Bart D. Ehrman quotes

Bart D. Ehrman is an American professor, author, and scholar of religious studies, especially early Christianity. His research focuses on the historical development of the New Testament and the transmission of biblical texts. He is widely recognized for his accessible writing and public lectures exploring the origins of Christian scriptures and beliefs. Here are 27 of his quotes:

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible. (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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty. View quote
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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
The very idea that society should serve the poor, the sick, and the marginalized became a distinctively Christian concern. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
Judas's act of "betrayal" is in fact his faithful obedience to Jesus' will. View quote
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 modern 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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
You can't believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to. View quote
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)
Christianity may well have succeeded even if Constantine had not converted. View quote
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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
There are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
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. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. But there could be a fourth option - legend. (Bart D. Ehrman)
The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew. View quote
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? View quote
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? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways. View quote
Bart D. Ehrman
The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God. [...] 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? View quote
Bart D. Ehrman