Forgery in Antiquity Archives - Page 3 of 7 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Forgery for a General Audience

Last week I tried to show the contrast between my trade books for general audiences and my academic books for scholars, by posting the very beginning of my book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, a tradebook, 2020) and the beginning of my book Jouneys to Heaven and Hell in the Early Christian Tradition (Yale University, due out April 5 2022; a scholarly book). The general topics are similar, as you can see by the titles, but they are not actually about the same thing. And the level of discourse is different. So too with my books on forgery -- I wrote one for a general audience (Forged: Writing in the Name of God -- Why the Bible Authors are Not Who We Think They Are Harper San Francisco, 2011) and the other for academics (Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in the Early Christian Tradition, Oxford University Press, 2013). In this case the differences are more obvious, I think, from both the titles and the openings. Here is how [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:57:06-04:00February 27th, 2022|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity|

Did Some One Forge the Writings of “John”? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez

Here my colleague Hugo Mendez wraps up his discussion of the writings of "John" -- the Gospel of John, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John -- and he does so with a BANG. I hope you can see both the quality and significance of these conclusions. This is very serious and persuasive scholarship put at a level that even non-scholars can understand, with huge implications for understanding four of the important writings of the New Testament but also for rethinking questions of authorship of the early Christian writings and the history of our earliest Christian communities. It's easy for scholars to see these implications (mainly because the conclusions he reaches are contrary to what most critical scholars actually teach their students all the time), which is why Hugo has stirred up a bit of a hornets' nest. I hope it's possible for you to both appreciate and enjoy the argument as well. There is only one point on which he and I probably disagree, and it has to do with the authorship of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:09-04:00May 19th, 2020|Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Problems with Thinking the “Letters of John” in the NT are Forgeries? Guest Post: Hugo Mendez

This thread of posts we have been having by Hugo Mendez on the writings of "John" in the New Testament has been unusually stimulating and in the world of scholarship, controversial. If you haven't followed the thread, just look at the four that have already been posted starting two weeks ago. If he were to argue that 1 Timothy was not really written by Paul, but someone claiming to be Paul (i.e., that it was a "forgery"), not a single New Testament scholar in the country would raise an eyebrow. But to claim the letters of John are forgeries? Yikes -- now *that* is something you don't hear every day. But can the claim be sustained? Here Hugo answers some of the objections others might raise. What do you think? Convinced? NOTE: most posts on the blog are for members only. This one is open to anyone who wants to see it. Wanna see this kind of post five times each and every week, going back eight years? Join [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:09-04:00May 18th, 2020|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Are the Gospel and Epistles of John Forgeries?? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez

Whoa! Forgeries? That seems a bit extreme! Right? Forgeries??? Hugo Mendez continues his discussion, and I have to say, it's pretty convincing. He and I may disagree on a couple of things about the Gospel of John -- I haven't decided yet :-) -- but on the epistles I'm gettin' there and am open to persuasion on the entire case. What do you think? The hardest part for most of us is preventing the knee that is jerking from controlling our brain that is judging. So read what he has to say, ponder it, and see what you think -- no matter how out of control the knee is. And if you see flaws in what he's saying, free to tell him (and me, and everyone else!) why. Here's his fourth post. ***************************************************** The Johannine Texts as Literary Forgeries The primary reason why scholars believe a “Johannine community” once existed is that we possess not only a Johannine Gospel (John) but also three Johannine Epistles/Letters (1, 2, and 3 John). Those letters seem to actually [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:09-04:00May 12th, 2020|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Did Paul Write Colossians? According to Most Scholars No – Paul did Not Write Colossians
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Did Paul Write Colossians? According to Most Scholars No – Paul did Not Write Colossians

Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Paul and His Letters

Did Paul Write Colossians? According to Most Scholars No – Paul did Not Write Colossians

Did Paul write Colossians? Asking and answering questions like this every now and then is useful on the blog to shift gears away from explaining at a more popular level what scholars have come to think - to showing how scholars make their arguments to one *another*. I don't want to do this a lot, but it seems that it can be helpful at times, just so blog readers can get a bit of a sense. Right now I'm in them middle of a thread on whether the author of Luke was really "Luke the gentile physician," one of Paul's traveling companions. The only reason for thinking such a person even existed (a gentile doctor named Luke) is that he is mentioned by Paul in Colossians. In my previous post I explained why the majority of critical scholars don't think Paul actually wrote Colossians (so that the historical Paul does *not* mention this person). The post was written for a general audience, and a number of people raised questions about it. So here is how [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 11th, 2020|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Paul and His Letters|

