Bart Ehrman Quotes
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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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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.
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Justin’s Logos Christology is more advanced and philosophically developed than that found in the Fourth Gospel.
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Some scholars have argued that ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods’ anger. But this divine anger was aroused almost always because of neglect. he gods—or at least one ofthem—had not been respected and worshiped properly or sufficiently. That was the main logic behind Roman persecution of the Christians. Because this group of miscreants refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay.
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Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.
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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.
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The art of the possible.
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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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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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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.
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I have often wondered what would have happened if Paul and Matthew had been locked up in a room together and told they could not come out until they had hammered out a consensus statement on how followers of Jesus were to deal with the Jewish law. Would they ever have emerged, or would they still be there, two skeletons locked in a death grip? If
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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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If there were just 2.5 million to 3.5 million Christians in the year 300, the church would have to grow only at a rate of 26 percent to reach 30 million by the year 400. For the fourth century, if the rate really was around 25 percent per decade, that would only mean that every hundred Christians would need to convert just two or occasionally three people a year.
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As I have indicated, Paul (along with other apostles) taught that Jesus was soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. The coming end of all things was a source of continuous fascination for early Christians, who by and large expected that God would soon intervene in the affairs of the world to overthrow the forces of evil and establish his good kingdom, with Jesus at its head, here on earth.
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To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story.
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One of our driving questions throughout this study will always be what these Christians meant by saying “Jesus is God.” As we will see, different Christians meant different things by it.
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Eventually incarnation Christologies developed significantly and overtook exaltation Christologies, which came to be deemed inadequate and, eventually, heretical.
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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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The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there.
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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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Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems.
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The idea that Wisdom could be a divine hypostasis—an aspect of God that is a distinct being from God that nonetheless is itself God—is rooted in a fascinating passage of the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 8. ... God made all things in his wisdom, so much so that Wisdom is seen as a co-creator of sorts.
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Throne, O God, endures forever and ever. Your royal scepter is a scepter of equity; You love righteousness and hate wickedness.
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What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting the Bible up as a false idol—or an oracle that gives is a direct line of communication with the Almighty?