The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot Quotes

“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, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“Even though the apocalyptic character of Jesus’ message is clear in our very earliest sources, such as Mark, Q, and the sources behind Matthew and Luke, in our later sources there is little of the apocalypse that is retained. The Gospel of John, the latest of the canonical Gospels, does not, as a rule, put apocalyptic sayings on the lips of Jesus. Even later, in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus preaches against an apocalyptic understanding of the world (e.g., in Sayings 3 and 113). Later Gospels have no apocalyptic message at all. When the end didn’t come, the followers of Jesus changed his message.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

“If this was the heart and core of Jesus’ proclamation—that someone called the Son of Man, a cosmic judge from heaven, was soon to arrive in judgment to establish God’s Kingdom—why don’t people today normally think of this as his message? The answer is not hard to find. The expected end did not come. 156 The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot Jesus died. Then his disciples died. And the end never arrived. As a result, the followers of Jesus started emphasizing other aspects of his message. His proclamation was reshaped away from its original apocalyptic emphasis. The Christian message became the preaching about Jesus, about his death and resurrection, rather than the preaching of Jesus, about the coming Son of Man. As later storytellers told and retold the stories of Jesus and his preaching, they deemphasized the apocalyptic character of the message. Jesus’ teachings, in effect, were deapocalypticized.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

“The second-century theologian and teacher Marcion, for example, claimed that the disciples of Jesus, constantly upbraided by their master for failing to understand, continued to think that he came from the Jewish god in fulfillment of the Jewish law. Because they never understood that he was from the other God, the one who had not created this world or called Israel to be his people, Christ had to call another apostle to proclaim his message. That is why he appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, to reveal to him the truth of the gospel. And that is why Paul regularly contrasted his gospel with the law. The gospel came from the God of Christ, the law from the god of the Jews. These two were irreconcilably at odds. This is why Paul had such heated arguments with Peter over whether Gentiles had to become Jews in order to be Christians (Gal. 2:11–14). According to Marcion, Paul had it right, Peter had it wrong: true faith in Christ renounced the god of the Jews, it did not worship him. The goal of true religion was to escape his clutches, not obey his rules.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

“And so we have a theological spectrum. On one end is the apostle Paul, who saw Christ’s death and resurrection as the be-all and end-all. What mattered was that Christ died for sins and was raised from the dead. Everything else about Jesus was completely subservient to his Passion. On the other end is the Gospel of Thomas, for which the death and resurrection of Jesus had no bearing on salvation. The way to have eternal life was by understanding his secret revelations, the teachings that could liberate a person from the entrapment in this corpse of our existence, the material world and the human body.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

“For Irenaeus, salvation came by having faith in the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus; according to the Gnostics, salvation came by learning the secret truths that Christ taught concerning how to escape this world of the body.
I should stress that these truths were not available to just anybody. Only those who had the spark of the divine within could receive them. Others—those without the spark—belonged to the god of this world, the creator who made matter and all the misery and suffering connected with it. These others could not know the truth because they were not from above. This made it exceedingly difficult to argue with Gnostics. If you claimed they were wrong, they could simply point out that you didn’t “know.” If you interpreted a passage of Scripture to counter their claims, they could smugly assure you that you misunderstood the passage. If you claimed that their interpretation violated that natural meaning of the text, they could say that the real meaning lies beneath the surface, there only for those with eyes to see.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

“The widespread notion that stories never should be changed but should be repeated without alteration every time is an innovation of modern written cultures. Before the creation of the printing press, this was not a widely shared view.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

“In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul is upset for a number of reasons, mainly because the Corinthian Christians were misbehaving in lots of ways: he indicates that they formed cliques that contended with one another over which of their leaders was spiritually superior; their worship services had grown chaotic; there was rampant immorality, with some men visiting prostitutes and bragging about it in church (they were saved already, so why did it matter how they behaved?), and one fellow was living in sin with his stepmother.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

“In all of the Gospels of the New Testament, Mary Magdalene is mentioned only one time during Jesus’ entire public ministry prior to his crucifixion, and in that one reference we are simply told that she was one of three women who accompanied Jesus and his disciples during his itinerant preaching ministry and who gave them the funds they needed to survive (the other two were Joanna and Susanna). That’s it! There are no references to her being a prostitute, having anointed Jesus (that was a different, unnamed woman), or having been the woman caught in adultery (that was yet a different unnamed woman)—let alone having been Jesus’ wife and lover. Where, then, do people get their ideas about the Magdalene from? From legends told about her many decades or even centuries after her death. These are stories that are made up—sometimes (for example, in the case of her having Jesus’ baby) made up in modern times by novelists or “independent researchers” who want to sell books.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at the Betrayer and Betrayed

“These manuscripts had evidently resided in this limestone box for over sixteen hundred years, completely undisturbed.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“This knowledge cannot come to us through natural means—for example, by looking around at the world and thinking hard about it.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“Irenaeus was particularly distressed about the widespread presence of Gnostic Christians in the midst of the church.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“Despite Dan Brown’s claim at the beginning of his novel that all of its “descriptions of documents … are accurate,” nearly everything he says about the Gospels outside the New Testament is wrong.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“So too the famous preacher and bishop of Constantinople, John, who was so eloquent in the pulpit that he earned the sobriquet Chrysostom, which means “golden-mouthed.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“When he comes to learn that he is in fact not related to the queen, and so is not the royal heir,”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“The author of Acts, who has put these words on Peter’s lips, sees that everything—even the disastrous events of Jesus’ betrayal and execution—was according to plan.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“The enemies of God might imprison, torture, and kill the apostles of Christ, but they could never stop the forward movement of the mission.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“The widespread notion that stories never should be changed but should be repeated without alteration every time is an innovation of modern written cultures.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“In the Hebrew language, the word for “anointed one” is mashiach, from which we get our word messiah. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the translation of mashiach is christos, whence we get our word Christ.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“(Paul, and all the other authors of the New Testament, wrote in Greek).”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“It was clear to me that this newly discovered Gospel of Judas could be one of two things. Its importance and the breadth of its appeal would depend entirely on which of these two things it was.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“Disagreement is simply something that scholars do.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

“the manuscripts back immediately and return the worthless checks.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“the state of the world today. Why is it a place of such misery, pain, and suffering? Because it is not the good creation of the ultimate true God.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“a book called the Golden Legend, compiled by the Dominican monk Jacobus of Voragine in 1265. Prior to the Protestant Reformation, this was the most widely read book in all of Christendom,”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“people either live in the light or walk in the darkness; they either stand for the truth or propagate error.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“thirty pieces of silver.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“that infamous cry that has led to such hateful acts of anti-Semitism over the ages, where they take responsibility for the death of Jesus and pass that responsibility on to their descendants: “His blood be upon us and our children” (27:25).”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“apostles” (i.e., those sent on a mission)”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed

“the New Testament is arranged not according to when the books were written but according to genre, with the Gospels first, then the book of Acts, then the letters (of Paul and others), and then the book of Revelation.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed