As time goes on, thing do get made up.
BART D. EHRMANIn terms of the historical record, I should also point out that there is no account in any ancient source whatsoever about King Herod slaughtering children in or around Bethlehem, or anyplace else.
More Bart D. Ehrman Quotes
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In Matthew, Jesus declares, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” In Mark, he says,“Whoever is not against us is for us.”
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You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.
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There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.
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My students sometimes ask: what is a fundamentalist? I give them a very simple definition.
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I don’t know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.
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Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.
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Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.
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Different authors have different points of view. You can’t just say, ‘I believe in the Bible.
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His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!
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The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don’t want to go there.
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No other author, biblical or otherwise, mentions this event. Is it, like John’s account of Jesus’ death, a detail made up by Matthew in order to make some kind of theological point?
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In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology.
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I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it. . . . But I don’t have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don’t see any plausible way of filling it.
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[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally.
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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