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In some parts of the church, the Apocalypse of John (the book of Revelation) was flat out rejected as containing false teaching, whereas the Apocalypse of Peter, which eventually did not make it in, was accepted. There were some Christians who accepted the Gospel of Peter and some who rejected the Gospel of John. There were some Christians who accepted a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke (without its first two chapters), and others who accepted the now noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Some Christians rejected the three Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which eventually made it in, and others accepted the Epistle of Barnabas, which did not.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman
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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.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there.
Bart Ehrman -
But if we don’t figure out the way the world works and is, and if we don’t live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off than the dumb animals.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman
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Wisdom is referred to as “she”—or even as “Lady Wisdom”—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine);
Bart Ehrman -
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”).
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
The art of the possible.
Bart Ehrman -
God was the ultimate source of all that was divine. But there were lower divinities as well. Even within monotheistic Judaism.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman
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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.
Bart Ehrman -
Similarity among all the speeches in Acts suggests that they were written by the same person—Luke.
Bart Ehrman -
The exaltation (of Jesus by crucifixion) is not to a higher state than the one he previously possessed, as in Paul. For John, he was already both 'God' and 'with God' in his preincarnate state as a divine being.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman -
Lord created me at the beginning of his work, The first of his acts of long ago.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman
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The idea that Jesus rose on the 'third day' was originally a theological construct, not a historical piece of information.
Bart Ehrman -
There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.
Bart Ehrman -
Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems.
Bart Ehrman -
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.
Bart Ehrman