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:

• An introduction to the claim that we have forgeries in our New Testament: What is a “forgery” and what is a “pseudonymous” document? Are they the same, different?
• Bart Ehrman’s main arguments for forgery in our New Testament, that certain letters, etc. were written in the name of a well-known person, with the intent to deceive: Examining issues like vocabulary, style, and message content.
• The special case of the pastoral letters of Paul. Of the thirteen letters attributed to the Apostle Paul, the most disputed regarding their authenticity are 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. Why some progressive Christian scholars accept some of the arguments presented by Bart Ehrman.
• An alternative to Ehrman’s position: Is is possible for a disputed document in our New Testament to have been a type of benign pseudonymity; that is, with the full permission granted by a well-known author, but written by a trusted secretary? Is this concept of “allonymity” even a necessary defense to counter Ehrman’s position?

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.

 

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Is it possible for a letter to be written under the name of a famous person, sometime after the death of that famous person, and yet it NOT be considered a forgery? In this fourth post in our Veracity blog series reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery, we explore the concept of “allonymity” as a benign alternative to “forgery” to describe certain pseudonymous writings within the New Testament. If you think this is a mouthful of “intellectual-speak,” I will try to unpack all of this here.

In previous posts in this series, we have explored the controversy over “forgeries” in the New Testament in an introductory manner. Secondly, we have examined more closely the kind of arguments Bart Ehrman uses to identify the existence of “forgeries” within the New Testament. Thirdly, we looked at the special case of the pastoral letters; 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, which are Pauline letters in the New Testament that are often deemed as inauthentic by scholars like Ehrman. In this post, we consider one particular alternative to the pejorative use of the term “forgery” to describe a pseudonymous New Testament document.

One of my New Testament professors at Fuller Theological Seminary, Donald Hagner, now emeritus, has made a positive case for a category of pseudonymous writing, one that lacks the negative stigma associated with the more pejorative term of “forgery.” In his The New Testament: A Historical and Theological Introduction, Donald Hagner accepts a number of arguments presented by those like Bart Ehrman, who suggest that certain New Testament writings were not actually written by the ascribed author. However, in contrast to Ehrman, Hagner suggests that such examples of pseudonymity in the New Testament are not deceptive in character. Therefore, we should treat such New Testament writings more fairly and not consider them to be forgeries.¹

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Did Paul really write 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus? Or are they forgeries? Or something else?

In this third blog post reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery, we examine what is perhaps the most difficult and controversial authorial issue in our New Testament, at least regarding Paul’s letters, that of the author or authors of the pastoral letters:  1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus.  All three of these letters contain statements within them which indicate they were written by Paul.  But is the traditional claim that these letters are truly Pauline based on a lie?

Bart Ehrman holds to the view that all three of these letters were written decades after Paul’s death by someone claiming to be Paul, making certain alterations to Paul’s message in the process. Disturbingly, there are also progressive Christian scholars who make the same type of arguments, several of which will be analyzed in this blog post.

 

The Authenticity of the Pastoral Letters Being Challenged

All three of these letters, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, have been considered by a wide range of scholars over the past several hundred years as part of the same group, aptly named the “Pastoral Letters,” for each letter is addressed to a specific person, known to have exercised pastoral responsibilities over particular Christian communities. Each letter roughly begins the same way:  “I, Paul” write “to Timothy” or “to Titus.”

In some cases, certain scholars will distinguish between the letters, in a way that breaks up the collection. For example, the British New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says “as to the Pastorals, 2 Timothy may well be by Paul, writing in a different mood and context,” as compared to 1 Timothy and Titus. Yet the broad consensus today is that all three letters represent a collection of Paul’s pastoral thought, written by the same author or using the same secretary.¹

Unfortunately for defenders of an historically orthodox approach to the New Testament canon, the three pastoral letters have the unhappy distinction of being considered the least Pauline of any of the thirteen letters specifically attributed to Paul in our New Testament, among numerous scholars. Several reasons are often cited to demonstrate that Paul did not write any of these three letters.

First, very few, if any, of the details of Paul’s various journeys with respect to Ephesus, in the case of Timothy, and Crete, in the case of Titus, can be synced with anything written in the Book of Acts. Secondly, the style and vocabulary of these three letters are substantially different from the established Pauline writings, more so than even 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians and Colossians. Thirdly, more questions were raised about the authenticity of the pastoral letters in the early church than any of the other Pauline letters found in our New Testament. Fourthly, the claim is made that the theology and message of the pastoral letters differ so much from the rest of Paul’s letters that they could not have been written by Paul himself.