Problems with Thinking That Luke Wrote Luke (and Acts)

I continue now with my discussion of whether one of Paul's traveling companions wrote the account of his life in the book of Acts, and thus, by association, the Gospel of Luke. It turns out to be a really sticky problem -- one of those that can't be solved simply by looking at a couple of verses and applying some basic logic. In my previous post I gave the logic that is typically adduced for thinking that the Luke was probably written by Luke, the gentile physician who was a companion of Paul for part of his missionary journeys. The short story, in sum: the author of Luke also wrote the book of Acts; the book of Acts in four places talks about what “we” (companions with Paul) were doing; both books were therefore written by one of Paul’s companions; Acts and Luke appear to have a gentile bias; only three of Paul’s companions were known to be gentiles (Colossians 4:7-14); Luke there is a gentile physician; Luke-Acts appears to have an enhanced interest in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 8th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Is It Ever Right to Lie? Or Was It? Even in Early Christianity? The Relevance for Forgery.

Is it ever morally acceptable – even desirable – to tell a bald-faced lie? That was probably a topic covered in your Philosophy 101 course. At a historian, I’m interested in the question from an ancient perspective. What did people in antiquity think about it? In particular Christians. Did they think – based on the Ten Commandments, say, or the teachings of Jesus, that a person should never lie? Or were they quite lax on the matter? Or something in between? I was actually a bit surprised to learn the answer to the question. And as you might expect, the answer is complicated. My original interest in the issue had to do with forgery. A forger claims to be someone famous, knowing full well he is someone else. That’s a lie, that is, it is a falsehood told intentionally. How did forgers justify that? It turns out, there appear to be answers. This is how I dealt with the matter in my lecture on forgery given at the conference in Quebec a couple of weeks [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 29th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

A Recent Argument that Ancient Pseudepigraphy Was NOT Deceptive (or Meant to Be)

I continue now with the lecture I gave on "forgery" in the ancient world, delivered at a conference in Quebec a couple of weeks ago. I had planned for this to be the last post, but I will have one more after this, the conclusion of my lecture where I deal with the ancient ethics of lying. In this one I talk about a brilliant recent attempt to argue that it was not (always) a deceitful practice to claim to be a famous person when writing a work in antiquity. ************************************************************** One of the most recent erudite and impressive attempts to defend at least one group of ancient pseudepigraphers comes in the study I mentioned earlier by Irene Peirano, a classicist at Yale, in her published Harvard dissertation, The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in Context. Most of this important book provides detailed analyses of highly literary Roman pseudepigrapha, including pseudo-Virgil. But she begins with a defense of her view that such works do not involve intentional deceptions but self-conscious “imitations” of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 24th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

What Motivated Some Ancient Authors to Lie About Themselves?

I return now to my lecture on ancient Pseudepigraphy, the practice of writing a book falsely claiming to be someone else, a famous person. I have been arguing that even in the ancient world this was considered to be a form of lying, the use of literary deceit, and authors who were detected doing it were outed and, if any moral judgment was passed, condemned for it. Today we would call it “forgery,” and the ancient discussions of it were similarly negative. Here is where I pick up in the lecture, part 3 of my 4 posts. (I think one of my most important points comes half way through, where I explain the key difference between “intention” and “motivation” – i.e., what we intend to do and what motivates us to do so. *************************************************** One could ask whether anyone on record in antiquity ever condoned the practice of pseudepigraphy. To my knowledge, there is only one possible trace of approval, in a single sentence of the late antique neo-Platonist Iamblichus, who does say, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 23rd, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

How Many Books in the New Testament Were Forged?

In response to the lecture on ancient practices of pseudepigraphy (writing in the name of a famous person when, alas, you are actually someone else), I received this important question, getting to the very basics – the heart and soul of the issue for students of early Christianity. QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I know you have published and spoken on the topic, but would you mind sharing which NT books are pseudepigraphical? RESPONSE Yes indeed, one of the reasons I’m so interested in this topic is that the use of pseudepigraphy, what today we would call “forgery,” was so much more widespread in antiquity than today, probably because there were far fewer people who were literate in the first place and so far fewer experts who could uncover a forgery; and those who could, of course, didn’t have our modern methods of analysis and technologies of data retrieval. It was very common in the Christian world as well. Before answering the question directly at the end of this post, let me just say something about how [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 20th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Reader’s Questions|

Were Ancient Readers Interested in Detecting Forgeries?

