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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Bart D. Ehrman

From the historians' perspective it is striking that all forms of early Christianity claimed authorization of their views by tracing their lineage back through the apostles to Jesus.

— 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.

— 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?

— Bart D. Ehrman

Judas's act of "betrayal" is in fact his faithful obedience to Jesus' will.

— 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.

— 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

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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Bart D. Ehrman

The very idea that society should serve the poor, the sick, and the marginalized became a distinctively Christian concern.

— Bart D. Ehrman

Christianity may well have succeeded even if Constantine had not converted.

— Bart D. Ehrman