Believers of course will dismiss out of hand the claims of renowned biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman, because facts are just not an important ingredient when it comes to religions.
They only time the faithful deign to deal in facts is when they are manipulating them to serve their beliefs.
Half of New Testament forged, Bible scholar says
By John Blake
A frail man sits in chains inside a dank, cold prison cell. He has escaped death before but now realizes that his execution is drawing near.
"I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come," the man -the Apostle Paul - says in the Bible's 2 Timothy. "I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith."
The passage is one of the most dramatic scenes in the New Testament. Paul, the most prolific New Testament author, is saying goodbye from a Roman prison cell before being beheaded. His goodbye veers from loneliness to defiance and, finally, to joy.
There's one just one problem - Paul didn't write those words. In fact, virtually half the New Testament was written by impostors taking on the names of apostles like Paul. At least according to Bart D. Ehrman, a renowned biblical scholar, who makes the charges in his new book "Forged."
"There were a lot of people in the ancient world who thought that lying could serve a greater good," says Ehrman, an expert on ancient biblical manuscripts.In "Forged," Ehrman claims that:
- At least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries.
- The New Testament books attributed to Jesus' disciples could not have been written by them because they were illiterate.
- Many of the New Testament's forgeries were manufactured by early Christian leaders trying to settle theological feuds.
Were Jesus' disciples 'illiterate peasants'?
Ehrman's book, like many of his previous ones, is already generating backlash. Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar, has written a lengthy online critique of "Forged."
Witherington calls Ehrman's book "Gullible Travels, for it reveals over and over again the willingness of people to believe even outrageous things."
All of the New Testament books, with the exception of 2 Peter, can be traced back to a very small group of literate Christians, some of whom were eyewitnesses to the lives of Jesus and Paul, Witherington says.
"Forged" also underestimates the considerable role scribes played in transcribing documents during the earliest days of Christianity, Witherington says.
Even if Paul didn't write the second book of Timothy, he would have dictated it to a scribe for posterity, he says.
"When you have a trusted colleague or co-worker who knows the mind of Paul, there was no problem in antiquity with that trusted co-worker hearing Paul's last testimony in prison," he says. "This is not forgery. This is the last will and testament of someone who is dying."
Ehrman doesn't confine his critique to Paul's letters. He challenges the authenticity of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John. He says that none were written by Jesus' disciplies, citing two reasons.
He says none of the earliest gospels revealed the names of its authors, and that their current names were later added by scribes.
Ehrman also says that two of Jesus' original disciples, John and Peter, could not have written the books attributed to them in the New Testament because they were illiterate.
"According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agrammatoi, a Greek word that literally means 'unlettered,' that is, 'illiterate,' '' he writes.
Will the real Paul stand up?
Ehrman reserves most of his scrutiny for the writings of Paul, which make up the bulk of the New Testament. He says that only about half of the New Testament letters attributed to Paul - 7 of 13 - were actually written by him.
Paul's remaining books are forgeries, Ehrman says. His proof: inconsistencies in the language, choice of words and blatant contradiction in doctrine.
For example, Ehrman says the book of Ephesians doesn't conform to Paul's distinctive Greek writing style. He says Paul wrote in short, pointed sentences while Ephesians is full of long Greek sentences (the opening sentence of thanksgiving in Ephesians unfurls a sentence that winds through 12 verses, he says).
"There's nothing wrong with extremely long sentences in Greek; it just isn't the way Paul wrote. It's like Mark Twain and William Faulkner; they both wrote correctly, but you would never mistake the one for the other," Ehrman writes.
The scholar also points to a famous passage in 1 Corinthians in which Paul is recorded as saying that women should be "silent" in churches and that "if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home."
Only three chapters earlier, in the same book, Paul is urging women who pray and prophesy in church to cover their heads with veils, Ehrman says: "If they were allowed to speak in chapter 11, how could they be told not to speak in chapter 14?"
Why people forged
Forgers often did their work because they were trying to settle early church disputes, Ehrman says. The early church was embroiled in conflict - people argued over the treatment of women, leadership and relations between masters and slaves, he says.
"There was competition among different groups of Christians about what to believe and each of these groups wanted to have authority to back up their views," he says. "If you were a nobody, you wouldn't sign your own name to your treatise. You would sign Peter or John."
So people claiming to be Peter and John - and all sorts of people who claimed to know Jesus - went into publishing overdrive. Ehrman estimates that there were about 100 forgeries created in the name of Jesus' inner-circle during the first four centuries of the church.
Witherington concedes that fabrications and forgeries floated around the earliest Christian communities. But he doesn't accept the notion that Peter, for example, could not have been literate because he was a fisherman.
"Fisherman had to do business. Guess what? That involves writing, contracts and signed documents," he said in an interview.
Witherington says people will gravitate toward Ehrman's work because the media loves sensationalism.
"We live in a Jesus-haunted culture that's biblically illiterate," he says. "Almost anything can pass for historical information... A book liked 'Forged' can unsettle people who have no third or fourth opinions to draw upon."
Ehrman, of course, has another point of view.
"Forged" will help people accept something that it took him a long time to accept, says the author, a former fundamentalist who is now an agnostic.
The New Testament wasn't written by the finger of God, he says - it has human fingerprints all over its pages.
"I'm not saying people should throw it out or it's not theologically fruitful," Ehrman says. "I'm saying that by realizing it contains so many forgeries, it shows that it's a very human book, down to the fact that some authors lied about who they were."
God help us! I subscribe to this and maybe it's fooling:
“Only the intuition that there is a superior invisible order gives any significance and meaning to human actions, whether they be individual or collective.”
- Adrian Salbuchi
I don't see that individual lives have any meaning beyond the ones that the individual assigns themselves...which is to say that the meaning of life for an individual is to give life meaning.
Beyond that there is the unknowable. I find my reverence/awe, if you will, in the sheer magnitude of both the universal scales, both micro and macro.
I don't codify it nor try to encapsulate it. Simply accepting my temporal part in it is enough for me.
Here's a lyric I wrote which more or less expresses my religious tendencies:
River of Life mp3
the river of life swallows everyone
yes, eventually we drown
and it rolls on so slowly
we don't notice its around
breathing may give you confidence
some meaning is assured
but the river of life
doesn't even know we're there
no, the river can't reassure...
do
you know
how
to get
to you?
we grow up stuffed like teddybears
made from pieces used before
born straight into innocence
'cept for the sin of wanting more
we all wind up downstream
with the scenery all changed
and the dreams we had all vanished
yes, the dreams get rearranged
do
you know
how
to get
to you?
I must read this book. This guy takes on the questions that too many are afraid to ask. I myself, have always wondered about how these books were put together.
It is a deadly mixture for so many Christians to not question the authority of their own church. The faithful faithfully drink from this poison cup as a wino drinks from his bottle. I should know, I am one of Christianity's victims.
We are all in this culture victim's of Christian history. I started quite early throwing off the yoke and recognizing first the absurdities and contradictions in the premises, then noting the cruelties and hypocrisy and finally acquiring perspective through study of world religions and secular thought.
As it is, this place is a mess and will likely I fear continue to be a mess for some time to come until we can unshackle ourselves from religion's dictates.
"this place is a mess and will likely I fear continue to be a mess for some time to come"
You are so right. I believe over half of the US professes to be Christian. Of that number, I am pretty sure the majority do not question the authority of their church. This is very dangerous.
My situation is a little different. I needed the faith in order to cope with my surroundings, it was my escape from the dichotomy of what Jesus said and what the church practiced. I did what few in the church do, I chose Jesus over the church. But now I am finding that this was a false choice, a choice between two ideas, neither of which is based in reality. So, after decades of this type of thinking, to say the least, my deprogramming is next to impossible to achieve....but it doesn't keep me from trying.