Quotes from Bart D. Ehrman

As a historian I am no longer obsessed with the theological question of how God became a man, but with the historical question of how a man became God.

we notice a discrepancy in sequences, that would be strange.

The Old Testament says no word about either eternal bliss for the righteous dead or everlasting punishment for the wicked. The poets praise God, instead, for allowing them to stay alive for a while longer, making it possible for them still to praise him.

All of these authors are trying to understand the world and their place in it, and all of them have valuable things to teach us. It is important to know what the words of these authors were, so that we can see what they had to say and judge, then, for ourselves what to think and how to live in light of those words.

Probably most people who read the Bible think of Sheol as a Jewish kind of Hades, a shadowy place where everyone goes and all are treated the same, a banal and uninteresting netherworld where nothing really happens and people are, in effect, bored for all eternity. But in fact, in most passages of the Bible where Sheol is mentioned, it may well simply be an alternative technical term for the place where an individual is buried—that is, their grave or a pit.

Their view was held by each and every one of the prophets: Jeremiah, Hosea, Joel—take your pick. It is that the people of God have sinned and God is punishing them for it. Suffering comes from God, to penalize his people for not living as they should. This is sometimes called the "prophetic" or the "classical" view of suffering.

Eventually Jesus came to be seen as God in every respect, coeternal with the Father, of the same substance as the Father, equal to the Father within the Trinity of three persons, but one God.

Instead, God has cosmic enemies. They are the ones doing it.

Hebrew anthropology was not dualistic (body and soul) but unitary. Nephesh means something like life force or even breath. It is not a substance that can leave a person and exist independently of the body. It is the thing that makes bodies live. When the body stops breathing, it becomes dead matter. In modern terms, when you stop breathing, your breath doesn't go somewhere. It just stops. So too with the Hebrew nephesh . The person is then dead.

A human being (say, a great ruler or warrior or holy person) could be made divine

Scholars sometimes use technical terms (i.e., Hypostases) for no good reason, other than the fact that they are the technical terms scholars use.

he truly suffered . . . not as some unbelievers say, that he suffered only in appearance. They are the ones who are only an appearance

The problem with material remains is that they are silent: they don't provide their own interpretations. And that means various interpretations are possible.

So far as we know, humans have always imagined there must be life beyond. Possibly, in part, that is because individual humans have always—as long as they have been able to think—known nothing other than existence, making it very difficult indeed to imagine a never-experienced state of nonexistence.

Pagans never had to affirm anything. As odd as this seems, pagans were not required to believe truths about the gods. Paganism was instead about performing the proper, traditional cultic acts.

a human seer experiences visions of heavenly realities—often told in highly symbolic language with, at times, quite bizarre images—is almost always written pseudonymously. A book of this sort is known as an "apocalypse," a literary genre used set to forth an apocalyptic view that explains the cosmic reasons for the horrible state of earthly affairs

One of the clearest ways to evaluate the common beliefs of a society is to consider the satires that arise within it. Satire makes fun of standard assumptions, perspectives, views, and beliefs.

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. HEAVEN

The problem is that most ancient people—whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan—did not have this paradigm. For them, the human realm was not an absolute category separated from the divine realm by an enormous and unbridgeable crevasse. On the contrary, the human and divine were two continuums that could, and did, overlap.

the rivers Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus flow into the Acheron.

The other advantage of making the author a famous religious figure of the past is that such books often purport to tell the future.

An "orthonymous" (literally, "rightly named") writing is one that really is written by the person who claims to be writing it.

This motivation was at work in both Christian and non-Christian circles. We know this because ancient authors actually tell us so. For example, a commentator on the writings of Aristotle, a pagan scholar named David, indicated: "If someone is uninfluential and unknown, yet wants his writing to be read, he writes in the name of someone who came before him and was influential, so that through his influence he can get his work accepted.

Making these "predictions" of the future was relatively easy when the real author was living after the events he "predicted.