(The following appeared on Larry Hurtado’s blog in regard to the Green Collection)

Newly-Identified Early New Testament Fragments?
by larryhurtado

Over the last couple of days have appeared numerous postings on reports that fragments of several early NT manuscripts have been identified (e.g., http://sheffieldbiblicalstudies.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/first-century-fragment-of-mark/). A statement by Dan Wallace in a recent debate with Bart Ehrman seems to be the source of these reports. In the debate, Wallace says that he referred to a fragment identified as part of a first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark (http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2012/02/wallace-vs-erhman-round-three/).

The fragment in question seems to be part of a collection of papyri that are part of the Green Collection (http://explorepassages.com/collection). The key figure listed as the guiding expert for the Greek Collection is Scott Carroll. One of the recent postings lists several putative early fragments of several NT writings (including some Pauline letters allegedly dated to the second century CE). According to Wallace, a formal scholarly publication of these items is in the works, scheduled to appear next year sometime.

It is entirely understandable, and yet also in some ways unfortunate, that polemicists for and against the Bible (such as the protagonists in the Wallace/Ehrman debate) have made the identification and secure dating of NT manuscripts such a controversial matter. It would be a wonderful further boon to textual scholarship to have additional early manuscripts of NT writings, even legible fragments. Among other matters, depending on the amount of text actually preserved, all portions of early manuscripts are vital for tracing the textual history of the writings they attest. With regard to NT writings, we are already in an enviable and unparalleled situation, with substantial early papyri copies of a number of them (e.g., the Chester Beatty papyri, and the Bodmer papyri). But here are some notes to bear in mind as we await further news of the putative new finds.

The identification and palaeographical dating of manuscripts requires huge expertise specific to the period and texts in question. Let’s wait and see whose judgement lies behind the claims.
Palaeographical dating can ever only be approximate, perhaps as narrow as 50 yrs plus or minus. Expert palaeographers often disagree over a given item by as much as a century or more. It’s never wise to rest much upon one judgement, and confidence will be enhanced only when various experts have been given full access to the items.
It is particularly difficult to make a palaeographical dating of a fragment, the smaller it is the more difficult. For such dating requires as many characters of the alphabet as possible and as many instances of them in the copy as possible to form a good judgement about the “hand”.
Although it rachets up potential sales of a publication to make large claims and posit sensational inferences about items, it doesn’t help the sober scholarly work involved. It also doesn’t actually accrue any credit or greater credibility for the items or those involved in handling them.

With many others, I await further news, and even more so I await more forthcoming scholarly work on these mooted items. Early New Testament fragments? As someone said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution: “Too soon to tell.”

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A highlight of the program is a lecture marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, presented by the noted scholar and Biblical Archaeology Review columnist Leonard Greenspoon. He will discuss this famous edition of the Bible as well as 10 of the most common misconceptions about Biblical translations.

The oldest temple in the world—just recently discovered at Gobeckli in southeastern Turkey—is the subject of Ben Witherington III’s paradigm-breaking research. Dr. Witherington’s presentation takes a close look at this incredible discovery and discusses what it means for our understanding of the origin of religions.

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Other popular presenters who will be sharing their latest discoveries and research include eminent scholars Amy-Jill Levine (Vanderbilt), Bart Ehrman (UNC), Mark Goodacre (Duke), Laura Nasrallah (Harvard), and Jodi Magness (UNC). James Charlesworth (Princeton Theological Seminary) will examine the most recent evidence for the Gospel of John’s accuracy in its portrayal of ancient Jerusalem.

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Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six

As Bart Ehrman points out in Chapter Seven of his study,  there are in fact a lot of anonymous documents in the NT, including all four Gospels, Acts,  Hebrews, and 1 John.  The practice of presenting documents anonymously, as Bart says, was a great deal more common in antiquity in our age where we even have intellectual property lawyers and plagiarism is a serious crime under certain circumstances.   In this chapter then,  Bart mentions the possibility that the later attributions of these books to one person or another might be perfectly innocent,  even if they were misattributions  (pp. 222-25).   He is right about this,  and it is worth asking why this anonymous book trend did gain more momentum in the second century than it seems to have done.  Why in fact was there some felt urgency to suddenly label previously anonymous documents?   The reasons are probably multiple, but in fact clearly one of them is that heretics began using these documents, and claiming them for their own causes, and there was a felt need to rescue them from the clutches of the false teachers.  Of course some, or perhaps most of the anonymous NT documents may not originally have been anonymous at all— the audiences may have known very well who created them.    What we can say in the case of these documents is that it is clear their authors didn’t feel compelled to throw their weight around in terms of their personal or apostolic authority by identifying themselves.    But it is also possible to conclude they didn’t identify themselves because, as the preface in Lk. 1.1-4 suggests, they themselves were neither eyewitnesses nor the original apostles or prophets or teachers in earliest Christianity.    This too might explain the anonymity.

Bart on pp. 224-25 suggests the interesting theory that perhaps some of these documents like Acts are anonymous because they are seen as continuations of the great OT narratives of a similar ilk— say the narrative in Samuel or Kings.   Thus the story of Jesus is seen as the continuation of the story of Israel and its kings.   This is possible, perhaps especially in Luke-Acts.

Now one of the unspoken but worthwhile considerations is that the insistence on labeling all these documents, and especially the insistence on connecting them with known authority figures such as the apostles or the Twelve suggests  that the authority of the documents to some extent hinges on the author.   And this leads to a further query, namely  if this is so, then it would seem these documents were not viewed as having inherent divine authority, which might mean they were not viewed as if they were Scripture,  like the OT books which were happily anonymous and no one felt any need to remedy that situation.    This line of thinking is worth pondering, but on the other hand we also have 2 Pet. 3 which suggests that that editor or author already thinks of Paul’s letters as Scriptures, or as comparable to ‘the other Scriptures’.  On p. 227 Bart makes the plausible suggestion that the reason the 4^th Gospel came to be said to be John’s is that it was felt it needed to be by someone who was close to Jesus— the closest being Peter, James and John,  and since James was already dead, and so too Peter,  perhaps John was the label chosen by default.  This is possible but it doesn’t account for the internal evidence in this Gospel pointing to a Judean eyewitness disciple, as we have discussed in previous posts.

The anti-Semitic second century document which began as an anonymous document and came to be called the letter of Barnabas is discussed on pp. 229-32 and there is nothing here to dispute. Bart makes the interesting conjecture that this document may have been in response to Marcion, attempting to counter the notion that the OT does not reveal Christ.  It is possible.    The author of Barnabas is clearly not Barnabas, and just as clearly it is supercessionist in character— God has replaced his first chosen people with a second group.    Bart then treats a variety of other pseudonymous documents such as the Proto-Evangelium  of James, Pseudo-Matthew, and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas  (up to pp. 238-39).  There is nothing really problematic about these analyses and sometimes they have some helpful  new insights about these apocryphal documents.  Bart is not sure whether a document like the Proto-Evangelium of James would be seen as fiction or fact, but he suggests it could be both, depending on who is doing the reading.

Of course you knew it was coming.  Just as he had done before,  Bart deals with later documents clearly agreed to be full of fables by scholars of all points on the spectrum, and then he says ‘and we see the same sort of thing in the NT itself’.    For example, on p. 239,  he points to the story of the census by Augustus, saying it never happened.   This unfortunately shows how little he knows about Romans when it comes to censii and tax collecting.  Censii were certainly done throughout the Empire in preparation for taxing people, and further more,  in just the next province over, in Egypt,  people were enrolled in their ancestral towns.   You can look up the info in the articles in the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels or in the forthcoming Luke commentary I have done with A.J. Levine.   Bart no doubt is thinking that because Quirinius is mentioned in Luke’s  account but Quirinius was only governor well after the birth of  Jesus  (A.D. 6 or later) that Luke has made a muddle of things and on top of which has talked about a worldwide census, which never happened.   In fact, Caesar did decree that each province should be enrolled and taxed,  one by one,  with the exception made of Asia Minor. The Greek of Luke’s account can be read to mean,   ‘this was the census before Quirinius was governor (the famous census then provoked the revolt of zealots like Judas the Galilean).  And as for  Herod’s slaughtering of the innocents, anyone who knows the character of Herod  (he killed his own children and some wives)  and the tiny nature of the village of Bethlehem in Jesus’ day (it would likely have not had more than 10 males 2 and under at the time)  can perfectly well believe the paranoid Herod would have them killed.  The fact this event is not recorded elsewhere is no surprise. It wasn’t some massive slaughtering of innocents, and in any case Herod was a butcher.  This would have been seen as a minor crime on the radar screen of his life compared to a variety of his other deeds.    I could go on, but I have answered some of Bart’s objections to these sorts of stories already in my earlier reviews of Jesus Interrupted and of  Misquoting  Jesus.

One of the problems is of course the assumptions Bart is prepared to make, without defending them at all here, or in full elsewhere.  For example, he suggests that the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 7.53-8.11 must be a fabrication by a later scribe, in part because it is not an original part of this Gospel.   He claims that the Greek style of this story differs from the style elsewhere in this Gospel,  but where is the evidence for either of these claims?   It is not presented.   It is not presented because Bart does not know this to be true, he simply asserts it.   In fact,  most Johannine scholars who have written on this subject think: 1) this is authentic story from the life of Jesus, and 2)  the Greek is not different in any significant way from the range of Greek we find in the rest of this Gospel; and 3) it was probably one of the many free-floating Johannine traditions, alluded to at the end of this Gospel which says Jesus did many other such signs (20.30) and says there are not enough books to contain all the info about Jesus (21.25).  As Martin Hengel pointed out very long ago, the problem for the Evangelists is not that they didn’t have enough material (and so had to make some up) but that they had way too much to get on a single scroll. It was thus a matter of boiling all the material down, and some of it was left out of the canon necessarily, with no suggestion it wasn’t an authentic Jesus tradition.  But of course this view Bart does not even consider, much less rebut.

On pp. 244-45 Bart turns to the old conundrum of  1 Cor. 14.33b-36.   He thinks it is an example of a falsification, an insert by a later scribe attempt to keep women from speaking in church.   This is not impossible,  but in fact there is no evidence for the omission of these verses. We do have evidence for displacement for there are some manuscripts that have part of these verses a bit later in the text.   But do we necessarily have an interpolation here?   What does the text really say?   It says that during the prophecying and teaching the married women in question should be silent, and if they have any questions they should ask them at home.  As Bart rightly points out,  Paul had already authorized in 1 Cor. 11 women to pray and prophesy in church, so it is unlikely he would turn around and place a universal silence on them here.  Suppose however that we are dealing with a common problem when it came to Gentile women and prophecies?  By this I mean the normal way to approach a prophet was with some question in mind you wanted to ask them. This is why you went to the oracle at Delphi not far from Corinth.  In other words, these women had brought there assumption about what should happen during the time of prophets speaking and their words being weighed.  Paul says no— if you have questions ask at home. Let’s not turn worship into a Q+A session.   Now if it is this specific problem Paul is addressing, then we certainly do not have here a ban of women speaking in church.  Furthermore, it should be noted that the command to silence has to do with being silent when God’s Word was being spoken. It has nothing to do with being silent in the presence of males.  There is no OT statement that women should be silent and subordinate to men.  But there is definitely a statement in the OT commanding ‘Be still and know that I am God’ which is the issue here.   Don’t interrupt the prophet, as Paul has already said earlier in this chapter.  1 Tim. 2.5-11 is likewise a correction of a problem  (in this case high status women with blink who want to speak and teach and exercise authority before they learn).   Paul says he is not now allowing them to teach or usurp authority over the male leaders there, and instead they are to be quiet, learning, and in submission to the teaching (nothing here either about being in submission to men in worship).   On this see my commentary on  1 Corinthians and on the Pastorals.   My point is that Bart ignores or dismisses many of the other options possible to the conclusion we have a fabrication and interpolation in 1 Cor. 14, and a whole forged document in 1 Timothy.

On pp. 246-47 quite rightly takes on the Jesus Seminar (go Bart go) and shows they were often wrong,  frequently made mistakes, and surprisingly ignorant about ancient writings.  For example,  Bart points to their statement that plagiarism was unknown in antiquity.  Bart is able to show in a mere paragraph that this is absolutely false.  Plagiarism was known and complained about bitterly in antiquity (see  Vitruivius Book 7; Polybius Hist. 9.2.12;  Martial Epigram 1.66; Diogenes Laertius 2.60; 5.93; 8.54).   This discussion is all quite helpful, and correct.  Equally helpful but unsettling is the evidence from the second century and later of Christians prepared to created forgeries, fabrications, and falsifications supposedly in the name of truth.    Yes, this did happen, and not just by heretics either, and Bart has every right to bring it to light, as it can’t stand the light of day.   His case for this going on in any of the books of the NT is another matter— it is weak, and more often than not, quite readily refuted and rebutted by those who have studied this material in depth and have written commentaries on all of this.   I am one such person.

—————————–

In his final chapter,  Bart deals with the problem of modern forgeries, fabrications and falsifications.  This is quite helpful in various ways, and I can honestly say I agree with most of this chapter.  He points to good resources by legitimate scholars like E.J. Goodspeed that expose these frauds for what they are.    I will let you peruse his skewering of the myth about  Jesus going to India, or the hoax about finding Pilate’s death certificate for Jesus, and the like.  We also hear about Morton Smith’s  secret Mark, but here, surprisingly he does not simply say it was probably a hoax.  It is clear enough to me, it was, and Morton Smith was having us all on.

What this book finishes with is the philosophical question of whether it is ever justified to lie, say to save a life,  or even is it justified to lie for the sake of a larger truth.    Bart’s answer is probably not, and I agree with him.     If you are committed to Truth with a capital T,  lying is basically out of the question, and so is deception, forgery, falsification, and fabrication.   In my estimation this is Bart’s best book so far, and if does nothing else than keep devout Christians honest about the truth, than it has served a useful purpose.    It raises a lot of uncomfortable questions,  and it does a pretty good job of questioning whether pseudonymity was an ancient literary convention, particularly when it comes to document like letters.      I have shown along the way the problems with Bart’s case when it comes to various NT documents, and here is the short list of some of these problems already mentioned:

1)       Bart’s overall historical analysis of the first four centuries of Christianity does not adequately  take into account the unique features of the first century A.D. nor the important roles that apostles, eyewitnesses and their co-workers played in the formation of the Christian movement and its source documents.  All of the NT documents, with the possible exception of 2 Peter, can be traced back internally or indirectly or directly to a very small group of literate Christians, some of them of some considerable status.

