March 15, 2024

Forgery and Counterforgery: What If Ehrman is Right?…(But Why He Is Wrong Instead)

By Clarke Morledge

Finally, in this last of a five part series, reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery, I want to play a bit of “devil’s advocate.” What if Bart Ehrman is correct about forgeries in our New Testament?

If the New Testament actually has a number of forgeries within its pages, as Bart Ehrman claims, what type of impact would that have on the truthfulness of the Christian faith? On the other hand, what if Bart Ehrman is wrong; that is, what if the early church got the New Testament right after all?

Here is what we have considered thus far:

In this concluding post, I can begin by saying that in Forgery and Counterforgery Bart Ehrman is presenting evidence that is worth considering and wrestling with. While most Christians are probably unaware of these claims, Christians who ignore them are doing so at great peril. Ehrman is a highly-skilled, very persuasive scholar, certainly when measured in terms of book sales (as a New York Times best selling author) and the hundreds of thousands, and even millions of YouTube channel views.

It is quite common for Christian apologists to dump on Bart Ehrman, and as suggested by the second half of this blog post’s title, (“But Why He is Wrong Instead“), I am not ultimately persuaded by his thesis either. But in fairness, if you follow the methodology he takes, he does make certain arguments that require a measured, thoughtful response, which I hope to do here.

But first, in playing “devil’s advocate” I  consider what might be the ramifications if Bart Ehrman’s case was proven to be correct. After that, I want to show why I do not find Bart Ehrman’s arguments, based on the method he uses, for forgery in our New Testament to be convincing in the long run. Granted, some particular lines of evidence advanced by Ehrman do give me some pause. Other lines of evidence do not. Nevertheless, the cumulative case Ehrman presents is not strong enough to make me dismiss any of our twenty-seven books from the New Testament. Rather, the cumulative case for supporting a “forgery-free” New Testament is still very strong.

In other words, the early church got the New Testament right.

From a more skeptical perspective, it would appear that if you search hard enough to find forgeries in our New Testament, as Bart Ehrman has done, you are bound to find them, even if the evidence for forgery is actually more ambiguous. I would recommend the reader to peruse a review of Ehrman’s popular level title, covering the same material aimed toward a less academic audience, written by New Testament scholar Michael Licona, with whom I broadly stand in agreement.

Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics argues that up to 70% of the New Testament content is derived from forged documents. How well do the claims of Bart Ehrman stand up to scrutiny?

 

Asking Questions About Possible Forgeries in the New Testament?

Some Christians might find the very prospect of considering the question of possible forgeries within the New Testament to be an attack on Christianity itself.  While I sympathize with the concern, I still argue that this would be a wrong headed response. Allow me to explain.

Consider the fact that even the early church fathers were not completely unanimous about the authenticity status of every book we have in the New Testament. Not everyone was convinced that James was really written by James, or Revelation by a “John” within the apostolic circle. Yet this was all part of the long discussion in the New Testament canonization process. So while James and Revelation were eventually regarded as being authentic by the end of the 4th century, and therefore authoritative, this process of scrutinizing of each individual book of the New Testament demonstrates the kind of rigorous method employed by early church thinkers to weed out spurious texts and keep in the authentic texts.

Even after the canon was settled by the end of the early church era, there were still questions every now and then during the church’s history. Martin Luther, the leading voice of the Protestant Reformation, famously considered James to be an “epistle of straw,” and had serious doubts about its authenticity. But in Luther’s final analysis, he translated James into German in his popular New Testament anyway, showing that even he recognized the historically orthodox position that gave James the benefit of the doubt of being authentic.

It really was not until the late 18th and early 19th centuries when more and more doubts were expressed regarding the authenticity of our New Testament documents. Whether we like it or not, in the era of the post-Enlightenment, we live with an avalanche of skepticism aimed at the Bible. The scholarship of Bart Ehrman stands within that more recent academic tradition of raising such questions. Nevertheless, two hundred years after the accelerated and heightened frequency of these questions, the New Testament still stands. But it is important to consider the alternative anyway: What if Bart Ehrman is correct?

Why The New Testament Should Not Be Thought of in the Same Way as the Book of Mormon

Before diving more deeply into this final topic, it is worth considering the vast difference between the integrity of the New Testament as a whole and something like the Book of Mormon. Even a scholar such as Bart Ehrman is willing to admit (and even defend!) the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, along with the historicity of an Apostle Paul and Apostle Peter. Jerusalem, Galilee and Rome are real places, where certain events described in the New Testament actually happened. Ehrman can reconstruct a type of history of the New Testament Christianity, even with the presence of forgery within the New Testament, as he sees it.

On the other hand, the Book of Mormon enjoys virtually none of this high level of historical confidence. No archaeological evidence has been found to substantiate Joseph Smith’s claim, from the translated golden plates he reportedly found, that the ten lost tribes of Israel made their way by boat to the Americas, sometime around the 7th-6th centuries B.C.E., to establish what we know of as the Native American peoples. No evidence external to the Book of Mormon has been found connecting the Lamanites, the Jaredites, the Mulekites, nor the Nephites to any Native American tribal group. No scholarship exists to support the actual bodily appearance of Jesus Christ to the Native American peoples and calling them to repentance, prior to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, as the Book of Mormon asserts. No extermination of the Nephites by the Lamanites can be linked to any source outside of the Book of Mormon. To put it succinctly, the historical reliability of the Book of Mormon pales infinitely worse as compared to what we have in the Christian New Testament. Not even close.1

Exploring the possibility of inauthenticity, or outright forgery, with elements in the sacred written tradition of Mormonism has far greater consequences than it does for the possibility of forgery within the New Testament. It is important to emphasize this from the start. As information about the dubious origins of the Book of Mormon have become readily available on the Internet, a growing movement of “Ex-Mormons” have rejected the claims of the Book of Mormon, only to then move onto rejecting the New Testament as well. Such an “all-or-nothing” approach to sacred texts is completely wrong-headed.

