(What follows here is a small excerpt from my forthcoming full dress socio-rhetorical Philippians commentary for Eerdmans, due out later this year.  See what you think).

A Closer Look: Honor, Shame, and Apostolic Life

The honor and shame culture Paul lived in was far different from contemporary Western culture and its values. “Honor” and “shame” in this context do not primarily refer to feelings of honor or shame, though feelings would be involved, but rather to being honored or disgraced in public. Paul’s main concern is that the gospel not be disgraced and that God be honored, whether by Paul’s life or his death. Being a mere public disgrace is of less concern to the apostle. In fact he would see such disgrace as an honor if it were suffered for Christ, so long as it did not involve the betrayal or renouncing of the gospel due to human weakness or the like.

What Paul saw as honorable or shameful was different from what the Greco-Roman pagan culture saw as honorable or shameful. There is overlap between the two, but also some categorical differences and contradictions between them. The category of overlap would include some of the things Paul lists as virtues in Phil. 4.8: “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right. . . .” Paul does not see the Christian worldview as inherently at odds with the worldview of the larger culture at every point. In these matters, Paul is not issuing a charge for entirely countercultural Christian beliefs and praxis. The culture’s values could be affirmed when they comported with Christian values. But this required critical sifting of the culture with the sieve of Christian values and beliefs. Some things could be affirmed, and some things needed to be critiqued or rejected.

But Paul realizes as he writes that many of his converts are likely to see him in a very compromised position when it comes to the matter of honor. C. Osiek put it this way: “For a man to be arrested and detained in a shameful condition of loss of freedom was damaging not only to his sense of self but to his public reputation.”66 But Paul the master rhetorician is able to show how he has turned a negative into a plus, even while suggesting from the very beginning of the letter, where he calls himself “a slave of Christ Jesus,” that what the world considers true honor is not always so. He will demonstrate that he is still free, free in Christ, by his parrh3sia, his free speech, in this section.67

In the Roman world honor was bound up with public life and was largely an issue for males in a patriarchal culture. Men represented the public face of a family or kinship group, and their task was to represent in an honorable way their family or constituency. The main role of women was to protect the family from shame, in particular from sexual shame. Paul is certainly not talking about the latter in Philippians 1.

But he still affirms the categories of honor and shame, however busily he is redefining what they amount to for a Christian person and in particular for a Christian apostle, an ambassador for Christ. It is the honor of Christ and the honor of the gospel that Paul is an emissary of and that is at issue here. Likewise in the case of shame, it is letting Christ down, being a bad witness, failing to hold the faith or to be bold in witnessing to the end that is called shameful here. A pagan would not recognize loyalty unto death to a superstition as an honorable thing. Nor would betrayal or denial of one’s former faith and commitments (if it was this Christian faith) under legal pressure be shameful. To the contrary, it would be sensible, as even a brief study of the correspondence between Pliny and Emperor Trajan in the early second century shows. Paul believes in the transvaluation of many of his culture’s values, but he has not transvalued or rejected all the categories, such as honor and shame.

So how does Paul de-enculturate his converts from some of their dominant cultural values, while at the same time both affirming other traditional values and urging on them more distinctively new and Christian values? First, he accomplishes this by raising their standards and sights. He tells them that ultimately there is a greater commonwealth and a higher citizenship than that associated with Rome. The ultimate model for their behavior should not be Caesar, with his displays of military power, public games, and public performances (e.g., at poetry contests in Corinth), but Christ, as ch. 2 will make ever so clear. If they really want to be high-minded and do what is truly honorable and praiseworthy, they need to aspire to have the mind of Christ and follow his behavior pattern. And here is where the strikingly new value is affirmed: humility, taking on the heart and role of a servant. Real honor comes in self-sacrifice, not self-serving behavior, suggests Paul. “[I]t is within the area of ‘lifestyle’ that Paul wants to establish the distinctive characterizations of a specific Christian identity.”68 Thus to some extent Paul is remapping the zone of what counts as honorable and what counts as shameful.

Second, Paul is trying to get the Philippians to to think eschatologically. Honor is indeed something that needs to be publicly acclaimed and recognized, but Paul suggests that the proper public forum for that is not the agora in Philippi but before the judgment seat of Christ. Public acclaim for works and ministry well done will come at the end when Christ returns and one’s deeds will finally be scrutinized by an impartial and compassionate judge and either rewarded or punished (1 Corinthians 3). It is God in Christ who can bestow real honor on the Christian, not society, and Christ alone can take away lasting shame and humiliation from sin and failure. God alone is at the apex of Paul’s value pyramid, Christ alone is the human paradigm that is immune to Paul’s critique of human behavior, and the form of the world is passing away (1 Corinthians 7). Therefore, Paul hopes that the Philippians will have a sense of detachment from the world and attachment to Christ and his values.He is busily inculcating both these things in Philippians. As Chrysostom reminds us, however, “One must not suppose that he is demeaning this life. He is not saying that since there is nothing good for us here, we might as well do away with ourselves. Not at all. There can be profit even here, if we live not toward this life finally but toward that other” (Hom. Phil. 4.1.22).

Paul is not encouraging his converts to be so heavenly-minded that they become no earthly good. He is saying that the temporal should be seen in light of the eternal, the lesser good in light of the greater, the present in light of the future with Christ, the lesser citizenship in light of the greater citizenship. He models all this for his converts in the very way he faces both rivalry and the adversity of being in chains and in a judicial process. It can rightly be said that the narratio, with its correspondences with the exordium which precedes it, shows that Paul practices what he prays and preaches.69 He also, in a status hungry and status conscious culture, addresses his converts as his equals—as his brothers and sisters in Christ and his partners in ministry. In this, too, he is providing a conscious paradigm for them that goes against the grain of the culture and against what would be considered normal, honorable behavior.