2)      Bart grossly underestimates and seems ignorant of the vast number of roles scribes played in the ANE, in second temple Judaism, and probably in early Christianity, including composing documents for other persons.   He needs to go back and read Scribal Culture and do a rethink about the range of possibilities with the use of scribes.

3)      Many of the supposed historical and literary problems Bart thinks he finds in the NT are ephemeral or in some case just not what he thinks they are.   Bart has a good critical mind and he tends to problematize things too much, in order to pursue a particular line of argument.   This is tendentious, to say the least, and it leads to over-reading weak evidence and making global claims that the evidence does not at all support  (e.g. ‘almost all scholars think…..’ and fill in the blank)

4)      Bart does not adequately come to grips with the phenomena of ancient fiction of various sorts.  Some of the documents he is examining  could be said to fall into this category, but he wants to disallow it.    Sometimes he seems to think that just because some gullible people believed something was a true history when it was a fiction, it must have had the intent to deceive.   This is not at all necessarily so.

5)      Bart seems to think he can play mind-reader when it comes to some of the writers of early Christian literature.  The proper question to ask is— How in the world do you know these documents were created as deliberate forgeries or falsifications, or fabrications when the author does not suggest this in the document, and we can’t interview him now?     Most of the time this conclusion is based on mirror-reading of the documents themselves looking for telltale signs of deceit sometimes more successfully than others.

6)       This book could easily be called Gullible Travels for it reveals over and over again the willingness of people to believe even outrageous things at times.  It reveals as well the deep desire in the human heart to trust someone or something about ultimate Truth.   Human gullibility however widespread in both antiquity and modernity however does not prove something about the intentions of the writers of this or that document.

7)      There is in fact some evidence in early Jewish literature, as pointed out by Richard Bauckham, that some kinds of literature, particularly apocalyptic did seem to have had pseudonymous authorship as a part of the literary convention.   It is a different story with  pseudepigrapha and here I think Bart is on basically target.   As Bauckham says,  when it comes to a false attribution in a letter, it necessarily must involve both a false attribution of authorship and of audience (i.e. it must be a later and different audience)  for the conceit and deceit to work.   See the long discussion in my Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians Vol. One, Introduction.

8)      Time and again Bart fails to take into account major factors that count against his argument.   Let’s take the argument about Greek style for a minute.  Nowhere in this book does he really acknowledge that what we have in most of the so-called letters in the NT are actually discourses, rhetorical discourses  set in the framework of epistolary features since they were sent at a distance.  These discourses are oral texts, and they follow the rules of such rhetorical texts and their structures and furthermore, the copying of these texts by scribes follows procedures already well known from the practices of someone like Tiro with Cicero.   Yes indeed, scribes did write down speeches, and notes on speeches, and then reframed them in more eloquent prose.   You cannot for example conclude Paul didn’t write Ephesians on style grounds, just because it uses Asiatic style rhetoric and epideictic rhetoric at that.  It follows those conventions.  Of this sort of thing, Bart says nothing.

9)      The arguments about Jesus, James, Peter being peasants will not fly.   They were Jews taught to read the Scriptures, and every bit of actual evidence (not arguments from silence or what must have been the case in bucolic Galilee) suggests they had at least basic literacy.   Peter is called unlettered in Acts 4, not illiterate.  And in any case, there were scribes aplenty to make up with the deficiencies one had in one’s own literacy and those scribes could turn a sows ear of a speech into a silk purse.     If we are going to talk about forgery and falsification seriously, it will have to deal almost exclusively with flat contradictions of substance between documents,  not the willow of the wisp of analysis of Greek style.  A good writer in Greek altered his style to suit the type of rhetoric and the occasion.   Christianity had some of these scribes as converts, say a Tertius who helped Paul.

10)   In this book Bart ‘over-eggs the pudding’ rather too often, as the Brits would say.  Had he restrained himself, he would have had a stronger  and more plausible case.  But by trying to rule something completely out of bounds or impossible,  he appears too strident, too tendentious,  and stepping on toes liberal, conservative, and others.   It’s not good rhetoric when you alienate most of your more learned audience.  The danger with this book is people will see some of its extreme rhetoric and fail to take seriously that there is a lot in this book worth considering, and many things that Bart gets right.  It is not simply a skree  but sometime it sounds that way.

11)    I do not recommend people to read this book who are not already well familiar with the evidence and other points of view, as it is liable to damage a young Christian’s faith not because it easily discredits Christianity but precisely because the naïve reader has no evidence with which to meaningfully critique the book and see it has severe problems.  For those of you well grounded,  even you must read the book critically and carefully and compare other view points in detail.

12)   As for the average lay person wanting to know the truth about early Christianity,  this is not the book to start with, since it is as likely to mislead and discourage you as help you get at the truth.  About one thing Bart and I definitely agree—the truth will set you free.  But as Pilate says, you need to know how to ask ‘What is truth?’  and is what Bart Ehrman says about it actually the Gospel truth?    My answer is sometimes yes (when he talks about Christian pseudepigrapha  from the second to fourth century) but mostly no (when he talks about the NT and the period when it was written).

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five

I have already warned against Bart’s penchant to make global claims which cannot be substantiated by the evidence, and  Chapter Six begins with another example of this tendency. We read on p.  181—“everywhere Paul went, he confronted Christian teachers who thought he preached a false gospel”.   Really?   In fact, this is far from true.  In an important study,  Jerry Sumney in 1990 wrote a book entitled Identifying Paul’s Opponents. One of the things he most definitely warned against repeatedly in this book is finding opponents of Paul under every rock and every letter in the Pauline corpus.   Frankly, there are no opponents in Philippians or Philemon or  really in 1 Thessalonians or in Romans, and we could go on.  Paul was not swatting gadflies at every turn either when he was in a city or when he wrote to congregations in cities.   Controversies he had, but not everywhere or all the time or with everyone.  Paul was not an ‘Athanasius contra mundum’.

Sometimes of course it is true he had opponents and controversies,  we see this for example in Galatians  (but even there Paul has to ask— Who has bewitched you?).   But it is important to note  Bart’s penchant for: 1) considerable exaggeration not supported by the facts; 2) trying to force binary opposite choices when in fact there are more than two legitimate options.

Bart says at the beginning of this chapter that he is a good debater, and of course rhetorical hyperbole is a good debating tactic to whip the opposition into submission especially if they don’t know the evidence as well as he does, but frankly  this is not what I would call either fair fighting or in accordance with a deep concern for truth.    No, it’s the sort of polemics that Bart himself intimates he despises about some early Christian apologetes.   It’s the pot calling the kettle black, I’m afraid.

Bart is however correct that some of the most heated debates by Christians were with other people who claimed to be Christians.  It needs to be said however, that some of them were in fact not Christians by any NT definition of the term.  Take Marcion or the Gnostics for example.    They did not accept the OT as God’s Word as the earliest Christians, who were Jews, all did, so far as we can tell,  nor did they accept the Biblical concepts of monotheism, or for that matter the earliest confessions about Jesus being the crucified and risen Lord, who made historical appearances to various people  in various places.   My point is simple— neither James nor Peter nor Paul nor John nor any of the other earliest Christian leaders would have recognized  Marcion or the Gnostics as Christians at all.   There was indeed a standard of orthodoxy, especially Christological and monotheistic orthodoxy and a standard of soteriology in the early church, and even if one wants to call it proto-orthodoxy,  nonetheless it was a measuring rod, the regula fidei,  and various of the people Bart chooses to talk about in this chapter frankly do not measure up, never did measure up, and do not deserve the title Christian.

At the same time,  they also did not deserve to be hated and vilified.  Christians themselves always need to even love their enemies, and in fact many early Christian writers fell short of that mandate or even violated it.  About this,  Bart is quite right.    But the notion that there was no standard of orthodoxy in earliest Christianity, and that the Jerusalem apostles were at odds with Paul on major theological issues, and not just issues of Christian praxis are both gross exaggerations of the facts.   The debates between the Jerusalem Judaizers and Paul  were not about Christ, or the validity of what Paul believed about Jesus,  or about monotheism or even about whether Christ was the savior and messiah necessary for salvation for everyone.  The debates were about whether Gentiles needed to become Jews, getting circumcised and keeping the whole Mosaic law,  in order to be saved, or not.   This is of course an important matter, and there were heated debates, no doubt.  But there was also a resolution of even that debate with James forging a compromise as Acts 15 makes clear.

The attempt to suggest that later diversity and debate between Christians and heretical offshoots of Christianity was not different than the sort of differences we find in the earliest church amongst its leaders,  is false. False teachers in earliest Christianity were labeled as such by all of the Christian leaders such as Peter, James, John, Paul and so on, and there was considerable agreement as to what constituted false teaching on matters of the faith and its ethics.   The old Bauer hypothesis about Hebrews vs. Hellenists,  and Jewish Christians vs. Gentile Christians has been disproved long ago, and should not be retreaded in 2011.   It is simply false to say that what we find in the NT canon is the theology of the ‘winners’.   On the contrary, what we find is both the considerable diversity in early Christianity, and also its Christological and soteriological unity.   We have books by both Jewish and Gentile Christians,  by both apostles and their co-workers,  by both Jewish missionaries and Gentile ones.   As I have made clear in What Have They Done with Jesus, there are no Gnostic books in the canon because there were no Gnostic heretics in the first century so far as we can tell.  And if Marcion had shown up in the first century rather than the second, he would have been called a false teacher immediately by Peter or James or John or Paul all of whom revered the OT as God’s Word.

What we find in the NT is first century documents written by eyewitnesses, or apostles, or their co-workers and colleagues.  The reason they are in the canon is because they are our earliest and best witnesses to what Jesus and his first followers were like.   They are not in the canon because of some later struggle with Gnostics or others.   The criteria for acceptance was these books needed to be by one of the three aforementioned groups, and what that in effect meant was the canon was effectively closed at the end of the NT era because of the criteria applied. Gnostic documents were never even considered for inclusion, and there was no movement within the church to do so at any point, because they were: 1) too late to be by apostles etc.;  2) too heterodox to comport with what the earliest documents claimed; and 3)  were generated in order to actually attack Christian orthodoxy and redefine it.   We are not talking about a long historical struggle in which Christianity seriously entertained Gnostic or Marcionite texts for inclusion in the canon, but in the end were rejected.   On this one can check the various essays in my What’s in a Word? Volume and What Have They Done with Jesus, and the Gospel Code. In short, the picture Bart paints of the first four centuries of church history is tendentious and often just inaccurate.

You know someone is running out of bullets when he recycles what he has said earlier in the book.  P. 185 recycles what was said about Colossians, and Bart’s view is we will never know who the opponents are that are attacked in this book.  He is right that there are lots of different views on this amongst scholars who have written monographs on the book.  Now if  Colossians is a forgery, this vagueness is quite strange.  If you want to use Paul’s name to attack some specific kind of false teaching, then you are going to delineate it better than is done in Colossians.  The very inability of modern scholars to figure out who the false teachers are shows: 1)  Paul is writing in a context where the audience will already know who he is talking about and so  2) he doesn’t have to be more specific.  But in a pseudonymous document with a falsely attributed author and also a falsely attributed audience, how was this  document going to be any clearer to the actual audience of the document than it is to modern scholars?    In other words, the nature of the critique and its allusiveness must count against the suggestion this is a later forgery.

Next on pp. 186-88 Bart takes on the little document known as Jude.  His view is it is a post-apostolic writing because it refers to ‘remembering the teaching of the apostles’  but he forgets that Jude was not among the Twelve, did not believe in Jesus during his lifetime (see John 7.5)  nor do we even know if Jesus appeared to Jude, as he did to his brother James.   Under these circumstances, we would hardly expect him to call himself one of the apostles.  He is simply the brother of James.

In order to make clear just how radical Bart’s views are about Jude, I would suggest you look at some of the best and most detailed commentaries on Jude written in the last twenty or so years.  You will discover that almost every one of these commentators concludes Jude is by Jude, and is not a forgery of any sort.   One should especially consult the commentaries by Bauckham, Bill Brosend,  and check the  bibliography in my commentary in Letters and Homilies for Jewish Christians. There is absolutely nothing in this document the historical Jude, who seems to have lived well into the first century, couldn’t have written or said.   Bart also dismisses its authenticity with the ‘peasant’ argument.  Even if Jude were unable to write Greek, there were scribes aplenty in Judaism he could have used to compose this document.   It will take more than a hastily mentioned argument without real substance to convince people he is right about Jude.   It needs to be remembered that Jude is a barely mentioned figure in the NT.  If you are going to make up a name of an early Christian to give your document some authority,  pick a big and famous one, not an obscure one, and in fact this is what we normally find in pseudonymous documents.   Jude doesn’t qualify.  He is a passing reference in the Gospels.

Bart is right, and demonstrates with easy, that Paul was a controversial figure, and indeed there were pseudonymous documents like the non-canonical Epistle of Peter which seem to have been chiefly written to critique Paul and his Gospel and probably written by a Jewish Christian.    The same can be shown to be true about the Pseudo-Clementines.

pp. 192ff. Bart presents his case for James being a forgery, and again quite against the trend of many recent commentaries on the little homily called James, including the work of John Painter, a good friend of mine,  whom Bart relies on for some of his analysis.   In an interesting argument,  Bart contends that James is not reacting to Paul himself, who would not have disagreed with the notion that good deeds are important, but rather to the forgery called Ephesians which presents not the historical Paul but a later caricature of Paul.  On p. 198 Bart plays the literacy card again as the most important proof this couldn’t be by the historical James, again completely neglecting the possibility the document was written for James by a skilled  Jewish Christian scribe, of which there surely were some in the Jerusalem church, converted from Judaism.    He also contends that James is responding to later garbled Paul.   But a moments reflection will show that the very view being critiqued here was probably the caricature of the Judaizers of what Paul said.  In other words,  the ‘garbled Paul’ alluded to here need not be from a time after James’ life at all.

