Bart Ehrman Quotes
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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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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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Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical.
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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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I was daily his delight, Rejoicing before him always, Rejoicing in his inhabited world And delighting in the human race.
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The very first surviving account of Jesus’s life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death. That’s obviously a lot of time.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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Similarity among all the speeches in Acts suggests that they were written by the same person—Luke.
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Lord created me at the beginning of his work, The first of his acts of long ago.
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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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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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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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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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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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There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.
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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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Wisdom is referred to as “she”—or even as “Lady Wisdom”—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine);
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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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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.