Ultimately, the figure of Jesus Christ was at the heart of this obsession.  More generally, it was the birth of Christianity and the fall of the ancient world.  I wanted to know desperately what happened in the first century, and why people in general never talked about it." (p. 306)

"All these skeptics insisted that the Gospels were late documents, that the prophecies in them had been written after the Fall of Jerusalem.  But the more I read about the Fall of Jerusalem, the more I couldn't understand this.

The Fall of Jerusalem was horrific, and involved an enormous and cataclysmic war, a war that went on and on for years in Palestine, followed by other revolts and persecutions, and punitive laws.  As I read about this in the pages of S.G.F. Brandon, and in Josephus, I found myself amazed by the details of this appalling disaster in which the greatest Temple of the ancient world was forever destroyed.

I had never truly confronted these events before, never tried to comprehend them.  And now I found it absolutely impossible that the Gospel writers could not have included the Fall of the Temple in their work had they written after it as critics insist.

It simply didn't and doesn't make sense." (p. 315)

"Before I leave this question of the Jewish War and the Fall of the Temple, let me make this suggestion.  When Jewish and Christian scholars begin to take this war seriously, when they begin to really study what happened during the terrible years of the siege of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the revolts that continued in Palestine right up through Bar Kokhba, when they focus upon the persecution of the Christians in Palestine by the Jews; upon the civil war in Rome in the 60s which Kenneth L. Gentry so well describes in his work Before Jerusalem Fell; as well as the persecutions of the Jews in the Diasporia during this period -- in sum, when all of this dark era is brought into the light of examination -- Bible studies will change. Right now, scholars neglect or ignore the realities of this period. To some it seems a two-thousand-year-old embarrassment and I'm not sure I understand why.

But I am convinced that the key to understanding the Gospels is that they were written before all this ever happened." (p. 316)

"The scholar who has given me perhaps some of my most important insights and who continues to do so through his enormous output is N.T. Wright." (p. 318)

(On Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' apocalyptic Left Behind series)
"I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision."  (MSNBC)

John J. Reilly
"Although the preterists have embraced Ms. Rice as one of their own, this does not necessarily mean that she shares their views about eschatology. Her interest in the area seems confined to the dating and credibility of the Gospels. Still, her work may succeed in doing what I would not have thought possible: providing preterism with a mass audience." (Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt Review)