Equally novel is the theory put forward on pp. 199-200 that 1 Peter was written as an apologetic to show that Peter and Paul in fact were in agreement.  If that were the purposed we would have expected a pretty different content to this document which certainly does not much sound like Paul, and unlike Paul relies heavily on Isaiah 52-53 in the way it views Jesus’ sufferings.   Were the purpose of this document rapproachment with Paul, we would have expected statements about how Peter came to agree with Paul about the non-necessity of keeping kosher and so on.  There is nothing like this in 1 Peter.  Bart argues that the territories listed at the beginning of 1 Peter were Pauline territories.   However this is ignoring that the division of missionary labor announced in Galatians was not geographical but rather ethnic—- Peter to the Jews,  Paul to the Gentiles.   It can be debated whether  1 Peter is written primarily to very Hellenized Jewish Christians or to Gentile ones,  but in any case there is no reason to see 1 Peter as a later attempt to mend fences between Peter and Paul.   And while we are at it,   1 Corinthians suggests that Peter did visit places Paul had evangelized, and so we have no reason to think he might not also have gone to various places in western and northern Turkey, evangelizing largely Diaspora Jews.   Bart tries out this same argument  (pp. 200-202) on 2 Peter, it too supposedly written to suggest Peter and Paul were buddies.    The problem with this is that we would never know this was even a possible focus of this document before its very end where Paul is mentioned.  No one would guess this listening to the document being read out seriatim.   And besides all this,  2 Peter 2 quotes Jude at length, and gives it much more attention than the passing reference to Paul at the end.    This composite document was put together by someone who indeed used Petrine, Jude, and Pauline sources and thought highly of all these early Christian leaders, probably sending this out as an encyclical at the end of the first century.  It may have been one of his purposes to suggest the original leaders were in harmony.   But he is even more concerned with dealing with false teacher’s and their bad eschatology and cosmology, to mention but one subject.

The case for Acts being a forgery  is made on pp. 202-209, and Bart is perfectly well aware that here he represents a decidedly minority opinion.  Why in the world would any body pick the Luke, a non eyewitness, non-apostle, marginal figure and only occasionally a companion of Paul (who was also not one of the Twelve) to attribute two huge and hugely important early Christian books to?   This idea in itself is a stretch.  Why not attribute it to someone more important, say a constant companion of Paul like a Timothy or a Titus if we are making it up as we go along?    That would account as well as the existing label for the focus on admiration of Paul in Acts?   In short, Bart knows he is paddling upstream here, hence the need to paddle harder.

On p. 204 we have once more a caricature of the data relating to Peter and Paul.  According to Bart, Acts wants to show that Peter and Paul are in complete agreement about the Gospel. Peter has no problems with eating Gentile barbecue, any more than Paul did.   In fact however that is not what Acts says.  Acts 10 tells us that except for divine intervention in the form of a vision, Peter would never have gone to Cornelius’ house at all, never mind eaten with the man.   And of course Bart completely fails to tell his audience that there is a debate about the dating of Galatians.   Many scholars, myself included,  think it is a very early letter of Paul, from the late 40s, and written before the Acts council mentioned in Acts 15 when these matters of praxis were sorted out.  On that showing, the picture of Peter in Antioch in Gal. 1-2 is like the picture of Peter before the Acts 10 vision and so the portrayal in Acts does not significantly differ from Galatians on this point.

On p. 295 Bart sees a flat contradiction between Gal. 1 and the portrayal of things in Acts 9.  In Galatians after his conversion, Paul says he went off into Arabia.  According to Bart, after a brief stay in Damascus, Paul made a beeline to Jerusalem. Gal. 1, it is true, does not mention a return to Damascus at all.  This is however mentioned in  2 Cor. 11.30-33.  The omission in Galatians does not mean it did not happen, nor for that matter does the omission of Arabia in Acts 9 mean that did not happen.  Furthermore, Luke leaves the clear impression not only that Paul spent some time in Damascus, but in fact Luke says nothing about Paul making a beeline from Damascus back to Jerusalem.  There is no time reference at all mentioned in Acts 9.25 or 26.   What happened in Acts 9.26 could have happened three days or three years after the Damascus Paul in a basket episode.  Luke does not say.   So what is going on here? Bart has taken a silence from the Galatians text and a silence from the Acts text, and come to the conclusion that the two texts must contradict one another.  Sorry–   nothing plus nothing allows you to conclude nothing of the kind.   Reading a contradiction into two silences is really a bridge too far.  It’s not even good logic.    Bart then goes on to say time fails him to mention all the numerous contradictions between Acts and the letters of Paul.   A  pity really, because the list he gave in his Jesus Interrupted pp. 53-58 was pretty easy to rebut  (see the earlier discussion on this blog on that book), and furthermore,  I have dealt in great detail in my Acts commentary on these alleged contraditions, and frankly they are ephemeral.    But don’t take my word for it.  Look at the Anchor Bible Luke and Acts commentary by Joe Fitzmyer.  He concludes Luke-Acts is indeed written by someone who was only a sometime companion of Paul on his second and third missionary journeys.  The Paul we have in Acts in any case is Paul the missionary and church planter, not the Paul of the letters which exposes us to his ongoing correspondence and relationships with the churches he founded.  We have no missionary speeches in Paul’s letters and we have only one speech to Christians by Paul in Acts at Miletus, and wouldn’t you know, it is the one speech that sounds the most like the Paul of the letters?   And finally there was no convention of inserting ‘we’ passages into account, or someone else’s travelogue  for the sake of versimulitude.  This is as much a myth as Bart says the convention of pseudepigrapha as a recognized convention was.    Were a forger to insert himself into Acts itself to make it look like an eyewitness account, why not make him present at the colossal events in Acts 2, or at Paul’s conversion in Acts 9, or with Peter in Acts 10?  But none of that happens.  Instead we have only a brief ‘we’ section in connection with Paul in Troas and Philippi on his second journey, and a more extended ‘we’ section for the third journey.   This hardly looks like the best efforts of a forger to introduce the suggestion he was an eyewitness to important things.   I have already repeatedly warned about Bart’s propensity to ‘overegg the pudding’ as the British would say— make enormous claims that neither his arguments nor the evidence will bear out.  Listen to this one “At just about every point where it is possible to check what Acts says about Paul with what Paul says about himself in his authentic letters, there are discrepancies.” (p. 208).     The real upshot of such extreme exaggerations is that it raises the question—why?   ‘Me thinks he doth protest too much’, and frankly it discredits his whole case in regard to forgeries in the NT.    One could as well say with only very slight exaggeration “at just about every point where it is possible to check Bart Ehrman’s comparison of Paul and Acts, there are unwarranted conclusions and over-reading of evidence again and again.”

On pp. 209-16 Bart goes on to discuss some Gnostic forgeries that are attacks on orthodoxy Christianity, and then he turns around and deals with some anti-Gnostic documents (pp. 217-18) that serve as a sort of rebuttal.  He has no trouble showing the polemics flying in both directions, but these later boxing matches are of little or no help in our deceiphering whether there were or were not forgeries in the NT period, or in the NT itself.

The conclusion to this chapter (p. 218) is an argument that says early Christianity was a group of hopelessly antagonistic people constantly arguing and contradicting one another, even on fundamentals like monotheism.   This view is frankly only possible if you include under the term Christianity all sorts of persons and groups that were acknowledge by orthodox Christians to be heretics,  not real Christian at all.   Bart however is prepared to call them all Christians, which leads to this conclusion.  And the assumption by the assertion is that there was no standard of orthodoxy before the fourth century when Constantine came to the rescue and the canon was closed.    Unfortunately for this view, it involves a reading of first century Christianity which is almost a total distortion of the facts, and the proper interpretation of the facts.   This is not to deny there were false teachers, heated arguments, and the like in earliest Christianity.  Indeed there were, and over some important matters of practice as well.   It is however to make clear that none of the later heretical groups and documents discussed by Bart would have been accepted by the original apostles, eyewitnesses, and their co-workers as genuinely Christian, any more than Simon Magus in Acts is viewed that way.   The history of earliest, largely Jewish Christian, Christianity is markedly different from the history of a largely Gentile church expanding through the Empire in the second-fourth centuries.  And the failure to see or recognize this,  leads to many mistakes in this latest book by Bart Ehrman.

For other parts of this series, see:

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four

History, as any good student of it knows,  is messy.   Things often do not follow ordinary or orderly patterns.  And the history of the composition of documents in antiquity is no different.    Bart’s attempt in the first half of his book ‘Forged’  to force the read to choose between basically two binary opposites— either the NT documents were composed by who they claim to be composed by, or they were forgeries or fabrications, is frankly to limit the possibilities to too few options.    I say this, not only because of what we now know of the many and varied roles scribes played in even composing documents in antiquity  (see K. van der Tooren as previously discussed) but I say this on the basis of the prima facia evidence within the NT itself.

Take for example the complex case of the document we know as the Gospel of John.  This document is formally anonymous (no direct internal naming of the author in the document), and it has the later attribution ‘according to John’.   But which John?  John Mark,  John of Patmos,  John son of Zebedee?   The attribution does not specify.   In the heat of controversy, trying to snatch this Gospel back from the Gnostics who apparently thought it was the best,  Irenaeus and others attributed this Gospel to John son of Zebedee.   But frankly, there are severe problems with that guess.  Here is a document which uniquely among canonical Gospels claims within the document to involve the testimony of an eyewitness—the Beloved Disciple  (see John 19-21).   But this Gospel contains none of the crucial eyewitness stories we find in the Synoptics involving John son of Zebedee—not the calling of the Zebedees,  not the raising of Jairus’ daughter,  not the Transfiguration,  not the asking for box seats in the kingdom when Jesus gets there—nothing like this is in John’s Gospel.   In fact there is hardly a mention of the Zebedees at all in the Fourth Gospel  (but see the passing reference in John 21).    Yet when we get to the end of the document we have a very peculiar testimony—“this (i.e. the Beloved Disciple) is the disciple who is testifying to these things, and has written them down, and we know his testimony is true.”  (21.24).   What makes this sentence doubly interesting is that it comes after a very strange disclaimer—- Jesus did not say the Beloved Disciple would live until he returned.

Why in the world do we need that disclaimer?   Apparently because the Beloved Disciple’s community thought he uniquely would do so.   But why would they think that and why stress it here?   The normal, and I think correct answer to this question is that the Beloved Disciple had finally died, and Jesus had not yet returned,  and so the community he was a part of wanted to reassure people that Jesus had not falsely predicted the endurance of the Beloved Disciple longer than he actually lived.    As to why the community of the Beloved Disciple would think he would not die before the return of Jesus, I can think of a very good reason— Jesus had already raised him from the dead once.   Surely, he would not die again.   You can read about my case for the Beloved Disciple being Lazarus in What Have They Done with Jesus. I think the case is a strong one, passing the case for John son of Zebedee in the fast lane.   For example,  there are no direct references to a Beloved Disciple before John 11.1-3, and quite a few there after, and in John 11.1-4 ‘the one whom Jesus loves’  is clearly said to be Lazarus.

Let’s pause for a moment on that phrase ‘the Beloved Disciple’.   Jesus famously said he came to be a servant, he rebuked his disciples for their debate about which one of them was the greatest,  he held up children as examples to his boastful disciples, and he preached humility.  What kind of disciple would go around calling himself ‘the Beloved Disciple’?   It’s a fair question.  I think that this is not what that disciple called himself.  It is what his family and later Christian friends and community called him.  And that brings us back to John 21.24—‘who exactly is the ‘we’ in that verse?  It’s surely the community of the Beloved Disciple testifying about the testimony the Beloved Disciple wrote down before he died.  But as Sherlock Holmes would say,  John 21.24 is the telltale sign that this Gospel in its final form was composed or put together and edited by someone other than the Beloved Disciple.   Who, exactly?

Obviously, it is a literate person who has collected and edited the memoirs of the Beloved Disciple.  He too seems to have been a person comfortable with calling this man, uniquely, the Beloved Disciple, amongst the many disciples Jesus had.  He is indebted to him, and highly values his testimony.   This person could be an ordinary scribe tasked with collecting, editing and presenting the Johannine community with this Gospel, probably the latest of all the canonical Gospels.  Why then is the common name John added to this document?

Papias tells us there were two famous John’s— John the apostle, and the elderly or elder John.  Only the latter had Papias met.   If you study all of the fragments of Papias’ writings from both within the work of Eusebius and other sources, one of the things you learn about him, which Eusebius despises, is that Papias is a chiliast — that is, a person who believes in a future millennium or messianic age at the end of history and before history’s end.  Of course the only person who clearly advocates such a thing directly in the NT is the author of Revelation— John the prophet or seer, John of Patmos (John 20).

Here is my theory about the fourth Gospel, but whether this theory is correct or not, John 21.24 must be accounted for, and it reveals the post-mortem collection and composition of this document by someone other than the Beloved Disciple, and someone not claiming to be the Beloved Disciple— the ‘we’ is not the ‘he’ in that verse.  My theory in sum is that John of Patmos, after he returned from exile to Ephesus where the Beloved Disciple had died, collected and edited the BD’s materials and promulgated this Gospel.  This fact was known well into the second century (the Gospel was probably only composed in the late 90s anyway) and it is the cause for it having the label ‘according to John’.   Now if John of Patmos had been interviewed and asked if he was the source of the material in this Gospel, he would have said no — he was simply the scribe or editor who assembled after the death of the BD.  In short, right before our eyes and within the canon in the Gospel of John, we have evidence of a composition history of a document  that involves someone other than the source of the material in the document composing the document.  This falls neither into the category of written by the genuine author nor into the category of forgery or fabrication.  Those categories are too narrow and cramped to explain all the NT data.

Bearing this in mind, we can turn to Bart’s Chapter Five.   In order to properly explain why there are so many forgeries or fabrications in the NT and in early Christian history, Bart takes the route of suggesting that Christians saw themselves as constantly embattled, and apparently the end justified the means,  even if the means was forgery and fabrication.  The truth would be defended by deceit and fraud.  If Bart is right that there was no literary convention of writing pseudonymous documents in antiquity, and if he is write that the NT documents were not written by those to whom they are credited,  then this is the sort of alternative one would expect Bart to come up with.

The problem is, he is partially wrong about the first theory, and extensively wrong about the second theory, and so we don’t really need this further rationalization of why Christians behaved badly and forged and fabricated documents.  We especially don’t need it if one adequately takes the measure of the varied roles scribes played, even after the death of an authentic witness, in composing documents.  He begins with Ephesians, once more, and suggests that there are an awful lot of references to truth in that book,  which is ironic if someone falsely claimed to write this book after the time of Paul.  He’s right about that, for the case for pseudepigrapha being a recognized literary convention is weak indeed.  Fortunately, Paul did write Ephesians and so it doesn’t involve deception.