The following are two short YouTube clips explaining Ehrman’s view of 1 Timothy:

Answering Objections to Authenticity of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus

But how strong are these objections to the authenticity of the pastoral letters? Responses to the first three challenges to Pauline character of these writings can be summarized here: First, it must be noted that the Book of Acts does not give us a complete history of the early church movement, including the story of Paul. Acts makes selective use of historical events in the life of the early church to suit the purposes for the book, and could easily skip over details of Paul’s life which are not covered within the pastoral letters. It is possible that the biographical events of Paul’s life and journeys in the pastoral letters were simply omitted by the Book of Acts. Many conservative scholars today contend that the Book of Acts stops short in describing the final outcome of Paul’s life. Acts concludes with Paul making his ultimate appeal to the emperor, with Paul awaiting that meeting while being under house arrest in Rome. End of story. Acts leaves us wondering what happened next.

On the other hand, a number of historians are loath to think that Paul was in some type of “catch and release” program with the Roman prison system. If such historians are correct, Paul’s 2-year time of imprisonment in Rome, where Acts 28 leaves the narrative unresolved, is the end of the road for Paul.

Yet it is quite plausible that Paul’s life did not end in Rome right away, just after the end of the narrative in Acts. He could have been acquitted in Rome and continued on with his missionary journey to Spain, as Paul intended as described in his letter to the Romans. He could have also made certain trips as described in the Timothy and Titus letters, before finally returning to Rome, getting into trouble again, to subsequently face his final imprisonment and execution. We can not simply rule out these details found in the pastoral letters in Paul’s life simply because the Book of Acts omits them. Acts was never meant to give us an exhaustive history of Paul’s life after his conversion to Christ.

As to the unique style and vocabulary of the pastoral letters, it is curious to note that these letters use more unique Greek words for important ideas that are not found elsewhere in Paul’s writings. The phrase to “pursue righteousness” as found in 1 Timothy 6:11 and 2 Timothy 2:22 is never found elsewhere in Paul, a phrase that at first glance might seem at odds with Paul’s teaching on justification. The word for “babble” in 1 Timothy 6:20 and 2 Timothy 2:16 is never used anywhere else in the New Testament. The hugely controversial word commonly translated to “have authority” or “assume authority” in 1 Timothy 2:12 (authenteo) is only found here once in the entire New Testament, whereas a different word for “authority” is found elsewhere in Paul.

Yet as suggested before, such uniqueness in vocabulary can be explained by Paul’s use of a specific secretary who accompanied him, who chose to express Paul’s teaching with a different vocabulary thought to be synonymous with Paul’s earlier teaching, acting in good faith. Or it could have simply been the exact words Paul wanted to use in these letters, which gives us a greater richness to the entire corpus of Paul’s thought. In other words, if the pastoral letters represent the final expression of Paul’s thought before his death, it should not surprise us to think Paul’s thought had developed over time, resulting in certain style and vocabulary differences from earlier writings, particularly if a secretary was involved.

A third objection raised is that these letters were late in being accepted as truly Pauline, by the early church. The 2nd century heretic Marcion was a vigorous supporter of Paul, but Marcion neglected to include 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus in his canon of acceptable, New Testament books. Nevertheless, the 2nd century apologist Tertullian argued that Marcion knew of these letters, but instead desired not to include them within the Marcion canon. The famous early fourth century copy of the Bible, Codex Vaticanus, lacks the pastoral letters, but it also lacks Philemon, which is well regarded as being authentic, suggesting that Codex Vaticanus simply left out Paul’s personal correspondence with individuals while retaining those letters addressed to church communities (e.g. Romans, Galatian, etc.).  The 2nd century Assyrian Christian Tatian was skeptical about the authentic status of these letters as well, and in particular Origen observes that some Christians were skeptical about 2 Timothy, due to the mention of the magicians Jannes and Jambres in 2 Timothy 3:8, names of persons not found in the Old Testament.  But by the end of the 2nd century all three letters were universally accepted as Pauline and remained that way for centuries. Serious doubts about the authenticity of the pastoral letters only re-emerged in the beginning of the 19th century . ²

 

 

Does the Theological Content of the Pastoral Letters Contradict the Genuine Paul?

By far the strongest component of Ehrman’s argument against the Pauline authenticity of the pastoral letters has to do with the theological content of the letter. The claim is that the theological teaching in these letters is so different that it makes it difficult to accept the idea that Paul really wrote these letters. For example, in the undisputed letters of Paul, the term “faith” means the kind of trust a person must have in Christ in order to bring about salvation through his death, as we find in passages like Romans 1:12; Galatians 2:16. However, in the pastoral letters, “faith” means something different; that is, the body of teaching which defines historically orthodox Christianity. This notion of “faith” developed later in the church, according to Ehrman, in response to various heretical movements, like Gnosticism. The term “righteous” in the undisputed letters refers to having a right standing before God, as in Romans 2:13, whereas in the pastoral letters, “righteous” now refers to the morality of an individual, as in someone who is “upright” (see Titus 1:8).