I had just gotten off the bus in a tiny coal mining village in County Durham England, when I saw the Methodist Chapel steward running down the hill to meet me.   It was Easter Sunday and I was scheduled to preach in that little chapel.   The steward came up to me, somewhat breathless and said,  “I’m ever so sorry but Mr. Witherington  I need to ask you a question.”    I said “Shoot”  and he replied “No nothing so drastic as shooting, just a question.”    I said “Go ahead.”    He said “You do believe in the resurrection of Jesus don’t you?”      I said,  “Of course,  that’s what I’m here to preach on.”   You could see the relief written all over his face.  “I’m ever so relieved,” he said,  “because the chap we had last year didn’t.  He rattled on about spring and the beauty of the flowers returning and that sort of drivel.”    But resurrection is not something that happens every spring, like the flowers popping up out of the grounds.   The resurrection of Jesus was an eschatological event out of due season,  long before the resurrection of everybody else, and we need to discuss it.   And the way we will do that this morning is through examining the story of Mary Magdalene and her visit to the tomb of Jesus early on Easter morning.

Let’s  start with a few basic facts—- her last name was not Magdalene.   She came from a little fishing village called Migdal on the northwest coast of the sea of Galilee.  She was a small town Jewish girl,  and in fact she was an outcast.  More on that in a minute.   Her first name was not Mary either, it was the Aramaic name Miryam— named after the prophetess in the OT, as are all the so-called Marys in the NT, including Jesus’ mother.    So her real name is Miryam from Migdal.   She is not to be confused with the anonymous sinner woman in Lk. 7.36-50, nor with Mary of Bethany, nor with the woman caught in adultery.  Her problem was not sexual immorality, it was something else as we shall now see.

When we first hear about this woman in Luke 8.1-3,   she is mentioned first in a list of female disciples, and listed as a person who was demon possessed— indeed as possessed as one could imagine— with seven demons, the Jewish symbolic number for a complete set.   Jesus had exorcised those demons out of her, and she had gone from being an outcast to being his follower.   There are various remarkable things about this, the first of which is that  early Jewish teachers before Jesus did not have female disciples, and they certainly didn’t have female disciples who had been dabbling with the dark arts or the Devil.   And yet, in the Gospels her name is listed first among the women disciples in every single such name list except one.  She is listed ahead of a woman like Joanna the wife of Herod’s estate agent, surely a much higher status woman than Miryam of Migdal.    Now here is the truly remarkable thing.

Not only did Jesus have women disciples he had travelling women disciples.  You can imagine the headline in the Galilean Gazette— ‘Radical rabbi on the road again with women and men he is not related to—- Oyveh!  News at Eleven’.   Jewish men were not supposed to study with, fraternize with, or travel with women they were not somehow related to, and yet in Luke 8.1-3 we see Jesus on the road with a significant group of women, as well as the Twelve men.   And in fact we hear that they travelled with Jesus to that last fateful Passover festival in Jerusalem.   And when they got there, it was the women, not the Twelve who were last at the cross, first at the empty tomb,  first to see the risen Jesus, and first to proclaim  ‘he is risen’.   And Miryam of Migdal is at the forefront of this story, hence the full presentation of her encounter with Jesus in John 20.   Now in a patriarchal culture,   a man’s man’s world like first century Judaism in which the witness of women was consider suspect, and not necessarily valid in court,   you don’t make up a story  like we find in the Gospels about these women if you are trying to start a world religion involving both men and women.  The prominent role of women in the Easter story is a sure sign of its authenticity.

Let’s have a close look at John 20 now, the story we have just watched from the film the Gospel of John.   The first thing to be noticed about the story is that the woman we call Mary Magdalene has gone to the tomb to mourn the loss of her teacher,  Jesus.   She will have brought spices and clean linens presumably to re-anoint the corpse and re-wrap it.  Jews normally mourned a dearly departed loved one for a full week, and would visit the tomb various times during the week.   Jews did not practice mummification like the Egyptians did, and so an odor retardant  like myrrh and other spices would be packed into the winding sheet around the corpse.   But when  she gets to the tomb nobodies home— there is no corpse to be found.   One of the things all the Gospel Easter stories have in common is that none of them describe the event of the resurrection.  Imagine being present when that happened.   (Steve the crocodile guy example).  Well, we have nothing like that in the Gospels. What we have are stories about how the risen Jesus appeared to a variety of witnesses over a 40 day period in a variety of places, sometimes to groups of witnesses, sometimes to individuals like Peter or James.  The stories all differ in detail because they happened in different ways to different persons in different places.  The common element is simply the risen Jesus and his encounter with people.

One of the most striking facts about the story in John 20 is the contrast between what happened when Peter and the Beloved Disciple raced to the tomb, having gotten the report from Miryam that it was empty,  and went into the tomb, and saw nothing but grave clothes as compared to what Miryam saw when she looked into the tomb after the two men had left— she saw two angels,  God’s  Fed Ex boys, his messengers.   Angels are like billboards.  Where ever they show up they indicate God is at work and something dramatic has or is about to happen.   Now the strange thing about the angels in John 20 is that although they do address Miryam they are hardly singing ‘Up from the Grave He Arose’.  Rather they ask the strange question— ‘Woman why are you crying?’   Now you would think they would know perfectly well why she was crying.    In Miryam’s view, someone has stolen the body of her beloved Teacher, she doesn’t know where it is, and so she can’t even mourn him properly according to the Jewish customs.  As if it were not enough that he was dead, now his body is gone too!