The burden of this chapter is first of all to show that there were reasons why most Jews in the first century did not accept Jesus as the messiah: 1)  he was not the messiah they were looking for, and he did not kick the Romans out of the land, instead he died a shameful death on a cross.  Early Jews were not looking for a crucified messiah, among those who were looking for a messianic hero at all; 2) of the OT texts used by early Jewish Christians to demonstrate that Jesus was the Jewish messiah, some had not been interpreted messianically before,  some were not prophecies, and some were prophecies that did not refer more specifically to a messiah  (mashiach). Bart is right about both of these points.   The dying and rising messiah is hard to find in the OT unless Isaiah 52-53 is talking about him but even that text says nothing about gruesome crucifixion.  Jesus did not match up with various essential early Jewish expectations.

Bart is equally correct that when Jews largely didn’t accept Jesus, this led, especially in the second century and later to anti-Semitism among Christians, including the charge that Jews were Christ killers. Never mind that it was the Romans who executed Jesus (which did not lead to anti-Italianism).   Bart is good at pointing out the sins of the early church, and this chapter is all about that, and about forgeries like the Gospel of Peter or the Gospel of Nicodemus (fourth century forgery), the Pilate Gospels which were used to beat Jews over the head.

Once again the purpose of spending so much time on later forgeries from the post- NT era is the guilt by association kind of argument— if there was this much deceit going on later,  there must have been a bunch of it in the first century A.D. as well.   The problem with this sort of argument by analogy is of course that each era of history, just as each individual person, has their own unique features.    For example,  as Jacob Neusner has so ably shown, you can’t retroject later rabbinic Judaism and all its practices back into Second Temple Judaism.    Things changed dramatically after A.D. 70, and after 120, Judaism ceased to be a Temple and territory focused religion at all,  focusing only on the third T—Torah.

I would stress that the historical conditions in earliest Christianity, with its apostles and eyewitnesses and co-workers,  had quality control agents and a sufficiently large Jewish Christian population to make some of the later practices of anti-Semitic Gentile Christians unlikely or exceptional in that era. Paul’s impassioned argument in Romans 9-11 that God had not abandoned nor was he finished with his first chosen people shows what the apostles were teaching about such matters.  That such arguments later fell on deaf ears should not stop us from recognizing the different character of the leadership in the earlier period.   It is interesting that some of the documents Bart discusses in this chapter could be called attempts at Christian fiction or novellas  a category of literature Bart mostly ignores (but see the discussion of the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea on p. 161).  This sort of literature was popular in the first four centuries of Christian history, but  even if viewed that way,  it does not exonerate them of their mean-spirited anti- Semitic ideas and emphases.  Worse still, the Romans were already anti-Semitic, and this sort of literature just fed their despising of the Jews.  This literature is a far cry from  Luke-Acts where we are told that even the Jewish officials who did have something to do with Jesus’ death acted in ignorance not malice and could be forgiven.

As a prelude to dealing with later Christian writings alleged to have been written by Jesus himself, on pp. 159-6o  Bart deals with the famous John 7.53-8.11 where he stresses that this text says that Jesus himself  could write.  Bart does not here comment on the historical merits of the story, but since elsewhere he says Jesus is an illiterate peasant, there is no doubt about how he views it.  He does mention the recent theory of Chris Keith that this story was concocted to demonstrate that Jesus could write!  But that surely is a minor motif in the story, we are not even told what Jesus wrote on the ground, so this theory while ingenuous is probably entirely wrong.  Most Johannine scholars anyway think this is an authentic Jesus story, but not originally a canonical one.   I agree with the latter opinion.

On pp. 162-63 Bart deals with the fascinating but fictional correspondence between King Abgar of Edessa and Jesus himself.   It is interesting  for many reasons, not the least of which is that a Christian pilgrim in the fourth century, Egeria, saw this document as displayed by the bishop of that place.   What this shows of course is that Bart is right— there were many fictitious writings and indeed forgeries and fabrications in early Christianity. There is no denying it, and very many of them sadly have an anti-Semitic slant.   This is not a part of Christian history that Christians should be proud of, or condone however fascinating these documents might be from a historical point of view.  But the fact that there is such an abundance of these documents should tell us one thing—-estimates that the literacy of early Christians was something like 1-5% must be way too low.   Somebodies produced these documents for some audiences,  and they bespeak of a geographically widespread literacy in early Christianity, and not just among the elites.

On p. 164 Bart makes a point that is historically dubious.  His is an argument from silence.  His argument is that because there were no Imperial edicts banning Christianity specifically, that it is not true that Christianity was widely viewed as an illegal religion.   This completely ignores the fact that the one thing saving Judaism from being proscribed was Imperial edicts saying the Jews could practice their own religion and need not offer sacrifices to the Emperor.   Bart does not even reckon with all the things said in Roman literature about ‘religio licita’  and for that matter about superstitio—eastern and foreign superstitions.   Beginning from Augustan on, there were indeed imperial efforts to ban and banish foreign cults,  and when it became clear Christianity was not merely Judaism, it fell under such a cloud.   Bart is right that actual persecution of Christians was sporadic and local in the first century, but the correspondence of Pliny and Trajan make perfectly clear that early in the second century, Christians were not being given the same ‘pass’ that Jews were given when it came to worshipping the Emperor.  Why not?  Because there were rules about how to deal with superstitions, and Christianity fell into that category.   Indeed, when Christians urged people not to worship the Emperor they were in violation of Caesar’s decrees  (see Acts), and notice how Paul in Athens in Acts 17 is on trial for promulgating false religion or false gods, gods not approved for worship by the Areopagus first.   In other words,  Bart’s portrayal of the first century situation for Christians has some historically dubious aspects to it.

As Christianity gained momentum and more and more followers, the need for apologetics became more urgent, as the faith became more visible in the Empire.  Bart on pp. 165-73 makes a reasonable case for seeing some of the fictional and forged documents as attempts to exonerate Christians from pagan charges, counter claims, or contumely.  For example the Acts of Pilate are held up as a possible response to a pagan document called the Acts of Pilate which paints Jesus in a very bad light.    I suspect he is right about this.   Christians resorted to rather transparent fiction as a vehicle to rebut false claims about their faith.  What is not clear to me is that at least the more transparent of these documents would not immediately have been recognized as fiction rather than fabrication.  That they were later, considerably later, in the Middle Ages (e.g. in the case of the Gospel of Nicodemus),  viewed differently is another story.  I think Bart spends too little time reckoning with the possibility and scope of early Christian fiction—which did not intend to deceive, and probably did not fool its original intended audience.   But I agree we must take seriously that there were various forgeries and fabrications in early Christianity, and simply admit that this is not consonant with a strong commitment to the truth in all things.

Bart goes on to discuss the Sibylline Oracles on pp. 173-76 and he is quite right that both Jews and Christians fabricated oracles and inserted them into or created these collections.  The original oracles were lost in temple fires before these monotheistic substitutes were created.  There is nothing in this discussion which seems amiss.  Christians were indeed prepared to create false prophecies to bolster their religion, as were early Jewish and indeed there was also an apologetic purpose in this, to convince pagans about monotheism.

One of the ironies about this book is that while Bart has no trouble showing that later Christians acting immorally created forgeries and fabrications, he does not show that such practices were indulged in by the apostles and original eyewitnesses themselves or by their co-workers.  And surely, if you want to actually discredit Christianity, what you actually need to do is go back ad fontes and discredit the original Christians and their actual eyewitness testimonies.  For example, you would need to discredit the content of, say, the seven undisputed letters of Paul.  You would have to discredit his testimony not only that Jesus died and rose from the dead, but that he appeared to hundreds of people, some of whom, like himself, had been previously hostile to Jesus and his followers.    This book does none of that.  But it certainly does leave the odor of a skunk on many Christians who lived after the NT era.  No wonder some people say I can believe in Jesus, but the church is simply unbelievable.

For the earlier parts of this series, see:

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three

As with previous chapters, Bart gives us a bit of his biography and how he came to leave behind the Evangelical faith and take a very different view of the Bible.   Along the way he suggests that there are at least two forgeries in  the OT—- Ecclesiastes and Daniel  (pp. 117-18).   One of the problems in the way Bart deals with both of these books is the failure to recognize the results of appropriate source criticism.   For example,  with Ecclesiastes, as with Proverbs, we are dealing with the tradition of Jewish wisdom literature, and as Proverbs shows perfectly clearly, this tradition involved including wisdom from numerous sources, including Solomon.  Proverbs, is perfectly clear about this, mentioning in Proverbs 30 for example the saying of a man named Agur.    Solomon is seen as the font or first major sponsor of the collecting of ANE wisdom, and while most scholars agree that Proverbs likely includes some sayings from King Solomon himself,  wisdom was an international form of literature collected from all sorts of sources.   This brings us to Ecclesiastes.  It is quite true that again there is an indirect mention of Solomon, for example at the outset of this document,  but to apply modern notions of authorship to such composite documents is anachronistic in the extreme.   No one is claiming that all the material in Ecclesiastes was by Solomon himself.  That would be unlike almost all the other collections of wisdom material we know of from the ANE.   Indeed, we learn in Eccles. 12.9-10 that  Qoheleth (‘the teacher’  not identified as Solomon) weighed, studied, and arranged proverbs.   What we have, says vs. 11 is sayings of the wise (wise being plural), sayings of various sages, and so these are sayings collected by one ‘shepherd’, but not all composed by one person.  Now most experts in Jewish sapiential literature recognize that in the document of Ecclesiastes itself, we have a collection of material from various sources.

In this case, it is quite inappropriate to call this an example of forgery, as there is no claim made in this document that it was all by Solomon.  Indeed, the most referred to source is the collector himself,  Qoheleth or the teacher.        What about Daniel.     It is true to say that Daniel is one of the more difficult books of the OT to pin down in terms of provenance.     It seems to include some authentic stories about a 6^th century prophet named Daniel and some of his visions,  but it also includes later material towards the end of the book.    As  Van der Tooren points out, books like this often have a long history of composition and compilation,  with scribes adding material for many decades.    Isaiah for example is a book compiled of prophetic materials from several different periods of Jewish history.     On top of all this,   Daniel has both Hebrew and Aramaic sections to it, which may in itself suggest materials written down at different periods of  Jewish history.   All that would be required for this document to be authentically ascribed to Daniel is that it contain some material about and from the prophet and that case can be made.   I have made it in my book Jesus the Seer, (Hendrickson) and I have made the case for Ecclesiastes in Jesus the Sage (Fortress).  And I am following the lead of many experts in these books.  But of such arguments Bart seems to be entirely ignorant, or else he is just ignoring them.     I don’t object to the conclusion that the final form of the book of Daniel came in the 2^nd century B.C.  But what I do insist is that the argument it was all composed then and is a forgery is frankly very weak, and based on the assumption that this document was not compiled over a long period of time, which the internal evidence is strongly against in this case.    The upshot of this is,  we do not have a precedent in these OT books for a case that forgeries were already in the Bible before we ever get to the NT writings.

On pp. 119-21 Bart is mostly taking on more liberal scholars that think there were perfectly well know literary conventions in which pseudonymity was an acceptable and known practice and should not be seen as examples of forgery.    While I do think that a case can be made for certain genre of literature,  for example apocalyptic Jewish literature,  often having pseudonymity as a well-known and recognized feature of it,  this is a non-issue for NT study since John of Patmos is widely agreed to be the real name of the person responsible for the book of Revelation.

What about pseudepigrapha?    Here I think Bart is likely right— there was no innocent practice of falsely attributed authorship when it came to the writing of letters (see my discussion in Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians Vol. One).  And as Richard Bauckham has rightly shown, the likelihood of pulling off such a scam in the NT era is not good, because it would involve not only a falsely attributed author but also a falsely attributed audience as well.

My view would be there are no forgeries in the NT at all,  no pseudonymous documents,  but that does not mean that all the documents of the NT meet a modern way of looking at authorship,  which is what Bart is applying to the NT documents.  There were definitely composite documents in antiquity named after the most important source for or contributor to that document.  And in addition to that, the varied practices of scribes writing or copying on behalf of others must be taken into account.

One of the things Bart and I do have in common is Bruce Metzger as a teacher.  And Bruce, a devout Christian did indeed ask: 1) how can you know there was no attempt to deceive when there was a  pseudepigrapha; and 2) if no one was taken in by the falsely attributed label, it is difficult to see why it was used at all, for surely the use of an apostolic or famous name is to add authority to and increase the audience of the document  (cited by Bart on p.123).  I quite agree with this line of reasoning, and here Bart and I converge on the same conclusion about such practices.  They were deceptive, and they were called deceptive in their own day.   This is why people are angry when they discover after the fact they have been snookered, and not by just anyone, but by a supposedly truth telling fellow Christian.   Earle Ellis in his Prophecy and Hermeneutics long ago made this point, and it still stands.  Deception is not consistent with the high standard for truth God expects of his people then or now.

Further, the critique of Kurt Aland on pp. 123-25, who claimed there were Spirit inspired cases of pseudonymity.   But if the Holy Spirit was in fact inspiring such a document, why indeed would one need to attribute it to a merely  human authority like an apostle?  If the Spirit is inspiring it, one can speak in one’s own name, because one has been made a prophet.  There is no need for pseudonymity.   Here again I think Bart has a good case.

In the following short section (pp. 125-29)  Bart takes on the notion that there were those who wrote ‘in the tradition of Isaiah’ and the earlier Isaianic materials are sources for the later material, but are not claiming to be by the original author.  They are simply reactualizing the earlier material and applying it to a later time.   Actually, this practice is precisely what seems to be going on in the later part of Daniel,  but Danielic material is being used and reaudienced and redirected in the later material. This is more an example of later editorial or redactional work on earlier source material.  It does not actually involve either later persons making authorship claims that are deceptive.   In describing the roles of scribes in the ancient Israelite world,  Van der Tooren says they undertook the following tasks: 1) transcription of oral lore; 2) invention of a new text; 3) compilation of existing lore, either oral or written; 4) expansion of an existing text;  5) adaptation of an existing text for a new audience; and 6) integration of individual documents into a more comprehensive composition  (p. 110, in Scribal Culture). Not only is it likely that we see examples of this sort of thing going on in the OT  (see Baruch and the collection and editing of Jeremiah’s material), but it is also likely going on in a document like 2 Peter.  Bart is apparently not prepared to take seriously any hypothesis but the single or jointly author authentic or pseudonymous document.  This frankly seems to be because he is assuming an all too modern notion about authorship, and is ignoring the evidence of the way ancient scribes worked, compiling composite documents.  In other words, he too quickly rules out whole ranges of possibilities that experts in ancient oral and scribal cultures have provided copious evidence for.