I continue now with my lecture this past week on whether ancient readers and writers considered pseudepigraphic writing – in which an author claimed to be someone else (always someone famous) – was seen as deceitful, a kind of literary lie, and is therefore appropriately, in an ancient context, appropriately considered by thos of us today, “forgery.” This is Part 2 of 4. ******************************************************** I do not need to give an extensive account of all the instances of ancient Echtheitskritik (= scholarly attempt to determine if a work is authentic) found throughout the surviving literature: full accounts are readily available in any of the lengthy monographs. To be sure, some recent scholars have claimed it was a rare discourse. But maybe abundance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I myself have always been struck by how extensive the discourse of authenticity is, going back in some sense to Herodotus and becoming a focus of interest for some authors, especially critics and biographers such as (the Roman medical writer of the second century) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 18th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

My Lecture in Quebec: Did Ancient Authors Try To Deceive Their Readers?

I have decided to go ahead and post the address I gave last week to an academic conference in Quebec on "Pseudepigraphy" in the ancient world. If you're not familiar with the term (why would you be??) it refers to a book written by an author who falsely claims to be someone else (like if I wrote a book and claimed to be Stephen King) (which maybe I should do....). Most scholars seem to think this was an acceptable practice in the ancient world. I don't. My lecture was meant to show why. This will take about four posts. Here's the beginning of the lecture (it came as the keynote at the end of two days of meetings/papers). In the post itself I have translated the foreign language terms I use. *************************************************************************************** Over the past three days we have enjoyed a wide range of papers on numerous important texts, specific instantiations of ancient pseudepigraphy. In this final address I will not be discussing a specific text but rather the broader phenomenon of pseudepigraphy itself, with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:13-04:00September 17th, 2019|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship|

My Two Books on Forgery

In a couple of weeks I will be going to Quebec City to deliver a keynote address for a scholarly conference on Pseudepigraphy in Antiquity; most of the presenters will be giving papers in French (hopefully we'll have written versions for those of us who can't pick up the nuances well orally), mine will be in English. I'll be saying more about it anon on the blog -- the work on the paper is getting me back into the question of ancient forgery, the practice of writing a book falsely claiming to be some other [famous] person, and whether it was generally seen as a deceitful practice. I'm firmly convinced it was -- other scholars in the field refuse to think so -- and whether "forgery" is the right term for it or is too loaded. In any event, I haven't worked rigorously in this field for ten years, and so am catching up in my reading. As it turns out, today on the blog I was going to post on the *second* time in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:12-04:00August 26th, 2019|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity|

An Ancient Author Trying to Justify His Deceit

Yesterday I talked about one Christian forger who got caught red handed who had to explain himself. Well, justify himself. Well, bend over backwards to make himself look innocent. We've been seeing a lot of that these days. It goes way back. Humans are humans. Here is my assessment of the situation, not in terms of our own front-page news but in terms of this obscure little controversy, which highlights my obscure little academic point: in the ancient world, readers simply did not *like* it when they found out someone had written a book claiming to a be a famous person. They condemned it. That should be borne in mine when thinking of other instances of the phenomenon, such as those found in far more familiar books from the early Christian tradition. (And this is the point the riles a number of my scholar friends, who just can't *believe* ancient authors would do something deceitful....) I'll start this post with a bit from the end of the previous one, to remind you about it. If [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 12th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity|

A Christian Forger Caught in the Act

Next month I will be giving a keynote address at a conference dealing with ancient pseudepigrapha at the University of Laval, in Quebec City. I have recently been discussing the topic (of ancient authors falsely claiming to be a famous person) on the blog in relation to the letter of James, and as you know, it was the subject of my monography Forgery and Counterforgery ten years ago, and my spin-off popular account Forged. I haven't worked seriously on the problem since then. But now, because of this upcoming lecture, I'm having to think about it long and hard again, a decade later. Lots of scholars simply don't (or can't?) believe that ancient people -- especially Christians, but others as well -- would lie about their identities. It's not that these scholars doubt that there are lots and lots of pseudepigrapha out there, Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian. There are. But these scholars don't think that the authors were doing anything duplicitous. There are different ways scholars have made this argument, but the basic line [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 11th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity|

Why Did the Author of James Claim to be James in Particular?