Contra Ehrman, the problem with this argument is that “faith” does at times refer to the substance of Christian doctrine ( 1 Cor 16:13; 2 Cor 13:5; Gal 1:23; Phil 1:27) in Paul’s undisputed letters.  Plus, the word “righteous” sometimes has an association with morality in the undisputed letters. True, it would be fair to say that the emphasis changes in the pastoral letters, but the concepts are not mutually exclusive from one another.  This does not sufficiently demonstrate that the content of the pastoral letters contradicts or undermines the teaching in the undisputed letters.³

Ehrman also suggests that the pastoral letters focus on the qualifications of elder/overseer in the church, and other features of church structure, as found in the pastoral letters, is completely missing in the rest of the Pauline correspondence. This would indicate that the organized structure of church offices arose later in the history of the church, and did not overlap with the time of Paul. For Ehrman, this is in contrast with a more organic concept of Christian leadership marked by a sense of urgency concerning the expected apocalyptic end-time event coming within Paul’s lifetime, that did not materialize, along with a freer sense of the gifting of the Holy Spirit which empowers a person for Christian ministry.

Yet again, we see that Erhman’s argument ignores, or at least sidelines, the presence of overseers and deacons in Philippians 1:1, one of Paul’s undisputed letters. Erhman’s case also sidelines the contribution of the Book of Acts, in Acts 20:17-38, whereby Paul summons the elders of the church in Ephesus to come and meet him in Miletus. How could any of these references to “elders” during Paul’s lifetime make any sense if no such office of “elder” had yet existed? However, if we are to understand that the pastoral letters were some of Paul’s last writings before his death, it would certainly be a concern of Paul’s to write specifically about the need to have proper oversight within the church, to carry on Paul’s mission after his death, particularly when the undisputed Pauline material is concerned about false teaching creeping into the church during his lifetime, as Paul extensively writes about in letters such as Galatians.⁴

Women in 1 Timothy: In Contradiction With the Message of the Genuine Paul?

Even more scandalizing to modern sensibilities, Bart Ehrman argues that 1 Timothy in particular takes a somewhat disparaging view of women. In contrast with the undisputed letters of Paul, which affirms women as leaders in the early church, 1 Timothy takes a different view according to Ehrman, now that Paul had been long dead and the next generations of the church had to grapple with the delay of the Second Coming, and prepare for the existence of the church over the long-haul:

“The women who once exercised authority in the church through their teaching and prophesying needed to be brought to bay now that the church needed to be seen as a respectable institution. The leaders needed to be upright men admired even by those on the outside” (Ehrman, p. 204).

Essentially, Bart Ehrman is saying that the pseudonymous author of 1 Timothy has sufficiently altered the teaching of the genuine Apostle Paul so as to domesticate his earlier message. Gone is the more egalitarian approach to men and women in the ministry of the church, and now it would appear that Paul has either changed his mind, or the pseudonymous “Paul” has manipulated Paul’s message to fit more within patriarchal social patterns of late first century or even second century Greco-Roman culture.

Another version of Ehrman’s argument regarding 1 Timothy is best summarized by John Barton, a progressive Christian scholar in the U.K., in a book which receives Ehrman’s enthusiastic endorsement, A History of the Bible:

…..the structures of the church that are implied in the Pastorals resemble much more those of the second century than those of Paul’s day. In Paul’s letters, as we have seen, church order is still inchoate; in the Pastorals there is a Christian polity, with bishops who have some standing in society in general and who are supposed to be heads of a family; and there is an order of widows in which elderly women can be enrolled (1 Timothy 5:3–16). The position of women is clear: they are to be subordinate to men:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. (1 Timothy 2:11–12) (see Barton, A History of the Bible, p. 182)

There is no hint from either Ehrman or Barton that the teaching regarding women was with respect to some particular situation in the church of Ephesus, or some temporary injunction. Rather, the pseudonymous author of 1 Timothy has radically altered the authentic Paul’s teaching on the relationship between men and women in the church. But have Ehrman and Barton overstated their argument? Neither Ehrman nor Barton consider the possibility that the application for 1 Timothy 2:11-12 is expounded in Paul’s teaching in 1 Timothy 3:1-7, which specifically teaches that the office of elder/overseer in the church is restricted to only qualified men, for the sake modeling fatherhood for Christian families, while permitting both men and women to serve in other capacities in the church, specifically as deacon (1 Timothy 3:8-13, Romans 16:1).⁵

If Ehrman (or Barton’s) position is correct, it is exceedingly difficult to avoid the charge of forgery with respect to 1 Timothy, and by implication 2 Timothy and Titus as well.  However, as I have argued elsewhere, the charges of misogyny against the Paul of 1 Timothy have been greatly overblown and distorted. Paul is not prohibiting women from any and all kinds of leadership within the church. Rather, women are only being asked not to serve specifically as “elders/overseers.” The community of the church, which is supposed to be a priesthood of all believers, where all Christians are called to minister for the sake of the Gospel, male and female, does not need an army of elders/overseers to effectively spread the Gospel. Rather, the office of “elder/overseer” represents but one function within the body of Christ where ministry and leadership can exist in a myriad of ways.

