Bart Ehrman Quotes
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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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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...
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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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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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Arguably it is also the most thoroughly misunderstood, especially by the lay reading public.
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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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Price says this figure provides compelling evidence of his view. In his words, “I find the possible parallel to the case of Hong Xiuquan to be, almost by itself, proof that James’ being the Lord’s brother need not prove a recent historical Jesus.” That is, since Hong Xiuquan was not really Jesus’s brother, the same could be true of James.
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In this connection I should stress that the discovery of the empty tomb appears to be a late tradition. It occurs in Mark for the first time, some thirty-five or forty years after Jesus died. Our earliest witness, Paul, does not say anything about it.
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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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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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The art of the possible.
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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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Justin’s Logos Christology is more advanced and philosophically developed than that found in the Fourth Gospel.
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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.
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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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Ancient people, whether pagans, Jews, or Christians, did not neatly differentiate between the religious and the political. They would have had a hard time understanding the difference.
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In Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ with an angel; he is equating him with an angel.
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At about the same time that apologies began to be written, Christians started producing accounts of their persecutions and the martyrdoms that happened as a result of them.
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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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A child has been born for us, A son given to us; Authority rests upon his shoulders; And he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God
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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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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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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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Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems.