Bart Ehrman Quotes
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In no first-century Greek or Roman (pagan) source is Jesus mentioned. Scholars
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Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife should give her a certificate of divorce’ a command found in Deut. 24:1, but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife for reason other than sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” It is hard to see how one can follow Moses’ command to give a certificate of divorce, if in fact divorce is not an option.
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Moreover, his view was precisely the one that many English Protestants feared would result from a careful analysis of the New Testament text, namely that the wide-ranging variations in the tradition showed that Christian faith could not be based solely on scripture (the Protestant Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura), since the text was unstable and unreliable. Instead, according to this view, the Catholics must be right that faith required the apostolic tradition preserved in the (Catholic) church.
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But one thing they all (i.e., E. P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, Dale Allison, Paula Fredriksen, and many others) agree on: Jesus did not spend his ministry declaring himself to be divine.
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It is important to remember that the emperor of Rome, who also lived in the city, was understood by many people throughout the empire to be the son of God—that is, the son of the divinized Caesar who preceded him.
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This is one of the hard-and-fast ironies of the Christian tradition: views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies. We have seen this movement already with the exaltation Christology that was the original form of Christian belief. By the second century it was widely deemed heretical. Later understandings of the second century were acceptable and dominant in their day, but they too came to be suspect and even spurned.
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Some people may think that it is a dangerous attitude to take toward the Bible, to pick and choose what you want to accept and throw everything else out. My view is that everyone already picks and chooses what they want to accept in the Bible...I have a young friend who whose evangelical parents were upset because she wanted to get a tattoo, since the Bible, after all, condemns tattoos. In the same book, Leviticus, the Bible also condemns wearing clothing made of two different kinds of fabric and eating pork...Why insist on the biblical teaching about tattoos but not about dress shirts, pork chops, and stoning?
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They all subscribed to the existence of many gods and all were based on cultic acts of worship, such as sacrifice, prayer, and divination. As such, they were by and large inclusive. None of them insisted their god was the only divine being, or that this god was to be worshiped in only one particular way everywhere. As a corollary, these religions were highly tolerant of differences. So too was the Roman government, both centrally in Rome and throughout the provinces. There were exceptions, but only when a cult was judged to be morally degenerate or socially dangerous.
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The word “cult” comes from the Latin phrase cultus deorum, which literally means “the care of the gods.” A cultic act is any ritualized practice that is done out of reverence to or worship of the gods. Such activities lay at the heart of pagan religions. Doctrines and ethics did not.
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Evidently Jesus came to be deapocalypticized with the passing of time. And it is not hard to understand why. In our earliest sources Jesus is said to have proclaimed that the end of the age would come suddenly, within his own generation, before the disciples themselves died. But over the course of time, the disciples did die and Jesus’s own generation came and went. And there was no cataclysmic break in history, no arrival of the Son of Man, no resurrection of the dead. What were later Christians to do with the fact that Jesus predicted that “all these things” would take place in his hearers’ lifetimes when in fact the predictions did not come true? They took the obvious next step and changed the tenor and content of Jesus’s preaching so that he no longer predicted an imminent end of the age. Over time, Jesus became less and less an apocalyptic preacher. This move to deapocalypticize Jesus was enormously successful. Down through the Middle Ages and on to today, the vast majority of people who have considered Jesus have not thought of him as an apocalyptic preacher. That is because the apocalyptic message that he delivered came to be toned down and eventually altered. But it is still there for all to see in our earliest surviving sources, multiply and independently attested.
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Christians came from the ranks of the illiterate. This is certainly true of the very earliest Christians, who would have been the apostles of Jesus. In the Gospel accounts, we find that most of Jesus’s disciples are simple peasants from Galilee—uneducated fishermen, for example. Two of them, Peter and John, are explicitly said to be “illiterate” in the book of Acts (4:13). The apostle Paul indicates to his Corinthian congregation that “not many of you were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:27)—which might mean that some few were well educated, but not most. As we move into the second Christian century, things do not seem to change much. As I have indicated, some intellectuals converted to the faith, but most Christians were from the lower classes and uneducated.
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An apocalypse is a vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities.
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For Ignatius, since salvation comes to the human body, it must be experienced in the human body.
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Later orthodox theologians would have found this view completely inadequate. In stressing that the Father was “greater” than the Son, Tertullian articulated a view that would later be deemed a heresy. Theology, in these early years of the formation of Christian doctrine, could not stand still. It progressed and got more complicated, sophisticated, and refined as time went on.
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People need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.
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Precisely those conservative evangelical scholars who claim that mass hallucinations don’t happen are the ones who deny that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to hundreds or thousands of people at once, even though we have modern, verified eyewitness testimony that she has.
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If salvation could come by belonging to the covenantal community of the chosen people, or by keeping the Law of Moses, there would be no reason for God’s messiah to have suffered an excruciating death. Following the law thus must have no bearing on how a person stands in a right relationship with God.
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If all this sounds familiar to Christian readers, it should. This man—here, the emperor—is a god whose birthday is to be celebrated because it brought “good tidings” to the world; he is the greatest benefactor of humans, surpassing all others, and is to be considered a “savior.” Jesus was not the only “savior-God” known to the ancient world.
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Only in the latest of our Gospels, John, a Gospel that shows considerably more theological sophistication than the others, does Jesus indicate that he is divine. I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself. And surely if Jesus had really spent his days in Galilee and then Jerusalem calling himself God, all of our sources would be eager to report it. To put it differently, if Jesus claimed he was divine, it seemed very strange indeed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all failed to say anything about it. Did they just forget to mention that part? I had come to realize that Jesus’ divinity was part of John’s theology, not a part of Jesus’ own teaching.
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In Romans 1:4, the phrase “in power” (has been) widely argued by scholars that Paul added these words to the creed.
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Orthodoxy is my doxy and heterodoxy is your doxy.
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The Greek word apocalypsis means a “revealing” or an “unveiling.” Scholars have called this view apocalyptic because its proponents believed that God had revealed or unveiled to them the heavenly secrets that could make sense of the realities they were experiencing—many of them nasty and ugly—here on earth. One
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If communities of believers obtained copies of various Christian books in circulation, how did they acquire those copies? Who was doing the copying? And most important for the ultimate subject of our investigation, how can we (or how could they) know that the copies they obtained were accurate, that they hadn’t been modified in the process of reproduction?
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What I want to show is that because of the very nature of the historical disciplines, historians cannot show whether or not miracles ever happened. Anyone who disagrees with me—who thinks historians can demonstrate that miracles happen—needs to be even-handed about it, across the board. In Jesus’ day there were lots of people who allegedly performed miracles. There were Jewish holy men such as Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the circle drawer. There were pagan holy men such as Apollonius of Tyana, a philosopher who could allegedly heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. He was allegedly supernaturally born and at the end of his life he allegedly ascended to heaven. Sound familiar? There were pagan demigods, such as Hercules, who could also bring back the dead. Anyone who is willing to believe in the miracles of Jesus needs to concede the possibility of other people performing miracles, in Jesus’ day and in all eras down to the present day and in other religions such as Islam and indigenous religions of Africa and Asia.