 

 

Progressive Christian Adoption of the Forgery Thesis

What many Christians may not know is that a number of progressive Christian scholars, such as John Barton, accept the cumulative case articulated by a Bart Ehrman to be compelling enough to conclude that Paul did not write any of these pastoral letters. As another example, Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, an associate professor of New Testament at Campbell University, in North Carolina, finds the evidence against Pauline authorship of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus to be convincing. In fairness, Dr. Bashaw readily admits that it is really impossible to know for sure if Paul wrote these letters or not. Nevertheless, she also states that “We should never make Pauline authorship of the pastorals a litmus test for faithfulness.”

It makes one wonder what Dr. Bashaw actually means by “faithfulness.” For if someone claiming to be Paul, without any direct knowledge or association with Paul, fabricated these letters and subtly altered the theological content to stand in opposition to certain teachings the authentic Paul did advocate, then it would appear that the label of “forgery” should readily apply to these letters. If we really have such forgeries in our New Testament, the canonical status of such forgeries would be in clear jeopardy, and any scholar who accepts the claim of “forgeries” should reject such writings in “faithfulness” to the truth. How “forgery” and “faithfulness” appear to be congruent with one another is quite a mystery, at least to me. How then does Dr. Bashaw define the category of “pseudonymity?”

In an article for “The Bible for Normal People” podcast, Dr. Bashaw argues that ancient authorship is not what you think: “There were several levels of authorship considered authentic in the first century—the author could dictate or commission a letter for an amanuensis to write …., there could be co-authors either named or unnamed (which is the case in several Pauline letters), a disciple could write in a teacher’s name with or without the permission of the teacher, or an admirer or later disciple of a person could write a letter in the style of that author and use his name (often posthumously).”

Dr. Bashaw is surely correct about the use of a secretary (or amanuensis), and/or co-authors, in ancient letter writing. The particular case of a disciple writing in a teacher’s name with the permission of the teacher will be addressed in the next blog post in this series. However, as to the other situations Dr. Bashaw describes, that of a disciple writing in a teacher’s name without permission of the teacher, or a later admirer writing a letter in the style of the author, and using his name, Bart Erhman explicitly argues against this view, and his arguments are formidable.

For Ehrman, the use of a person’s name without permission in writing a letter would be just as objectionable in the ancient world as it is in our contemporary world today. Even if a later admirer without permission, having no immediate contact with the supposed author, would write a letter pseudonymously, and even express many of that famous author’s ideas correctly, it would still be rejected as forgery.

Strikingly, while a number of progressive Christian scholars will accept the basic reasoning advanced by Bart Ehrman that letters like 1 Timothy, etc. were forged, these same scholars will reject the use of the label “forgery” because to them it sounds too negative. Ehrman is frustrated by this response, and for good reason. This short YouTube clip demonstrates this frustration:

Eusebius records that the Acts of Paul and Thecla and Third Corinthians were written by persons “out of love for Paul,” with much of the theological content contained within those letters to be in alignment with Paul’s known thoughts. Yet in the case of both of these documents, they were rejected from being eligible for containment within canonical New Testament Scripture because of the deceitful authorship. The actual authors of the Acts of Paul and Thecla and Third Corinthians lived long after Paul was dead, and so had no direct contact with the Paul of history. Such documents are useful in helping us understand the shape of Christian history and doctrinal development. But as authoritative sources for New Testament life and teaching, the early church resoundingly rejected such writings.

The case is even more damaging for popular writings which invariably distorted the teachings of the famous author being misrepresented, despite what some might consider to be good intent. Eusebius recalls that the late second century Serapion, bishop of Antioch, rejected the Gospel of Peter as not being truly New Testament Scripture:

“For our part, brethren we receive both Peter and the other apostles as Christ, but the writings which falsely bear their names we reject, as men of experience knowing that such were not handed down to us“.⁶

Is “Paul’s” Letter to Titus Incurably Racist, So Much So That We Should Deny It Ever Being Written By the “Real” Paul?

Dr. Bashaw is not alone in her views. I know of yet another progressive Christian scholar, who shall not be named, who believes that Paul did not write the letter to Titus, while still insisting that the pseudonymous character of the letter need not be labeled pejoratively as a “forgery.” In Titus 1:12, the author quotes Epimenides, most likely, when he says “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” However, this scholar states that for Paul to have referenced this quote is actually something the genuine Paul would never do. Presumably, this scholar believes that this negative reference as to the Cretans being “liars” is a kind of ethnic slur that would have been unbecoming of the Apostle Paul. Others who accept this interpretation would either be forced to conclude that Paul completely erred in making such a racist comment, or that indeed, the “real” Paul never had anything to do with writing this letter to Titus. It was the work of an imposter!

