New Testament full of “forgeries”? Some things are so silly you need a PhD to believe them
The enfant terrible of the Biblical scholarship world, former Evangelical-turned-skeptic Bart Ehrman, is at it again. Now he is hawking a book which claims that much, if not most, of the New Testament is made up of “forgeries”:
The Bible might be the best-selling book in history, but it may also be full of lies. At least, that’s the claim being made by biblical scholar and former evangelical Christian, Bart Ehrman, in a new book titled, “Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.”According to Ehrman, at least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries, while only seven of the 13 epistles attributed to Paul were probably written by him. Moreover, none of the writings attributed to the Apostle Peter could have been written by him, and even the authenticity of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John can be questioned.
This is the type of claim that gets the media all in a lather, but any serious look into the claim shows it is more full of holes than Swiss cheese or the Chicago Cubs defense. Let’s take a closer look at some of Ehrman’s claims:
“The Bible not only contains untruths of accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies,” writes Ehrman, who is also currently a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Okay, we already have one problem here: Ehrman says, “what almost anyone today would call lies”. But we should not judge ancient writings by today’s standards, but by the standards of the times. So if it was common for a writing to be done in someone else’s name, and everyone knew this, then that practice would not necessarily be a “lie”. This is a minor point to the overall issue, but it is an important one – we judge things based on their own context, not based on later cultural norms and practices.
Ehrman builds his case by noting scores of inconsistencies in the writing styles among authors of the New Testament. Discrepancies in the language and content among books attributed to Paul are particularly glaring. For example, Ehrman’s analysis shows that the text in the book of Ephesians, which has been attributed to Paul, is filled with long Greek sentences, which is unlike the style found in many of Paul’s confirmed writings. The content of Ephesians also doesn’t seem to jive with what is known about Paul’s own thought, says Ehrman, and sounds more like something written to conform to the Ephesians.
This is one of my pet peeves – scholars today judging whether or not Paul really wrote something based on whether the scholar thinks it jives with their conception of Paul. There are two points to Ehrman’s critique here: writing style and theological consistency. Let’s consider each one in turn:
Writing Style: Although the letters attributed to Paul make up the bulk of the New Testament, we need to remember just how little of Paul’s writings we have. All we have are a maximum of 13 short letters he wrote over a period spanning a dozen years (assuming for the moment that Paul actually wrote all the letters attributed to him). From this, we are supposed to know all the details of his writing style? Furthermore, is Paul’s writing style stagnant, or can it not evolve over time? Consider two of my own writings – a paper I wrote on Catholic Scripture Interpretation back in the mid-90′s and my book Who is Jesus Christ? I’m willing to be that some future scholar 2,000 years from now would not be able to conclusively prove that the same person wrote them.
Theological Consistency: Ehrman’s claim that the content of Ephesians “doesn’t seem to jive with what is known about Paul’s own thought” is rich. How do we know what is “Paul’s own thought”? If some of these letters could be forgeries, how do we know for sure which ones are legit and which are not? Perhaps Romans was not written by Paul but Ephesians is? Furthermore, what Ehrman really means is that Ephesians doesn’t jive with his interpretation of Paul’s thought. Considering the diversity of theories about what Paul “really meant,” it seems to me that there is more consistency between Romans and Ephesians than between the scholars who follow him. Finally, we have so little of Paul’s writings that one cannot construct his complete theology from just his letters. He was writing each letter for specific purposes, and so each one contains only parts of his overall theology. Scholars for too long have assumed they knew all of Paul’s thoughts from a very small group of letters.
Moving on, Ehrman makes a claim next that only an idiot or a PhD* could make:
Meanwhile, Ehrman claims that the authenticity of any book attributed to Peter should be doubted since Peter was, like just about every other fisherman raised in rural Palestine at the time, most certainly illiterate.
I really don’t know how he can say this with a straight face, and how a reporter can report it at face value. There are two really obvious flaws in this specious argument. First, Peter did not remain a fisherman raised in rural Palestine. As the most reliable history tells us, he became the prime spokesman for the fledgling Christian Faith and ended up traveling throughout the Empire, eventually settling in the hub of culture and learning of the time, Rome. Does Ehrman really think that over the course of forty years with such extensive contact with others, that Peter could not have learned how to read and write? Perhaps if he had a PhD that might not have been possible, but it probably would not have been too difficult for most people.
Secondly, even if Peter didn’t bother to learn to read and write, that doesn’t mean that his letters are “forgeries”. Has Ehrman never heard of dictation to a secretary? We know that at least some of Paul’s letters are dictated, so why can’t Peter’s be as well? One does not need to be literate to talk, after all. In fact, many believe that the 1st Letter of St. Peter was originally a homily of Peter’s that was turned into a letter. This of course does not make it a “forgery”.