On pp. 129-33 Bart takes on the philosophical school hypothesis.  He admits that there is an text in Iamblichus which says that the followers of Porphyry the philosopher did compose documents in his name ascribing the glory and credit to their teacher rather than to themselves.   But Bart urges that this single text hardly provides some sort of massive literary precedent on the basis of which we could conclude that there was a school of Peter or a school of Paul.    As Bart goes on to show, Iamblichus is well after the NT era, and there is no evidence of some sort of widespread influence of Prophyry or his followers on early Jews or early Christians.    Bart then suggests that one reason NT scholars have latched on to this possibility is that they want to avoid the suggestion that we have forged documents in the NT.  He may be right about this, but it’s hard to know.

Finally, on pp. 133-39 we come to his rebuttal to secretary or scribe theories.   Bart relies on the work of E.E. Richards here, and he acknowledges Paul and others certainly used secretaries.  What he disputes is that secretaries were given any latitude in the composition of documents, or at least, he wants to see the historical evidence for such latitude.  This is a reasonable request,  but there is more to attend to here.   Bart wants to argue that what we have in Paul’s corpus is letter-essays.   This however is not quite correct.  What we have is rhetorical discourses within an epistolary framework.   In the largely oral culture of the Greco-Roman world,  Paul’s so-called letters and documents like Hebrews were orally delivered by Paul’s co-workers as speeches, and more importantly they reflect the structure and practices of ancient rhetoric.   About this Bart is completely silent.  He does not consider as an option, he does not rebut it as in error.   He is simply silent.   And here is the point—-  secretaries took down speeches in a variety of ways, including using short-hand, taking notes and then filling out in a more elegant rhetorical form, and so on.   We have an abundance of evidence about the taking down of ancient speeches by scribes.   Of this Bart says nothing.   Here then is a major fly in the ointment and flaw in the analysis in ‘Forged’.    We don’t need to track down how secretaries handled philosophical essays, we need to track down how they dealt with speeches.  And the previous comments of Thucydides and Polybius are relevant here as well.

There is another assumption in Bart’s argument that surfaces here, namely it is only the elites who have secretaries that have literary skills and could produce Pauline like documents (or Petrine ones).   This is forgetting how many slaves were not only educated but trained to be excellent secretaries.  We must remember that many persons who had become slaves in the Empire, had previously been teachers, land owners, and in fact amongst the elite in their own region.  There were many slaves who became Christian converts, some from elite households.  For example,  Paul mentions in Romans 16 people from the household of Aristobolus, or the Herodion slaves, and indeed Philippians mentions Caesar’s own household had converts.   Various of these persons were domestic slaves, and some of them were likely able scribes.  In other words, the social situation was such that Paul and Peter and others could definitely have access to very competent, and rhetorically skilled former slaves who were secretaries.

Bart concludes this section by referring again to the unlikelihood that Peter used a skilled and rhetorically and Scripturally knowledgeable scribe to compose 1 Peter in Greek with Peter perhaps speaking in Aramaic and giving the gist of what he wanted to say.   Really?  Let us consider for a moment what  Papias says about the composition of the Gospel we know as Mark’s  Gospel.

“And the elder used to say this, Mark became Peter’s interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered, not, indeed, in order, of the things said and done by the Lord. For he had not heard the Lord, nor had followed him, but later on, followed Peter, who used to give teaching as necessity demanded but not making, as it were, an arrangement of the Lord’s oracles, so that Mark did nothing wrong in thus writing down single points as he remembered them. For to one thing he gave attention, to leave out nothing of what he had heard and to make no false statements in them.”   (quoted in Eusebius H.E. 3.39.4ff).     It also goes on to say Peter spoke in Aramaic, and Mark translated it into Greek.  A detailed and helpful analysis of this can be found in Bauckham’s  Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

What is of importance to say here is the following: 1)   the Gospel of Mark is a long document and the composer of the document is indeed Mark; 2) Mark is translating from Aramaic, but he is making his own arrangement of the material, in fact he is making it into rhetorical chreiae  among other things; 3)  Mark gave attention to detail but made his own arrangement of things.     While this is not a testimony about a letter or a rhetorical speech, it is a testimony about one Christian using source material from another Christian and composing something in his own Greek style with his own arrangement of material.  He is not simply taking down verbatim what Peter says as Bauckham  shows.

As it turns out, Bart’s argument about there being no evidence to help us figure out what sort of liberties secretaries might have had in composing things is not quite correct. We not only have the evidence from Papias, we have the evidence amassed by Van der Tooren about earlier scribes and their creativity and literary skills, and if that were not enough we have the evidence about rhetorical education and the taking down of speeches.

Bart’s parameters of either single or joint authorship or forgery and fabrication, are much too narrow to account for what we find in the NT itself, and in its era. And finally, it will not do to suggest that with Cicero and Tiro we have some sort of isolated and singular example of where a scribe might compose a document for his master.   Read Anthony Everett’s fine life of Cicero or William Johnson’s excellent monograph (both reviewed on this blog), Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, (Oxford 2010).   There are lots of good reasons to question Bart’s conclusions about secretaries and for that matter about what counted as authorship or forgery in antiquity.     At the end of the day, I do think Paul mostly dictated his letters— all of them with the possible except of the Pastorals.   This didn’t mean that the secretary would not put it into a more apt rhetorical form after he had taken notes for the composition of the document in a fair hand.   We do need to make some allowance for the contrast in 2 Corinthians where the Corinthians say Paul’s letters are powerful and rhetorically impressive, but his ethos and in person speech was weak.

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two

(N.B.  This is a long post on this chapter, and you may want to take it in doses, as there is much to deal with).

So we may orient ourselves appropriately we will start with Bart’s bold conclusion on p. 114.— “the majority of scholars acknowledge that whereas there are seven letters in the New Testament that Paul certainly wrote, , six others are probably (or for some scholars, certainly) not by Paul…”    I have already warned in these posts against Bart’s penchant for making out-sized and unwarranted  large claims to back up his assertions and this is one of them.    If by ‘majority’  Bart meant something like  the ‘majority of German commentators in 1970’, then a statement like this could probably stand.

As it is, it is completely erroneous if we are talking about worldwide Biblical scholarship in 2011.   But let us suppose we are only talking about scholarship in the English speaking world and commentaries and monographs written in English.   Even here, this conclusion would be erroneous and leaving a completely false impression.    In fact the majority of English speaking commentators and specialists on documents such as 2 Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians think these documents also should be attributed to Paul, whatever scribes he may have used to produce them.   I ought to know.  I have researched and written commentaries on all these books.  How many commentaries on books of the New Testament has Bart researched and written?  None.   Not one.   And he should not be taken as a reliable guide on what the majority of commenting scholars think about these matters.

It is then only the Pastoral Epistles which are much more heavily debated by scholars, and understandably so as their style and vocabulary are different from the earlier Paulines.   But even here, at the point of my writing this,  there are probably only a slight majority of commentators and specialists who think it more likely Paul didn’t write these documents than that he did.   And if we are talking about trends,  increasingly the tendency even in very non-traditional commentaries is to be less dogmatic about asserting these can’t possibly be by Paul.  For example,  have a look at the introductory discussion in Luke Timothy Johnson’s detailed commentary work on the Pastorals, and see the many, and good reasons why no one can afford to simply say these documents must be forgeries any more.

Bart, is actually swimming against the tide of the scholarship, even on the Pastorals.   And here I must register a big complaint.   Look at the footnotes to Chapter Three.   Do we find any evidence at all that Bart has even read a broad and representative sampling of commentaries on Paul’s letters, or even on the Pastorals?   No, we do not.  Maybe he has,  but his views only match up with a sort of cherry-picking approach to the scholarship, highly selective in character, and tendentiously favoring only the more radical or controversial commentators on Paul.   It is also worth noting that he relies heavily on the older scholarship  of A.N. Harrison or N. Brox or the eccentric work of  D. MacDonald.   But this older scholarship has long since been critiqued, and largely discarded as inadequate.   Bart however trots it out as if: 1) it was news, and 2) such conclusions would go unchallenged today by the majority of scholars.   Wrong, and wrong.    With these preliminary remarks we are now ready to deal with the particulars of Chapter Three.

To begin with,  Bart is certainly right that Paul has had an appalling number of phony stories, unhistorical stories, penned about him.  Not surprisingly,  Bart begins his discussion (pp. 81ff.) with the ‘Acts of Paul’ in particular ‘ the Acts of Paul and Thecla’ a second century narrative, which, while it may have some historical features (e.g. the physical description of Paul has sometimes been thought to be accurate, though it appears to be more likely to be a typical character description in the form of a physical description— e.g. large forehead equals wise man), it is overwhelmingly likely to be a work of fiction. Here, Bart and I would agree.   The question then becomes whether it was a recognized novella, or a deliberate attempt to deceive some public about Paul, claiming to be some sort of eyewitness account.    This latter question can actually be debated.   Ancient Christians knew about novella,  fictional works often about famous persons,  and so it is appropriate to ask if ancient Christians created their own versions of Harlequin romances.   I think in some cases the answer is clearly yes, and that the audience would have known this.   The charming stories about St. Paul and the baptized lion or St. John and the bed bugs  are probably not intended to make historical claims about these figures, they are moralizing tales meant to teach moralizing lessons based on lives of the saints.  In other words, they are forms of fictionalized hagiography about real historical persons.     The question then becomes does a document like ‘the Acts of Paul and Thecla’  fall into this category?

Last summer,  I was given the special privilege of visiting the cave church of Paul and Thecla, have on a hill hovering over Ephesus.  There are famous wall paintings in this church of both these figures.  There can be little doubt that at some point in the pre-Constantinian era the stories of Paul and Thecla had caught the imagination of early Christians, and some of them probably believed various of these tales were true.   Otherwise, why make them wall paintings in a cave church?    The term legend  is applied to stories that gestate over a long period of time, and have a kernel of historical substance,  but are embellished in various ways as the tale is retold.  It is possible the story of Paul and Thecla is like this, but there are some reasons to doubt the substance of the story in various particulars.  For example, the element of extreme asceticism in the story, attributed to Paul, probably involves a rather serious misreading of what Paul says about such things in 1 Corinthians 7.

Bart then is quite right to point out on pp. 81-82 that the preaching of Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, about sexual abstinence as being a necessary part of holiness, is quite at odds with the typical preaching of Paul in the NT.   This red flag must be taken seriously.   Indeed, in this story Paul even forbids sex within marriage, quite the opposite of what he says in 1 Cor. 7.   An important element in this story which is grounded in the actual ministry of Paul in the first century, is having women as Pauline co-workers who taught or proclaimed the Gospel.   There is clear historical evidence for this both in Paul’s letters and in texts like Acts 18, so here is an element in an otherwise fictional story that would be recognized to be true to the ministry of Paul.   But the story reflects a very different ethos than the one of Paul in the mid-first century.   In the second century and later in Christianity we have the rise of extreme asceticism,  asceticism of a form that sexual abstinence is seen as a key to being holy at all, much less be a holy man or woman proclaiming God’s Word.  This certainly did not characterize the lives of the earliest Christians,  especially not the Jewish Christians,  and reflects the growing dominant Gentile ethos of the church in the second century and thereafter.     Unfortunately this deficient view of the goodness of human sexuality and sexual expression in the right context has continued to infect and affect large portions of the church ever since then.     So here it needs to be stressed— sexual asceticism has nothing to do with the NT ideas about holiness, except if we mean by that sexual abstinence in the life of an unmarried person.    The church sadly has long proclaimed a mixed and oxymoronic message about sex—- the message I was given in MYF in junior high school was basically—- ‘sex is dirty, save it for the one you really love’. The Acts of Paul and Thecla sadly perpetuate that sort of view, and go beyond it, even calling for abstinence within marriage.

One of the more helpful distinctions Bart makes in his study is between forgery and fabrication.  In this case, a fabricator is a person who makes up stories about Paul, a forger is one who usurps the name and voice of Paul.  I think this is a helpful distinction, and on these terms ‘the Acts of Paul and Thecla’  could be called a fabrication.  Bart gives us the famous story of Tertullian about the book saying it was a fabrication by an elder in the church in Asia Minor who was disciplined for writing it.  If true, it suggests that the book was not seen as a harmless moralizing fiction.  It was seen as seeking to make some historical claims about Paul and women  (see p. 83).   Tertullian of course was indeed a misogynist. He had a dog in this fight, and he wanted to repudiate the idea that Paul had female co-workers.  But Tertullian’s axe to grind does not obviate the probably truth that this document was simply fiction masked as an historical account— not a recognized and harmless novella,  but a fabrication, hence the disciplining of the elder in question.

Pp. 84-92 present us with forgeries in the name of Paul, such as 3 Corinthians, or the work of Marcionites, or  the famous letters of Paul and Seneca.  It is widely agreed these documents were not written by Paul, and so on Bart’s terms, are forgeries.   I don’t have an argument with the case he lays out in these pages,  the pressing question is not addressed until page 92— are there forgeries in the NT canon of Paul’s letters?    There is however one point made on p. 90 that deserves correction.  In fact, Paul uses the term sarx in various texts simply to mean our physical skin or body.  There are texts where it is simply interchangeable with the use of soma. R. Bultmann was wrong about this, and so is Bart.  Yes, there are also places where sarx is used by Paul in a loaded moral sense— to mean our sinful inclinations generated by our fallen bodies or desires.   But in texts like 1 Cor. 15— ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom’ especially the pairing with the term blood makes clear Paul is simply using sarx in a mundane sense there.   Thus, it is quite impossible to use Paul’s varied uses of the term sarx as a litmus test to prove that later documents like 3 Corinthians must be forgeries because they confuse the Pauline uses of flesh and body, and assume they can be seen as synonymous.   There are other reasons for seeing 3 Corinthians as a forgery, but this is not one of them.

