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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.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman
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One of Jesus’s characteristic teachings is that there will be a massive reversal of fortunes when the end comes. Those who are rich and powerful now will be humbled then; those who are lowly and oppressed now will then be exalted. The apocalyptic logic of this view is clear: it is only by siding with the forces of evil that people in power have succeeded in this life; and by siding with God other people have been persecuted and rendered powerless.
Bart Ehrman -
Jesus taught that the age he lived in was controlled by forces of evil but that God would soon intervene to destroy everything and everyone opposed to him. God would then bring in a good, utopian kingdom on earth, where there would be no more pain and suffering. Jesus himself would be the ruler of this kingdom, with his twelve disciples serving under him. And all this was to happen very soon—within his own generation. This
Bart Ehrman -
All we would need to do would be to read the Bible and accept what it says as what really happened. That, of course, is the approach to the Bible that fundamentalists take. And that’s one reason why you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.
Bart Ehrman -
We have very little evidence to suggest that serious intellectuals converted to the Christian faith between the time of Paul and the mid-second century. Most converts would have been lower-class and uneducated. This was certainly true in Paul’s own day. In a letter to one of his largest congregations, he explicitly reminds the Corinthians about their own constituency: “Consider your calling, brothers and sisters: Not many of you were wise...
Bart Ehrman -
The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife.
Bart Ehrman -
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?
Bart Ehrman
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In ancient Judaism the king of Israel was considered both Son of God and—astonishingly enough—even God.
Bart Ehrman -
In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told.
Bart Ehrman -
Do not be of two minds whether this should happen or not. Do not take the Lord’s name for a futile purpose. Love your neighbor more than yourself. Do not abort a fetus or kill a child that is already born. Do not not remove your hand from your son or daughter, but from their youth teach them the reverential fear of God.
Bart Ehrman -
One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer have led many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads—and where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. So if, in theory, you can verify the “objective” truth of religion, and then it turns out that the religion being examined is verifiably wrong, where does that leave you? If you are an evangelical Christian, it leaves you in the wilderness outside the evangelical camp, but with an unrepentant view of truth. Objective truth, to paraphrase a not so Christian song, has been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know, I’m one. Before moving outside into.
Bart Ehrman -
As we will see, there are lots of other discrepancies in the New Testament, some of them far more difficult to reconcile (virtually impossible, I would say) than these simple examples. Not only are there discrepancies among different books of the Bible, but there are also inconsistencies within some of the books, a problem that historical critics have long ascribed to the fact that Gospel writers used different sources for their accounts, and sometimes these sources, when spliced together, stood at odds with one another.
Bart Ehrman -
You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.
Bart Ehrman
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Some believers took the Christological views of the Gospel to an extreme and maintained that Jesus was so much God that he could not really have been a man. The book 1 John was written, then, to counter that view by insisting that 'Jesus Christ came in the flesh' and that anyone who refused to acknowledge his fleshly existence was in fact an antichrist.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
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. HEAVEN
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
To cite one well-known example of this ignorance of Jewish customs: Mark 7:3 indicates that the Pharisees “and all the Jews” washed their hands before eating, so as to observe “the tradition of the elders.” This is not true: most Jews did not engage in this ritual. If Mark had been a Jew, or even a gentile living in Palestine, he certainly would have known this.
Bart Ehrman -
The time when Christianity arose, with its exalted claims about Jesus, was the same time when the emperor cult had started to move into full swing, with its exalted claims about the emperor. Christians were calling Jesus God directly on the heels of the Romans calling the emperor God.
Bart Ehrman
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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.
Bart Ehrman -
The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
In Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ with an angel; he is equating him with an angel.
Bart Ehrman