Bart D. Ehrman > Quotes
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“There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer
― Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer
“One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
“Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.”
― Bart Ehrman
― Bart Ehrman
tags: atheism, bible, criticism, literature, skepticism
“The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God
― Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God
tags: disillusionment, evidence, truth
“[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
tags: bible, intelligence, life, literature, religion
“The historical problems with Luke are even more pronounced. For one thing, we have relatively good records for the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there is no mention anywhere in any of them of an empire-wide census for which everyone had to register by returning to their ancestral home. And how could such a thing even be imagined? Joesph returns to Bethlehem because his ancestor David was born there. But David lived a thousand years before Joseph. Are we to imagine that everyone in the Roman Empire was required to return to the homes of their ancestors from a thousand years earlier? If we had a new worldwide census today and each of us had to return to the towns of our ancestors a thousand years back—where would you go? Can you imagine the total disruption of human life that this kind of universal exodus would require? And can you imagine that such a project would never be mentioned in any of the newspapers? There is not a single reference to any such census in any ancient source, apart from Luke. Why then does Luke say there was such a census? The answer may seem obvious to you. He wanted Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, even though he knew he came from Nazareth ... there is a prophecy in the Old Testament book of Micah that a savior would come from Bethlehem. What were these Gospel writer to do with the fact that it was widely known that Jesus came from Nazareth? They had to come up with a narrative that explained how he came from Nazareth, in Galilee, a little one-horse town that no one had ever heard of, but was born in Bethlehem, the home of King David, royal ancestor of the Messiah.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
“In terms of the historical record, I should also point out that there is no account in any ancient source whatsoever about King Herod slaughtering children in or around Bethlehem, or anyplace else. No other author, biblical or otherwise, mentions this event. Is it, like John's account of Jesus' death, a detail made up by Matthew in order to make some kind of theological point?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
“Some people may think that it is a dangerous attitude to take toward the Bible, to pick and choose what you want to accept and throw everything else out. My view is that everyone already picks and chooses what they want to accept in the Bible...I have a young friend who whose evangelical parents were upset because she wanted to get a tattoo, since the Bible, after all, condemns tattoos. In the same book, Leviticus, the Bible also condemns wearing clothing made of two different kinds of fabric and eating pork...Why insist on the biblical teaching about tattoos but not about dress shirts, pork chops, and stoning?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
“In Matthew, Jesus declares, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” In Mark, he says,“Whoever is not against us is for us.” Did he say both things? Could he
mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that
one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that
one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
“You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
“The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
― Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
“The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible & Why
― Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible & Why
“The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered canonical—other Gospels, for example, allegedly written by Jesus’ followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The Exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds on numerous points and contain nonhistorical material. It is hard to know whether Moses ever existed and what, exactly, the historical Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul. Many of the books of the New Testament are pseudonymous—written not by the apostles but by later writers claiming to be apostles. The list goes on.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“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.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus--that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes.
Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours.
Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours.
Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
“Only in the latest of our Gospels, John, a Gospel that shows considerably more theological sophistication than the others, does Jesus indicate that he is divine. I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself. And surely if Jesus had really spent his days in Galilee and then Jerusalem calling himself God, all of our sources would be eager to report it. To put it differently, if Jesus claimed he was divine, it seemed very strange indeed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all failed to say anything about it. Did they just forget to mention that part? I had come to realize that Jesus’ divinity was part of John’s theology, not a part of Jesus’ own teaching.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“All we would need to do would be to read the Bible and accept what it says as what really happened. That, of course, is the approach to the Bible that fundamentalists take. And that’s one reason why you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
“The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“What you can control are your attitudes about the things in your life. And so it is your inner self, your attitudes, that you should be concerned about.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
“In the American South, where I live, Christianity is very much about the Bible. Most Christians come from churches that preach the Bible, teach the Bible, adhere (they claim) to the Bible. It is almost “common sense” among many Christians in this part of the world that if you don’t believe in the Bible you cannot be a Christian. Most Christians in other parts of the world—in fact, the vast majority of Christians throughout the history of the church—would find that common sense to be nonsense.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“I should point out that the Gospels do not indicate on which day Jesus was raised. The women go to the tomb on the third day, and they find it empty. But none of the Gospels indicates that Jesus arose that morning before the women showed up. He could just as well have arisen the day before or even the day before that—just an hour, say, after he had been buried. The Gospels simply don’t say.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
“Ancient Jews had no expectation—zero expectation—that the future messiah would die and rise from the dead. That was not what the messiah was supposed to do. Whatever specific idea any Jew had about the messiah (as cosmic judge, mighty priest, powerful warrior), what they all thought was that he would be a figure of grandeur and power who would be a mighty ruler of Israel. And Jesus was certainly not that. Rather than destroying the enemy, Jesus was destroyed by the enemy—arrested, tortured, and crucified, the most painful and publicly humiliating form of death known to the Romans. Jesus, in short, was just the opposite of what Jews expected a messiah to be.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
“Whether you are a believer—fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal—or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“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).”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“Who was the first person to go to the tomb? Was it Mary Magdalene by herself (John)? or Mary along with another Mary (Matthew)? or Mary along with another Mary and Salome (Mark)? or Mary, Mary, Joanna, and a number of other women (Luke)? Was the stone already rolled away when they arrived at the tomb (Mark, Luke, and John), or explicitly not (Matthew)? Whom did they see there? An angel (Matthew), a man (Mark), or two men (Luke)? Did they immediately go and tell some of the disciples what they had seen (John), or not (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? What did the person or people at the tomb tell the women to do? To tell the disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee (Matthew and Mark)? Or to remember what Jesus had told them earlier when he had been in Galilee (Luke)? Did the women then go tell the disciples what they were told to tell them (Matthew and Luke), or not (Mark)? Did the disciples see Jesus (Matthew, Luke, and John), or not (Mark)?1 Where did they see him?—only in Galilee (Matthew), or only in Jerusalem (Luke)?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
“What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting the Bible up as a false idol—or an oracle that gives is a direct line of communication with the Almighty?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
― Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
“There were lots of early Christian groups. They all claimed to be right. They all had books to back up their claims, books allegedly written by the apostles and therefore representing the views of Jesus and his first disciples. The group that won out did not represent the teachings of Jesus or of his apostles. For example, none of the apostles claimed that Jesus was “fully God and fully man,” or that he was “begotten not made, of one substance with the Father,” as the fourth-century Nicene Creed maintained. The victorious group called itself orthodox. But it was not the original form of Christianity, and it won its victory only after many hard-fought battles.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“One of my favorite apparent discrepancies—I read John for years without realizing how strange this one is—comes in Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the last address that Jesus delivers to his disciples, at his last meal with them, which takes up all of chapters 13 to 17 in the Gospel according to John. In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” A few verses later Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going” (John 14:5). And then, a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, “Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” (John 16:5). Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters, creating an odd kind of disconnect.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible
“Some people today claim that cultures rooted in oral tradition are far more careful to make certain that traditions that are told and retold are not changed significantly. This turns out to be a modern myth, however. Anthropologists who have studied oral cultures show that just the opposite is the case. Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts “as they really are.” And this is because in literary cultures, it is possible to check the sources to see whether someone has changed a story. In oral cultures, it is widely expected that stories will indeed change—they change anytime a storyteller is telling a story in a new context. New contexts require new ways of telling stories. Thus, oral cultures historically have seen no problem with altering accounts as they were told and retold.3”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
“This is one of the hard-and-fast ironies of the Christian tradition: views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation Of A Jewish Preacher from Galilee
