Bart Ehrman Quotes
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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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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.
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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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Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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On the practical level, the gods were understood to be closely connected with every aspect of the social and political life of a community... On the imperial level this meant that it was widely known—and genuinely believed by most—that it was the gods who had made the empire great... The Christians refused to worship or even acknowledge the gods of the empire, claiming in fact that these were evil, demonic beings, not beneficent deities that promoted the just cause of the greatest empire the world had ever known. The refusal to worship was seen by others to be dangerous to the well-being of the empire and thus to the security of the state. And so the decision to persecute—which seems to us, perhaps, to be a strictly religious affair—was at the time inherently sociopolitical as well.
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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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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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Similarity among all the speeches in Acts suggests that they were written by the same person—Luke.
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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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Wisdom is referred to as “she”—or even as “Lady Wisdom”—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine);
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There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.
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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.