Bart Ehrman Quotes
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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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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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Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical.
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I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it. . . But I don't have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don't see any plausible way of filling it.
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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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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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In Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ with an angel; he is equating him with an angel.
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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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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.
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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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Paul did not see himself as switching religions. He came to realize that Christ was the fulfillment of Judaism, of everything that God had planned and revealed within the sacred Jewish Scriptures.
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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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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.
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Research on conversion has demonstrated that, long after such an experience, a convert tends to confuse what actually happened in light of everything that occurs in its aftermath. That is to say, years later, the accounts people tell, to both themselves and others, have been slanted by all they have learned, thought, and experienced in the interim.
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I was daily his delight, Rejoicing before him always, Rejoicing in his inhabited world And delighting in the human race.
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It is worth stressing that Paul does indeed speak about Jesus as God, as we have seen. This does not mean that Christ is God the Father Almighty. Paul clearly thought Jesus was God in a certain sense—but he does not think that he was the Father. He was an angelic, divine being before coming into the world; he was the Angel of the Lord; he was eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all of God’s honor and worship.
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You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.
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We might mean different things. How can you tell? Only by reading each of us carefully and seeing what each of us has to say—not by pretending that we are both saying the same thing. We’re often saying very different things.
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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 you get fired from your job, that’s outside your control, so you shouldn’t be personally invested in your job.
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Within Judaism we find divine beings who temporarily become human, semidivine beings who are born of the union of a divine being and a mortal, and humans who are, or who become, divine.
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Jews also believed that divinities could become human and humans could become divine.
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I wonder if the fact that I left the faith is somehow seen as threatening, at least among people who have a gnawing suspicion.
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The whole story was in fact a legend, that is, the burial and discovery of an empty tomb were tales that later Christians invented to persuade others that the resurrection indeed happened.