The content of chapter 2 in Ehrman is much more useful for understanding what the Apostle Paul encountered in his attempts to spread the Christian message in a pagan world than anything that occurs in the life of Jesus. Paul's mission was to take the message of Jesus to the pagan world. Jesus lived a rather provincial life in Palestine, remaining among people who spoke Aramaic (the common spoken dialect of Hebrew in Palestine).
Granted there were Greek cities in Palestine at the time of Jesus, whose inhabitants would be a combination of pagans and Greek speaking Jews. Some New Testament scholars like to speculate that Jesus would have spent time in these cities, especially since one of them, Sepphoris, was close to Nazareth. I find this rather unlikely since all the towns that are mentioned in the Gospels in connection with Jesus would have had only Aramaic as the local language (including Jerusalem).
Ehrman does provide a good sketch of Greco-Roman religiosity (pages 17-25). Though the information here is much more useful in understanding what is going on in Acts and 1 Corinthians than anything that happens in the Gospels. One point that cannot be over-emphasized is what Ehrman says about Hellenization in Box 2.2 (page 16). The word might seem funny, but that is because we call the place Greece, following the example of the Latin speaking Romans. In Greece itself, in the Greek language their country is call "Hellas". So that's why scholars came up with the term Hellenization to explain the process of how the Mediterranean world became dominated by Greek language, (and to a lesser degree) by Greek culture and customs in the 300 years after the death of Alexander the Great.
This might be hard for us to grasp today, because we look at the Mediterranean world post Muhammad, in which the Greek speaking Christian cultures of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor and North Africa were not prepared militarily to resist the rapid advance of Islam. One hundred years after the death of the prophet Muhammad, Islam had advanced across northern Africa, through Spain and into southern France, while also threatening Byzantine Constantinople, all by 750 CE, using the proven evangelizing technique of "convert or die." But prior to the spread of Islam, from the time of Alexander the dominant language around the Mediterranean world was Greek, which was especially the language of international commerce from even the time before Alexander because of the dominance of Greek merchant ships on the Mediterranean Sea.
Thus the Greek language dominated in the east until the arrival of Islam. Even in Jerusalem, the language of the Christian liturgy (i.e. worship services) changed from Aramaic to Greek Greek became the language of the liturgy (worship) in western Europe because the first converts to Christianity were among Greek speaking Jews (especially in Rome). So the Greek language still held sway in worship in the early centuries of Christianity in Rome, even when the majority of converts would be Latin speaking people. In the Christian "west" (western Europe and western north Africa) sometime around 250-300 CE the language used in Christian worship began to shift from Greek to Latin, but this process was not complete until after 400 CE.
As can be expected, Ehrman throws in his section on "One Remarkable Life" to take a dig at Christians. I suspect Ehrman is overstating his case when he says that Jesus was just "one of many" miracle workers whose followers called him the "Son of God." No one I know of comes as close to resembling Jesus as Apollonius, though there were many who used some form of "magic" to impress people and get them to follow them. You can find a perfect example in Acts 8 with Simon Magus (of whom we also know from sources outside Acts) who had such a reputation as a miracle worker (I would think the word charlatan would be appropriate here) that people believed the power of a pagan god worked through him.
Also of questionable reliability is the source that Ehrman uses, the Life of Apollonius by Philotratus. You will soon discover that Ehrman does not consider the Gospels in the New Testament very reliable sources of the sayings and actions of Jesus for two reasons. First, Ehrman does not believe miracles can happen. Many modern Biblical scholars agree with him on this. Likewise with the second point, which is: if the sayings of Jesus were not written down until about 70 CE, there must have been much alteration of the sayings of Jesus as they were passed on by word of mouth for 40 years. So Ehrman (like many other modern scholars) does not believe the NT Gospels offer a reliable portrayal of the life of Jesus.
Now, my next dig at Ehrman on Apollonius. If the 40 years between the death of Jesus and the time his sayings were written down renders them of suspect historical reliability, what about the 150 years between the death of Apollonius and the time that Philostratus wrote the story of his life? I would say that this renders the truthfulness of the Life of Apollonius even more suspect. Of course all of this is irrelevant to Ehrman; his main point is to try to erase any features about Jesus that might seem to us to be unique. To Ehrman, Christianity is just another ancient religion founded on false pretenses.
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