(Also, we should not assume that a fisherman raised in rural Palestine was necessarily raised illiterate. The Jewish people highly prized literacy, so there is a decent chance that Peter in fact learned to read and write at an early age).
Ehrman’s “proofs” of forgery don’t get any better:
So the question remains: Who did write these books and why did they attempt to conceal their identities? Ehrman points out that early Christian sects, struggling to legitimize themselves, would have had plenty of motivation to fabricate their religious texts.“If your name was Jehoshaphat and no one had any idea who you were, you could not very well sign your own name to the book,” said Ehrman. “No one would take the Gospel of Jehoshaphat seriously. If you wanted someone to read it, you called yourself Peter. Or Thomas. Or James. In other words, you lied about who you really were.”
*Note: Nothing in this post is meant to denigrate PhD’s. Some of my best friends are PhD’s. Some of them even have common sense. But the evidence is clear that only PhD’s are constitutionally able to make such silly claims with a straight face. Must be something that happens to them during the dissertation process.
I am a cradle Catholic, so correct me if I’m wrong. The red flag that jumped out at me is that he is a former evangelical. Don’t evangelicals basically believe that the bible is inerrant because the bible says so? At least with Catholicism and also with Eastern Orthodoxy, there’s a high regard for the early Church fathers, and the historical backdrop of early Christianity.
As to style, it can be dictated by the purpose of a piece. A letter to a close friend will be written differently than a letter to a less familiar community. A letter will have a style different from that of a treatise. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a letter to my choir about the role of the director. Even my own wife, who knows my overall style of writing quite well, thought the email had been written by someone else. Ehrman’s “style argument” is particularly full of holes!
Correcting an earlier commentator
@Paul
Evangelicals believe the Bible is inerrant because the Catholic Church says so in declaring the Canon of Christian Scriptures. I am sure that is what you meant as the idea that the Bible is inerrant is found nowhere in the Bible.
Too often Evangelicals and their brethren mistakenly apply the attributes of Divine inerrancy to their books commonly and mistakenly called Bibles, which is absurd of course. Absurd because, not to speak of various New Testament textual aberrations depending on the sect and publisher, many Protestant “Bibles” do not use the Christian Canon but instead rely upon the heretical-Masorite Canon; two animals of entirely different flavour.
Pax Vobis Omnibus.
With that said,
it is easy and dare I say, it follows, that any scholar no matter how talented with gifts by God if they do steep themselves in what is from God.
Our Abrahamic fathers had to learn the lesson that in order to have life one must eat flesh with true life. In this way, the consuming of blood was forbidden, because earthly blood is cursed and summarily not true blood and earthly flesh is cursed and likewise is not true flesh.
The Canon of Christian Scriptures is of the very same true essaence as the true flesh and true blood. The canon of scriptures used in the tribes of division often called the Protestant denominations is flesh tainted with sin. In short, the books they use are forgeries and I applaud the scholar for coming to that conclusion. Their books carry the seed of evil in it’s flesh. And, although the Almighty God can work good through evil according to His Will, He has already given us Moses and the Prophets.
We should pray that our scholar now encounters the Living God of the Eucharist who is found in every word of the Catholic Canon.
Basically Bart Ehrman is repeating the same nonsense he stated in Misquoting Jesus… and no serious scholar took such nonsense seriously…
Ehrman is either deluded or hungers for fame and fortune, or both.
Ehrman makes so many claims (I could go on for ages quoting his nonsense) but presents no proofs beyond his own anti-biblical opinions.
Ehrman is perhaps quite ignorant of the New Testament.
Yes I know he has degrees with honors… but I question indeed how valid they are. Beside a degree is no absolute infallible guarantee (think about Hendrik Schon, a physicist who forged results to publish in prestigeous journals like Nature and Science… and he was working at MIT!)
If he’s NOT IGNORANT than he’s malicious and intellectually dishonest.
Indeed one of Ehrman’s main influences is W. Bauer… and every serious scholar know Bauer was a quack.
Moreover Ehrman emphasizes textual criticism to absurdity and makes conclusions from shaky premises.
What he reports on ‘Misquoting Jesus’ for example is often true (like about the copyist errors) but his conclusions (that the NT is unreliable) does not really follow from that. Since we have over 10.000 copies of various documents of the NT, scholars clearly know and have shown that most ‘errors’ or ‘differences’ would not even matter (like spelling a word in two different ways, or using ‘you’ or ‘thee’ ie two different ways to say the same word depending on dialect or time period.)
Even if we would throw away the really ‘doubtful parts’ of the NT, it would not change much Christian theology…
—————–
Yes Ehrman was evangelical, and they believe the Bible is 1000% inerrant in all things.
Catholics and Orthodox recognize that the bible might contain errors or imprecisions, but is infallible only in matters of theology and morals, not strictly exact in matters of history.
So yes Ehrman believed that the Bible is like a newspapaer’s article that tells everything exactly and precisely.