The integrity of the New Testament far exceeds competing claims from other sacred texts. We do need to emphasize that even for Bart Ehrman, the question of possible forgeries in our New Testament need not imply some type of vast conspiracy by early church leaders to intentionally corrupt the New Testament. In other words, there was not the 4th century equivalent of cigar smoking men in some back corner of a room secretly plotting a way to smuggle in forgeries into the New Testament. Rather, Ehrman would probably say that the early church lacked the scientifically historical rigor to be able to sufficiently and accurately tell the difference between an authentic New Testament writing versus a forgery.

Playing Devil’s Advocate: What Do We Lose If the Pastoral Letters Turn Out to Be Forgeries?

For the sake of the argument: If Bart Ehrman is correct, in that some of the books in our New Testament have been forged, what consequences would there be for the Christian faith?

Consider the case of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. What if all three of these letters were forged as Ehrman claims? What if 1 Timothy, or perhaps even the other two pastoral letters, 2 Timothy or Titus, were written by someone falsely claiming to know Paul and be Paul? Of all of Paul’s letters, these three letters are the most disputed letters among the Pauline correspondence.

Here is what we would lose: We would lose the most controversial passages in the New Testament, 1 Timothy 2:8-15 and into 1 Timothy 3:1-7, which has historically been argued to prohibit women from serving as elders in a local church. Essentially, complementarian theology regarding the role of women in local church leadership would be severely hampered. The church would become effectively egalitarian with respect to the roles of men and women in the Christian community and worship.

This would also severely weaken the case for having a structured church leadership, with respect to having elders and deacons. The rest of the New Testament has only a few references to elders and deacons, though 1 Timothy and Titus are the only books in our New Testament which spell out the criteria for becoming elders/deacons. So, it could be argued that any and all clergy/laity distinction would be effectively eliminated.

However, aside from these particular doctrinal distinctives, nothing substantial or essential to Christian faith and doctrine would be lost if the pastoral letters were conclusively rejected as being forgeries. The other, widely-regarded as authentic Pauline correspondence, ranging from Romans to Galatians, seven letters in all, emphasizes the importance of the Resurrection of Jesus, the reality of the Crucifixion, the importance of salvation by grace through faith, the expectation of Jesus’ ultimate return to judge humanity and usher in eternal life for those who have faith in Christ, and the authority of the rest of Scripture. Scholars will continue to debate on the specifics, but by and large, the integrity of most fundamental truth claims associated with Christianity would remain on a solid footing.

The most important of these features of Christian teaching is Paul’s belief in the Resurrection of Jesus, which is the absolute grounding point for the Christian faith. For if the Resurrection of Jesus did not happen, Christianity would not be true. Nevertheless, what we have in the undisputed letters of Paul stands as our earliest written witness to the truthfulness of the Resurrection of Jesus as an actual act in history. For if the Resurrection is true, then Christianity is true. Period!

What If Other Letters in Our New Testament Turned Out to Be Forgeries As Well?

Similar arguments can be made even if Ehrman is correct about 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, as well as other letters being forged. While all of these letters do flesh out more of the doctrinal content and context found in Paul’s otherwise authentic letters, and many aspects of the Gospels, no single core doctrine is irretrievably lost if these New Testament documents were deemed as forgeries. More minor doctrinal concerns might suffer some loss, but the “big ticket” items, such as the belief in Christ’s death and resurrection remain firmly intact.

Nevertheless, perhaps the most difficult consequence of acknowledging that such forgeries might indeed exist in our Bibles is that it would damage our confidence in the integrity of the witness of the early church. For if the early church got the canon of the New Testament wrong, one might be provoked to ask what else the early church got wrong. Ehrman’s claim of forgeries in the New Testament is no trivial matter. More than half of our New Testament somehow fits within Ehrman’s category of “forgery,” as he lays out his case in Forgery and Counterforgery.

In contrast, the early church fathers believed that the work of the Holy Spirit guided the church to accept the books of the New Testament as they presently are in our Bibles to be authentic and true. To weaken that belief places a greater apologetic burden on the church to defend her witness.

The early church surely got a few things wrong in its history. The abrupt break in relations between Jew and Gentile in the Christian movement would be one of them. Some early church fathers either unintentionally or even intentionally fueled the fires of anti-Judaism, which ultimately contributed to the horrid legacy of anti-semitism centuries off into the future, giving a sense of legitimacy to the Nazis who ushered in the Holocaust of World War II. The tendency to elevate celibacy as being a more “spiritual” state as compared to marriage might be another one. But these issues have less serious impact as compared to the integrity of which books were acknowledged and named to be part of our New Testament.

If anyone has doubts about this, consider what might have happened if the early church adopted the list of books that the 2nd century heretic Marcion of Sinope had within his canon of Scripture, instead of what Christians have now.  As historians know very well,  Marcion completely obliterated the entire Old Testament from his list of “sacred Scripture.” If someone think that the strands of anti-semitism that arose out of the complicity of the German Christian church with Nazi ideology was bad enough, the prospect of having a Bible with no Old Testament would have resulted in far worse anti-semitism!!

Mistakes were made even in some early attempts to validate the authenticity of writings to be included within the New Testament. The organic process of development of the New Testament canon itself inevitably led some early church fathers to misjudge certain writings along the canonization process. In other words, story of how we got our New Testament canon has some messy parts to it. The Shepherd of Hermas was once a popular candidate for inclusion within the New Testament, as some thought that the Hermas mentioned in Romans 16:14 was its author. But continuing discussion led to its eventual dismissal for lacking sufficient apostolic character. The Muratorian Fragment identifies the “Hermas” author to be a second-century brother of the bishop of Rome, Pius, and not a companion of the first-century Paul.

The Book of Hebrews is the classic case in the opposite direction, as some early church leaders insisted that the Apostle Paul wrote it. Even as late as the King James Version of the Bible, the letter was designated as “The Epistle of Paul the Epistle to the Hebrews.” Why, it says so in the Bible my wife received when she graduated from high school!!

The problem with this designation is that nowhere in the letter is the name of the author ever specified. The influential church father, Origen of Alexandria, claimed that “only God knows” who wrote Hebrews. Perhaps it was Clement, an early bishop in Rome, or even Luke. Nevertheless, the early church eventually judged that the book had enough apostolic character to it for Hebrews to be included within the New Testament canon. Whether it was really Paul who wrote it is still debated, though likely not, it was sufficient to say that someone within that early apostolic circle, either an apostle or a close associate to an apostle, stood behind the writing. It was sufficient enough for the Book of Hebrews to have an apostolic stamp regarding its theological content for it to be included within the New Testament.

