Top 40 Bart D. Ehrman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!”

— Bart D. Ehrman

4. “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

5. “In Matthew, Jesus declares, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” In Mark, he says,“Whoever is not against us is for us.” 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?”

— Bart D. Ehrman

6. “There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

7. “In fact, most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. 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.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

8. “You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

9. “The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

10. “Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

11. “The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

12. “My students sometimes ask: what is a fundamentalist? I give them a very simple definition. A fundamentalist is no fun, too much damn, and not enough mental.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

13. “The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

14. “As time goes on, thing do get made up.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

15. “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

16. “Whether you are a believer – fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal – or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

17. “Within three hundred years Jesus went from being a Jewish apocalyptic prophet to being God himself, a member of the Trinity. Early Christianity is nothing if not remarkable.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

18. “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. 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?”

— Bart D. Ehrman

19. “Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

20. “The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time originated about two centuries before the life of Jesus, and by his day it had become a common feature of Jewish thought. Later, at the hands of Christians, it came to be transformed into a teaching of postmortem rewards and punishments, the ideas of heaven and hell.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

21. “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

22. “4. To cite one well-known example of this ignorance of Jewish customs: Mark 7:3 indicates that the Pharisees “and all the Jews” washed their hands before eating, so as to observe “the tradition of the elders.” This is not true: most Jews did not engage in this ritual. If Mark had been a Jew, or even a gentile living in Palestine, he certainly would have known this.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

23. “The Sibyl informs him that it is, in fact, quite simple to get to the world of the dead. The problem is getting back:.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

24. “One of Jesus’s characteristic teachings is that there will be a massive reversal of fortunes when the end comes. Those who are rich and powerful now will be humbled then; those who are lowly and oppressed now will then be exalted. The apocalyptic logic of this view is clear: it is only by siding with the forces of evil that people in power have succeeded in this life; and by siding with God other people have been persecuted and rendered powerless.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

25. “The fear of death in antiquity differed from the terrors of torment or horrors of actual nonexistence experienced by so many in the West today. It was instead the dread of losing out on everything a full life has to offer, everything that makes living pleasant.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

26. “In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

27. “This is how readers over the years have come up with the famous “seven last words of the dying Jesus” – by taking what he says at his death in all four Gospels, mixing them together, and imagining that in their combination they now have the full story. This interpretive move does not give the full story. It gives a fifth story, a story that is completely unlike any of the canonical four, a fifth story that in effect rewrites the Gospels, producing a fifth Gospel. This.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

28. “The word “cult” comes from the Latin phrase cultus deorum, which literally means “the care of the gods.” A cultic act is any ritualized practice that is done out of reverence to or worship of the gods. Such activities lay at the heart of pagan religions. Doctrines and ethics did not.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

29. “Traditionally in Christian circles, Judas in fact has been associated with Jews. Of being traitors, avaricious, who in fact, betray Jesus, who are Christ-killers. And this portrayal of Judas of course also leads then to horrendous acts of anti-Semitism through the centuries.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

30. “It took at least three hundred years of debate before the question of the canon even began to reach closure. The decisions that were eventually made were not handed down from on high, and they did not come right away. The canon was the result of a slow and often painful process, in which lots of disagreements were aired and different points of view came to be expressed, debated, accepted, and suppressed.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

31. “Philosophers talked a lot about how people should act toward one another, as members of a family, in relationships with friends and neighbors, as citizens of a city. Good behavior was part of being a worthwhile human being and a responsible citizen. But it generally was not a part of religious activities.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

32. “We might mean different things. How can you tell? Only by reading each of us carefully and seeing what each of us has to say – not by pretending that we are both saying the same thing. We’re often saying very different things.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

33. “What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting the Bible up as a false idol – or an oracle that gives is a direct line of communication with the Almighty?”

— Bart D. Ehrman

34. “7. This is a consensus view among scholars today. For one thing, Matthew used Mark as a source for many of his stories, copying out the Greek word for word in some passages. If our Matthew was a Greek translation of a Hebrew original, it would not be possible to explain the verbatim agreement of Matthew with Mark in the Greek itself.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

35. “In spite of having no body they stand and move, think and talk; in short, it’s as if their naked souls were walking about clad in the semblance of their bodies.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

36. “To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

37. “There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

38. “How awful is it to be dead? It would be better to be the lowest, most impoverished, slave-driven nobody on earth than to be the king of the dead in gloomy Hades. And there is no turning back and no way to improve one’s lot. That is the fate of virtually all who die.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

39. “The books we call the New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after the books themselves had first been produced.”

— Bart D. Ehrman

40. “Many Christians today may think that the canon of the New Testament simply appeared on the scene one day, soon after the death of Jesus, but nothing could be farther from the truth.”

— Bart D. Ehrman