However this is stupid. People write in a different manner in the past (and every decent biblical scholar should know this). They recorded only details of interest and sometimes they did not bother with the fine details concentrating rather to give the big picture and the correct message.
Indeed in several debates Ehrman was pulverized by his adversaries, and with good reason too.
—
Regarding a PhD: yes many use their PhD as a tool for autority. Ehrman says that people ‘used the name of the Apostles to give their writings authority’, yet Ehrman and many others do the same.
It’s called intellectual dishonesty.
@Eric
Thanks for your post and your quick analysis. Obviously, more could be said but you do a fine job in showing the huge cracks in the foundations. One suggestion: Let’s not concede that there are only 13 Epistles of Saint Paul. You mentioned in your article that the names of the writers, known to the Church in which they were written and received, were passed down by tradition. Let’s not, therefore, forget that tradition also assigns the authorship of Hebrews to Paul. Moreover, a growing minority of “scholars” is adducing some good reasons/arguments that support this assertion of tradition.
@Jacob
Woah! You are certainly correct in pointing out that the Protestant “canon” is incomplete (their OT “canon”), but your rhetoric is way overwrought and your conclusion is incoherent. To wit: it is not the OT Protestant “canon” that this “scholar” (Ehrman) is attacking, but the very legitimacy of the writings themselves. That is, not which books but that any of the books are legitimate at all. A bit less florid language and a calmer analysis might be in order.
Pax,
Ben
I was taken by this right from the start: “The content of Ephesians also doesn’t seem to jive with what is known about Paul’s own thought, says Ehrman, and sounds more like something written to conform to the Ephesians.”
Hmmm, so it’s obvious that a reasonably well-educated man wouldn’t ever write to his audience? Even assuming that it could be known what the “thought of the Ephesians” was, wouldn’t the fact that the letters of Paul were addressed to different audiences account in itself for some differences in style?
I saw this and I also shot down a couple of his arguments without much thought.
The writing style part- yes and I also always write in the same way all of the time. My research papers are written in the same style as my recent note to my 7 year old nephew for his first communion and the style I use for e-mails to my boss.
I also love the “they were simple/illiterate argument, which has also been used against Moses (who grew up in the Egyptian court and we all know the had no method of writing…sheesh). As you point out, the Jews prized literacy and even “working class” Jewish men were expected to know, learn and live the law.
Of course I expect to see coverage of this book and the “issues” on World News Tonight sometime soon.
Thanks Eric, good article. I once heard Bart Ehrmann on a ‘Fresh Air’ interview. I thought he made a great case against popular evangelical notions of the Bible. But as I told a co-worker (who was also listening), in Catholicism we don’t have this problem. I was NEVER taught by the Church that the ‘authors’ of the Gospels were the same as the titles given them. These well known ‘inconsistencies’ do not shake the faith of those who follow Sacred Tradition.
As a former Evangelical myself, I think it is mistaken to say that Evangelicals believe that the Bible is inerrant because “it says so” or because “the Catholic Church says so.” Both of those sources have obvious problems. In reality, Evangelicals believe the Bible to be inerrant because that is the unanimous consensus of the best and most serious Christians they know. It takes a leap of faith to go from even the best and most serious Christians, who are still fallible and flawed, to God, Who is infallible and perfect, but it is not an unreasonable leap.
We need to bear this in mind when we think of trying to win converts. Do we have a true, deep love for God? Does it make a difference in our lives that others can see? If not, all the arguments in the world will not make us convincing.
Might I point out that some very well-educated and prominent Catholics, including Pope Benedict, consider claims that some of the Pauline corpus are pseudonymous to be very plausible, even if they cannot be demonstrated with mathematical or logical certainty. One need not be a Bart Ehrman with an anti-fundamentalist axe to grind to believe that some of the very substantive doctrinal and linguistic differences within the Pauline corpus, together with the way the concept of authorship functioned in the first century, point to pseudonymity.
I thought that the whole development of Catholic Biblical Studies since Divino Afflante Spiritu by Pius XII in 1943 had made this kind of polemical debate unnecessary. If only Ehrman were Catholic, he would realize that. I wish the author of this column would also immerse himself more fully in the Catholic approach to Scripture, which can easily accomodate such questions without losing the authority of Scripture. Catholics just think differently about how the authority of Scripture functions than (most) Protestants do, and thinking like a Catholic as regards Scripture means a lot more than tacking on the Magisterium and the Pope to an Evangelical apporach to the Bible. It requires that we think of Scripture as a (very important) expression of a larger ecclesial expression of faith.
For a point of clarification of how the Word is proclaimed with the guarantee of the holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life.
One must not introduce an artificial division between the “people” and the “bishops”. They are meant to be one enrolled in complimentarity.