Notice again how Bart’s modus operandi  and rhetorical strategy is to trot out first documents widely agreed to be forgeries or fabrications, thus gaining momentum for the conclusion that there must be such documents in the canon itself,  since it seems to have been a widespread Christian practice.   The problems with this sort of approach are numerous,  not the least for the reasons I have already given— the social situation in the first century in which Jewish Christians were in the majority, and the movement was just beginning to establish itself,  and the apostles and eyewitnesses were still around to correct attempts at forgeries and fabrications is a very different social situation from that in  the middle of the second century and later.

So the anachronistic attempt to read back into the first century later conditions is fraught with peril, and should not be allowed to stand as good historical reasoning.    Were the social conditions in Nazi Germany in which all sorts of propaganda supporting the Third Reich was churned out, identical to the situation fifty years earlier in Germany before WWI?  No of course they were not, and indeed it is not an accident that the Nazi propaganda did not much need to fear contradiction in the way it interpreted the  era before Kaiser Wilhelm.  The people of that earlier generation were by the 1940s dead, or forced into silence by oppression and persecution.  The proper methodological for a historical study like Bart is undertaking is to work forwards, from the earliest Christian documents and situations in life, and take care to make sure one doesn’t read into later periods conditions only prevalent in earlier ones, and vice versa.   We cannot reasonably assume that because there are forgeries and fabrications in the second and later centuries there must have been in the first century as well and some of them must be in the canon.  This is an assumption that must be proved,  not simply asserted, and Bart does not offer any compelling proof.

The discussion of the Pastoral Epistles is found on pp. 93-105 and here we find a more detailed argument to make the case for the Pastorals being forged.    Let us start with a point of agreement.  Bart is right that the vocabulary, grammar, syntax of 1 and 2 Timothy are sufficiently similar to rather strongly suggest these documents are written by the same person.  Bart uses this point as an argument against those  (see L.T. Johnson)  who would argue that 2 Timothy, but probably not the other Pastorals, is by Paul.   In fact, all three of these documents share a good deal in common, for example the phrase about ‘it is a faithful saying…’ followed by some kind of quotation.  And there is no gainsaying that are notable differences in style and vocabulary between these letters, and the earlier Paulines.     How are we to explain these things if these documents are by Paul?   You will have to consult the full-length case made in my Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians Vol. One. Here a few key remarks will have to do.

Firstly,  Bart makes the mistake of trying to compare these letters, which come as close to being personal letters as any in the Pauline corpus, to letter written to whole congregations (e.g. 1 Corinthians).   This is a mistake. If there is an authentic Pauline letter it should have been compared to in terms of its form, it is Philemon.  And if there is a letter it should have been compared to because the shadow of death overs over these letters as Paul is either under house arrest or in jail, particularly when 2 Timothy is written,  it is Philippians, the latest of the so-called capital Pauline letters.    When we compare the Pastorals to Philemon what do we learn?    First of all, we learn that it is not true that Pauline churches were purely pneumatic in their order or leadership structure.  This is not even true in 1 Corinthians which rightly refers to Stephanus and his household  (1 Cor. 16.15) who are to be listened to and served, as leaders in Corinth.    So the attempt to contrast the Pastorals with a definite hierarchial leadership structure with the earlier genuine Paulines does not work.    Indeed, it especially does not work when we compare Philippians to the Pastorals, for in the prescript to Philippians we hear about elders and overseers/bishops  who are specifically addressed in this letter.   It seems clear that the leadership structure in the Pauline churches develops over time, and what we find in the Pastorals is simply the latest stage of such a development, not a departure from Paul’s genuine and earlier practices.  And indeed, it is totally  believable that Paul, on the verge of being executed would be concerned about leaving the churches in the hands of good leaders like his co-workers— Timothy and Titus.

The second old chestnut trotted out and retreaded by Bart in these pages is that Paul, like Jesus, blessed their hearts,  thought Jesus was coming back necessarily within decades, and therefore couldn’t have been very interested in church structure or the long haul or encouraging marriages or the like.  What’s the point if the world is definitely coming to a screeching halt soon?  Unfortunately,  this too is a caricature of Paul and Jesus, as I have made very clear in my book, Jesus, Paul, and the End of the World, (IVP).   Bart is simply retreading the old arguments of A. Schweitzer, and they have been shown to be deeply flawed many times over since Schweitzer wrote in the early 20^th century.    Both Jesus and Paul talk about the return of Christ coming at an unknown and surprising time like a thief in the night—it could be sooner, it could be later, but no one can be certain it will definitely be sooner.   Paul himself in 1 Thess. 4-5 does not claim Jesus is certainly coming back in his lifetime.  He believes it is possible, and when there are two unknowns, namely the date of one’s own death and the date of Christ’s return it is quite impossible for Paul to say ‘no we who are dead when Christ returns….’   The only category he can put himself in  when those two dates are unknowns is in the category of the living.  Thus, the attempt to take that passage as proof Paul thought Christ’s return was necessarily imminent must be said to have failed.

Is Paul opposed to marriage in 1 Corinthians 7?  Certainly not.  He simply says that the single life gives one more time to serve the Lord and less anxieties, and he is surely right about both of those things.  In fact, he encourages people to marry in 1 Cor. 7 if they don’t have the ‘charisma’ or grace gift for remaining single.  In short, there is nothing in 1 Cor. 7 that is at odds with advice to leaders in the Pastorals that they should be ‘the husband of one wife’.  It should be noted that this is not advice to get married.  It is rather advice about a person not being married multiple times or to multiple women at one time—they are to be monogamous.    It is not really difficult, and it does not take that long to show the flaws in Bart’s logic when it comes to the Pastorals.

But I want to return briefly to the issue of vocabulary, grammar and style.    Stephen Wilson,  sometime ago wrote a very helpful book entitled  Luke and the Pastoral Epistles. What he showed is that there is a remarkable amount of unique vocabulary in the Pastorals, including phrases and ways of referring to things,  that are found nowhere else in the NT except in Luke-Acts.    This  is in fact so extensive in these three little letters that Wilson concluded Luke wrote these little letters, perhaps even as the sequel to his Acts.   Now, I think the latter conjecture is unnecessary, but the former point needs to be taken seriously.   These letters have enough of a unified style and vocabulary that it does seem likely one person wrote them all.    And so, I have argued that Luke, who in 2 Timothy is said to alone be with Paul at the end,  is responsible for the writing out of these letters from things Paul has said to him.   When Paul had a long time trusted colleague, he might well do what many writers, including Cicero did,  not feeling the necessity of dictating word for word, but having the trusted colleague or co-worker do the composition.  And in the case of 2 Timothy, there was good reason for this— Paul was likely in the Mamartine prison and quite unable to do dictation or composition.   Luke, then, in his own words, preserved the last will and testimony of Paul for his closest long time co-workers and church leaders encouraging them to carry on.   The hands that composed these documents are Luke’s but the voice is the voice of Paul.

In Bart’s discussion of  2 Thessalonians  (pp. 103-08) Bart continues to assume that Paul had preached the definite imminence of the return of Christ, and that now he must write the Thessalonians and say— not so fast, that’s not quite what I said.   The Thessalonians are worried about their fellow believers who have recently passed away.   In fact all Paul had suggested was the possible imminence of the parousia in 1 Thess. 4-5, used as an eschatological sanction and reassurance,  but perhaps some of his audience had misunderstood.    Bart then trots out the old argument that 2 Thessalonians 2 obviously flatly contradicts 1 Thess. 4-5  because the former text talks about preliminary events that will precede the return of Christ.    While is a common enough argument, that doesn’t make it a valid one.  Why not?  Because if you bother to read both early Jewish and early Christian eschatological texts, they frequently juxtapose remarks about the possible imminence of an event with discussion of the events that will precede it.  While to a late Western mind this might seem to be a contradiction, obviously it wasn’t for early Jews and early Christians.  And in the case of Paul, it wasn’t for him precisely because he was not asserting the definite imminence of Christ within his lifetime.    I have dealt with this supposed contradiction at length in my 1 and 2 Thessalonians commentary (Eerdmans), and you are welcome to seen the extended argument there.   In short, once again Bart is wrong in his assumptions,  instead trotting out views that have been critiqued and shown wanting for a long time.

In addition, we have on p. 108 the odd argument that the reference to Paul signing his name to a document as a telltale sign of a forgery.  Really?   Isn’t this exactly what Paul says in Galatians 6.11, and wasn’t it a normal practice for letter writers to sign their documents giving an assurance of authenticity— yes, and yes.    But all too typically Bart doesn’t bother to actually deal with Gal. 6.11.   And since this is a book for lay people,  the failure to deal with well-known counter evidence may go unnoticed.   But this is not just sloppiness, it is tendentiousness.   When you fail to fairly deal with counter evidence, especially when it is considerable, you may be a successful rhetorician with the unlettered,  but you will hardly persuade those who know the evidence as well or better than Bart does.

Moving on to Ephesians, on p. 109  Bart once again makes the claim— the majority of scholars think Paul did not write Ephesians.  This is simply a false claim.  If by the majority you mean the majority who are actual experts in Ephesians, have written commentaries or monographs on Ephesians, then no,  this is not true.   Don’t take my word for it, look at the massive Ephesians commentary by Harold Hoehner and the long and definitive list of scholars writing on Ephesians he is able to produce.   His listing takes us up to 2002, and one can compare my commentary list since then.   This is simply a factual mistake on Bart’s part, and it’s the kind of mistake he keeps making.   Let me be clear that I am not even counting devotional commentaries, commentaries written by ministers, or commentaries written by uncritical or precritical or fundamentalist Bible teachers.   I am only counting scholars who are members of societies like the SNTS and the SBL.   Even on this showing,   Bart is wrong.

It is not clear to me whether or not Bart knows much about Greco-Roman rhetoric, and in particular about Asiatic rhetoric, a rhetoric in which great orators like Cicero were trained.  If he does know something about that, then he should have recognized that Ephesians, unlike earlier Pauline letters is written in the style of Asiatic rhetoric, noted for its long sentences and hyperbolic speech, and on top of that it is an epideictic discourse focusing on the praise and blame of certain things in the present.    The reason it differs from earlier Pauline letters is not because it isn’t by Paul.  It’s because this is a circular letter written to the very region where Asiatic rhetoric was most popular,  in Asia Minor,  and reflecting the conventions of that species and kind of rhetorical discourse.

Again, on p. 110 we have to deal with caricatures.  Paul in the genuine letters does not talk about doing good works,  or salvation apart from good works.  He is always contrasting salvation with works of the Mosaic law.    Really?   Always? And does he never have a good word for good works?   In fact, this is false.   It does not account for all sorts of material in the ethical sections of Paul’s earlier letters in which Paul talks both about the importance of work and good works.  See for example Rom. 12-15,  Gal. 5-6,  Philippians 4,   and the discussion of work in 1-2 Thessalonians.    Sorry Bart, once again, that dog won’t hunt.  Paul does not contrast faith and works of the Mosaic law in all the undisputed Paulines.   And as for themes that are crucial—the urging to ‘seek the welfare of the city by doing the good’, a theme explored at length by Bruce Winter  on the basis of the undisputed Paulines,  is simply ignored here.   And the claim that the genuine Paul never uses the term ‘save’ to refer to the present condition of  Christians is simply astounding and absurd—  take for example 1 Cor. 1.21— God saves people (now) through the foolishness of Paul’s preaching,  or 1 Thess. 2.16 where Paul complains that Satan is hindering his ability to speak to the Gentiles so that they may be saved (in the present) and I could go on.   Notice that in Phil. 2.12 Paul talks about believers working out their salvation which God is already working in them to will and to do.

Bart then makes the argument that Paul does not talk about having resurrection life spiritually in the here and now as Ephes. 2.5-6 suggests.  He points to  Rom. 6.1-4 as evidence that Paul always talks about resurrection as something believers will experience in the future.     I think this is in the main a valid point, but there is a very good reason why in Ephesians Paul would focus on the present benefits of Christ for believers.  This is the very nature of epideictic rhetoric, to focus on what is now true and can be praised.   The case that Bart makes for Colossians being unPauline is even less credible.  A good writer in Greek is perfectly capable of varying his style, but Bart is right that there is a clear connection between Colossians and Ephesians, the latter based on some of the former.  For this reason, he should have dealt with Colossians first, which the majority of Colossians scholars do indeed think is by Paul.  See the arguments for example in the recent commentary by J.D.G. Dunn or my Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon, (Eerdmans).    In other words, there is an answer to every single one of Bart’s assertions and arguments he wants to make about these various canonical Pauline letters.

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two

Introduction | Chapter One

Bart begins his second chapter (pp. 43-77)  by making the good point that truth is complex, and that there can be stories that may never have historically happened, but are true in some other or deeper sense.   Obviously any kind of good fiction, say parables, is a good example of this point.  Parables are not attempt to describe things that have actually happened and were observed to have happened.   There has never been a harvest like the one recounted in the parable of the sower, not even with modern fertilizer, and there has never been a woman who put that much yeast in the dough, and so on.   These are literary fictions that are not true in the sense of being true to life.  No they are true about God and the Gospel of the Kingdom, a different matter.  As Bart puts it on p. 45— truth is more than just correct historical information.   It is however not less than that if the author is making historical truth claims.   Much depends on the genre of the literature and the aims of the writer.

On p. 47, Bart makes an assertion about speech material in antiquity that should be challenged.  Here is what he says:  “If an event took place decades or even centuries earlier…how was a historian to know what the character actually said?  There was in fact no way to know.” If we were to apply this reasoning to the NT,  all of which documents were likely written within 70 years of Jesus’ death,  we would have to reject this conclusion.  The conclusion could certainly hold in the case of many documents written centuries after an event or a speech,  but not always in those cases either.

Why not?   Because in the first place, the NT was written at a time in which a person could either be in contact with eyewitnesses, or with those who had met eyewitnesses.  Even Papias in the early second century A.D. is able to say he contacted such people.   The point is that in the case of the NT, we must not imagine a long gap between the occurrence of the event and when it was written down.    But the second point to make is that we are dealing with Jewish oral cultures, and part of the discipling process in that setting was the memorizing of large chunks of the master’s teaching.  One doesn’t need tape recorders when you’ve got people who can certainly remember large quantities of given teaching, especially when it was repeated on various occasion.  The image of Jesus running around Galilee and Judea with his disciples and never repeating himself in his teaching is a myth.  And those running around with him were his ‘learners’.