However, this scholar whom I shall not name misunderstands the context for this quotation. Just prior to the Epimenides quotation, Paul acknowledges that there are members of the “circumcision party,” otherwise affiliated with the Judaizers of Galatians, who were deceiving Gentile Christians to think that they must become circumcised in order to become fully Jewish and fully follow Christ. Paul urges Titus that such false teachers should be silenced (Titus 1:10-11). Paul’s use of the Epimenides quote was not being used as an ethnic slur, so as to slander all Cretans. Rather, Paul is referencing the supposed immoral reputation of the Cretans in order to describe in particular these false teachers who were, in fact, lying to the Gentile Christians.

Nevertheless, it is important to state that the argument in defense of Paul in Titus is even stronger than that! Paul was giving an illustration of a well-known logical paradox to show that the false teachers in the church were misusing language in order to deceive believers: the so-called “liar’s paradox.”

The key to understanding the “liar’s paradox” is grounded in the fact that Epimenides himself was from Crete, a Cretan making a supposedly true claim that all Cretans are liars. If “Cretans are always liars,” would you really believe a Cretan, like Epimenides? Paul’s sarcastic expression in the next verse, verse 13, “This testimony is true,” is tongue in cheek, underscoring how logically deceitful the false teachers of Crete really were. Paul is using a famous quote familiar to the Cretans, to illustrate the logical inconsistency of the false teachers in Crete. Therefore, to classify Paul’s use of the Epimenides quote as a kind of broadly ethnic slur is to distort the rather sophisticated context in which Paul was using it. It is an unconvincing argument to make if one wishes to attribute Titus to have been written by someone other than Paul.⁷

To claim, as this scholar appears to suggest, such a pseudonymous writing is somehow still not a forgery, after making such a stinging critique about the use of the “Cretans are always liars” quote is quite baffling. For if the author of Titus would misrepresent the authentic Paul so badly, then this only reinforces the argument that Titus is indeed a forgery. Such a line of thinking appears to be more like a form of “wishful thinking,” a vain attempt to somehow retain the use of Titus as genuine Scripture for the Christian by somehow pretending that the letter is not a forgery, while at the same time making an argument which actually suggests that Titus is indeed a forgery!! How astonishing and perplexing can such scholarship be?

Frankly, Bart Ehrman’s rejection of this kind of fallacious thinking is far more convincing than the case made by this progressive Christian scholar to somehow “save” Titus from the jaws of “forgery” status. It is far more convincing to either reject Titus as being forgery altogether, or else accept Titus as being fully and authentically Pauline. Such alternatives are more plausible than this kind of convoluted, progressive Christian logic. Better yet, it makes better sense to say that indeed the early church got it right in judging Titus to be an actual letter authorized by the Apostle Paul.⁸

This same progressive Christian scholar, who still is not to be named, holds to the belief that the Bible allows for women to serve as “elders/overseers” in a Christian church. However, this scholar is not an evangelical egalitarian; that is, one who believes that the teaching regarding women in 1 Timothy is only addressing a particular historical, culturally-limited situation in Timothy’s church in Ephesus, and therefore, is not applicable to churches today. Instead, this scholar quite frankly acknowledges that the author, whom this scholar claims is pseudonymously writing under Paul’s name, in 1 Timothy 2-3 is restricting the office of “elder/overseer” to that of being a qualified male, in very much a universalizing sense. As a result, this scholar contends that this message in 1 Timothy goes against Paul’s established teaching elsewhere in his truly authentic letters.

If this scholar is correct, does this not indicate a blatant contradiction in the New Testament? How could it be fully asserted that a supposedly pseudonymous work like 1 Timothy be still accepted within the New Testament canon, and not call it a deceptive forgery?

Remember Dan McClellan? : A Better Answer to the “Scholarly Consensus”

In the first blog post in this series reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery, I brought up a short YouTube video where skeptic-leaning biblical scholar, Dan McClellan, dismisses the pastoral letters as having been written by the Apostle Paul, citing the “scholarly consensus.” As explained in  Forgery and Counterforgery, Bart Ehrman concludes that these three letters are assuredly “forgeries.”

At this point, after reviewing the data thus far, it might be good to return to McClellan’s videos on this topic (he has done several, much of them repeating the same types of arguments), and make a summary response to McClellan’s claims. Thankfully, Erik Manning from the YouTube Testify channel, has done that for me. Erik has done a nice job drilling down on the details with a 13 1/2 minute video responding to McClellan’s claims:

Frankly, it is embarrassing to think that so many progressive Christians are taken in by the skepticism along the lines of a Bart Ehrman or a Dan McClellan. Sadly even more so, such progressive Christians continue to push these types of narratives in their respective churches, without acknowledging other viable ways of interpreting the data, more inline with historic orthodox Christianity.

However, suppose someone is still not honestly convinced that Paul really wrote 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, or Titus. I mean, how can someone argue against such a broad scholarly consensus? Nevertheless, there is still yet another way to think about the authorship of the pastoral letters.

Is There Yet Another Defensible Approach to the Pastoral Letters as Being Truly Pauline?