This will be my last post on the epistle of James in the New Testament as “counter”-forgery, that is, as a forgery (a book written by someone falsely claiming to be a famous person) that is written against another book that is itself a forgery (written by someone claiming to be some *other* famous person). In this case, the author is claiming to be James, the actual brother of Jesus, and he is writing to counter views of Paul – but not views Paul himself endorsed (exactly), but later developments of Paul’s views by an author (or authors) who wrote books, after Paul’s death, while *claiming* to be Paul. All a bit confusing! But here I finish by explaining why I think this author of the epistle of James claimed to be James in particular. Why did he choose that name? Why not some other? We will never know for sure, of course, but here are my thoughts about it. (This again is taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery; I’ve added a couple of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 6th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Is the Author of James Rejecting Paul Himself?

I have been talking about how the letter of James appears to refer to Paul's letters in order to contradict them (as has long been thought by scholars -- going back at least to Martin Luther). But as it turns out, I don't think it's actually that simple. I briefly mentioned this in an earlier post, but here is the fuller scoop. This again is taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery. I should remind you what I mean by those terms, "forgery" and "counterforgery." The term "forgery" is a technical term for a book that claims to be written by a famous person who in fact did not write it. (So "forgery" does NOT mean, in this context, something like "a made-up story." It refers specifically to the claim by an author -- either explicit or implicit -- to be someone other than he is.) A "counter-forgery" is a kind of forgery -- it refers to a forgery written in order to contradict the views found precisely in someone else's forgery (whether or not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 5th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

The Close Connections of James and Paul

I continue here my comparison of the wording of the book of James to the writing of Paul, in order to establish the point that whoever wrote James, it was someone who was directly responding to the letters of Paul (because he imitates Paul’s wording while refuting his views.) This will lead then to my argument – not yet made – that the author of James is in fact writing a “counter-forgery” – that is he is writing a forgery in order to counter later writings forged in the name of Paul. (I know this can be confusing: but I’m not saying he’s writing directly against Paul. He may *think* he is, but my argument is that he will be opposed to later writings claiming to be Paul; that argument will start in my next post.) Here now is the second example of the borrowing of Pauline writings: ************************************************** James 2:24 and Gal. 2:16 and Rohhhm. 3:28 James 2:24: You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone Gal. 2:16: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:57-04:00August 2nd, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Is James Responding to Paul?

I now begin to explain why someone might have wanted to (falsely) claim to be James the brother of Jesus when writing the letter attributed to him in the NT. My basic argument is that the letter is being written to oppose the writings of Paul (at least as they were being *interpreted*: whether Paul himself would have agreed with the interpretation of his views that they oppose is a completely different question), and the author needed someone of the stature of James in order to make the refutation convincing, both because James was the head of the Jerusalem church and because it was widely thought that he was at loggerheads with Paul. I have taken this again from my book Forgery and Counterforgery. It’s written for scholars, but I’ve tried to make it accessible by explaining the terms I use and translating the Greek. This will take a few posts, so here’s the start, where I lay the groundwork: the letter of James does seem to be responding to the writings of Paul. ************************************************************** [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:40-04:00July 31st, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Does James (the Book) Have the Same Concerns as James (the Man)? Part 2

This will be my last post mounting the case that the brother of Jesus, James, did not write the letter of James. Here I get into some of the most substantive issues: what does this author consider to be the most important aspects of his Christian faith, and how does this stack up against what we know otherwise of James of Jerusalem? And are there indications that in fact he is addressing issues that simply do not appear relevant to Christianity in its earliest stages? ***************************************************** In light of the previous post, it is interesting to notice which sins and failures occupy the author of the letter of James (given the dominant interest of James of Jerusalem, so far as we can know, on the importance of strict Torah observance). They are by and large not explicit violations of the Torah but moral shortcomings such as showing favoritism, not controlling one’s speech, and failing to help those in need. So too, what is “true religion” for this author? It has little to do with specific [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:40-04:00July 28th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

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