In my Acts of the Apostles, commentary  (Eerdmans)  I deal with exactly how ancient historians and biographers dealt with speech material, including people like Thucydides and Polybius whom Luke imitates in methodology.   They sought to present the major points  (not just the gist)  of ancient speeches, and did not simply make up appropriate speeches right, left, and center.   What we have for example in Acts is, in any case, rhetorical summaries of speeches telling us important bits of what was said.   In short,  the way to evaluate this issue of the passing on of oral traditions is not on the basis of 20^th century German form criticism based erroneously on how Balkan folklore was passed on, but rather on the sort of procedures first century writers, including especially Jewish writers, followed in such matters.

And here I must draw a line and say that Bart’s evaluation of what Thucydides said about speech writing is both unfair, and absolutely inaccurate.   Bart says “Thucydides explicitly states that he simply made up the speeches himself.” (p. 47).  WRONG.   You will notice that Bart does not bother to quote Thucydides at this juncture, nor in his notes.    The crucial passage in Thucydides is found in Pelop. War. 1.22.1-2. Here Thucydides does say that at times it was difficult to adhere to the verbatim of what was said, but that he was claiming ‘to adhere as closely as possible to what was actually said, or what it seemed likely that they said’. In short Thucydides is claiming that he presented his speech-makers as saying what it seemed likely that they did say, adhering as closely as he could to what he knew of what they actually spoke.   This is a far cry from Ehrman’s ‘he just made up speeches’ claim.    In his very helpful article J. Wilson (“What Does Thucydides Claim for His Speeches”  Phoenix 36 (1982), pp. 95-103) what can be called the majority position among classics scholars about what Thucydides means: 1) he offers reporting of speeches in his own style, not that of the speaker necessarily; 2) he makes a selection from among the various speech material he has historical evidence for; 3) a selection is then made of which ideas from the speech are reported, for he gives speech summaries for the most part;  4) he will take everything in the speech material into account and give not merely the main thesis, but various of the main points (the gnome ); 5) he will add some words to make these points clearer; 6) abbreviating or expanding is fine so long as the gnome is clear;  7) he will cast these main points in a form that makes the historical points he, Thucydides, wants to make by citing them.  In other words, Thucydides does not handle his speech material in a radically different way than he handled his narrative material,  and in both cases, he is a careful Greek historian adhering to his sources, and consulting those  who know the sources.  Luke in Lk. 1.1-4 in fact claims to do as good or better than that.  He claims to have consulted eyewitnesses and the original preachers of the message at some length.   In other words,  while the claim on p. 47 is used to set up what follows in Bart’s argument, his argument is flawed from the outset.   There was no convention in ancient Greek history or biography writing of ‘making up speeches’.   Did some people do it— likely so, but it was not part of the normal operating procedure of such writings.  See again Bauckham’s  Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Having misread Thucydides,   Bart turns around and gets Polybius right, on p. 48.  Polybius however was standing on the shoulders of Thucydides when he said the historian “should simply record what really happened and what really was said” (Hist. 2.56-10-12).

One of the methods of operation of Ehrman in this book is to compare documents that are not really alike, and claim the same thing is going on in both.  For example the fictional letter from Titus to Peter which comes from at least 400 years after Paul’s letter to Titus.  Now no one that I know of in the whole scholarly world is claiming that the letter ‘by Titus’  is anything other than a pseudepigraph.   But there are plenty of scholars who have written commentaries on the Pastorals who do not accept at all that they are pseudepigraphs, whether written by Paul, or for Paul by one of his close co-workers.   Indeed, there are whole monographs about the Pastorals that show that the style and grammar and vocabulary of the Pastorals seems to be Lukan, but the substance is Pauline.  In short, the hands are the hands of Luke,  but the voice, is the voice of Paul.

And this brings us to a crucial point about NT letters.   Paul, and Peter, and others used scribes, sometimes giving them more license to write, sometimes dictating more in a verbatim way, depending on the situation.   In these circumstances, in order to provide a plausible argument that the Pastorals are not from the voice of Paul, one has to come up with better evidence than vocabulary usage and style, because the style could be that of the scribe, not the speaker.  One would have to come up with clear contradictions between the later Paulines and the earlier ones  in thought and substance.   This, Bart Ehrman is not able to do,  and indeed, he has to ignore the many many commentaries and monographs about the Pastorals, written by good critical scholars from all over the spectrum that argue that the voice speaking in the Pastorals is indeed Paul.  One may wish to compare the extensive list I provide of such scholars in the Introduction to Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians Vol. One.

I have no issue with Bart arguing that the letter by Titus or the Acts of Peter from the 2^nd century are pseudonymous documents.  Fair enough, but they have nothing to do with the evaluation of  1-2 Peter in the canon.   The attempt however to project back into the first century the sort of situation in life that existed centuries later when the church was overwhelmingly Gentile will not work.   The reason pseudonymous documents could be produced an nauseum in the later second century and thereafter is because there were no eyewitnesses or apostles or co-workers, or those who had talked to eyewitness around to call people on their forgeries and frauds.   There were indeed restraints in the first century, even though clearly there were some attempts at forgery in the first century Christian context as well.

On p. 52,  Bart shares with us his conviction as to why so many Christians made up fictional documents about the apostles— “Different Christians had competing assumptions, outlooks, practices, and theologies, all of which needed apostolic authority behind them. A writing in the name of Peter could authorize one set of views in the name of a great authority, named as its author.”      I think there is some truth to this.   In the post-apostolic  era, there was indeed a concern for human authority amongst Christians making competing claims.

It is however more difficult to demonstrate this for the first century A.D. for three good  reasons: 1) there were still apostles around and their co-workers etc. and it was these figures who had authority in the rather tight-knit social networks of this minority religion which came to be called Christianity; 2) it is clear enough, especially in Pauline communities that it was not at all necessary to claim apostolic backing or authority to make prophetic or inspired remarks about a whole host of things.   There was a pneumatic dimension to early Christianity, seen in both Acts and Paul especially, but also in Revelation,  which obviated any necessity for artifice, like falsely claiming one was speaking in the voice of an apostle.  One had the Spirit, and it was God’s authority in the speaking, not the human authority that was of greatest importance. The felt need to create pseudonymous documents is largely lacking in such settings in the first century; and again 3)  the commitment of early Jewish Christians to truth and keeping their testimony and story straight in a world full of doubters in the surprising idea of a dying and rising messiah is crucial.   In other words,  the ethos of first century Christianity had some very large inhibitors to the likelihood of there being a regular and successful practice of creating pseudonymous documents.  In his notes Bart also makes the off-handed comment that Paul did not think he was writing Scripture.  Well he did think he was speaking and writing the Word of God (see 1 Thess. 2.13 and 1 Cor. 7) and that it had the same authority as either Scripture or the teaching of Jesus.  This suggests Paul would not have been surprised when his letters later ended up in a canon called Scripture  (see my The Living Word of God).

Bart’s discussion of the Gospel of Peter is basically correct and does not need to be debated.  One of his historical assumptions, an assumption that has cropped up from time to time in his earlier works as well,  reappears on p. 60—“Many scholars have thought of the early church as seriously divided.”    First of all, yes there have been a good many scholars, influenced by the Hegelian approach of  Bauer and other German scholars of the early 20^th century to see dueling banjos  (between Jewish and Gentile Christians)  in the early church.    It would be incorrect to dispute that there were some tensions between Paul’s approach to the Gospel and some of the Judaizers from Jerusalem.   What does need to be disputed is first of all the anti-Semitic analysis of Bauer and others which wanted to disparage early Jewish Christianity and exalt early Gentile Christianity.   The actual historical situation was complex,  and frankly very different from the situation in  the second century and later when the church was overwhelmingly Gentile. In the first place,  Paul himself had Jewish converts, and he cared deeply about Jews coming to Christ, even said the Gospel he preached was for them first.   So, it is not so easy or correct to divide up Pauline Christianity from Jewish Christianity.  Secondly,  Paul himself, our earliest source, is just as clear as Acts is, that there was a meeting of the minds in Jerusalem between the pillar apostles and Paul on his Gospel.  Galatians says so clearly.   That there were Judaizers who didn’t like the compromises of James the brother of Jesus, or Peter, or other apostles,  is neither here nor there.   They were a part of the Christian movement, but they were not its core or originators, and did not represent even the leadership of the Jerusalem church.   Furthermore, they did not produce any of the documents in the NT itself, all of which can be traced back to about 8-10 persons who were either apostles, eyewitnesses, or co-workers of apostles and eyewitnesses.      So the image of the leadership of earliest Christianity being deeply divided,  and in the same state of disarray as say in some quarters in the late second century, is not historical accurate.

The discussion on pp. 62-63 of the Epistle of Peter (not to be confused with 1-2 Peter in the canon)  is unobjectionable, and Bart is right to point out how different the relationship between Peter and Paul is painted in that document (they are enemies) than say in Acts.   Likewise the discussion of  the Gospel of Peter is basically on target.   But in terms of procedure one may rightly wonder what the rhetorical strategy is by dealing with all these much later pseudonymous Petrine documents, and then finally turning to the canonical Petrine documents.  It would appear that Bart wants to imply that the burden of proof must be on those want to claim authenticity for 1-2 Peter in light of the dubious track record of the other Petrine documents.  This is forgetting that those canonical documents are earlier than all these other documents, and cannot be said to be following the examples or same practices as the creators of these later, and in some cases much later documents.

pp. 66-68 summarize some of the main themes of 1 Peter, and it becomes clear that Bart wants to argue that both 1-2 Peter are forgeries.   The only initial reason given (p. 68)  is that it refers to Rome as Babylon,  and  Bart questions whether it would have been called that before the fire of Rome, the persecution of Christians in A.D. 64 and the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.    There is however a good reason why it might be so called—- in A.D. 49— Christians were sent ‘into exile’  from Rome, by the Emperor Claudius,  Christians who were Romans.  They were able to come back only after the death of Claudius in A.D. 54.  A Roman Emperor who sent people into exile could well remind a figure like Peter steeped in the OT of the earlier exile producing pagan rulers as well.   This is not a good reason to late date 1 Peter,  nor to claim it was not by Peter.   And frankly, there are just too many good scholars who think that the voice of Peter is heard in 1 Peter to simply dismiss that whole line of argument with the wave of a hand and a citation of one commentary from 1992 to the contrary.

Towards the end of the chapter Bart will attempt to play the ‘Peter was a peasant and couldn’t have written this card’.   This is bogus, since the document itself suggests  Peter used a scribe or amaneuensis, and indeed Papias tells us he did so when he related the stories about Jesus’ life,  using Mark as his scribe.  That Peter was illiterate, can certainly be doubted since businessmen who worked in Galilee, such as fishermen,  often had need of literacy to have a successful business.  The archaeological evidence is even clear that fishermen could be quite prosperous, as is shown by the fisherman’s large house excavated at Bethsaida.

The discussion of 2 Peter is equally brief (pp. 70-72) and here Bart is nearer to the position of many scholars.  If there is one document in the NT for which a strong case of pseudonymity can be made it is this document.  The reasons are several and are clear: 1) it refers to a collection of Paul’s letters; 2)  it uses Jude in 2 Pet. 2 as a source;  3) it is written at a time when people are scoffing at the notion of the return of Christ, surely more likely toward or at the end of the first century A.D. than in the 60s before Peter died; and 4) the reference to ‘your apostles’  seems to be a deliberate indicator this was not written by Peter, but by someone later than Peter although this could be a reference to those non-Petrine persons who had been the audience’s apostles.     So then, should we agree with Bart that this must be a pseudonymous document?     Here is where I stress that this is a composite document, as almost all the commentators who have written commentaries on this book have noted.   It clear uses Jude as a source.  Could it have used other sources as well?  The answer is yes.   In Chapter One we have a testimony by Peter about the Transfiguration, a testimony not simply copied out of some Gospel that we know of.   A careful study of the Greek of this testimony material shows it matches up extremely well with the Greek of 1 Peter, but not with the Greek of the rest of this document.    What should we conclude—-  this document includes an important Petrine source, just as 1 Peter reflects the voice of the real Peter,  and the document is therefore attributed to Peter as the first and most important source of this document.   In short,  not even 2 Peter is pseudonymous   (see my Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians Vol. 2).

The end of this chapter is full of all sorts of strong assertions that Peter could not be the voice speaking in either 1-2 Peter because he was an illiterate peasant.  Let’s start with the supposed evidence found in Acts 4.13.    This text does not say Peter was illiterate.  It says, and means he was not educated in a school, in this case a school in Jerusalem, so he could be a ‘grammateus’. Thus he is called  ‘agrammatoi’ which means unlettered.   This is not the same thing as claiming he is illiterate.    What surprises the audience in Acts 4 is not Peter’s handwriting skills, it is his argumentation and use of Scripture.   They had no way of knowing whether Peter was literate or not, but they did have a way of knowing if he had shown up in Jerusalem and been trained to be a ‘lettered’ person or a scribe.   This they could confirm he was not.     This evidence then does not in any way support Bart’s case that Peter could not be the person speaking in 1 Peter or a part of 2 Peter.

What about the argument that 1 Peter appears to be composed in Greek, and surely Peter did not know Greek?     Let’s think about this for a minute.  The Holy Land had been Hellenized long before the time of Peter, and there were plenty of  Jews in both Judea and Galilee who knew at least conversational Greek, which is indeed the language they would have used to talk with centurions and Roman officials of any kind who came around collecting taxes.     While Mark Chancey I think is right that some scholars have over-emphasize the presence of Gentiles in Galilee,  even if it were true they were simply found in Tiberias and Sepphoris— guess what?  The former is right next door to Capernaum and the latter right next door to  Nazareth, and in both cases artisans and fishermen did indeed sell their wares and practice their trade in the vicinity, and certainly some of their customers would have been Greek speakers without any doubt.   There is a reason why the inscriptions in the floor of the Sepphoris synagogue are in Greek, even though that synagogue is from even later than Peter’s period.  Greek still had influence in Jewish settings in Galilee.    And frankly,  what about all those nice inscriptional honorific columns found in Capernaum?  Was it just a Galilean backwater in no contact with next door Tiberias, and with no Greek speakers in it?    I don’t believe this for even a minute.  The fishermen did business all up and down the northwest coast of the sea of Galilee and we are told in the Gospels they also went across to the Golan, where there were certainly plenty of Gentiles.     In other words, the attempt to insist Peter was a peasant, was illiterate,  couldn’t have known any Greek, and so on is a dog that won’t hunt as an argument.