The ultimate point is this: Despite the messiness of the process in determining the final status of the New Testament canon, the reputation of the early church as a whole is at stake in determining the trustworthiness of the final outcome of that organic process.

The Very Real Problem of Forgeries in Various Early Christian Writings

However, a final judgment needs to be made as to whether or not it is necessary to accept the claims put forward by Bart Ehrman that much of our New Testament has been forged. To Ehrman’s credit, there is overwhelming evidence that some Christians, in the name of trying to defend historic orthodox Christianity, or who would seek to condemn the views of other Christians would write forged letters and other writings, in the name of some famous person, in order to try to advance their views.

Jerome sought to translate the Old Testament into Latin from the original Hebrew in the late 4th to early 5th centuries. However, other Christians opposed his work, insisting that the Greek Septuagint translation popular then in the church was superior. Bart Ehrman relates the story that Jerome tells about one of these opponents, which is worth quoting in full:

My brother Eusebius writes to me that, when he was at a meeting of African bishops which had been called for certain ecclesiastical affairs, he found there a letter purporting to be written by me, in which I professed penitence and confessed that it was through the influence of the press in my youth that I had been led to turn the Scriptures into Latin from the Hebrew; in all of which there is not a word of truth. When I heard this, I was stupefied. . . . Letters were soon brought [to] me from many brethren in Rome asking about this very matter, whether the facts were as was stated: and they pointed in a way to make me weep to the person by whom the letter had been circulated among the people. He who dared to do this, what will he not dare to do? It is well that ill will has not a strength equal to its intentions. Innocence would be dead long ago if wickedness were always allied to power, and calumny could prevail in all that it seeks to accomplish. It was impossible for him, accomplished as he was, to copy any style and manner of writing, whatever their value may be; amidst all his tricks and his fraudulent assumption of another man’s personality, it was evident who he was. It is this same man, then, who wrote this fictitious letter of retractation in my name, making out that my translation of the Hebrew books was bad, who, we now hear, accuses me of having translated the Holy Scriptures with a view to disparage the Septuagint. . . . I wonder that in this letter he did not make me out as guilty of homicide, or adultery or sacrilege or parricide or any of the vile things which the silent working of the mind can revolve within itself. (Adv. Rufin. 2, 24, as found in Erhman, pp. 530-531)

The fact that Christians would practice such despicable deceit, while claiming justification for such lying, is a stain upon church history. It happened far too often. Even more well-intended church leaders contributed to the problem. The fourth century orthodox bishop. Epiphanius of Salamis, helped to demonstrate that certain apocryphal works, like the Gospel of Philip, were forgeries. But according to Erhman, Epiphanius also fabricated stories about certain heretical Christian groups, like the Phibionites, particularly with respect to their supposedly bizarre sexual practices, in his most well-known work attacking heresies, the Panarion (Ehrman, p. 19). Christians should expose heresy, but they should not misrepresent the views and attitudes of their opponents in the the process.

Even as late as the Reformation, we have evidence which suggests that perhaps one leading Christian engaged in producing forgeries. Desiderius Erasmus, who produced the definitive Greek New Testament text which inspired Martin Luther and served as the basis for the King James Bible, who even established himself as a scholar who exposed the forgeries of others, probably produced a forgery of his own. Erasmus supposedly discovered an ancient text,”On the Two Forms of Martyrdom,” claiming that the 3rd-century church father, Cyprian, to have been its author, but which oddly had characteristics of Erasmus’ own ideas and writing style (Ehrman, p. 25). So, it is certainly reasonable to ask actually how far such deceptive practices went in the history of Christianity, and whether or not documents within the New Testament itself might be forgeries.2

So, Is Bart Ehrman Right After All?…. Not So Fast

Nevertheless, Bart Ehrman’s overall case for forgeries in the New Testament itself suffers from numerous difficulties. As this is the final post in this blog series, here we summarize some of the pushback to Ehrman’s thesis as presented earlier, while adding a few other additional arguments along the way: Like various other critical scholars, Ehrman dismisses shorter books, like James and Jude, for not being written by their attributed authors, despite the embarrassing and glaring fact that we have no other surviving written material by either James or Jude with which we can compare these letters.3

It is common among certain scholars, though not necessarily Bart Ehrman himself, to draw a comparison of forgery in the New Testament to pseudonymous works in the Old Testament. But the comparison does not neatly fit. Just because a name is attached to a particular Old Testament book does not necessarily mean that the person who is associated with the book was actually written by that person. No serious scholar, conservative or liberal, actually believes that Job wrote the Book of Job, or that Joshua wrote the Book of Joshua. For how could Joshua write about his own death as a past event (Joshua 24)? References to Job in the book associated with his name are consistently in the third person. So as noted in the first blog post in this series, while both Joshua and Job are technically pseudonymous, this does not mean at all that Joshua and Job are forgeries.

There are many Psalms which are ascribed as “a psalm of David.” While in certain cases this could mean that King David himself was the author, it could also mean in other cases that the psalm was written in honor of David. While Solomon’s name as the author never appears in the Book of Ecclesiastes, the author is described as “the son of David” (Ecclesiastes 1:1), which could indeed be Solomon, but that could also mean any other legitimate descendant of David, just as Jesus is described frequently in the New Testament as “the son of David,” many centuries and generations after David lived.

However, the genre of a New Testament letter, like the letters of Paul, are quite different. Paul is well aware that he has enemies who would seek to undermine his gospel message, so it would not be surprising to see competitors of Paul trying to use his name in order to undermine genuine Pauline teachings. Repeatedly, we have in the letters of Paul direct statements like “Paul” writing to a particular Christian community or particular person. We have explicit statements such as to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:13 to “bring the cloak I left with Carpus at Troas,” and in 2 Thessalonians 3:17, “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the sign of genuineness in every letter of mine; it is the way I write.” While the original manuscripts of Paul are lost to us, the point should be clear: Statements such as these were meant to indicate the authenticity of the letter. Alternatively, Ehrman sees these statements as clever attempts by the forged letter writer to deceive his audience, trying to make them think that such letters were written by Paul, when in reality they were not. But is it really the supposed forgerer of Paul’s letters who is clever, or is it the 21st century scholar?

