Bart D. Ehrman Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
Not a single one of our ancient sources indicates that Jesus was married, let alone married to Mary Magdalene. All such claims are part of modem fictional reconstructions of Jesus' life, not rooted in the surviving accounts themselves. The historical approach to our sources may not be as exciting and sensationalist as fictional claims about Jesus (he kept a lover! he had sex! he made babies!), but there's something to be said for knowing what really happened in history, even if it is not as titillating as what happens in novels.

Bart D. Ehrman
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
Judas's act of "betrayal" is in fact his faithful obedience to Jesus' will.

Bart D. Ehrman
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
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
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
There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

Bart D. Ehrman
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
Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have considered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves.

Bart D. Ehrman