Bart Ehrman Quotes
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Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in the face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2, 27)
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My students sometimes ask: what is a fundamentalist? I give them a very simple definition. A fundamentalist is no fun, too much damn, and not enough mental.
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German scholar and skeptic Gerd Lüdemann argues that the visions of Jesus experienced by Peter, and then later by Paul, were psychologically induced.
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Paul started out as an outsider to the apostolic band and originally opposed rather than supported their movement.
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God was the ultimate source of all that was divine. But there were lower divinities as well. Even within monotheistic Judaism.
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The earliest Christians held that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status at his resurrection. (This shows, among other things, that this is not simply a “skeptical” view or a “secular” view of early Christology; it is one held by believing scholars as well.)
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Most of the people who are trained in Bible scholarship have been educated in theological institutions. Of course, a wide range of students head off to seminaries every year. Many of them have been involved with Bible studies through their school years, even dating back to their childhood Sunday School classes. But they have typically approached the Bible from a devotional point of view, reading it for what it can tell them about what to believe and how to live their lives. As a rule, such students have not been interested in or exposed to what scholars have discovered about the difficulties of the Bible when it is studied from a more academic, historical perspective.
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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.
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The political benefactors are considered 'religious' heroes. They have statues and a place in the temple, and sacrifices are made in their honor. In a very real sense they are the 'saviors' and so are treated as such.
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It will become clear in the following chapters that Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development.
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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. HEAVEN
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It’s like what some Episcopalians say about themselves today: get four in a room and you’ll find five opinions.
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The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.
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Whoever finds me finds life, And obtains favor from the Lord; But those who miss me injure themselves; All who hate me love death.
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There are very serious reasons to doubt that Jesus was buried decently and that his tomb was discovered to be empty ... Faith is not historical knowledge, and historical knowledge is not faith.
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In short, the books that were of paramount importance in early Christianity were for the most part read out loud by those who were able to read, so that the illiterate could hear, understand, and even study them. Despite the fact that early Christianity was by and large made up of illiterate believers, it was a highly literary religion.
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In the American South, where I live, Christianity is very much about the Bible. Most Christians come from churches that preach the Bible, teach the Bible, adhere (they claim) to the Bible. It is almost “common sense” among many Christians in this part of the world that if you don’t believe in the Bible you cannot be a Christian. Most Christians in other parts of the world—in fact, the vast majority of Christians throughout the history of the church—would find that common sense to be nonsense.
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The son of a human is human, just as the son of a dog is a dog and the son of a cat is a cat. And so what is the son of God?
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Conversion was not a widely known phenomenon in antiquity. Pagan religions had almost nothing like it. They were polytheistic, and anyone who decided, as a pagan, to worship a new or different god was never required to relinquish any former gods or their previous patterns of worship. Pagan religions were additive, not restrictive.
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On the practical level, the gods were understood to be closely connected with every aspect of the social and political life of a community... On the imperial level this meant that it was widely known—and genuinely believed by most—that it was the gods who had made the empire great... The Christians refused to worship or even acknowledge the gods of the empire, claiming in fact that these were evil, demonic beings, not beneficent deities that promoted the just cause of the greatest empire the world had ever known. The refusal to worship was seen by others to be dangerous to the well-being of the empire and thus to the security of the state. And so the decision to persecute—which seems to us, perhaps, to be a strictly religious affair—was at the time inherently sociopolitical as well.
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I personally love the Bible. I read it all the time, in the original Greek and Hebrew; I study it; I teach it. I have done so for over thirty-five years. And I don’t plan to stop any time soon. But I don’t think the Bible is perfect. Far from it. The Bible is filled with a multitude of voices, and these voices are often at odds with one another, contradicting one another in minute details and in major issues involving such basic views as what God is like, who the people of God are, who Jesus is, how one can be in a right relationship with God, why there is suffering in the world, how we are to behave, and on and on. And I heartily disagree with the views of most of the biblical authors on one point or another. Still, in my judgment all of these voices are valuable and they should all be listened to. Some of the writers of the Bible were religious geniuses, and just as we listen to other geniuses of our tradition – Mozart and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Dickens – so we ought to listen to the authors of the Bible. But they were not inspired by God, in my opinion, any more than any other genius is. And they contradict each other all over the map.
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Modalism was the view that evidently was held by a majority of Christians at the beginning of the third century—including the most prominent Christian leaders in the church, the bishops of the church of Rome (i.e., the early “popes”).
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One of the greatest Roman poets was Ovid, an older contemporary of Jesus (his dates: 43 BCE–17 CE). His most famous work is his fifteen-volume Metamorphoses, which celebrates changes or transformations described in ancient mythology. Sometimes these changes involve gods who take on human form in order to interact, for a time, with mortals.
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The history of this world was divided into two phases: the present age, which was controlled by the forces of evil, and the age to come, in which God would rule supreme.