Consider how Ehrman agrees with the early church that they were right to dismiss an array of pseudonymous works as being forgeries, ranging from the Gospel of Thomas, to the Gospel of James, to Third Corinthians, and to the Gospel of Peter. If the early church was sufficiently informed to spot forgeries like these, why would they be so ignorant of the supposedly deceptive nature of the books which did, in fact, become accepted as canonical New Testament Scripture? Ehrman claims that nearly half of the individual book titles, a whopping 70% of our New Testament, were written by people other than to whom these texts were attributed. If Ehrman is correct, the integrity of the New Testament might be judged as a colossal failure. But it certainly comes across in Forgery and Counterforgery that Ehrman views the New Testament to be guilty until proven innocent, as opposed to the other way around. Is that really the most fair way to judge the authenticity of ancient documents?

Walter Bauer, an early 20th century German Bible scholar, argued that the early period of Christianity was more diverse than is commonly understood. The earliest Christians were made up of conflicting movements and groups, with “orthodox” Christianity as one option among several. What we today know of as historically “orthodox” Christianity was the “winner” in the fight over several centuries to determine what Christians should think and believe. Bart Ehrman holds to Bauer’s thesis as a key driver in his methodology.

 

Concerns about Ehrman’s Methodoloy: Is The Walter Bauer Thesis a Trustworthy Guide?

The bias in Bart Ehrman’s methodology should be apparent. By clinging to the thrust of the Walter Bauer thesis, a topic discussed before here on Veracity, which emphasizes diversity over and against unity in the early Christian movement, Ehrman is more prone to focus on divergence of thought as opposed to coherence within the New Testament as a whole. What best explains this intra-polemic nature of our New Testament for Bart Ehrman? The presence of forgeries. Why not?

The irony of all of this is that Ehrman’s case against the integrity of the New Testament fuels the arguments of Ehrman’s opponents in the Jesus Mythicism movement who deny the existence of an historical Jesus. For if the integrity of the New Testament sinks so low as Ehrman supposes, then why would anyone look upon the New Testament as being a reliable source for reconstructing a life of the historical Jesus? Yet this is exactly the foundational argument which Jesus Mythicists use to dismiss the historical Jesus, or even an historical Paul, or Peter, etc., and instead treat the whole of the New Testament as pure fable.4

Concerns about the Complexity of Bart Ehrman’s Forgery/Counterforgery Thesis

Consider here a survey of some of the main ideas in Bart Ehrman’s thesis regarding authenticity of the New Testament books, at a fairly high level. Note how the concept of counterforgery depends on the presence of forgery:

  • As with Hebrews mentioned above, the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are technically anonymous. Church tradition dating back at least to Irenaeus in the late 2nd century recognizes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John…. as well as Luke for Acts, to be the respective authors of these texts. John, the son of Zebedee, has been traditionally associated with being the author of 1 John, 1 John, 2 John, and Revelation  as well.  But while it is no surprise that Ehrman does not accept these traditional authorial designations as being valid, it does not matter that much for Bart Ehrman’s thesis, as he is primarily concerned in Forgery and Counterforgery about books that explicitly claim to have been written by a certain person (or persons) but which were in fact not.5
  • Of the thirteen letters explicitly associated with the Apostle Paul, only seven of them are authentically Pauline:  Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.
  • 2 Thessalonians, on the other hand, is a forgery. Ironically, 2 Thessalonians issues warnings to other Christians to be wary of books claiming to have been written by Paul.
  • Ephesians and Colossians are forgeries as well. Both books were written by someone pretending to be Paul, with the intent of domesticating Paul’s more radical message found within his authentic writings.
  • The pastoral letters: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus are also forgeries. Like Ephesians and Colossians, these books were written by someone pretending to be Paul, for the purpose again of trying to domesticate Paul’s original message, and developing a kind of sophisticated church structure in contrast with the more organic, egalitarian model of church governance as found in the authentic Pauline letters.6
  • The peculiar case of Acts is that while Luke is not technically named as the author, there are several “we” passages in Acts which would indicate that the author had been a companion of Paul. However, Ehrman argues that Acts was not written by a companion of Paul, and certainly it was not Luke. Interestingly, Acts is making the case that its author is a Gentile. But since only in Colossians 4:7-14 do we read that Luke is a Gentile, and Colossians was not written by Paul, it is highly suspect that Luke wrote Acts. In a sense then, because Colossians is a forgery, Acts is a type of counterforgery, partly arguing against something put forward by yet another forgery. In particular, Acts is a polemic against those who say that Paul was fundamentally and irrevocably at odds with the other apostles, like Peter and James. Instead, Acts wants to paint a portrait of Paul getting along rather well with Peter and James, thus seeking to persuade the reader that Paul was in harmony with the other apostles.
  • Letters claiming to have been written by other significant leaders in the early church, such as 1 Peter, 2 Peter, Jude, and James are also forgeries, if not counterforgeries as well. In the case of James, the author pretending to be James, Jesus’ brother, has produced yet another counterforgery, arguing against ideas put forward by still yet another forgery, such as Ephesians.
  • In the case of 1 Peter, an author pretending to be Peter is trying to sound like Paul. Why would he do so? In order to show that Peter and Paul were on the same page theologically, as an attempt to comfort Christians going through persecution by seeking to persuade the reader that Peter and Paul, the chief leaders of the apostles, were on the same team, and not at odds with one another.
  • In the case of 2 Peter, someone again pretending to be Peter has a similar agenda to the author of Acts,. In many ways like what is going on with 1 Peter, 2 Peter is trying to show that Peter fully approved of Paul. The Petrine pretender of 2 Peter wants to argue against those who believe that Paul and Peter remained at odds with one another throughout their lives. The main difference between 1 Peter and 2 Peter is that in the case of the latter, the primary concern is not about Christian suffering, but rather it is about false teaching being promoted within the church, and seeking to combat such false teaching by appealing to the unity between Paul and Peter.

