Armageddon Quotes

“It is also the portrait of Christ many people prefer today. It is a portrait that enables and encourages Jesus’s followers to embrace violence, vengeance, domination, and exploitation, to do whatever it takes to assert their will on others.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“The book of Revelation was one of the least copied and read books of the New Testament and had difficulty making its way into the canon. In the first four Christian centuries, it was accepted mainly by the churches of the western part of the empire, where some leaders such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Victorinus cited it as an authoritative text. Other writers found its message dangerous and claimed it was forged in the name of the apostle John. In the eastern empire, the book was for the most part not well received, for two reasons. For one thing, many church leaders found its crass materialism offensive. As Christian leaders began to stress the importance of a spiritual union with God rather than carnal, physical rewards for obedience, they considered Revelation hopelessly indebted to a view of leisure and pleasure embraced by the wider culture. The Christian faith was supposed to be different. The book, then, did not represent a revelation of the true God and his Christ.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Donald Trump was elected in 2016, which, as it turns out, is the sum of 666 + 666 + 666 + 6 + 6 + 6.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Irenaeus argues that since these Gnostics could not support their bizarre teachings about the creation of the world or the identity of Christ simply by appealing to the texts, they reassembled them. In a memorable image, Irenaeus says the heretics are like someone who takes a gorgeous mosaic of a gallant king and rearranges the stones so they now portray a mangy dog, claiming this is what the artist intended all along. Even more, they insist this is a portrait of the king. For Irenaeus, this is no way to treat a book (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.8).”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“this is not reading the Bible as a book. It is using the Bible as a kind of Christian Ouija board.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Of the many, many thousands of serious students of the Bible throughout Christian history who pored over every word—from leading early Christian scholars such as Irenaeus in the second century; to Tertullian and Origen in the third; to Augustine in the fifth; to all the biblical scholars of the Middle Ages up to Aquinas; to the Reformation greats Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin; on to, well, everyone who studied or simply read or even just heard passages from the Bible—this idea of the rapture occurred to no one until John Nelson Darby came up with the idea in the early 1800s (as we will discuss in chapter 3).”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Those who think following Jesus means doing “great deeds” in his name, but who do not act in loving ways toward others, are lost, even if they do insistently call Jesus their Lord. This is the gospel of Jesus.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“And he tells them why they have been saved: “Because I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, a foreigner and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me….” The sheep are overjoyed, but, at the same time, surprised: they have never seen the king or done any of these good things for him. But he tells them that since this is how they acted toward the most lowly of his brothers and sisters, they did so to him.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“More than ever, it has become de rigueur to portray Jesus according to one’s own ideological perspectives. And so we have scholars (not to mention preachers) who celebrate the Capitalist Jesus, the Marxist Jesus, the Feminist Jesus, the Countercultural Jesus, and the Political Revolutionary Jesus. The Nazis had an Aryan Jesus. Among us still today there is a White Nationalist Jesus. Name your ideological preference and write your book.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“The word “rapture” never appears in the Bible. Here’s another: Even apart from the actual word, the book of Revelation never says anything about the followers of Jesus being taken out of the world before it all goes up in flames. The idea of the rapture has not been taken from the Bible; it has been read into the Bible.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“But is he the kind of Christian that Jesus would recognize?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“The English word “Almighty” is a bit weak for the Greek term used here: Pantokrator, a rare word, or at least it was before the book of Revelation.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Christ, the Lamb, is to be united with his bride, the church of his followers, and there will be a celebration. That sounds festive. But who are the banqueters? And what is on the menu? Those who eat the marriage supper of the Lamb are the scavenger birds; their meal is the flesh of Christ’s enemies.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Christ, the Lamb, is to be united with his bride, the church of his followers, and there will be a celebration. That sounds festive. But who are the banqueters? And what is on the menu? Those who eat the marriage supper of the Lamb”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“You may think God is justified in his anger. But having infants dashed to pieces and pregnant mothers ripped open?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“When his predictions didn’t come true, or even close to true, he continued writing books and giving lectures about how now the signs were coming to be fulfilled”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“That’s not how authors, ancient or modern, work. Authors write for readers in their own time and place.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“But the reality is that most of these symbols would have been quite simple for anyone at the time to discern, whether a devoted Christian or a Roman pagan.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“What Luther did understand about the book made him doubt its apostolic origin. In the Preface to Revelation, he explains: About this book of the Revelation of John, I leave everyone free to hold his own ideas, and would bind no man to my opinion or judgment: I say what I feel. I miss more than one thing in this book, and this makes me hold it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic. First, and foremost, the Apostles do not deal with visions, but prophesy in clear, plain words, as do Peter and Paul and Christ in the Gospel…. [But] I can in nothing detect that it [Revelation] was provided by the Holy Spirit.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“One of the interesting features of the book of Revelation is that unlike nearly all the other apocalypses it does not appear to be pseudonymous.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“This belief in the rebuilding of the temple is key to understanding evangelical support of Israel.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Balfour wrote the famous Balfour Declaration, dated November 2, 1917, in the name of the country’s cabinet in a letter”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“A very common technique is simply to open the Bible at random—either with a particular concern in mind or hoping to learn whatever God “wants to tell me today”—and to read the first passage that strikes your eye”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Our Bibles today have chapter and verse divisions. These are extremely helpful, of course, since without them it is very hard indeed to tell someone where to find a passage. But the authors did not write in chapters and verses. One problem with our having them is that they make us think that the next chapter (or even verse) is changing the subject.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“The idea of the rapture has not been taken from the Bible; it has been read into the Bible.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“For people in power to think that mutual self-destruction has been foreordained in holy writ is not, obviously, a comforting thought.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“evangelical commitment to the country remains vibrant—and cannot be separated from evangelical interpretation of Revelation. In a recent poll by Lifeway Research, some 80 percent of evangelicals believe that the establishment of the state of Israel was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that shows that we are now closer to the second coming of Christ.23”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“there is not a single word in all of Revelation about God loving others and no instruction to the followers of Christ to do so, either.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“the God of Revelation cannot be the true God.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“Back, then, to my original question: Is this the God of the New Testament?”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End