Evangelical Christians still continue to debate how to interpret provocative statements, like in 1 Timothy 2:11-12, where the author says that a woman is not to teach or have authority over a man, and what the exact qualifications for elder/overseer are in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. But to argue as some progressive Christians do that 1 Timothy is making a universal prohibition against women serving as elders/overseers in a local church, while still saying that this irreconcilably contradicts Paul’s teachings in his other letters, does not demonstrate a high level of confidence in the integrity and inspiration of the New Testament writings as a whole. There are better answers to this claim that the authentic Paul of the undisputed Pauline letters is at irreconcilable odds with the pseudonymous “Paul” of the letters to Timothy and Titus.⁹

Nevertheless, some scholars suggest that there might be cases where a pseudonymous work might still be received as inspired Scripture, without the negative stain of deceptive forgery.  In other words, a case can be made to suggest something else, that a disciple of Paul could have written the pastoral letters, or at least, completed them after Paul’s death, while still acting in good faith under Paul’s apostolic authority.

This thesis requires a bit of unpacking and will be discussed in the next blog post in this series. But I will take a break from this topic for a few weeks and pick this series back up again in the New Year of 2024.

Notes:

^{1. See N.T. Wright, Paul and the Righteousness of God, p. 61 ↩}

^{2. Ehrman brings out a number of these arguments on p. 198, and elsewhere, which I try to answer in this paragraph associated with this footnote.  For a YouTube summary of Ehrman’s views, see this YouTube Q&A session on the History Valley channel where I queried Dr. Ehrman.  See also Kümmel, Introduction to the New Testament, p. 370 ff.  Dan McClellan offers additional points of evidence against Pauline authorship of the pastoral letters, namely that up to a third of the vocabulary found in the pastoral letters never shows up in Paul’s undisputed letters. The theology of being “in Christ” is presented differently than what we find in the undisputed letters. The emphasis on the body (soma) which is so prevalent in the undisputed letters is entirely missing in the pastoral letters.  McClellan notes that the emphasis of the time being short, as found in the undisputed letters, is missing in the pastoral letters.  But this latter point can be adequately addressed by noting that if these letters were written late in Paul’s life, he probably had come to the realization that there was indeed a delay in the parousia (popularly known as the “Second Coming of Christ”), which would probably not occur within Paul’s own lifetime. These objections do cause some difficulties, but they are not insurmountable.  ↩}

^{3. See  Christopher M. Date, “By Command of God Our Savior: A Defense of the Pauline Authorship of the Pastoral Epistles”, in Diligence: Journal of the Liberty University Online Religion Capstone in Research and Scholarship: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 5., p.8., for further exploration of this critique of Bart Ehrman’s argument.  ↩}

^{4. It should be noted that many critical scholars dismiss a great deal of historical accuracy with respect to Acts, and some even suggest that Acts was written well into the second century, which puts Acts out of range of being authored by .  Nevertheless, even if one does not consider Acts, Philippians is sufficient to demonstrate that church structure, for the sake of guarding against false doctrine, would have been a legitimate concern for Paul. Ehrman provides some pushback (Erhman, p. 210) by noting that the word for “elders,” Greek, presbyteroi, is not present in any of the authentic letters. However, most scholars acknowledge that the category of “elder” (presbyteroi) and “overseer” (episcopos) are interchangeable.Therefore, this is a weak argument presented by Ehrman.  ↩}

^{5. In Forgery and Counterforgery, Ehrman views the pseudonymous author of 1 Timothy to be misogynistic. Furthermore, Ehrman argues that attempts by evangelical egalitarian scholars to try to “get Paul off the hook” fail in that there is no indication in the text that the author had some type of local situation in mind, nor any specific thought of addressing a particular feature of the Artemis cult seeping into the Ephesian church (see the question I asked Dr. Ehrman in a YouTube Q&A session on the History Valley YouTube channel). According to Ehrman, attempts to say that the author is only talking about the relationship between husbands and wives, in that wives are not to have authority over their husbands (1 Timothy 2:11-12) likewise fail as the very next set of verses in 1 Timothy 3 speaks of men and women, not husbands and wives, thus making such an interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:11-12 “implausible” (Erhman, p. 375). Some suggest that the pseudonymous author of 1 Timothy is trying to elaborate on 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 about the silence of women in the churches, thus reinvigorating the argument with more force. Ehrman views Gordon Fee’s argument that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is a later interpolation, and not original to Paul, as a “rather weak argument” (Erhman, p. 377). However, Ehrman does not consider the possibility that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 might be an example of quotation/refutation rhetorical device at work. Nor does he consider any sacramental understanding of 1 Timothy 2:8-15 at work as a counter-argument to the supposed misogyny of the “Pauline” author.  See previous Veracity blog posts. ….. As I have argued elsewhere, a more sacramentalist approach to eldership can help us to understand why the New Testament puts “eldership” into a category different from other roles in church leadership. Evangelical egalitarians propose a different way of understanding Paul’s comments about women in 1 Timothy, in that Paul has in mind a specific situation in Ephesus, as opposed to a universalizing command which does not permit women to serve as elders in a local church. However, numerous critical scholars are not convinced by this reasoning, arguing that evangelical egalitarians follow this line of thinking as somehow a failed attempt to “rescue” Pauline authorship of the pastoral letters. By accepting the same argument made by critical scholars that 1 Timothy 2:8-15 appears to contradict Paul’s teaching in his authentic, undisputed letters, evangelical egalitarians have placed themselves in the same position as more secular-minded critical scholars, thus forcing them to reach for alternative readings of the pastoral letters, which secular-minded critical scholars do not find to be convincing. Evangelical complementarians, on the other hand, do not have the same problem, as they do not ultimately see a fundamental contradiction between what we have in general statements about women in the pastoral letters versus what we have in Paul’s undisputed letters.  See blog post reviewing Andrew Bartlett’s book.  For an interview with Oxford scholar and Anglican priest John Barton by Islamic YouTube apologist, Paul Williams, elucidating his perspective, see the following video:}

