How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee QUOTES

1 " You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

2 " All we would need to do would be to read the Bible and accept what it says as what really happened. That, of course, is the approach to the Bible that fundamentalists take. And that’s one reason why you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

3 " What you can control are your attitudes about the things in your life. And so it is your inner self, your attitudes, that you should be concerned about. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

4 " I should point out that the Gospels do not indicate on which day Jesus was raised. The women go to the tomb on the third day, and they find it empty. But none of the Gospels indicates that Jesus arose that morning before the women showed up. He could just as well have arisen the day before or even the day before that—just an hour, say, after he had been buried. The Gospels simply don’t say. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

5 " Who was the first person to go to the tomb? Was it Mary Magdalene by herself (John)? or Mary along with another Mary (Matthew)? or Mary along with another Mary and Salome (Mark)? or Mary, Mary, Joanna, and a number of other women (Luke)? Was the stone already rolled away when they arrived at the tomb (Mark, Luke, and John), or explicitly not (Matthew)? Whom did they see there? An angel (Matthew), a man (Mark), or two men (Luke)? Did they immediately go and tell some of the disciples what they had seen (John), or not (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? What did the person or people at the tomb tell the women to do? To tell the disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee (Matthew and Mark)? Or to remember what Jesus had told them earlier when he had been in Galilee (Luke)? Did the women then go tell the disciples what they were told to tell them (Matthew and Luke), or not (Mark)? Did the disciples see Jesus (Matthew, Luke, and John), or not (Mark)?1 Where did they see him?—only in Galilee (Matthew), or only in Jerusalem (Luke)? "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

6 " Ancient Jews had no expectation—zero expectation—that the future messiah would die and rise from the dead. That was not what the messiah was supposed to do. Whatever specific idea any Jew had about the messiah (as cosmic judge, mighty priest, powerful warrior), what they all thought was that he would be a figure of grandeur and power who would be a mighty ruler of Israel. And Jesus was certainly not that. Rather than destroying the enemy, Jesus was destroyed by the enemy—arrested, tortured, and crucified, the most painful and publicly humiliating form of death known to the Romans. Jesus, in short, was just the opposite of what Jews expected a messiah to be. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

7 " Some people today claim that cultures rooted in oral tradition are far more careful to make certain that traditions that are told and retold are not changed significantly. This turns out to be a modern myth, however. Anthropologists who have studied oral cultures show that just the opposite is the case. Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts “as they really are.” And this is because in literary cultures, it is possible to check the sources to see whether someone has changed a story. In oral cultures, it is widely expected that stories will indeed change—they change anytime a storyteller is telling a story in a new context. New contexts require new ways of telling stories. Thus, oral cultures historically have seen no problem with altering accounts as they were told and retold.3 "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

8 " This is one of the hard-and-fast ironies of the Christian tradition: views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

9 " the whole story was in fact a legend, that is, the burial and discovery of an empty tomb were tales that later Christians invented to persuade others that the resurrection indeed happened. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

10 " Paul, by the way, never says that Jesus declared himself to be divine. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

11 " Scholars have long recognized that Luke himself wrote these speeches—they are not the speeches that these apostles really delivered at one time or another. Luke is writing decades after the events he narrates, and no one at the time was taking notes. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

12 " Whoever wrote the Gospel of John (we’ll continue to call him John, though we don’t know who he really was) must have been a Christian living sixty years or so after Jesus, in a different part of the world, in a different cultural context, speaking a different language—Greek rather than Aramaic—and with a completely different level of education .. The author of John is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus’s words; they are John’s words placed on Jesus’s lips. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

13 " There are very serious reasons to doubt that Jesus was buried decently and that his tomb was discovered to be empty ... Faith is not historical knowledge, and historical knowledge is not faith. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

14 " What we think of as the twenty-seven books of “the” New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, and it was the side that won the debates over what to believe that decided which books were to be included in the canon of scripture. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

15 " This oldest Christology of all may be found in the preliterary traditions in Paul and the book of Acts, but it is not the view presented in any of the Gospels. Instead, as we will see at greater length, the oldest Gospel, Mark, seems to assume that it was at his baptism that Jesus became the Son of God; the next Gospels, Matthew and Luke, indicate that Jesus became the Son of God when he was born; and the last Gospel, John, presents Jesus as the Son of God from before creation. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

16 " the idea that Jesus rose on the 'third day' was originally a theological construct, not a historical piece of information. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

17 " In this connection I should stress that the discovery of the empty tomb appears to be a late tradition. It occurs in Mark for the first time, some thirty-five or forty years after Jesus died. Our earliest witness, Paul, does not say anything about it. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

18 " God was the ultimate source of all that was divine. But there were lower divinities as well. Even within monotheistic Judaism. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

19 " In ancient Judaism the king of Israel was considered both Son of God and—astonishingly enough—even God. "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

20 " I wonder if the fact that I left the faith is somehow seen as threatening, at least among people who have a gnawing suspicion, "

― Bart D. Ehrman , How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee