Bart Ehrman Quotes
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In Matthew, Jesus declares, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” In Mark, he says,“Whoever is not against us is for us.” Did he say both things? Could he mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?
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Pagans never had to affirm anything. As odd as this seems, pagans were not required to believe truths about the gods. Paganism was instead about performing the proper, traditional cultic acts.
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And so Christianity was the only evangelistic religion that we know of in antiquity, and, along with Judaism, it was also the only one that was exclusive. That combination of evangelism and exclusion proved to be decisive.
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Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation “RIP” (“Rest in Peace”). Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes: “I was not; I was; I am not; I care not.” The meaning is clear. There was no existence before birth. A person existed only after being born. After death there once more was no existence.
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Approximately half the Roman Empire claimed allegiance to the Christian faith by about 400 CE. The empire as a whole is thought to have comprised some sixty million people at the time.
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1a Christ died 2a For our sins 3a In accordance with the scriptures 4a And he was buried. 1b Christ was raised 2b On the third day 3b In accordance with the scriptures 4b And he appeared to Cephas.
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The first Christian author we have is the Apostle Paul.
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Then Elizabeth moaned and said, “Mountain of God, receive a mother with her child.” For Elizabeth was not able to climb the mountain. And straight away the mountain split open and received her. And the mountain was shining a light on her, for an angel of the Lord was with them, protecting them.
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Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshipped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Isaiah, with its insistence that “I alone am God, there is no other,” is monotheistic. It represents the minority view in the Hebrew Bible.
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Scholars sometimes use technical terms (i.e., Hypostases) for no good reason, other than the fact that they are the technical terms scholars use.
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The idea that Jesus rose on the 'third day' was originally a theological construct, not a historical piece of information.
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This motivation was at work in both Christian and non-Christian circles. We know this because ancient authors actually tell us so. For example, a commentator on the writings of Aristotle, a pagan scholar named David, indicated: “If someone is uninfluential and unknown, yet wants his writing to be read, he writes in the name of someone who came before him and was influential, so that through his influence he can get his work accepted.
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The Christian religion is founded on the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. And it appears virtually certain that it was Mary Magdalene of all people, an otherwise unknown Galilean Jewish woman of means, who first propounded this belief. It is not at all farfetched to claim that Mary was the founder of Christianity.
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The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew.
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As a historian, I am struck by a certain consistency among otherwise independent witnesses in placing Mary Magdalene both at the cross and at the tomb on the third day. If this is not a historical datum but something that a Christian storyteller just made up and then passed along to others, how is it that this specific bit of information has found its way into accounts that otherwise did not make use of one another? Mary’s presence at the cross is found in Mark (and in Luke and Matthew, which used Mark) and also in John, which is independent of Mark. More significant still, all of our early Gospels—not just John and Mark (with Matthew and Luke as well) but also the Gospel of Peter, which appears to be independent of all of them—indicate that it was Mary Magdalene who discovered Jesus’ empty tomb. How did all of these independent accounts happen to name exactly the same person in this role? It seems hard to believe that this just happened by a way of a fluke of storytelling. It seems much more likely that, at least with the traditions involving the empty tomb, we are dealing with something actually rooted in history.
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In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!
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This oldest Christology of all may be found in the preliterary traditions in Paul and the book of Acts, but it is not the view presented in any of the Gospels. Instead, as we will see at greater length, the oldest Gospel, Mark, seems to assume that it was at his baptism that Jesus became the Son of God; the next Gospels, Matthew and Luke, indicate that Jesus became the Son of God when he was born; and the last Gospel, John, presents Jesus as the Son of God from before creation.
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Atheism was an exceedingly rare phenomenon in antiquity: very few people believed there were literally no gods. The word “atheism” itself, however, simply means “without the gods,” and one could be “without” them while still acknowledging they existed. ...atheism applied more normally to “anyone who rejected or neglected the traditional modes of honoring the gods.” That is to say, anyone who abjectly refused to participate in the worship of divine beings could be labeled an atheist. Such a person could expect a good deal of opprobrium and sometimes civil action. The Christians were often accused of being atheists. Obviously that was not because they denied the divine realm but because they refused to acknowledge (and act as if) it was inhabited by more than the one being they worshiped and refused to interact with it in traditional ways.
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Remembering then is not a matter of literally reduplicating the past. . . . In fact, if we consider evidence rather than presupposition, remembering appears to be far more decisively an affair of construction rather than one of mere reproduction. Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless, and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most elementary cases of rote recapitulation.
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The approach taken to the Bible in almost all Protestant (and now Catholic) mainline seminaries is what is called the “historical-critical” method. It is completely different from the “devotional” approach to the Bible one learns in church. The devotional approach to the Bible is concerned about what the Bible has to say—especially what it has to say to me personally or to my society. What does the Bible tell me about God? Christ? The church? My relation to the world? What does it tell me about what to believe? About how to act? About social responsibilities? How can the Bible help make me closer to God? How does it help me to live?
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What you can control are your attitudes about the things in your life. And so it is your inner self, your attitudes, that you should be concerned about.
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And so by carefully investigating what is here and now, we must seek for the things that can save us. We should flee, entirely, all the works of lawlessness; otherwise, they may overwhelm us. And we should hate the error of the present age, that we may be loved in the age to come. 2 We should not allow our souls to relax, thinking they can consort with sinners and the wicked; otherwise we may become like them.
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If Jesus really were equal with God from “the beginning,” before he came to earth, and he knew it, then surely the Synoptic Gospels would have mentioned this at some point. Wouldn’t that be the most important thing about him? But no, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke he does not talk about himself in this way—nor does he do so in their sources (Q, M, and L).
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The adoptionists were right to affirm that Jesus was human but wrong to deny that he was God; the docetists were right to affirm that Jesus was divine but wrong to deny that he was human; the Gnostics were right to affirm that Christ was both divine and human but wrong to deny that he was a single being. And so, if you put together all the orthodox affirmations, the result is the ortho-paradox: Christ is God; Christ is a man; but he is one being, not two. This became the standard Christological affirmation of the orthodox tradition. As we will see, this did not settle the issue of who Christ was for the orthodox. It instead led to more questions, and “false beliefs” continued to propagate—not against any of the standard orthodox claims, but against various ways of understanding these claims. As time went on, heresies became increasingly detailed, and the orthodox affirmations became increasingly paradoxical.