Did you follow all of that? While Ehrman’s thesis is indeed a fascinating one, it is undoubtedly complex, relying upon a series of claims made about certain supposed forgeries within the New Testament, with an additional layer of counterforgery claims layered on top.7

Here is an example of how complicated Ehrman’s thesis gets: While Luke is mentioned in Philemon 24, nothing else in Paul’s undisputed, authentic letters tells us anything more about him. However, Ehrman’s supposedly “forged” Colossians 4:14 does mention Luke, and tells us that this Luke is a physician. But if Colossians is forged, on what basis would we have for believing that Luke really even was a physician? 2 Timothy 4:11 mentions Luke, but then again, for Ehrman this letter, too, was forged.  Then again, Luke is supposedly the author of Acts, but Bart Ehrman says this, too, was forged, with the famous “we” passages pretending that Luke, this physician, had been among them, and even suggesting that this Luke has medical knowledge, thus furthering the lie that a real “Doctor” Luke wrote Acts.

Whew! That is a whole complex web of lies, if we are to really believe that up to 70% of our New Testament has fabricated authors!

Is such a complicated thesis really the best explanation for what we find within our New Testament? Or is it simpler to accept the traditional, historically orthodox view that all of the New Testament documents with explicit authorial attributions found within them are actually valid and more reasonable? My judgment is that the latter is more persuasive than the former. In particular, if the forgery claims associated by Ehrman with the six disputed letters of Paul turn out to be false, then the larger framework of counterforgeries tied to other disputed letters laid on top of these disputed Pauline letters tends to fall apart.

The Primary Weakness in Ehrman’s Case for Forgeries in the New Testament: the Use of Secretaries

Nevertheless, what is the most vulnerable weakness in Ehrman’s case for forgeries in the New Testament? The use of secretaries. For if the New Testament authors relied on secretaries much of Ehrman’s case fails to hold together. Repeatedly throughout Forgery and Counterforgery, Ehrman claims that the bulk of the New Testament writers could not have authored their respective documents, because they were illiterate.

This argument of Ehrman’s however is weak. Even if Peter and John were illiterate fisherman, and including Matthew the tax collector, this obstacle would have been easily overcome by the use of skilled secretaries trained in the art of letters and narrative writing.

In 1 Peter 5:12, Peter explicitly names Silvanus as a secretary. Ehrman’s counter-argument is that the reference to Silvanus in the verse probably means that Silvanus was only a “letter carrier” and not the co-author, as some Bible translations suggest (like the Phillips New Testament). To support this, Ehrman argues that “Silvanus does not actually solve the problem of the Greek, since he too was an Aramaic-speaking Jew from Palestine (Acts 15:22)“, and that the praise in 1 Peter 5:12 would have been inappropriately self-serving (Ehrman, pp. 248-249).

However, just because the Jerusalem church sent Silvanus to accompany Paul and Barnabas in Acts 15:22 does not necessarily mean that Silvanus was not a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian, as Acts 2 explicitly tells us that a number of Greek-speaking Jews became believers at Pentecost, which could have easily included Silvanus. Where is the evidence to indicate that Silvanus was unskilled in Greek, ” an Aramaic-speaking Jew from Palestine (Acts 15:22).” when Acts 15:22 tells us nothing about where Silvanus was from?

Though not definitive, it is plausible to think that the phrase “I have written briefly to you” could be an admission that Peter only wrote a few words in the letter, and that the bulk of the letter was penned by Silvanus:

By Silvanus, a faithful brother as I regard him, I [Peter] have written briefly to you, exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it. (1 Peter 5:12 ESV)

Even the Common English Bible (CSB), normally not as conservative in approach as the ESV, implies such a reading:

I [Peter] have written and sent these few lines to you by Silvanus. I consider him to be a faithful brother. In these lines I have urged and affirmed that this is the genuine grace of God. Stand firm in it.

Furthermore, it would make very little sense for a supposedly purely Aramaic speaking Jew, like Silvanus, to go on and accompany the highly literate, highly fluent Greek speaking Apostle Paul across the Greek speaking world without being considerably educated in Greek himself. Silvanus was known by yet another name, Silas.

The argument against Ehrman’s position is further supported by noting that even the most highly educated and literate of the New Testament authors, the Apostle Paul, used a secretary to compose his most significant and undisputed letter, Romans:

I Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord (Romans 16:22)

Bart Ehrman’s argument against the use of secretaries by the New Testament authors is not as secure as he presents it in Forgery and Counterforgery.

The Inherent Deceitful Motivations of the New Testament Authors Questioned

Nevertheless, the supposed “lack of secretaries” argument is not the driving force underlying Ehrman’s critique against the integrity of the New Testament. Ehrman’s thought world is thoroughly enmeshed with the idea that layers upon layers of deceit, disillusion over the delay of the final apocalypse, and intra-Christian polemic defined the early Christian movement.

But you would think that more vocal voices within early Christianity would have spoken out against such deceptive practices and mindsets. In so many ways, it simply comes down to who you can trust. Do we trust that the early church got the New Testament right? Or do we put our trust in scholars living twenty centuries into the future living in a post-Christian culture? It is better to give the early church the benefit of the doubt.

Ehrman’s case rests mainly on the claim that scholars living some twenty centuries after these documents were written have had better access to the tools that can help people discover the presence of forgeries than the scholars of the early church. But is this a defensible claim? Some of the finest minds of the early church were exceptional scholars, with profound literary skill, enough to rival if not exceed the work of contemporary scholars. There is no plausible reason to think that skilled early church fathers like Tertullian, Ireneaus, or Origen were any less competent than contemporary New Testament scholars.