Now it is interesting that Miryam is apparently more perceptive spiritually than the two men.   She does see two angels, and they only see grave clothes.  But this hardly gets her out of her funk, or beyond her grief.   She continues to weep and mourn.   And then, equally oddly, she hears the same question being asked of her again, only this time outside the tomb.   She turns and sees a man standing nearby, who had also asked ‘Woman why are you crying’.    Thinking the man is the gardener she asks him where he has put Jesus so she can go retrieve the body.   It is then that something very special happens.   It is then that the first Easter happens for Miryam herself, and she becomes the very first person to see the risen Lord, so far as we can tell.

Jesus calls her by name— Miryam!  And it is only when he calls her by name that she realizes it is Jesus!   Now this matches up nicely with what John 10 says— Jesus says he is the good shepherd and he knows his sheep, and they know the sound of his voice, and most importantly,  he calls each one by name. That is what happens here, and at that juncture Miryam’s eyes light up,  she grabs Jesus and exclaims  -Rabbouni!    This is Aramaic for  my teacher.  You will notice she does not call him ‘Honey’  or ‘husband’  or suggest they jump start their marriage again by reading a Dobson book,  despite the hysterical fiction of Dan Brown’s da Vinci Code.  The relationship between Miryam and Jesus is that of teacher and disciple— that is all.  Miryam is the lead female disciple from Galilee,  nothing less, and nothing more.

Jesus’ response is interesting.  He tells her— ‘don’t cling onto me’.   If your translation reads ‘don’t touch me’  this is incorrect.  Jesus is telling her that there is no clinging to the Jesus of the past.  He is no longer just Miryam’s teacher, and there is no going back.  He is now the risen Lord.   There was something strikingly different about the risen Jesus.  We are not sure what it was, but he is not instantly recognized in these first appearance stories.  Compare for example the story about the disciples on Emmaus road, or even Saul’s conversion on Damascus road—he asks ‘Who are you sir!’

We need to be able distinguish between what happened to Jesus on Easter, and what had happened previously to say Lazarus or the daughter of Jairus or the widow of Nain’s son.   These latter resurrections were back to the old form of life, and these people all went on to live and die again.  I am not an archaeologist, you know what they say about them— their life is always in ruins.  But if I was I would like to find Lazarus’ tombstone— it would say died 29 A.D. and then after that died 42 A.D.  That would confuse some people.    What happened to a Lazarus is not identical to what happened to Jesus.  Yes, they were both raised from the dead,  but only Jesus gets a resurrection body that he takes with him to heaven— a body immune to disease, decay and death.   Paul in 1 Cor. 15 is very clear that normal flesh and blood cannot enter the Kingdom of God.   You need a resurrection body, not merely a jump start of the old body again.   This is also why Paul calls Jesus the first fruits of the resurrection when he knows perfectly well the OT stories about Elijah raising the dead.    What is new at Easter is a person, for the first time on earth having permanently overcome death, having a body immune to disease, decay and death.   As the old preacher puts it—- in Jesus,  God’s yes to life is much louder than death’s know.   Because of resurrection,  instead of death being a period,  the end of something, it becomes a comma,  the story continues with everlasting life, with an afterlife.  Praise God.

We would be remiss however, if we didn’t notice that Jesus commissions Miryam of Migdal to be the first Easter preacher— he commissions her to go tell the boys what she has just seen and touched and heard.  He tells her to tell them he will soon be ascending to God the Father.   Jesus did not rise from the dead to continue earthly existence, so things could go on business as usual.   Jesus rose from the dead to begin the endtimes, then and there, the eschatological age, the age in which all manner of things would change, and when Jesus comes back, we too will experience resurrection from the dead as 1 Cor. 15 promises.  Christ’s history is our destiny, for we will be conformed to the image of God’s risen Son.   And so, Miryam faithfully, went and told the male disciples what Jesus had said.

Did the men then believe her?   Well, Luke 24 suggests they did not.  Indeed, Luke 24 says they thought it was an old wives tale, a typical male reaction to a female testimony in those days.    And they were dead wrong about Jesus, as he was not dead and gone.   But it took his appearance to them in the upper room before they too believed, he had arisen.

Miryam of Migdal is the only woman disciple, for whom we have something like a complete story.   Her story is a story of courage, and change, and redemption, and witness.   When Jesus arises and commands you to do something— you do it. Whether you are believed or not.   And this is still true today.   What is it that the risen Jesus is saying to you this morning?   Could it be, don’t cling to the Jesus of the past,  don’t cling to the church of the past.   It is not about getting back to the good old days.  It is about going forward into a bright future, which is where Jesus is leading us.  As Adoniram Judson said,  the future is as bright as the promises of God— and what the resurrection of Jesus promises is that neither death nor life nor powers nor principalities nor things present nor things to come can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.   Christ is risen— and all manner of things are possible for this church and for your Christian life.  AMEN

Chapter Three takes on the issue of the Gospel (euangelion) and the Kingdom of God—the subject of  Jesus’ proclamation.   As the Pope says euangelion was a term with a history—it was used of all the Emperor’s official messages, whether they involved particularly positive or cheerful news or not.  The translation ‘good news’ in that context could be quite ironic— ‘good news’ the Emperor has just conquered and plundered your country and sent you a procurator to rule over you, and sent off various of your people into slavery, but hey, the land is quieter now that we have pacified it. Some good news.   The Pope thinks the Gospel writers are deliberately playing off this political use of the term and saying  “What the emperors who pretend to be gods, illegitimately claim, really occurs here—a message endowed with plenary authority, a message that is not just talk, but reality.” (p. 47).   In contemporary language we are being told that God’s Word about his reign on earth is not just informative it is performative speech— a form of action and efficacious power that changes things.   The point is that only God can really change and save the world.   Of the 122 times the phrase Kingdom of God/heaven shows up in the NT 99 are in the Synoptics, and 90 of the 99 are predicated of Jesus.

