Bart Ehrman Quotes
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There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
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There can be no doubt on the basis of the written and archaeological evidence that the Christianization of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe involved the destruction of works of art on a scale never before seen in human history.
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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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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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It is the sorrowful penitent who is acceptable; that is the kind of woman these texts seek. One can’t help but think that the men who relish this recollection of Mary the penitent sinner are those who are trying to inform their own world with their own vision of what sexual and gendered relationships ought to be, with women not enticing men with the dangers of sex but falling at their feet in humble submission and penitence.
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We simply do not know how many Christians suffered imprisonment or died at the hands of the authorities: possibly hundreds of people, although almost certainly not many thousands. We do know that, in the end, the Christians came out on top. Constantine converted, and with one brief exception all the emperors to follow were Christian. There would never again be an official Roman persecution of the Christians. Throughout these early centuries of on-again, off-again opposition, Christians were not always bullied, beaten, tortured, and executed. Most of the time, in most places, they were simply left in peace. Many Christians went from cradle to grave without facing any public ridicule, opposition, or persecution. We do not hear much about these Christians for an obvious reason: peace and quiet rarely make it into the history books.
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Nero did not, technically speaking, prosecute Christians for being Christian. He executed them for committing arson. True, they probably were not guilty, but that was the charge. Being a Christian was not punishable, but setting fire to Rome was. Nero’s persecution was localized. It involved only the city of Rome. Nothing indicates that Christians elsewhere in the empire suffered any consequences. Even more significant, it appears that none of Nero’s successors down to Trajan (ruled 98–117 CE) persecuted Christians. Between Nero in 64 CE and Marcus Aurelius in 177 CE, the only mention of an emperor’s intervention in Christian affairs, apart from the episode involving Trajan found in Pliny’s letters, is a letter from the emperor Hadrian that gives instructions to a local governor to conduct his trials against the Christians fairly.
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When she was young, Peter learned in a vision from God that if she remained healthy, she would lead many astray; she apparently was beautiful as a child, and as an adult she would entice men to sleep with her. When she was ten, a next-door neighbor attempted to seduce her, but before he could sleep with her, she became paralyzed, by the mercy of God. The neighbor went blind for his troubles, until healed by Peter and converted to faith in Christ. But the girl had to remain paralyzed, lest she lead others astray. Here again the point is perfectly clear: sex is dangerous and to be avoided at all costs, even if it means being an invalid for life.
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But the message was not only for Jews. It was for all people, Jew and gentile. And it came to gentiles apart from observing the Jewish law. Thus, to be members of God’s covenantal people, it was not necessary for gentiles to become Jews. They did not need to be circumcised, observe the Sabbath, keep kosher, or follow any of the other prescriptions of the law. They needed only to believe in the death and resurrection of the messiah Jesus. This was an earth-shattering realization for Paul.
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In some parts of the church, the Apocalypse of John (the book of Revelation) was flat out rejected as containing false teaching, whereas the Apocalypse of Peter, which eventually did not make it in, was accepted. There were some Christians who accepted the Gospel of Peter and some who rejected the Gospel of John. There were some Christians who accepted a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke (without its first two chapters), and others who accepted the now noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Some Christians rejected the three Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which eventually made it in, and others accepted the Epistle of Barnabas, which did not.
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The exaltation (of Jesus by crucifixion) is not to a higher state than the one he previously possessed, as in Paul. For John, he was already both 'God' and 'with God' in his preincarnate state as a divine being.
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On the latter point, it was sometimes noted that Christians gathered together under the cloak of darkness, calling one another "brother" and "sister" and greeting one another with kisses; they were said to worship their god by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of God. What was one to make of such practices? If you can imagine the worst, you won't be far off. Pagan opponents claimed that Christians engaged in ritual incest (sexual acts with brothers and sisters), infanticide (killing the Son), and cannibalism (eating his flesh and drinking his blood). These charges may seem incredible today, but in a society that respected decency and openness, they were widely accepted. Christians were perceived as a nefarious lot.
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My overarching point is that the Gospels, and all the books of the Bible, are distinct and should not be read as if they are all saying the same thing. They are decidedly not saying the same thing—even when talking about the same subject (say, Jesus’ death). Mark is different from Luke, and Matthew is different from John, as you can see by doing your own horizontal reading of their respective stories of the crucifixion. The historical approach to the Gospels allows each author’s voice to be heard and refuses to conflate them into some kind of mega-Gospel that flattens the emphases of each one.
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People—wondered why such miracles no longer happened. Augustine had a witty response: “I might, indeed, reply that miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order that it might believe. And whoever now-a-days demands to see prodigies that he may believe, is himself a great prodigy, because he does not believe, though the whole world does.
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The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife.
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Justin alludes to his conversion, indicating that originally it was Christians’ martyrdom that showed him they deserved to be believed.34 They were willing to die for what they held dear. Of how many people can that be said? Or, to put it differently, how many martyrs for Zeus do we hear about?
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As Christianity grew, it eventually converted intellectuals to the faith, who were well equipped to discuss and dismiss the charges typically raised against the Christians. The writings of these intellectuals are sometimes called apologies, from the Greek word for “defense” (apologia). The apologists wrote intellectual defenses of the new faith, trying to show that far from being a threat to the social structure of the empire, it was a religion that preached moral behavior; and far from being a dangerous superstition, it represented the ultimate truth in its worship of the one true God. These apologies were important for early Christian readers, as they provided them with the arguments they needed when themselves faced with persecution.
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In terms of the historical record, I should also point out that there is no account in any ancient source whatsoever about King Herod slaughtering children in or around Bethlehem, or anyplace else. No other author, biblical or otherwise, mentions this event. Is it, like John's account of Jesus' death, a detail made up by Matthew in order to make some kind of theological point?
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As time goes on, thing do get made up.
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One of my favorite apparent discrepancies—I read John for years without realizing how strange this one is—comes in Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the last address that Jesus delivers to his disciples, at his last meal with them, which takes up all of chapters 13 to 17 in the Gospel according to John. In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” A few verses later Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going” (John 14:5). And then, a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, “Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” (John 16:5). Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters, creating an odd kind of disconnect.
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The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered canonical—other Gospels, for example, allegedly written by Jesus’ followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The Exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds on numerous points and contain nonhistorical material. It is hard to know whether Moses ever existed and what, exactly, the historical Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul. Many of the books of the New Testament are pseudonymous—written not by the apostles but by later writers claiming to be apostles. The list goes on.
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Modern research on conversion has demonstrated that, long after such an experience, a convert tends to confuse what actually happened in light of everything that occurs in its aftermath.
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These antifamily traditions are too widely attested in our sources to be ignored (they are found in Mark, Q, and Thomas, for example), and they show that Jesus did not support what we today might think of as family values. But why not? Evidently because, as I have already emphasized, he was not teaching about the good society and about how to maintain it. The end was coming soon, and the present social order was being called radically into question. What mattered was not ultimately the strong family ties and social institutions of this world. What mattered was the new thing that was coming, the future kingdom. It was impossible to promote this teaching while trying to retain the present social structure. That would be like trying to put new wine into old wineskins or trying to sew a new piece of cloth to an old garment. As any wine master or seamstress can tell you, it just won’t work.
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I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.