However, a reasonable question to ask is “Why?” Why give the early church the benefit of the doubt? A critical scholar like Bart Ehrman will want to look at the story of the early church, including the development of the New Testament, from a purely “historical” perspective, and bracket off any notion of divine “inspiration” to the Bible. I am actually somewhat skeptical that such a purely “historical” perspective is actually achievable and agnostic regarding bias. But for the sake of the argument, let us assume Bart Ehrman’s assumption is correct and achievable. Ehrman would probably say that I am bracketing off history in favor of divine inspiration of the Bible. Yet I would challenge that assertion.8

I return to an earlier statement: For if the Resurrection is true, then Christianity is true. Period! Furthermore, if the Resurrection is true, and grounded in history as a real event, then it follows that God would also be able to communicate the truth of Christianity through Jesus’ followers, primarily the apostles and those within that early apostolic circle, to give us a New Testament that faithfully and accurately represents revealed teaching about the meaning, significance and importance of the Resurrection, that could be readily passed on from one generation to the next. It seems highly improbable that God would go through all of the trouble to raise Jesus from the dead, only to let the story about the Resurrection and the implications of that truth be partially lost or distorted within a set of documents where some 70% of that material was forged. That just does not seem to make a whole lot of sense.9

What About Progressive Christians Who Accept the Kinds of Arguments Promoted By Bart Ehrman?

Now, this is a question which I am sure will come up in the minds of some people: Is it possible for someone to still be a Christian while rejecting a number of books from the New Testament as being forgeries?

For a number of conservative Christians, the immediate answer to this question would be, “NO.” Many “progressive Christians,” on the other hand, will resent the very framing of this question as a loaded one, meant to disparage progressive Christians and their self-perception of faith.

There are “progressive Christians” who hold to such a position, or something close to it, like a John Barton or Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, just to name a couple, as discussed in previous blog articles in this series.

Others will surely disagree with me, but I am not even remotely qualified to answer a question like that. I have no interest in saying that a “progressive Christian” is not a real Christian. Instead, I would want to be as generous as possible.

After all, I have learned that I can still appreciate insights gained from scholars with whom I have serious theological differences. If you do not believe me, go read my review of John Barton’s A History of the Bible, a work I turn to now and then, even when I strongly reject a number of his arguments. He offers positively helpful insights into the Bible that I have rarely heard from conservative evangelical authors. I do not need to agree with a “progressive Christian” scholar on certain core doctrinal matters in order find substantial value to their work.

However, what I can say is that a belief in the whole of the New Testament canon as the inspired Word of God is the only consistent position which an historically orthodox Christian can hold, whether they be Protestant, Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. To think that we somehow have forgeries in our New Testament, and that this situation is somehow “okay” for the Christian, is really just a perspective coming from wishful thinking.10

It is absurd to somehow confess the Bible to be in some sense the “Word of God” on the one hand, while simultaneously rejecting a substantial portion of the New Testament as being written under fraudulent pretenses.  Such “progressive Christians” who hold such a view have to do a lot of theological contortions to try to make such an incoherent view sensible.

Furthermore, to hold to such a “progressive Christian” view of a New Testament, where the origins of much of the New Testament writings are held to be so highly suspect, does not enhance the growth of the Christian movement in the long term. Having such a low view of Scripture only makes it more difficult to pass on the faith to future generations.

After all, it makes one wonder what kind of “God” would supposedly “inspire” a set of New Testament documents to have such a deceitful provenance, if Ehrman’s case turns out to be correct? If Ehrman’s case were to be proven correct, then the most sensible thing at the very least would be to reject those forged texts from membership within the New Testament canon. But most “progressive Christians” who hold such a view seem content to live with the situation as is.

The numbers tell the story: The decline over the past centuries of mainline Protestant churches, which is primarily where such progressive Christian views have taken root, and even seeped into unsuspecting evangelical churches, should provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate that such an approach to the Bible does not bode well for the future of the church.

Some progressive Christians, like John Barton, an Anglican priest at Oxford, do not seem too bothered by the contradictions they see between faith and history. The problem is that most people from a generation or more younger than Barton, and under his influence, do not appear to be drawn to following in his version of Christian faith. The gradual decline of attendance at Church of England services over the past few decades demonstrates the difficulty in passing on John Barton’s progressive version of Christianity to younger generations.

To this extent, Bart Ehrman is right. The ancient world looked down on the practice of pseudonymity, where such pseudonymous writing sought to change the doctrinal teaching or otherwise misrepresent the famous author being imitated. This is deception in the most negative sense, pure and simple. Therefore, for a progressive Christian to say that there are these type of forgeries in our New Testament, while at the same time refusing to use the terminology of “forgery,” is just pretending something to be the case when the evidence points in a very different direction. I have greater respect for someone like a Bart Ehrman who calls a spade a spade on this. Though I judge Ehrman to be wrong in significant areas in his analysis of the data, it makes a lot more sense to reject the New Testament as an authoritative text, if someone is convinced that there are forgeries in it. 11

Do we have forgeries in our New Testament? Veracity investigates the claims found in Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics.

 

Making the Distinction Between Benign Pseudonymous Writings and Forgeries

The only caveat I would add is the category of “alloymity,” as advanced by scholars like Donald Hagner, whereby a well-known author explicitly gives permission to a disciple or associate to complete a letter already started, or otherwise compose a letter, with the intent of remaining faithful to the message of the well-known author, perhaps even years after the well-known author’s death. The case of 2 Peter is the classic example of something in the New Testament which might be “allonymous.” In this sense, Peter could have authorized a secretary to produce a final letter, on Peter’s behalf, even if the final completion of that secretary’s work would not have happened until a few decades later. In other words, 2 Peter could be considered as a benign pseudonymous letter.

Professor Hagner’s view of “allonymity” might be broader than this, but I see no reason to broaden “allonymity” beyond this careful definition, even if the designation of an “allonymous” letter might be practically impossible to prove or disprove. Nevertheless, Bart Ehrman categorically rejects any form of this argument for “allonymity” as being an acceptable or otherwise “good” form of pseudonymity. He would include “allonymity” within the category of “forgery.” However, I am not convinced that Bart Ehrman is right here.