The Pope quotes Alfred Loisy’s famous saying ‘Jesus preached the Kingdom, but it was the church that showed up’.  Did the Kingdom fail to come?  What is the relationship between the message of the Kingdom and the messenger Jesus?  This, says the Pope, is the big question.   The Pope turns to the church fathers to help understand the term basiliea . Origen called Jesus the auto-basileia, that is the Kingdom in person.  On his showing the Kingdom is not a place or an abstract concept like ‘ruling’ or ‘saving rule’  but a person— Jesus himself.   In other words ‘kingdom of God’ is a veiled Christological term alluding to the king.   The point is he is God’s living presence, power, rule in person—wherever he is, there is the Kingdom.    Origen also brings up the second notion about the kingdom—namely that it is the reign of God in the soul of human beings—  (Jesus as Lord of my heart idea).  This to some extent is based on the misreading of the saying of Jesus ‘the kingdom is within you’  which should actually be translated ‘the kingdom is in the midst of ya’ll’ (you plural).    The third rendering suggests that yes, the church is the kingdom of God on earth.  It is the place where people can experience the presence, power, reign, saving activity of God.

The Pope then reviews certain modern and utopian and even secular notions about the kingdom on pp.  51-54.   But as the Pope says (p. 55) the secular and utopian vision of the Kingdom pushes God not merely to the periphery but off the stage entirely.  We are well beyond Sir Thomas More’s Utopia.   The Pope rightly points out that the Hebrew malkuta and the Greek basileia actually have the sense of kingship, rule of a King the sovereignty of a sovereign, the reigning of a ruler.  In other words, if you have a kingdom you have a king, and if its God’s kingdom, God’s rule on earth he has to be present and involved in it.   The announcement of Jesus then is about God’s final self-revelation and his salvation breaking into human history.  Interestingly here the Pope says that Daniel with its vision of the Son of Man, is a book composed in the second century B.C.

On pp. 57-58 the Pope denies that Jesus is an imminentist— someone who believes the end of the world is just around the corner.  He says that Jesus is proclaiming the beginning of the final act of God, not its end.  He says that too many sayings of Jesus don’t suit the apocalyptic Jesus view— one must ignore parables about the seed growing secretly or gradually, or the sower and seed where the harvest is clearly in the future, and so on.   The Pope in effect says Jesus’ Kingdom message was complex, involving both the already and the not yet.  He takes on the exegesis of Lk. 17.20-21  ( the kingdom is in your midst).    As it turns out, Jesus means not merely the Kingdom is present in Him, but the Kingdom shows up when he acts— if it is by the Spirit of God that I caste out demons then the divine ruling has come upon you.   Through Jesus’ presence and action, God is actively present in our midst working his will on earth as in heaven.   When the Kingdom or rule of God is something one receives as a gift, then it is grace, not achieved, not an accomplishment, and not based on one’s deeds— good or bad.  Hence the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee, and why the former went away justified, not in his own eyes, but in God’s eyes.

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

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

Bart Ehrman’s new book,  Forged   (Harper, 2011, 307 pages) has hit the bookstalls  and has been hovering in the 300s in the list of top sellers,  eclipsed by another Harper book that came out at about the same juncture—- Rob Bell’s  Love Wins which has been reviewed in detail already, chapter by chapter on this blog.   Ehrman’s new book will receive the same sort of chapter by chapter analysis.

This book should not be confused with some of Bart’s previous efforts, in particular Misquoting Jesus, as Bart is not arguing in this book merely that are errors or mistakes in the Bible.   No, in this book he takes the next step in arguing that there is deliberate fraud going on in the canon, deceitful practices undertaken to convince or bamboozle some audience into believing something, on the basis of the authority of some apostle or original disciple, who in fact did not write the book in question.      In other words,  Bart is taking on not merely the conservative view that the NT is written by those authors to whom it is attributed but also the widespread notion that pseudonymity was a regular and widely recognized literary practice in antiquity, and that no one was deceived, nor was there an intent to deceive by such a practice.   This book is likely to addle scholars and lay people all across the spectrum of belief, including quite liberal ones who have for a long time argued that pseudonymity was an accepted practice in antiquity.   To judge from the early reviews on Amazon, those who are looking for an excuse to call the early Christians liars and deceivers are delighted with this book.

I need to say from the outset and on first glance that there appears to be a rather large lacunae in the argument of this book, namely the failure to do this study after having studied in depth ancient scribal practices and the roles of scribes in producing ancient documents in ancient Israel.  For example,  I see no interaction whatsoever in this book with the landmark study of  Karel Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, in which it is demonstrated at length that scribes played a huge role in collecting, editing, and producing ancient documents, and that it was indeed a regular practice to name a scroll after either the originator of the tradition, or the first or a major contributor to the tradition, not after the scribe who actually produced the document, often decades or centuries after the tradition had first been formed.

This was neither a deceitful practice nor a blatant attempt at forgery, but rather a normal practice in a culture with a deep reverence for ancient traditions  which in a largely illiterate society relied on scribes to be the conservators, copiers, preservers and presenters of the tradition, in written form.   Inasmuch as the writers of the NT appear to have  been almost entirely Jews or God-fearers deeply steeped not only in the OT but in Jewish ways of handling sacred traditions and sacred texts,  it is rather surprising that this book does not spend more time actually examining such things.  Perhaps in the scholarly monograph that is to follow this popular level book, this rather colossal  oversight will be remedied.

I need to also say, that I am all for the search for truth about such things, and as Bart says in this Introduction, Evangelicals are rightly credited with being some of the most persistent truth hounds in the world.   And I will add this.  Bart is also right that there was plenty of forgery or production of pseudonymous documents, depending how you look at the matter going on in the Gnostic movement and other offshoots of Christianity.  Bart is absolutely right about this, and right to stress  it.  And I agree that in various cases, there does indeed appear to be the intent to deceive the audience.    You probably thought it unlikely that I would begin this review by agreeing with Bart on something other than the merits of Carolina basketball.  You would be wrong.