^{Below, Daniel McClellan critiques a view by an evangelical egalitarian pastor who claims that the restriction against women as elders in 1 Timothy was simply something in reference to a particular situation in Ephesus.}

^{While friendly to the thesis regarding 1 Timothy and women, McClellan is skeptical about whether or not we actually have data to support this thesis, and I would actually agree with McClellan here. In particular, the evangelical pastor being interviewed makes the claim that there was a deity figure in Ephesus (Artemis) who was a “fertility goddess” (about the 3:30 minute mark).  This designation of Artemis as a goddess of fertility has been proven patently false, yet many evangelical egalitarian scholars/pastors continue to repeat this falsehood. S. M. Baugh argues that “Artemis of Ephesus in Pauline Ephesus was a state goddess cast in the form of the classic virgin huntress….. We looked at some of the positive evidence from Ephesus to show that the priestesses of Artemis—wrongly thought by many today to be a fertility or mother goddess—were no more than daughters of noble families, whose terms of office involved them in the honorary public roles and the financial obligations which typified priestly offices in Greek state cults. A priestess of Artemis compares better with a Rose Bowl queen or with Miss Teen America than with a cult prostitute.”  Artemis was a virgin, NOT a fertility goddess. (see S.M. Baugh, “Cult Prostitution in New Testament Ephesus: A Reappraisal”, JETS 42/3, September 1999, p. 459-460). We should take McClellan’s critique more seriously on that particular issue, yet there is more to consider here. While McClellan’s reasoning about 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is not entirely wrong,  a quotation/refutation view of the passage is the more plausible.  Either way, it is fair to say that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 does not accurate reflect Paul’s actual views about women. Also, McClellan argues that with respect to 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, this passage is “no where argued to be deutero-Pauline.” yet as I reviewed in the Veracity blog series on head coverings, McClellan is factually incorrect, as there are scholars who indeed make that very argument. I offer a better reading of that passage. However, McClellan lumps this concern about misogyny, along with Paul’s teaching about slavery, and Paul’s call for celibacy in the authentic letters as things that we no longer as moderns accept, and that such texts as 1 Timothy can be simply “renegotiated” as not applicable to our day and time. However, McClellan sets up a number of false dichotomies in this video that should be rejected, for several reasons: (a) having only men serve as elders in churches is not inherently misogynistic. It is no more misogynistic than it is to say that only having Levites serve as priests in ancient Israel somehow demonstrates the supposed inherent superiority of the Levites over and against other Israelites. It does not. (b) while Paul in places appears to approve of the current Greco-Roman slavery system, so as to not impede the spread of the Gospel, and does not explicitly come out and condemn slavery, Paul’s letter to Philemon indicating that he treats Onesimus, a runaway slave, as like a brother or son is a radical departure from the Greco-Roman thinking about slavery, which did not view slaves in such a familial way, thus sowing the seeds for the later abolitionist movement (see this video by Dr. Bill Mounce), (c) Paul’s call to celibacy is not absolute as McClellan tends to imply, as even in 1 Corinthians 7, he does allow for marriage. If one takes Ephesians and Colossians to be authentically Pauline, the case for Paul and marriage is strengthened as both of these letters are strongly pro-marriage. See my previous blog posts about women in the church and slavery for more detail.}

^↩

^{6. Eusebius citation of Serapion as found in, Donald Hagner, The New Testament: A Historical and Theological Introduction, p. 430..  ↩}