Nor am I convinced that the concept of “allonymity” is ultimately a necessary one. A case can still be made that 2 Peter was really written in a more “hands on” manner by Peter himself before he died. The possible existence of “allonymous” documents within our New Testament is an on-going debate which scholars will likely continue to debate for years to come.12

To repeat for the sake of clarity, the category of pseudonymity is inherently broad, suggesting the use of a famous person’s name to be attached to a document, even though someone else actually wrote the document. Some cases might be benign. Other cases might be deceptive. In the benign cases, the famous person would have given permission to an associate or other trusted writer to write on behalf of that famous authority figure. However, in other cases, a pseudonymous work would be a forgery, if permission were not given by the authority figure to the actual writer, such that the document would be used for polemical purposes. This book review has tried to defend the case that while there indeed might be benign forms of pseudonymity within our New Testament, the New Testament lacks the presence of actual forged documents.

Why Bart Ehrman’s Position is Important For Professing Christians To Consider

Many evangelical Protestant Christians will probably never bother with reading Forgery and Counterforgery, or its more popular, less-academic version, Forged, as Ehrman has gained for himself the reputation as being one of the most outspoken critics of Christianity. Thus many readers will simply dismiss Bart Ehrman’s work here as yet just another example of a bible scholar gone off the deep end. However, this would be naive.13

First, simply because many evangelical Protestant Christians often assume “the Bible” to have dropped out of the sky does not mean that the question of what constitutes “Scripture” is merely  answered by looking at a Bible’s table of contents. There is no such thing as an inspired table of contents in the Bible, a “thus sayeth the Lord” type of pronouncement. The process that the early church went through to determine the list of canonical books was much more rich, nuanced and organic than that. No doubt that there are at least some readers of this blog series who have never heard of the Shepherd of Hermas, the Gospel of Peter, or Third Corinthians before. But the canonization process required discernment between that which was apostolic in nature, versus that which was not…. and this process took time.

Protestant Christians are often puzzled when they think about the so-called “Apocrypha,” a list of books often appended somehow to the Old Testament in Roman Catholic Bibles, which Roman Catholics commonly refer to as the “DeuteroCanonical” books, like Tobit and Judith. Then there are additional books considered valuable among certain Eastern Orthodox traditions, like the Book of Enoch. With all of this variety of supposedly sacred books among professing Christians, it is becomes vitally important to consider why we consider which books are to be trusted and reliable guides to spiritual truth.

Secondly, it should be noted that non-believing scholars like Bart Ehrman, along with progressive-leaning Christians scholars surveyed in this blog series, including Oxford’s John Barton and Campbell University’s Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, are accomplished scholars who actually have something to offer to more historically orthodox-minded Christians.  These scholars do take the Bible seriously. However, this should not diminish the significance of certain sharp disagreements they have with more conservative scholars.

Thirdly, many advocates of deconstruction within the church look to Ehrman (and others) as a “gateway drug” to unbelief. Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery marshalls together in one volume perhaps the best case for forgeries being present in the New Testament, more than any other work in English that I am familiar with. To say the least, Ehrman’s series of arguments are quite interesting, and have become quite persuasive among those once raised in Christian homes who now pursue a path of deconstruction.

Though I disagree with his final assessment about the state of the New Testament, I still have learned a lot from Forgery and Counterforgery that I never knew before. In addition, the reader will probably learn more about the apocryphal writings connected to the New Testament than what you would typically find from a conservative evangelical book publisher, of a Sunday school class. In the next to the last chapter, Ehrman’s description of the Protoevangelium of James, a popularly read defense of Mary during the medieval period, is particularly enlightening. The Christian-ized Sybilline Oracles, as discussed in the same chapter, is a fascinating topic as well.

Then what caught my eye was learning that the Epistle of Barnabas, an apocryphal work supposedly attributed to one of Paul’s companions, made the “audacious claim that Jews have always misunderstood their own religion and that the Old Testament is a Christian, not a Jewish, book” (Ehrman, p.331-332). Though sometimes mistakenly attributed to Barnabas by some in the early church, the Epistle of Barnabas boldly claims that the Jews had misinterpreted the Law in the Pentateuch by reading it too literally, instead of seeing the Law as prefiguring a more symbolic meaning associated with the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. What makes this so disturbing is that the Epistle of Barnabas was included in Codex Sinaiticus, one of our earliest surviving manuscripts of the Greek Bible. Thankfully, the early church was ultimately right in excluding this one from the New Testament canon.

Most Christians are woefully unprepared to answer the arguments Ehrman brings forward in his book. This book review only responds to some of the most significant arguments presented by Bart Ehrman. What is needed is a book length interaction with Ehrman’s work by a conservative scholar who might offer a different perspective. In an age where many dismiss the Bible as being unreliable and untrustworthy, good arguments need to be presented to answer the claims of critics of Christianity, as well as correcting missteps taken by otherwise well-meaning yet misguided progressive Christians.

If I could include one particular endorsement it would be for interested readers to consult Fuller Seminary’s Donald Hagner work: The New Testament: A Historical and Theological Introduction, which addresses a number of the key issues presented by Bart Ehrman in Forgery and Counterforgery, though not all. Even if a reader is not convinced by Hagner’s “allonymity” category thesis, Hagner’s book offers a helpful counterpoint to Erhman’s Forgery and Counterforgery.14

Despite a wide array of arguments put forward by Bart Ehrman, the cumulative case for a New Testament free from forgeries is still an intellectually viable position to take. In other words, the early church got the New Testament canon right, and Christians can remain confident that all twenty-seven books in the New Testament are in alignment with the apostolic authority established by Jesus, and that the New Testament faithfully communicates the Word of God to us.