Lastly,  I want to say that having begun to read Bart’s latest salvo,  I spent some time with my friend Richard Bauckham asking him what was the evidence, especially the internal evidence, from early Jewish and early Christian literature that pseudonymity was a received and accepted literary practice.  We will say more about this as we go along,  but Bauckham is quite clear there was such a literary practice that was not intended to be deceitful or an attempt at forgery in any sense.   For example, he pointed me to a book like the Wisdom of Solomon which makes clear internally that it was not by Solomon at all, but stood in the tradition of his wisdom.   I would add that there is as well evidence of this in Jewish apocalyptic materials.   More about this later,  but in the meantime, if one wants to read  something I have said at length about such matters,  one should read the Introduction to my Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, Volume One. While there may not be a great wealth of things I agree with Bart Ehrman about, I do agree that it is helpful to question the acceptability of pseudepigraphical letters.   On to the argument itself.

In some ways, the premise of Rob’s question, raised in Chapter Four, is not entirely logically coherent.   If the answer to this question  (Does God always get what he wants?)  was yes, would we even have sin and evil in the world?   Would Adam and Eve have fallen in the first place?    Would there even be a need for salvation or Hell?

If God is truly like the way Augustine depicted him, not merely almighty and all good, but always ‘Charles in charge’, determining every little thing that happens in all of time and history in the whole universe,  then it is very difficult to explain, without absolute cosmic dualism (as in Manicheanism which Augustine escaped from) how in the world Evil got a foot in the door of the universe in the first place.

And if God didn’t always get what he wanted in the beginning, why in the world would be believe he will get all he wants in the end?    Because ‘Love Wins’?    Really?    But if love is an expression of some sort of freedom of choice, whether by God or by humans,  are we really supposed to believe that God’s love stops being freely given and freely received and becomes at some future juncture more like the Godfather than like God—‘making us an offer we can’t refuse?’     This is not a coherent line of thought no matter how much we believe God loves us all.  I do wish one of Rob’s friends or editors had pointed some of this out before he wrote the final draft of this book.    As it is, the book thus far makes Rob sound more like a hopeless romantic rather than a dangerous heretic.

Chapter  4 begins with listing things Rob has found on church websites of the ‘turn or burn’ variety.   Yes, there are such churches, and yes they do have such things on their website.  I’ve even seen a church in the mountains of North Carolina which has on the church sign— ‘an independent, premillennial, King James preaching, total immersion Baptist Church’.  The only thing missing on the sign was snake-handling, but that might have scared away all the customers.    What Rob is probing when pointing out references to Hell on websites right next to ‘God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life’  stuff,  is the apparent or perceived contradiction between these two messages.  I say apparent or perceived, because in fact these two messages are not incompatible if in fact you hold the very view of God and love and freedom Rob has.   Some people don’t ever want anything to do with God.  Not now, and not ever.

As in previous chapters,  Rob cites a pile of texts, soundbyting them rather than doing contextual exegesis of them,  for the purpose of suggesting that God never ever gives up on anyone.   The problem with this is that many of these OT texts are about God’ s covenant faithfulness to his own chosen people, not to the world in general.   And in regard to the notion that we are ‘all children of God’   the Gospel of John in fact says—- No we are not!   We are all creatures of God, created in God’s image, but we are not all inherently ‘children of God’.  John 1-3 is pretty clear you don’t become a child of God through the decision of your parents, or through mere physical birth, or through the will of a spouse,  you become a child of God by being ‘born again’.  My goodness, even Nicodemus is told he must be born again in order to enter God’s kingdom.

Does God love everyone, the whole world?  Yes he does, as John 3.16 says.  Does that, or being created in God’s image automatically make anyone a child of God—-  no.   There are issues of being part of the people of God.  And here perhaps more than anywhere else is one of the fundamental problems with Rob’s argument—- bad ecclesiology.   As Paul puts it in 1 Cor. 12—- when it comes to being a real child of God “we were all baptized by one Spirit into the one body of Christ (whether Jew or Gentile), and all given the one Spirit from which we all drink.    God has a people, and the lost need to become found and a part of that people.    This is one of the major messages of both the OT and the NT and it involves  covenanting,  it involves a people set apart,  it involves conscious involvement in the people of God, if you don’t die in infancy.

One of the real problems with this chapter (see e.g. p.  102)  is the tendency to talk in binary opposites.   Is God like the woman who seeks the coin, or is God one who will allow you to spend an eternity in Hell?     Is history tragic, or does love win?    In fact, the Bible is complex, and it gives complex answers to these sorts of questions— questions we have debated for two millennia and can’t be resolved with a simply setting up of a ‘you can give me this or you can give me that’  (cue the Kia commercial)  because both can’t be true.   In fact both can be true.   It can be true that a good deal of history is tragic and also true that God’s love wins in millions and millions of cases.

And now we come to the escape clause part of the argument.  Since it is obvious that God’s love doesn’t win over everyone in this lifetime— can we go into overtime, and indeed continue to play overtimes until God finally wins, outlasting our ‘March Madness’?   Does God final melt even the hardest of hearts— somewhere out there?

The texts, like Col. 1 or Phil. 2 which are thought to suggest such an outcome  (and of course no one is suggesting such an outcome is impossible for an omnipotent God if he is prepared to run roughshod over the wills of billions of humans), are not quite on all fours with such an assumption about ‘love winning’.   Some of these texts are about how when Jesus comes back, everyone, whether willingly or unwillingly will have to recognize who is Lord, even if they don’t like it.   Notice for example in Phil. 2 Paul seems to refer to demonic or angelic beings who will have to recognize the truth about Jesus,  but we are not being told they will trust and be transformed by this truth.  Indeed, Col. 1 says Jesus triumphs over the powers and principalities on the cross, and 1 Pet. 3 is about Christ proclaiming victory over the ‘spirits in prison’  who are the fallen angels  (see Gen. 3).    And then there are the texts about God reconciling ‘all things’  (not all persons,  all things)  by which is meant God’s kingdom will include all of creation, all will one day be under his rule.   These texts do not proclaim the salvation of every last individual—- and they never did.

Once again,  Rob appeals to some church fathers in support of some kind of universalism.  Again the problem is that he is citing theological speculation of this or that church father,  not the settled convictions of the church as revealed in their creeds, councils,  confessions.  There is a difference.   The creeds, councils, and confessions are the result of the body of Christ reasoning together and coming to some consensus on what orthodoxy looks like.  They are not isolated shots fired in the dark by one or another church father.   I hope no one holds me to every  speculative thought I have put into writing at some point.

The point is— neither in the Catholic nor the various Orthodox, nor the various Evangelical traditions has there ever been a statement of faith by any such church suggesting what seems to be suggested in this chapter in this book.     Rob wants to suggest that the stream of orthodoxy is broad and includes those who at some point advocated universalism.    This can only be said to be true if you  ignore the importance of churches collectively,  and sticks with speculating individuals.   It can only be said to be true if you ignore the nature of the NT canon.   Where did it come from?   Did it drop from the sky?   No.  It was assembled by various Christian groups, and then there was agreement of  whole churches in the east, and in the west, and in north Africa in about 367 A.D.  that ‘these 27 books and no others’  are our NT Scriptures.  This was not decided by Constantine, it was agreed upon and recognized by church synods and councils.

Why am I pointing this out?   You wouldn’t even have the NT to argue about were there no churches and church decisions,  and you had best not ignore what the church writ large has said about the interpretation of this Bible along the way, not just cherry pick this or that church father’s  momentary entertainment of some idea.   In short your theology and soteriology are interconnected with ecclesiology, and you cannot and should not try to decide theological or ethical issues just on the basis of your very selective reading of the Bible or church fathers.    Even the Protestant Reformers would not be happy with that sort of approach to theology and ethics.

Towards the end of this chapter (pp. 112ff.)   Rob points out that the book of Revelation doesn’t end with blood and violence.  It ends with the picture in Rev. 21-22.  True enough, but that new creation only emerges after the last judgment and the casting of demons, the Devil, the wicked into the lake of fire. You don’t get to Rev. 22 by bypassing Rev. 19-21.  You have to go through that part of the story.

The end of the chapter stresses that if we want heaven or hell, we can have it.  God will allow us to have our freedom of choice, and some do and may well continue to choose evil rather than good, unto all eternity.  It is statements like this that allow Rob to insist he isn’t a universalist.

But Rob wants to leave the door open a crack, and so he draws attention to the fact that in the new Jerusalem the gates are always open.   Now that imagery implies to Rob that there is still hope for the outsiders who have chosen darkness rather than light.   The problem with that is not only texts like  Rev. 21.8 and 22.14-15.   The problem is that Rob ignores the verse that speaks of angels at the Twelve gates of the city— God’s bouncers, who will never allow the wicked in  (check out the angel guarding the Garden of Eden post Fall).  Indeed, the fate of the lost is  said in Rev. 21.8 to be the second death in the lake of fire.   We are not told the angels at the gates have fire extinguishers and will hose down the outsiders, so they can become holy and enter the city.    Because, as John says—- you have to be holy, have to be set apart by and for God, to enter the city.     In other words, the image of the open gates is a reassurance to John’s persecuted, prosecuted, and executed churches that there will be no more danger to them when they arrive at the crystal city.   There will be no more night, no more deeds of darkness— they will be safe and secure in God’s arm forever.   Revelation is the book of the martyrs and the imagery here is meant to reassure the martyrs they will not have to deal with their tormentors any more—- ever.  It is not meant to encourage speculation about reversals in the afterlife.

(Hieronymous Bosch painting)

The subject of Hell has suddenly become front burner flame-on hot since little bits of news have been leaking out about Rob Bell’s new book  Love Wins. Patheos is just beginning what will be an extended conversation on the book and the issues it raises, in what it hopes will be a charitable and constructive conversation.  See here.

I have not read the book yet, but I do know the testimony of the President of Fuller Seminary, Richard Mouw, who says the book is all about Jesus and within the bounds of what could be called generous orthodoxy as opposed to stingy orthodoxy.    I will write a full review when Harper sends me my copy of it,  but in the meantime,  let’s address the basic questions—

Does the NT teach that 1) there is a Hell, and 2) some folks are going there (not necessarily in a handbasket), and 3)  they will experience eternal torment once there?

I have put the matter in three parts, because you could answer questions 1) and 2) with an emphatic yes,  and in fact say no to 3).  Indeed, there is a time-honored tradition of interpreting the NT to say that what happens to the damned is that they are consumed in Hell or Gehenna or the Lake of Fire — pick your favorite moniker — but then, since they are consumed, there is no eternal torment.  Their suffering does not go on and on forever.  And one of the possible implications of interpreting the NT this way is that when we finally get around to the last rodeo, which is to say to the new heaven and new earth, only believers in Christ are left standing on the premises.   Now this is certainly not universalism in the typical modern sense of the term; it’s not an “all dogs go to heaven” kind of universalism, or a Unitarian kind of universalism.   This is, instead, the view that except for those who willfully and knowingly refuse to have any part in Christ and his kingdom,  ‘Love Wins’.

I had a student come up to me this week who thought he had resolved the above conundrum and said we need not choose between anihilationism and eternal torment because for the person in question, the torment is forever, if by forever we mean always until he or she ceases to exist. This is an interesting spin on the old question, and worth considering especially when you actually do your homework on the Hebrew word ‘olam’  or the Greek equivalent ‘aeon’.

