47 Quotes by Bart D. Ehrman

The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife.

Philosophers talked a lot about how people should act toward one another, as members of a family, in relationships with friends and neighbors, as citizens of a city. Good behavior was part of being a worthwhile human being and a responsible citizen. But it generally was not a part of religious activities.

It took at least three hundred years of debate before the question of the canon even began to reach closure. The decisions that were eventually made were not handed down from on high, and they did not come right away. The canon was the result of a slow and often painful process, in which lots of disagreements were aired and different points of view came to be expressed, debated, accepted, and suppressed.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.

This is how readers over the years have come up with the famous “seven last words of the dying Jesus” – by taking what he says at his death in all four Gospels, mixing them together, and imagining that in their combination they now have the full story. This interpretive move does not give the full story. It gives a fifth story, a story that is completely unlike any of the canonical four, a fifth story that in effect rewrites the Gospels, producing a fifth Gospel. This.