Notes:

1. Of course, this does not mean that Mormon apologists will not try to mount some kind of defense for the Book of Mormon. It is just that Mormon apologists have a much more difficult job than historically orthodox Christians have by an order of magnitude. The insurmountable problems associated with the three and eight witnesses who say they saw the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith was required by the angel to translate, only make the argument in favor of the historical narrative in the Book of Mormon more difficult to difficult to defend. See Grant Palmer’s An Insider’s Guide to Mormonism. Also, consider this archaeological documentary, the Bible vs. The Book of Mormon. ↩

2. A full examination of New Testament Apocrypha is beyond the scope of this book review.↩

3. In the case of James, Ehrman exaggerates the contrast between James and Paul as being irreconcilable. But not only that, Ehrman argues that the pseudepigraphic author of James is actually not writing a polemic against the authentic Paul. Rather, the pseudepigraphic author of James is polemicizing the pseudepigraphic author of the disputed letters, thus making the letter of James to be a counterforgery, as defined by Ehrman: ” James is attacking a later understanding of Paul embodied in forged Pauline traditions by later Paulinists,” such as in Eph. 2:8–9; 2 Tim. 1:9; Tit. 3:5–7.  “In the letter of James we have a forger attacking a Deutero-Paul for views that Paul himself, so far as we know, never held. (Ehrman, p. 295-296). ↩

4. See Michael Kruger’s review of Ehrman’s popular level book, Forged, which summarizes the arguments of Ehrman’s more academic book, Forgery and Counterforgery. Kruger notes that a number of the early church fathers, such as Papias, Justin, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria were accomplished literary critics themselves, able to detect forgeries, and offered their studied opinions in their efforts to weed out apocryphal works from authoritative ones. ↩

5. Even more historically orthodox scholars have questions about the authorship of certain books of the New Testament, especially when the identity of the authorial attribution is not mentioned in the text of the New Testament document, or the authorial attribution is unclear. For example, the letters attributed to John, like 1 John, 2 John, and 2 John, as well as the Book of Revelation, are traditionally associated with the Apostle John, son of Zebedee, one Jesus’ earliest followers. However, 1 John is completely anonymous and 2 John and 3 John describes the author only as “the elder”  (2 John 1: 3 John 1). The Book of Revelation says the author is “John”, who was on the island of Patmos (Revelation 1:1; 1:9). Like in the Gospel of John, the identify of that Gospel author, along with author of 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John, and Revelation, is commonly associated with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23; 21:7; 21:20; 19:26).  However, a number of scholars, even evangelical scholars, are not convinced of this. Bart Ehrman even shares this view that the author of the fourth Gospel is not “disciple whose Jesus loved.”  It does raise the question of  who is this “disciple whom Jesus loved?” It is possible that the “disciple whom Jesus loved” was not John, son of Zebedee, while suggesting that the John, son of Zebedee, was still nevertheless the author of the fourth Gospel. As evangelical scholar Ben Witherington suggests in an informative essay, this disciple  may not be John son of Zebedee after all.  Perhaps it was Lazarus!  (See this linked YouTube video for a summary of Witherington’s views). If so, it leaves some unanswered questions about who wrote the New Testament documents associated traditionally with “John.”  Which John are we talking about?  After all,  John was a very common name during the 1st century. For example, t is quite possible that the “John” of letters and/or Revelation was a “John the Elder,” someone associated with the church at Patmos, who may very well have known John, the son of Zebedee. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to assign New Testament documents like these to the concept of “forgery,” so Bart Ehrman does not show much interest in dealing with these books of the New Testament in Forgery and Counterforgery. Rather, Ehrman’s focus is on New Testament documents which  make specific authorial claims within the text that he contends are inherently deceptive in nature.  For two five-minute videos with Dr. Michael Licona, an evangelical scholar, who responds to Ehrman’s views about the Gospels, consider the following videos. ↩

6. For a historically orthodox, evangelical defense of Pauline authorship of the pastoral letters, see this sample from Scot McKnight’s commentary on these books.  London Bible teacher Andrew Wilson draws some insights from Gerald Bray’s commentary on the pastoral letters, “Did Paul Write the Pastorals? Seven Questions For Those Who Think He Didn’t.”  ↩

7. For Bart Ehrman’s explanation of his thesis, demonstrating the complexities involved, see the following video from his “Misquoting Jesus Podcast.”↩

8. See the Veracity blog post series on “historical criticism” which addresses the issue of method which scholars like Ehrman uses when conducting research on the New Testament. ↩

9. See my Veracity review of Andy Stanley’s book Irresistible for a deeper look at how the event of the resurrection is the fundamental truth claim of the Christian faith. ↩

10. See Veracity blog post on wishful thinking, and how it can blind us to the truth.    For a series of interviews with John Barton, a leading progressive Christian scholar, regarding his understanding of the Bible, I would recommend these two episodes from the Delgado podcast.    ↩

11.  Diarmaid MacCulloch, a progressive Christian scholar in the U.K., sees Ehrman’s efforts to understanding forgery within the New Testament to be unsympathetic in certain ways, while also acknowledging that Ehrman does offer an important challenge to the work of progressive Christian scholars, who are hesitant to use the terminology of “forgery” to describe the pseudonymous works that critical scholars like Ehrman find within the New Testament. Interestingly, MacCulloch compares Forgery and Counterforgery to be in the same category of Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution and Timothy Law’s When God Spoke Greek, which both challenge particular aspects of Christian history deemed settled by previous generations of scholars, both liberal and conservative. ↩

12. A good evangelical study Bible, like the ESV Study Bible or the Christian Standard Bible Study Bible, can have some very helpful notes on this topic. I rehearse some of these arguments favoring a plausible early date for 2 Peter, within the apostle’s lifetime, in a previous blog post from several years ago, and another blog post within this series on Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery. ↩

13. A good example of the contrast between what often goes on in academia versus common beliefs held within evangelical churches is illustrated by the popularity of a YouTube video that has been making the rounds in the early months of 2024 : “Satan’s Guide to the Bible”.  Veracity has a blog post covering the controversy surrounding this video, where a prominent argument against a traditional view of the Bible considers the controversy about forgeries being in the New Testament.    The world of podcasting is catching up with the trend to talk more about supposed forgeries in the New Testament, such as the Skeptics Bible Project podcast.    ↩

14. I have not read the book yet, but from my understanding, the work of Andreas Köstenberger, Scott Kellum, and Charles Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament, make a conservative case for traditional authorship of the New Testament books, without appealing to the category of “allonymity,” which Donald Hagner uses in his The New Testament: A Historical and Theological Introduction.  ↩

About Clarke Morledge

Clarke Morledge -- Computer Network Engineer, College of William and Mary... I hiked the Mount of the Holy Cross, one of the famous Colorado Fourteeners, with some friends in July, 2012. My buddy, Mike Scott, snapped this photo of me on the summit. View all posts by Clarke Morledge
This entry was posted on Friday, March 15th, 2024 at 6:00 pm and tagged with , , , and posted in Apologetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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