‘Olam’ has been loosely translated ‘forever’  but the problem with this translation, according to my esteemed colleague Bill Arnold in his 1 Samuel commentary, is twofold: 1)  in the phrase berit olam (loosely forever covenant or eternal covenant) it becomes clear that olam actually means a covenant of a definitely long but unspecified duration.  In other words, it doesn’t exactly seem to be a synonym for our word ‘eternal’  which means infinitely going on into the future.   2)  notice that we have the phrase ‘olam wu olam’  in the OT, loosely translated ‘forever and ever’.  Now the phrase ‘wu olam’ is totally unnecessary if in fact ‘olam’ by itself means ‘forever’.  In that case, the additional phrase is redundant.   And in fact we have the same issue with the word ‘aeon’ in Greek which could be rendered ‘forever’  but it could refer to a specific period of time— an age or aeon.   And sure enough we have this same redundancy with a similar Greek phrase.  For example in Heb. 13.21 (in some mss.) we have the phrase ‘unto the aeon of aeons’.  Why exactly would we need the ‘of aeons’ phrase at all, if ‘aeon’ itself means forever in the modern sense?    Inquiring minds want to know.

But what exactly does the Bible say about Hell?

Let’s start with some basic facts.  Fact One— the Old Testament says little or nothing about Hell.   What it does talk about is Sheol, the land of the dead, which in Greco-Roman thinking has been called Hades.   For example, in 1 Sam 28 we hear about Samuel’s shade or spirit being called up from Sheol to be consulted by the medium of Endor.   Samuel is none too pleased about the summons, but he is not depicted as having been in either heaven or hell.  He is simply in the land of the dead.  This concept of Sheol continued on well into the New Testament era, and may well represent what Paul believes about where people have gone who have died, but who are not in Christ.  For Christians, of course, Paul says “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord”  (2 Cor. 5), but what about everyone else?

In 1 Cor. 15,  Paul says quite literally that  Jesus is raised on Easter “from out of the dead ones”, not merely raised from death, though that is true, but raised from out of the realm of dead persons.  This suggests that the dead are still out there, and have not yet been consigned to Hell.

Indeed, traditionally the Christian idea was that no one is consigned to Hell until after the Final Judgment — which, in case you’re wondering, has not yet taken place!  Paul is perfectly clear that the Final Judgment comes after Jesus returns, and there is the bema seat judgment of Christ (again 2 Cor. 5) before which we all must appear to give an account of the deeds we have done in the body.  (Yes, even Christians are accountable for such things).  Thereafter, it would appear, we are assigned to our eternal destinations.

Or consider  Revelation 20.  Though this is a highly metaphorical and apocalyptic text, it nonetheless suggests the following sequence: 1) the return of Christ; 2) the temporary confinement of Satan; 3) the resurrection of those who are in Christ who will rule with Christ during the millennium; 4) the resurrection from the dead of those not in Christ at the end of the millennium; 5) Satan released, and a final hubbub which leads to Jesus’ judgment on Satan and the nations who are sent packing off to the Lake of Fire, once and for all.  So 6) the new heaven and new earth does not emerge until after Final Judgment has been done on the earth.  And when John says “and there was no more sea” this is metaphorical but refers to there was no more chaos waters, no more Evil in the universe.  This may suggest that Hell is not forever and ever Amen.  But there is other evidence, which can be read in different ways.

Let’s be clear that the answer to the first question — Is there a Hell to be found in the New Testament — is certainly yes.  And Jesus is perhaps the one most clear about this.  He calls it Gehenna, and he says it’s rather like the stinky garbage dump in the Hinnom Valley south of the City of David, and like a garbage dump its where the worm does not die and the fire never goes out.  And there are people expected by Jesus to go there, as the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus shows in Lk 16.  Granted, this is a parable,  an extended metaphor, but it is surely referential, and it indicates the rich man is in an unpleasant place  and there is no remedy.  There is an unalterable divide between the bosom of Abraham and the place where the rich man currently resides in the after life.  The parable teaches that how we live in this life has consequences for where we end up in the afterlife, and this must be taken seriously.

A good presentation on the implications of this is C.S. Lewis’ famous work — The Great Divorce.

So far we have seen that the rather clear answer to the question is there a Hell and are some people going there is—  yes, and yes.     But consider for a moment the further implication of that parable in Luke 16.   It suggests that Abraham,  and poor Lazarus did not go to Hell,  and yet neither one of them believed in Jesus as Lord and Savior.

Indeed belief in Jesus as the risen Lord doesn’t even arise amongst Jesus’ followers until Easter and thereafter.  Do we really want to say that nobody went to heaven before Jesus died and rose again?  That would be pretty bold theology, and it is a theology contradicted by OT stories (Enoch and Elijah taken up into the presence of God), and Jesus’ afterlife  parable in Lk. 16.  And then of course there is the issue of whether people are consigned to Hell because they have never heard of the existence of Jesus.  The answer to this latter question is no.

The basis for judgment on anyone is the sins they actually have commited, not something they never knew.  Indeed,  Luke and Acts indicate that God has mercy and forgiveness on even Jesus’ executioners  “because they know not what they do”.  Are we really going to argue that when Jesus asked God to forgive his executioners,  God turned him down?  I don’t think so.  It would seem then that there is a place for considering the possibility that there is a wideness in God’s mercy, greater than some might think.  Rom 1.18-32, which is not about final judgment but a present temporal judgment suggests that God’s existence and power is evident to all in creation, and so no one is every condemned for not knowing God at all.  They are condemned for rejecting the light they have received,  refusing to recognize the evidence of God and his power which is everywhere.  So the answer to the ‘what about the lost person in some obscure place where the internet and Gospel has not penetrated’ is that each will be judged on the basis of what they have done with the light/revelation which they have received from God.