^{7. Interestingly, Bart Ehrman acknowledges the possible presence of the “liar’s paradox” in Titus 1:13 (Erhman, p. 373). Contra to Philip Towner in  Letters to Timothy and Titus, New International Commentary, Kindle location 14059, whose reasoning is sympathetic yet weaker here, the evidence for this “liar’s paradox” is in the text. R.L. Thomas and Andreas Köstenberger write: “Paul’s citation taps into the common Greek convention of the “liar paradox,” as though one were to ask, “Everything that I say is a lie: is this true?”’ (See Thomas and Köstenberger Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Titus, p. 418). According to tradition, the Cretans claimed that Zeus was not only born in Crete but that his tomb was in Crete as well.  Greeks outside of Crete viewed the claim of Zeus’ tomb as a pure lie. Some scholars, such as Craig Keener, contend that the Epimenides quote was “so common that logicians played with it: if Cretans are always liars, then Epimenides was lying, but if he was lying about this, then the saying was untrue and Epimenides need not be lying. [With respect to Paul’s use of :] evil brutes, lazy gluttons. Thinkers called unreasoning people brutes (cf. 2Pe 2:12); gluttons were associated with the base pursuit of pleasure (cf. note on Php 3:19)” (See Keener, NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, p. 10630).  This would indicate that Paul was using the Epimenides quote to ridicule the false teachers in the Cretan church, as such false teachers were making false claims about the Gospel, while contending that what they said was true. Anthony Thiselton argues in a similar manner: “The paradox in Titus is clear: a Cretan is quoted as saying that Cretans are always liars. If he was telling the truth then his claim is false for as a Cretan himself he too is a liar and cannot be trusted. But if he was not telling the truth then his claim that Cretans are liars is a lie—in fact they speak truthfully. But then he too would be speaking truthfully. A paradox! What Paul is doing, I shall argue, is using this paradox to talk about right use of language” (See Thiselton, Puzzling Passages in Paul: Forty Conundrums Calmly Considered, p. 117).    Titus 1:16 suggests that the false teachers “claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him.” (Thiselton, p. 117).  In other words, the false teachers of Crete were misusing language just as the Epimenedes’ quote misuses language. Paul was using a familiar logical paradox in order to urge the elders of Crete to instill sound doctrine within the church, so as to encourage the believers to faithfully obey God. Paul’s use of the quote had nothing to do with making some kind of ethnic slur. The title of Thiselton’s chapter in his book regarding this topic is: “Is the epistle to Titus incurably racist?” We can answer this question with a confident and resounding, “NO.” ↩}

^{8. See Barton, p. 185, admits the problem.  “Liberal readers of the Bible may either consciously or subconsciously take less notice of the pseudonymous texts, while still being interested in their content and open to finding aspects of them illuminating; but for more conservative readers the problem is acute, since they are committed to the full inspiration of these texts.” ↩}

^{9. See early Veracity blog posts on complementarian/egalitarian debate. For further evangelical views on authorship of the pastoral letters, see these lectures by Fred Sanders, and these lectures from Stephen Boyce.  ↩}

What does ChatBot AI have to say about who wrote the New Testament? This is the second post in a multi-part series reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery.

Nowhere does the seriousness of the claims of forgery in the New Testament become so problematic as when it comes to the letters associated with the Apostle Paul. Aside from the writings attributed to Luke, Paul is our most prolific author in the New Testament, making up 23.5% in terms of total word count. We have explicit statements in thirteen of our New Testament books which either ascribe the writing of these letters to the Apostle Paul alone, or in a few other explicit cases, Paul along with a fellow companion, such as with Timothy in the case of Colossians.

However, not every scholar agrees that Paul wrote all thirteen of these letters. Unless you take a religion class at a secular college or university, or spend much time on social media, you might not know about this. However, we can always ask an artificial intelligence bot, like ChatGPT, to give us a current summary of the scholarly debate. If I type in “Did Paul write all 13 letters attributed to him in the New Testament?,” here is a typical answer you will get:

There is some scholarly debate over whether the Apostle Paul wrote all 13 of the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. While traditionally these letters are attributed to Paul, some scholars have raised questions about the authorship of a few of them. The letters that are generally considered to be undisputed or securely attributed to Paul are:

• • Romans
  • 1 Corinthians
  • 2 Corinthians
  • Galatians
  • Philippians
  • Philemon
  • 1 Thessalonians

These letters are widely accepted as authentic Pauline writings. However, there is more debate about the authorship of the following letters:

• • Ephesians
  • Colossians
  • 2 Thessalonians
  • 1 Timothy
  • 2 Timothy
  • Titus

Some scholars believe that these letters may have been written by followers of Paul or in his tradition, but not necessarily by Paul himself. The reasons for this debate include differences in writing style, vocabulary, and theological emphasis between the undisputed and disputed letters.

Ultimately, the question of authorship may not have a definitive answer, and opinions on this matter can vary among scholars. It’s important to note that these debates do not diminish the religious significance of these letters in the Christian tradition, but they are a subject of scholarly inquiry and discussion.

Well, there you go. Artificial intelligence speaks!

Bart Ehrman would fit in that category of a scholar who seriously questions the authenticity of those six letters mentioned last. Ehrman unashamedly describes all six of those letters as “forgeries.” That is a pretty serious claim. Is there a defensible, historically orthodox answer to this?

 

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