In short the Catholic Church is the whole kit-and-kahboodle. The action of the Church extends to the world, echoing to all ends of the earth (even into the Evangelical camps). The action of the Church is the holy Eucharist. The Eucharist and the Scriptures are one in same person, the Word of God, Jesus Christ.
It is by way of their historical usage in the worship of the Almighty within the confines of the Sacred Action that takes place a Mars Tsaba; that is, the meeting place between Heaven and Earth, that the Canon of Christian Scriptures are proclaimed to be inerrant.
There is a thing called the Infallibility of the Faithful. The Faithful of the Catholic Church, as a body, speak to the world and to Heaven their praise of God. Peter, responsible for shepherding his brethren, acknowledges this as so, and as such is ratified by oecumenical council.
God bless you all.
I do not usual post this much at all but I have a great love for the Eucharist, which I cannot contain. This shall be my last and will again go back to the sidelines.
How does doubt in Scripture arise?
In a nutshell it is from evil. The evil is seperating the Faithful from the Eucharist. When this artificial seperation occurs a consequent rupture is inevitable in the holy books.
Please follow the language here. Doubt in the One will correspond doubt in the Other.
Thank you my friends.
+
@Ishmael — last sentence – “intellectual dishonesty.” That is a great way of depicting “former Evangelical” infidels who apostatized and were, therefore, never really Christian. But, correct me if I am wrong, I think a more apt phrase “pious fraud” has since Gibbons (Fall of Roman Empire guy) made heresy more digestible. Also, the hyperbole of evangelicals being 1000% for believing the bible in all things makes your comments just pejorative and insulting (civil discourse — most blog sites expect that). Anyway, nothing like a little stereotyping to just cover the problem.
No one knows who authored “Hebrews” or many of the Psalms or
the OT accounts of Kings/Chronicles etc. Moreover, lower textual criticism works through the passages that have either a questionable source or scribe’s error and such.
Skeptics are in both camps (Catholic and Protestants). But each writer must be evaluated on his own merits, work, and competency, not a portrayal of the huddle masses yearning to be free [from either interpretation]. As a former cradle RC, I was educated from k-12 and received an outstanding prep for my future. But after Vatican II, the changes made in all areas, sent many a young person searching elsewhere because of the 180 degree changes made (Mass, retreats where priests encouraged marijuana, nuns losing their habits, etc., and a the beginning of a loss of spirituality [so-called]). Skeptics are a dime a dozen but VII opened the flood gates for your side too!!!
As an aside (please indulge me), you parade adults who either come back HOME or profile the Gingrich types for all to see but as few who come in the front door, most have already deserted via their feet (don’t come back at all). If Catholicism is the ONLY way to the Father (Trent, et al), the message did not get through or has some serious flaws in it….just thinking.
Eugenio,
I am aware that many faithful Catholic scholars (including Pope Benedict) do not consider Paul’s authorship definitive for all the epistles attributed to him, and I have no beef with them. In fact, I don’t necessarily think that all the books of the NT are by the traditional author assigned to them. As I make clear in my post, the human authorship debate is somewhat inconsequential when it comes to our faith in the truth of Scripture.
But this is not the main point in my post. Too many scholars – both Catholic and non-Catholic – have taken modern biblical scholarship way beyond the bounds of its usefulness, and Ehrman is a prime example. This is something Pope Benedict has repeatedly criticized about modern biblical criticism – scholars use its tools in all the wrong ways. There is no problem doing textual criticism or redaction criticism to determine the origin and evolution of a text, but one must do it with a humble spirit and faithful to the context of the Scriptures – which is the living Church. Constructing one’s own idea of what Paul really thought and then using that as a blunt instrument to reject everything outside your conception as not truly Pauline is not scholarship or criticism, it is ideology. And ideology is what drives Ehrman and many other Scripture scholars today.
I know Bart a little bit. He’s personable, friendly, affable. He could also take up being a serious scholar of early Christianity again. Unfortunately, what he’s doing, essentially, is repackaging nineteenth- and early twentieth-German biblical scholarship and selling it to folks eager to get off the hook with the traditional Jesus. Really, he’s making a lot of money being a media w***e, when he could be doing real work in his field of textual criticism. (Even there, however, he simply applied the claims of Walter Bauer — that orthodoxy was a later theological concept, with an orthodox Church emerging out of a cacophonous multitude of early Christianities — to text criticism, claiming the textual tradition of the NT reflects the influence of Christological debates.)
Derivative drivel. Enjoy that porridge, Esau, even while we pray for you.
Dear who Eric,
Thank you for your response to my post. I agree whole-heartedly with your response. I think it is a bit more measured and clear than your article, which takes a bit of a blunt ax to irresponsible scholars like Ehrman (Irenaeus is not inaccurate in his assessment of Ehrman) and comes close to caricaturing some serious scholarship. Nevertheless, I think we agree on the important points at issue — thanks for the response.
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