Bart D. Ehrman Quotes (21 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium

Bart D. Ehrman

Did Jesus Exist?

Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman: 21 quotes 2 likes

Famous Bart D. Ehrman Quotes

“Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.”

Bart D. Ehrman

“I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.”

Bart D. Ehrman

Source: God's Problem (2008), Ch. 1, p. 3

“There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.”

Bart D. Ehrman

Source: God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer

“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

Source: Forged: Writing in the Name of God

“Even though Jesus may be the only miracleworking Son of God that people know about today, there were lots of people like this in the ancient world.”

Bart D. Ehrman

Source: How Jesus Became God (2014), Ch. 1: 'Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome'

“Very few people who devote their lives to studying the historical Jesus actually want to find a Jesus who is completely removed from our own time. What people want … is relevance.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium

Source: Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999), Ch. 8: 'Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet', p. 127

Bart D. Ehrman Quotes about God

“If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering? The problem of suffering has haunted me for a very long time. It was what made me begin to think about religion when I was young, and it was what led me to question my faith when I was older. Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith.”

Bart D. Ehrman

Source: God's Problem (2008), Ch. 1: 'Suffering and a Crisis of Faith', p. 1

“How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly?”

Bart D. Ehrman

Introduction
Whose Word Is It?: The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why (2006)

“For the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Misquoting Jesus

Conclusion
Misquoting Jesus (2005)

“Some recent scholars have proposed that Jesus … preached a "radically egalitarian society"—that is, that he set about to reform society by inventing a new set of rules to govern social relations … There is little to suggest that Jesus was concerned with pushing social "reform" in any fundamental way in this evil age. In his view, present-day society and all its conventions were soon to come to a screeching halt, when the Son of Man arrived from heaven in judgment on the earth. Far from transforming society from within, Jesus was preparing people for the destruction of society. Only when God's Kingdom arrived would an entirely new order appear, in which peace, equality, and justice would reign supreme.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium

Source: Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999), Ch. 11: 'Not in Word Only', p. 190

Bart D. Ehrman Quotes

“We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Misquoting Jesus

Introduction
Misquoting Jesus (2005)
Context: It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the originals—so saying they were inspired doesn't help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. As we will see later in this book, these copies differ from one another in so many places that we don't even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

“Christianity may well have succeeded even if Constantine had not converted.”

Bart D. Ehrman

Introduction
The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

“Many Christians don't want to hear this, but the reality is that there are lots of other explanations for what happened to Jesus that are more probable than the explanation that he was raised from the dead. None of these explanations is very probable, but they are more probable, just looking at the matter historically, than the explanation of the resurrection. … Historians can only establish what probably happened in the past, and by definition, miracles are the least probable of occurrences.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Jesus, Interrupted

Source: Jesus, Interrupted (2009), Ch. 5: 'Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? Finding the Historical Jesus'

Reality , Past , Dead

“Judas's act of "betrayal" is in fact his faithful obedience to Jesus' will.”

Bart D. Ehrman

Source: The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (2006), Ch. 6: 'The Gospel of Judas: An Overview'

Faith , Betrayal

“The question is then how can we decide what anybody in the ancient world said. We can't. We wish we could. It would be nice if we could. You would like to think that because you can go to the store and buy an edition of Plato that you are actually reading Plato, but the problem is that we just do not have the kind of evidence that we need in order to establish what ancient authors actually wrote.”

Bart D. Ehrman

"The Textual Reliability of the New Testament: A Dialogue between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace" (April 4–5, 2008), in The Reliability of the New Testament (2011) edited by Robert Stewart, p. 47

World , Question , Problem , Thinking

“One could argue as well that Jesus is the most important person in the history of the West, looked at from a historical, social, or cultural perspective, quite apart from his religious significance.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Did Jesus Exist?

Source: Did Jesus Exist? (2012), Ch. 4: 'Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels'

History , Personality

“My thesis can be stated simply: scribes occasionally altered the words of their sacred texts to make them more patently orthodox and to prevent their misuse by Christians who espoused aberrant views.”

Bart D. Ehrman

Introduction
The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993)