Bart Ehrman Quotes
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By the second half of the second century, apologies had become a popular form of Christian writing.
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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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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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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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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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In Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ with an angel; he is equating him with an angel.
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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.
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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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It is because in John’s Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus’s words; they are John’s words placed on Jesus’s lips.
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The art of the possible.
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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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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.
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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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Give Gnostic scholars a new Gnostic text filled with aeons and cosmic mysteries and they think they’re in hog heaven.
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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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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.
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Traditionally in Christian circles, Judas in fact has been associated with Jews. Of being traitors, avaricious, who in fact, betray Jesus, who are Christ-killers. And this portrayal of Judas of course also leads then to horrendous acts of anti-Semitism through the centuries.
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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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Similarly, some biblical views of women are superior to others. And so the apostle Paul’s attitude about women is that they could be and should be leaders of the Christian communities—as evidenced by the fact that in his own communities there were women who were church organizers, deacons, and even apostles (Romans 16). That attitude is much better than the one inserted by a later scribe into Paul’s letter of 1 Corinthians, which claims women should always be silent in the church (1 Corinthians 14:35–36), or the one forged under Paul’s name in the letter of 1 Timothy, which insists that women remain silent, submissive, and pregnant (1 Timothy 2:11–15).
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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.
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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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You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.
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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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The books we call the New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after the books themselves had first been produced.