If you do study the life and teaching of Gandhi who  certainly did know about Jesus and his teachings you will discover that Gandhi didn’t really have much of a problem with the teaching of Jesus — he had a problem with the church.  There are a lot of people out there like that these days.  More importantly, I don’t think anyone is in the position to say that Gandhi is burning in Hell and we know this with absolute certainty (an issue raised by Rob Bell’s advance video for the book).  That is to presume to know the final destiny of someone  and where their heart was when they died, and frankly no one has such knowledge except God!  We can talk about the criteria the NT establishes for salvation in Christ, but we can’t talk about whether this or that individual definitely embraced these truths before he or she died since we are not omniscient. It is God who looks upon the heart.  These facts should cause all censorious Christians to take a chill pill when it comes to definitively consigning someone, especially some living person, to outer darkness, especially since  ‘where there is life, there is hope’.

What about texts which suggest that Hell is  a place of eternal torment?  Yes, there are such texts, and they can be interpreted that way.  Perhaps the most famous of these texts is 2 Thess 1.5-10  which should be quoted in full:

“All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering. ⁶ God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you ⁷ and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. ⁸ He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. ⁹ They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might ¹⁰ on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you.”   Note—- there is that word aeon, in this case aeonion in vs. 9, and in the NIV  translated ‘eternal’, as above.

Notice several things about this text: 1)  the point at which people are punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the Lord’s presence is  “on the day when he comes”. Not before the return of Christ,  but on the day when he returns.  This certainly suggests that while lots of people are in the land of the dead just now,   none of them are yet in Hell.  That comes after the final judgment of  Jesus.  2) what are we to make of the phrase “eternal destruction”.    This has usually been interpreted to mean eternal torment.   But note the word destruction.  The phrase seems almost an oxymoron — how can anything be eternally destroyed?  If it is destroyed, isn’t it done with, over, gone?  I agree that this phrase might be interpreted to refer to eternal torment, but this is not perfectly clear.  Eternal torment may be the implication of Jesus’ parable of the weeds which ends by saying “They will be thrown into a blazing furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt. 13.43) but Jesus does not say for how long. The fact that the fire doesn’t go out in Gehenna does not tell us how long a particular person in Gehenna suffers from it.   2 Pet. 3.7, similarly talks about the judgment and destruction of the ungodly  but it also  shortly after this talks about the destruction of the old heavens and old earth, and the author seems to imply that once something is destroyed it is gone.  In this case it is replaced by a new heaven and a new earth.

What are the implications of all this?   I don’t think we can debate that the NT says there is a place we today call Hell, and that some people will end up there, because of their own choices and wickedness.  Whether they  will experience eternal torment is more debatable.   My advice however is that we abstain from pronouncing a final judgment on any human soul; that is Jesus’ job at the final judgment.  We simply don’t know the outcome of many who are not followers of Christ now.

And here is a final reason for caution — Romans 11 clearly says that when the Redeemer comes forth from Zion he will turn away the impiety of Jacob — that is,  says Paul, when Jesus comes back and the dead are raised,  “all Israel will be saved”, which at least means a lot of Jews being saved who currently do not believe in Jesus.  Perhaps what Paul means about the second coming in  Phil. 2.5-11 is that there will come a day when all will recognize Jesus as the Christ and as Lord, at the eschaton,  even though many of them don’t do that now.  But there is a difference between recognizing and embracing the truth about Jesus.  The demons recognize the truth about Jesus, but it does not transform them.

What I am more sure of than ever, is that there is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ, and that in the end ‘every knee will bow and ever knee confess’  even those humans or demons who want to have nothing to do with Jesus thereafter.  Salvation in the end is not just a matter of being forced to recognize the truth — it’s about positively embracing and trusting that truth.  And there are apparently some who will never ever do that.  To them God says  “if you insist,  have it your way”.  Hell is the place you experience the absence of the presence of God for as long as you continue to exist.  Whether there is a time when Hell will cease to exist, like the crystal sea of Revelation, equally orthodox persons can debate.  Annihilation or destruction of Satan, Hell and its inhabitants is a possible interpretation of the eschatological endgame, but it is also possible Hell will go on ‘olam wu olam wu olam‘.  If the former is true, then the last persons standing are all followers of Christ according to Revelation.  Revelation 21.8 seems pretty clear — “But as for the cowardly, the faithless…[etc.], their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death”.  Even more telling is the statement in Rev 22.15 which states that after the new heaven has landed on the new earth and the new Jerusalem  has been set up,  “outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”   It would appear from these last two text,  that Hell still has a future, even after the new heaven and new earth show up at a theater near you.  What this suggests is that love, even divine love, does not always win with everyone, not even in the end, and it breaks the heart of God as it should break ours.

In Dante’s Divine Comedy Part One  (Inferno), and in Jonathan Edward’s rightly famous sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ we find vivid depictions of Hell.   Whether or not these lurid pictures amount to ‘over-egging the pudding’ as the British would say,  it has never been the case that we should consign some idea to the dustbin of history simply because we find it troubling or even offensive.   Indeed, it may well be the hard edges of the Gospel which we most need to hear in an age in which the unholy Trinity holds sway over our culture — the wrong sort of pluralism, the wrong sort of universalism, and relativism.

Hell in the New Testament is a constant reminder that there is a final accountability for our beliefs and behaviors in this life, whatever the particulars and temperature and durability of Hell may be.  It is a reminder that this life is basically the time of decision, and the decisions we make now can indeed have eternal consequences in the afterlife.  And, frankly,  this is not bad news.  It is a part of the Good News that in the end justice as well as mercy, righteousness as well as compassion, and holiness as well as love wins.  Thanks be to God.