Lost Christianities Quotes

“Later orthodox Christians, after they had secured their victory, tried to obscure the real history of the conflict.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“But the historian is no more able to pronounce on ultimate “truth” than anyone else. That is to say, historians cannot decide who is right in the question of whether there is one God or two; they can simply show what different people have thought at different times.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“The group that emerged as victorious and declared itself orthodox determined the shape of Christianity for posterity—determining its internal structure, writing its creeds, and compiling its revered texts into a sacred canon of Scripture.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“Do not return to what you have vomited to eat it.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“For ancient people, male and female were not two kinds of human; they were two degrees of human.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“The other Gospel that Origen mentions, the Gospel of Thomas, has been discovered in its entirety in modern times and is arguably the single most important Christian archaeological discovery of the twentieth century.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“The proto-orthodox had a variety of strategies for linking their views to those of the apostles. The most basic argument involved the “apostolic succession,” seen already in a quite early form in 1 Clement.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“And the side that knew how to utilize power was the side that won.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“Thus, for Reimarus, the disciples started the Christian religion.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“Orthodox” Christianity insisted that people are made right with God by faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection. This Gospel maintains that people are saved by receiving the correct knowledge of who they really are.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“A number of central issues are discussed in the writing: the nature of God, the character of the world, the person of Christ, the work of salvation he brought, and how to respond to it. Notably, its views stand diametrically opposed to those that eventually became dominant in Christianity and that have been handed down to Christians today.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“Plato, too, had emphasized a kind of dualism of shadow and reality, matter and spirit.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“The quotations that Clement thought of as a second edition, Secret Mark, were in fact, Smith argued, part of the original Gospel of Mark, but were taken out by later scribes. And so the two versions of Mark were not, technically speaking, both produced by him. He wrote the longer version, and it came to be shortened by subsequent scribes who copied his text.13 Clement misunderstood the true relationship of these two versions.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“For some works, linguists are able to determine that the Coptic is “translation” rather than “original composition” Coptic.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“When the verses on women are removed, the passage flows neatly without a break. This too suggests that these verses were inserted into the passage later.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“Often their false teachings are said to be matched by their promiscuous lives.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“belief in only one God, the creator of the world, who created everything out of nothing; belief in his Son, Jesus Christ, predicted by the prophets and born of the Virgin Mary; belief in his miraculous life, death, resurrection, and ascension; and belief in the Holy Spirit, who is present on earth until the end, when there will be a final judgment in which the righteous will be rewarded and the unrighteous condemned to eternal torment”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“written by someone who chose to reformulate the history of the early tensions within the church to show that the catholic solution had been in place from the beginning.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“fundamental question: Did Jesus and his disciples teach an orthodoxy that was transmitted to the churches of the second and third centuries?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“some of their texts reappeared by sheer serendipity in modern times.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“the ones claiming to be in the know became the object of scorn and derision.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“law of retaliation, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” is “interwoven with injustice,” since, as Ptolemy points out, “the one who is second to act unjustly still acts unjustly, differing only in the relative order in which he acts, and committing the very same act”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“like all groups of Christians at all times and in all places, understood themselves to be the fortunate heirs of the truth, handed down to them by their faithful predecessors, who received their understandings about God, Christ, the world, and our place in it from people who should know—ultimately from the apostles of Jesus, and through them from Jesus himself, the one sent by God.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“Do they still exist?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew

“When the soldiers seize him, all his disciples flee. But there is someone else there, “a young man” who is “clothed with a linen cloth over his naked body.” The soldiers grab this unnamed man, but he escapes, nude, leaving them with the linen cloth in their hands (Mark 14:51–52). Who is this person,”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture & the Faiths We Never Knew