had to keep the Jewish law to enter the kingdom of Heaven, a view categorically rejected by Paul….
[M]any of the books in the New Testament were not even written by their putative authors: only eight of its 27 books are almost certain to have been written by the people whose names are attached to them. [Ehrman] writes that scholars have tended to avoid the word “forged” because of its negative connotations, but argues convincingly that much of the Bible is, in fact, forged….
As Ehrman notes, there were many other Gospels floating around in the days of the early Christians, many of which claimed to be written by apostles, and there’s no historical reason to believe that some of these non-canonical gospels were any less worthy of being part of the Bible than the books that made it in….
Finally, and most devastatingly, Ehrman points out that “some of the most important Christian doctrines, such as that of a suffering Messiah, the divinity of Christ, the trinity and the existence of heaven and hell,” were not held by Jesus himself and were not contemporaneous with him. They developed later, “as the Church grew and came to be transformed into a new religion rather than a sect of Judaism.” The doctrine of the trinity only appears once in the New Testament, and the doctrine that Jesus is equal but not identical to God is found in none of the four Gospels….
Only in one Gospel, John, does Christ call himself divine, but John’s theology is radically different from that in the other three Gospels. To understand Jesus’ attitude toward himself, Ehrman argues, we must remember who he was: a radical millenarian Jew. Like other Jewish prophets in the Palestine of his day, Jesus thought that a cosmic judge, the Son of Man, was coming soon to earth. But he did not regard himself as the Son of Man….
Jesus was not a Christian at all, but a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. It was only with his followers that “Christianity” came into existence. Ironically, Jesus preached a profoundly Jewish religion: It was the later Christians (including John and Paul) who turned Christianity into the virulently anti-Semitic religion it was to become….
It’s almost a peculiarly American version of Christianity that says that to be a Christian you have to believe in the Bible. It’s actually a modern invention, located in America and wherever American missionaries have gone out. But historically, Christianity has never been about belief in the Bible….
I don’t think Christianity or monotheistic religions are the source of all evil in the world. [Of course, no atheist, even the ones who say that "religion ruins everything" it touches, has ever claimed that religion was the source of all evil in the world—straw man, there.] I think the problem is people just do wretched things. And they’re going to do wretched things whether they’ve got a religious justification for it or some other justification for it.