You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.
BART D. EHRMANSometimes 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.
More Bart D. Ehrman Quotes
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The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew
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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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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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Did he say both things? Could he mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?
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In 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.
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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.
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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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In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet.
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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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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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My students sometimes ask: what is a fundamentalist? I give them a very simple definition.
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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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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.
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There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.
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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.”
BART D. EHRMAN