47 Quotes by Bart D. Ehrman

Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation “RIP” (“Rest in Peace”). Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes:“I was not; I was; I am not; I care not.” The meaning is clear. There was no existence before birth.A person existed only after being born.After death there once more was no existence.

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew

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.

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.

Orthodoxy is my doxy and heterodoxy is your doxy.

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.

Because of the open nature of polytheism, there was virtually no such thing as “conversion.” Anyone who chose to begin worshiping a new god was welcome to do so and was not required or expected to leave behind any previous practices of worship or make an exclusive commitment to this one deity.

The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don’t want to go there.

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.