But let us take the further argument that 1 and 2 Peter are too sophisticated to be by Peter.     It is here at the very end of  the chapter (see pp. 76-77) that Bart drops the bombshell that he believes there is no evidence of scribes composing letter-essay documents for others?    I suspect he will be forced to back off this  extreme claim if he ever bothers to read all the evidence that Tiro did this for Cicero with regularity.      And in fact,  the latest studies of scribes by  van der Tooren completely rule out such a claim when it comes to Jewish scribes.    Furthermore, we have plenty of evidence from Paul’s own letters that he used scribes, such as Tertius, mentioned in Romans 16,  or probably Sosthenes mentioned in 1 Corinthians 1.     The scholarship of  E.R. Richards on scribes and also J. Murphy-O’Connor  make perfectly clear there were scribes composing all sorts of documents, including letter essays in the first century A.D.     What we see at the end of this chapter is someone who has to push his argument too far, to make his case, running roughshod over a lot of evidence to the contrary.     It’s too bad, because  there is also a lot of useful material in this book to interact with.  Sadly,  it’s more extreme claims will cause many to dismiss this book out of hand as simply a polemic.

Introduction | Chapter One

Introduction

The first chapter begins with something of a disclaimer.  “There was a good deal of that sort of activity in the ancient world [i.e. forgery]…although it was not a major factor in early Christianity. This was for a simple reason: Christian books were not, by and large, for sale”  (p. 15) and as Bart points out,  making money was even in antiquity one major reason for forgeries.    On p. 17 Bart goes on to say that there is ‘scant’ evidence of Christians producing forgeries just for the sake of seeing if they could get away with it, as has and does happen from time to time.   There seem to have been other motives in play, for clearly enough we do have forgeries produced in the second century A.D. for example the Gospel of Peter which Bart uses to make his point.  Oddly, what he does not stress, but should have,  is that when it was discovered by  Bishop Serapion that the book was a forgery, he banned it from being read in church.  According to  Eusebius (vi.12.2) quoting from a pamphlet Serapion wrote concerning the Docetic Gospel of Peter, Serapion presents an argument to the Christian community of Rhossus in Syria against this gospel and condemns it:

“We, brethren, receive Peter and the other Apostles even as Christ; but the writings that go falsely by their names we, in our experience, reject, knowing that such things as these we never received. When I was with you I supposed you all to be attached to the right faith; and so without going through the gospel put forward under Peter’s name, I said, `If this is all that makes your petty quarrel, why then let it be read.’  But now that I have learned from information given me that their mind was lurking in some hole of heresy, I will make a point of coming to you again: so, brethren, expect me speedily. Knowing then, brethren, of what kind of heresy was Marcion… From others who used this very gospel— I mean from the successors of those who started it, whom we call Docetae, for most of its ideas are of their school— from them, I say, I borrowed it, and was able to go through it, and to find that most of it belonged to the right teaching of the Saviour, but some things were additions.”

Here is a Bishop who is indeed a truth-seeker, concerned that his flock not be misled.  Of course the problem with forgeries is they may include some true material in them, at least for the sake of verisimilitude.   And such was the Gospel of Peter.   The early church was indeed concerned about the issue of forgery, and it is fair say while the relevant church fathers could be deceived, they would not willingly have passed along documents they knew were forgeries, much less agree to including such documents in the canon of the NT.

Truth was a commodity the early church was deeply concerned about, and as Bart admits,  Christianity stood out like a sore thumb from Greco-Roman religionists who did not subscribe to a certain number of truth claims about their gods, and were often prepared to admit mythology was composed of myths!    Yes, they believed gods existed, but no, they did not have sacred texts that they believed told the ‘Gospel truth’ about their gods.

While we could dispute some of the analysis of Bart about some of the forgeries claiming to be written by this or that apostle, the general point is without dispute.  There were lots of forgeries between the second and fourth centuries in Christian history, and some of them were believed to be genuine (e.g. the Apocalypse of Peter).   Bart counts as many as 100 such forgeries.   One of the things they all appear to have in common is they were written by Gentiles,  in a Greco-Roman setting where such practices were common.    I would add,  they were also written by people who by both first century and later Orthodox standards shouldn’t be called Christians—- I mean Gnostics,  Docetists,  Marcionites and the like.

There is a reason why these folks were called heretics in their own time— they were false teachers and not surprisingly they propagated their false teachings through forgeries.     What I would especially stress is that they not only failed later Christian litmus’ tests for orthodoxy.  They also completely failed the earliest tests for orthodoxy found within the NT documents themselves.   Claiming these folks were ‘Christians’   is rather like claiming Deepak Chopra is a Christian theologian just because he talks about Jesus in some spiritual way.   Sorry, but that dog won’t hunt.

Bart goes on on p. 19 to make clear that there were forgeries amongst first century Christians as well, and he is surely right.  He is right to point to 2 Thess. 2.2 which indicates that there were false teachers usurping Paul’s name and writing documents claiming to be by him.   This is probably the reason Paul used the practice of signing his own documents with his own hand, so there would be a way of authenticating the document.    But of course Bart wants to suggest that some of the NT documents themselves with Paul’s name appended, deserve to be called forgeries.

Here is where I say  ‘caveat emptor’—let the buyer beware when Bart begins to make sweeping claims like “Second Thessalonians… is itself widely thought by scholars not to be by Paul”  (p. 19).   I called Bart on this very point when we were debating at New Orleans Baptist Seminary last month.  I pointed out, that if one does the head count of what commentators say about 2 Thessalonians, in fact the majority of commentators, even if one restricts one’s self to  so-called critical commentators,  still believe Paul is responsible for 2 Thessalonians.

Bart’s rebuttal was that he was not counting conservative  or orthodox commentators.   My response to the response was that in fact he was ruling out the majority of Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, not to mention some Jewish scholars at this point.    In other words,  his ‘canon’ of critical scholars is small, a distinct minority of the total number of NT scholars around the world,  with whom he has chosen to agree.     My point here is,  don’t believe such claims as ‘widely believed’  or  ‘the majority of good scholars think’  without first doing the math.   In fact, Bart’s math does not add up.   Thus while it is true that often forgers throw people off their trail by warning about forgery in their own forged documents,  in fact, there were plenty of genuine warnings of this sort by authors like Galen, who were really upset with people writing documents in their own name.   Galen even published a list of his authentic writings to make clear what was a forgery.   As it turn out, many ancients were very concerned about the dangers of forgery,  and Paul was one of them.

On p. 21,  Bart goes on to deal with the controversy over the book of Revelation.  And again he is right, there was a dispute in the early church over whether John son of Zebedee wrote this book, with the church father Dionysius disputing it.  He thought two different John’s had been confused.   Now any time you get into a debate about authorship of a book, including NT books, it is important to observe from the outset that internal evidence of the document itself should always take priority over later external labels or arguments about the book.

Nowhere in Revelation is the claim made that this book is written by John son of Zebedee.   Indeed, nowhere in this document is there a claim it was written by an apostle either.   The claim in Rev. 1 is that it was written by John the seer, on the island of Patmos.  That is all.  And in fact most scholars today, including those who have written commentaries on the book,  do not dispute this claim.   What the man’s exact relationship may or may not have been with John of Zebedee or the Beloved Disciple can be debated, but the fact remains that even the best scholars of apocalyptic literature like John Collins  (see his The Apocalyptic Imagination ) accept that someone named John wrote this book.    So this book is not an example of a pseudonymous apocalypse, unlike the later Apocalypse of Peter.  Apparently Bart recognizes this.

Again, Bart is right that several of the books now in the canon were disputed even in the early church.   Besides Revelation,  both Jude and 2 Peter are rightly mentioned by Bart as disputed by the church fathers, the former because of its citation of a tradition from the apocryphal Enoch literature.   We will say more about this later.

Bart is also right that there was a dispute about Hebrews, though that document is formally anonymous, makes no claims about authorship, and frankly the argument that Heb. 13.22-25 is trying to make some sort of weak claim that it is by Paul is a real stretch  (see p.  22).  The most you can get out of that text is it is probably written by someone in the larger Pauline circle,  say an Apollos for example.

The fact that various modern scholars dispute the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles is true enough.  Indeed, modern scholars are pretty evenly divided about the Pastorals.  By my count when I wrote a commentary on the Pastorals, a slight majority favored some sort of Pauline authorship,  but that was a change from the situation in the 1970s when the majority seemed to favor seeing them as pseudepigrapha.    There was a reason for this change in opinion as well—- more and more scholars had learned more and more about the way scribes were used in antiquity in the composition of documents, and also had learned a good deal about the latitude trusted scribes, like Cicero’s Tiro had in composition.  Furthermore, as  Luke Timothy Johnson pointed out,  many writers were capable of writing in a style that suited the rhetorical nature of this or that discourse or document.  Style and vocabulary reflected purpose, and could not be seen as a clear litmus test as to authorship.   More on this as well.

The remainder of the first chapter  (pp. 22-42)  dwells on the subject of forgery in antiquity, the terms of the debate,  the motives and justifications of the practice, and related matters.     Pp. 22-24 provide us with a  helpful glossary of terms and the real burden of this book comes to light.   Bart is not primarily concerned with documents that were formally anonymous, but were later ascribed to someone, say an apostle.  So for example Matthew’s Gospel is not attributed to Matthew in the document itself  (vss. 1-to the end).   The fact that it was later ascribed to Matthew can be debated,  but it would not make it a forgery in the narrow sense in which Bart is using the term, namely a claim to authorship by the person who produced the document which is a false claim and deliberately a false claim.   Bart is right in one of his main theses of this book— “that those who engaged in this activity in the ancient world were roundly condemned for lying and trying to deceive their readers.”  (p. 25).  This is correct, and interestingly it means that I agree with Bart’s critique of liberal scholars who want to claim such practices were mere recognized literary practices, not attempts at deceit, whatever genre of literature we might be discussing. I think there is a very limited scope of types of ancient documents of this sort that were not attempts to deceive.  There does not, for example, appear to have been any literary convention warranting pseudepigraphical  personal letters in antiquity.

On p. 26, we have a helpful distinction between intentions and motivations, one too little observed in scholarly writings.   Intention has to do with what one wants to accomplish, motivation with the reasons one wants to accomplish it.  Thus, the forger’s intention is to deceive, but his reasons for wanting to do so can be many and varied.   As things turn out, I also agree with Bart that The Secret Gospel of Mark is indeed likely to be a forgery by Morton Smith (p. 27).   It’s nice to find points of agreement with someone I usually disagree with.

On p. 30, Bart argues that not even in the case of apocalyptic literature can we argue for pseudonymity as  a legitimate literary device without attempt to deceive.  He argues this way because Tertullian once argued at length that the Book of Enoch was really by Enoch, and somehow miraculously survived the flood!    He thinks there were other ancients who normally took apocalypses apparent authorship claims at face value.

But what if there were deliberate pulling back of the curtains so to speak in various such documents, which made evident the composer of the document was not the person to whom it was formally attributed at its outset?    Richard Bauckham has argued this is precisely the case in 2 Peter, a document ascribed to Peter, perhaps because it includes a Petrine source in the first chapter, but then later in the document the author reveals his hand in comments about a collection of Paul’s letters (made after Peter’s death) and other things which the audience of the document would know were in reference to activities in their own day, not in the time of Peter (and no, these references are not presented as prophecies).     In other words,  there are reasons not to take at face value the claim that ‘all ancients took authorship claims at face value, even in apocalyptic literature’ and so we must assume forgery and an attempt to deceive.

What was the motivation for forgery in antiquity?  To gain a wider hearing than one would otherwise have for one’s ideas, presumably.  Here  I think Bart is probably largely correct.  There may have been many motivations, but in religious or quasi-Christian circles this was surely one of them.  Here it will be well to remind my audience that recently on this blog I have talked about the ancient book trade,  how small it was, the role of scribes and copiests and the like.   These blog posts should be consulted as one works through this critique, as certain things said there, are presupposed here.

One of those things is that what we mean by authorship today, indeed what we mean by putting someone’s name on a document today, was not exactly the same as what was meant in antiquity.   Sometimes a document was named or labeled after its most famous contributor  (e.g. Moses when it came to the Pentateuch, or  Matthew when it came to the Gospel in his name).    Sometimes a document would be named after its most famous source (e.g. 2 Peter which has a Petrine source).  Sometimes a document would be named after the person who actually wrote it— say Luke, in Luke-Acts.  Now all of these practices were legitimate scribal practices, when they were putting tags on ancient documents to identify them and their sort or source or author.  Van der Tooren is worth a close look on some of these things, and one can also read the Introductions in my commentaries on the Pastorals or on 1-2 Peter and Jude.

What I will be arguing as this review goes on, is that Bart is wrong, not about the many forgeries out there in antiquity.  He is too narrow in his thinking about what the name label on a scroll  might mean,  and is therefore wrong that we have forgeries in the  NT.  No, actually we do not.  We have documents authored by those so named, we have documents written by scribes on behalf of those so named, we have anonymous documents later mistakenly ascribed to Paul (e.g. Hebrews)  or John son of Zebedee (e.g. Gospel of John, Revelation of John), we have composite documents that list the first or most important contributing source.   In none of these cases are we dealing with forgery as defined by Bart Ehrman.  It can be also stressed that pseudepigrapha which has a named specific audience was especially difficult to pull off because it involves not just a false author claim, but almost always as well a false audience claim, and if the recipients of the document knew any members of the alleged audience  there is a high degree of likelihood someone would have spelled a rat.

Ehrman has done some very good homework for this book, and he is right that in antiquity forgery was roundly condemned in both Christian and non-Christian circles, repeatedly.  And he is likely right as well that forgers wanted to deceive their audiences for one reason or another, and had the intent of doing so from the outset.    And Ehrman is also right that when forgers were caught the penalties could be severe  (defrocking, exile, even death), which shows how seriously some ancients took forgery.

At the very end of this first chapter Bart makes clear that he is not just interested in the historical question (are their forgeries in the NT), but the deeper philosophical one, is it ever justified to lie about something, and under what circumstances?  The ancients, as well as moderns, have different answers to those sorts of questions.   But there is an even deeper one Bart wants to probe—is it ever justified to lie for the sake of the truth, to promote the truth?  Augustine of course said no, but surprisingly  Origen and Clement allowed at least for the little white lie in the case of trying to get someone to take their medicine etc.   More on this anon.

Introduction