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Scholars have long recognized that Luke himself wrote these speeches—they are not the speeches that these apostles really delivered at one time or another. Luke is writing decades after the events he narrates, and no one at the time was taking notes.
Bart Ehrman -
Books were at the very heart of the Christian religion—unlike other religions of the empire—from the very beginning. Books recounted the stories of Jesus and his apostles that Christians told and retold; books provided Christians with instruction in what to believe and how to live their lives; books bound together geographically separated communities into one universal church; books supported Christians in their times of persecution and gave them models of faithfulness to emulate in the face of torture and death; books provided not just good advice but correct doctrine, warning against the false teachings of others and urging the acceptance of orthodox beliefs; books allowed Christians to know the true meaning of other writings, giving guidance in what to think, how to worship, how to behave. Books were completely central to the life of the early Christians.
Bart Ehrman
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Outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work—not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the empire. As MacMullen has succinctly put it: “After Saint Paul, the Church had no mission.” That may be hard to believe, but in fact, if you were to count every Christian missionary about whom even a single story is told, from the period after the New Testament up through the first four centuries, you would not need all the digits on one hand. We are not talking about armies of volunteers knocking on doors. We know of three, all in a different isolated region. And, as we will see, even the stories told of them are highly legendary.
Bart Ehrman -
The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.
Bart Ehrman -
Only two people known by name were also called “Son of God.” One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.
Bart Ehrman -
If Jesus predicted that the imminent apocalypse would arrive within his own generation, before his disciples had all died, what was one to think a generation later when in fact it had not arrived? One might conclude that Jesus was wrong. But if one wanted to stay true to him, one might change the message that he proclaimed so that he no longer spoke about the coming apocalypse. So it is no accident that our final canonical Gospel, John, written after that first generation, no longer has Jesus proclaim an apocalyptic message. He preaches something else entirely.
Bart Ehrman -
God was saving this world. He had destroyed the power of sin by the death of Jesus; he had destroyed the power of death by the resurrection of Jesus; and he would destroy the power of evil by the return of Jesus.
Bart Ehrman -
Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have considered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves.
Bart Ehrman
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The Christ of Nicea is obviously a far cry from the historical Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant apocalyptic preacher in the backwaters of rural Galilee who offended the authorities and was unceremoniously crucified for crimes against the state. Whatever he may have been in real life, Jesus had now become fully God.
Bart Ehrman -
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?
Bart Ehrman -
Whoever finds me finds life, And obtains favor from the Lord; But those who miss me injure themselves; All who hate me love death.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
Martyrdoms would rarely lead to conversions because they were themselves relatively rare. The vast majority of pagans—including the millions who eventually converted—never saw a martyrdom, as recent scholarship has shown. As the most prolific and one of the best-traveled authors of the first three Christian centuries, Origen of Alexandria, stated in no uncertain terms: “Only a small number of people, easily counted, have died for the Christian religion.
Bart Ehrman -
The author of “The Little Labyrinth” indicates that the Theodotians maintained that their view—that Jesus was completely human, and not divine, but that he was adopted to be the Son of God—had been the doctrine taught by the apostles themselves and by most of the church in Rome until the time of Bishop Victor, at the end of the second century.
Bart Ehrman
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Moreover, this earlier tradition has a different view of Christ than the one that Paul explicates elsewhere in his surviving writings. Here, unlike in Paul’s writings ... the idea that Jesus was made the Son of God precisely at his resurrection is also stressed.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
The Need for an Empty Tomb ... If there was no empty tomb, Jesus was not physically raised.
Bart Ehrman -
Justin’s Logos Christology is more advanced and philosophically developed than that found in the Fourth Gospel.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman
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In some ways, though, Judaism was distinctive. All other religions in the empire were polytheistic—acknowledging and worshiping many gods of all sorts and functions: great gods of the state, lesser gods of various locales, gods who oversaw different aspects of human birth, life, and death. Judaism, on the other hand, was monotheistic; Jews insisted on worshiping only the one God of their ancestors, the God who, they maintained, had created this world, controlled this world, and alone provided what was needed for his people. According to Jewish tradition, this one all-powerful God had called Israel to be his special people and had promised to protect and defend them in exchange for their absolute devotion to him and him alone. The Jewish people, it was believed, had a “covenant” with this God, an agreement that they would be uniquely his as he was uniquely theirs. Only this one God was to be worshiped and obeyed; so, too, there was only one Temple, unlike in the polytheistic religions of the day in which, for example, there could be any number of temples to a god like Zeus. To be sure, Jews could worship God anywhere they lived, but they could perform their religious obligations of sacrifice to God only at the Temple in Jerusalem.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
Within three hundred years Jesus went from being a Jewish apocalyptic prophet to being God himself, a member of the Trinity. Early Christianity is nothing if not remarkable.
Bart Ehrman -
Paul started out as an outsider to the apostolic band and originally opposed rather than supported their movement.
Bart Ehrman