Forgery in Antiquity Archives - Page 4 of 7 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did James Write James?

In two previous posts I gave an overview of the letter of James, one of the real gems hidden away in the New Testament (it takes 15 minutes to read it, max. Try it! Great little book.) Now I want to devote several posts to address the question I was originally asked about it. Was it really written by James, the brother of Jesus, as traditionally claimed? I deal with that question at some length in my book Forgery and Counterforgery. I think the discussion is accessible to the non-expert. Here is how I begin (some of this has been edited to make it slightly more user-friendly). It ends up being an important issue: do we have a writing from Jesus’ own brother? Now *that* would be interesting! But, alas, I think not. *************************************************** The letter of James begins simply enough: “James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings” (1:1). A number of persons are named James in the New Testament, including the father [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 21st, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

One of My Favorite Letters in the New Testament: The Book of James

Sometimes the questions I get from readers are short and to the point, but require long answers over a number of posts. Here’s one of the recent ones: QUESTION: Could you write a blog on the book of James and why it is considered a forgery? RESPONSE: I think this question deserves an entire thread of responses. I haven’t talked much about the letter of James on the blog (at least so far as I can remember and tell!). So why not? It’s a short “book” – just five brief chapters. You can read it in fifteen minutes. Go ahead! What I say about it will then make better sense. The best known feature of the letter is that it *seems* to be opposing the writings and teachings of Paul. But does it? Martin Luther, father of the Reformation, thought so. He included the book only as an appendix to the New Testament. I talk about the letter, and the reasons I don’t think it was actually written by James, the brother of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 12th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Why Paul Did Not Write 2 Thessalonians: A Final Post

This will be my last post on the question of whether Paul wrote 2 Thessalonians. If you’ve been following all this, you know that my view is that he did not. My sense is that a lot of people have trouble accepting that view simply because it’s not what they’ve always heard and thought. It’s hard to change your mind about something that just seems sensible and right, even if you haven’t really given it much thought or attention. We’re *all* inclined to think what we’ve always thought. For most people, of course, the question doesn’t matter a twit. Who CARES? Well, some of us care. And if you’re one who does, then I’d suggest being open to changing your mind if the evidence takes you in a different direction. If you don’t want to change your mind, or are just on principle disinclined to do so, fair enough. We all have to decide that to think and also what even not to bother thinking about. (But then why are you reading these posts?!? J) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 18th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Does Paul Think the End is Coming Soon? Does 2 Thessalonians?

I now come to the crux of the matter, the argument that for me seems the most convincing that Paul probably did not write 2 Thessalonians. I already stated the argument in its simple form last week, here: https://ehrmanblog.org/did-paul-really-write-2-thessalonians/ Now I want to show how the argument gets grounded in a much deeper exploration of the text itself; in part this is to show that it’s not a particularly simple matter and in part it’s to illustrate, again, how scholars make argument like this to other scholars (as opposed to summarizing the results more broadly). That may not be your cup of tea – but if so, then be assured, another pot is brewing. Once more, this comes from the blog (five years ago), and can be found with footnotes (if you’re a real glutton for punishment) in my monograph Forgery and Counterforgery. I have translated most of the Greek here. For further guidance, among the technical terms I use, “realized eschatology” refers to the idea that believers are *already* enjoying the full benefits of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 17th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

2 Thessalonians as a Forgery? Does the Author “Write” Like Paul?

I have made the following post available to all readers, whether they belong to the blog or not. Rarely on the blog do I show how scholars make arguments to other experts in the field of biblical studies (as opposed to scholars who simply summarize the results for non-scholars); even more rarely do I make such posts available to anyone who wants to see. But here is an example -- just in case you're interested and would like to know. (You'll notice that once you get into the meat of the discussion, about half-way through, it's not the sort of thing that would occur to regular-ole readers of the Bible, even if they've been reading it their entire lives.) This is a "re-post" of a post I made some five years ago. If you were a member of the blog, you could read five posts a week, nearly always written at a popular level for non-scholars, but always based on scholarship "behind the scenes" (like this). So think about joining! ************************************************************* In my previous two [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 16th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Is 2 Thessalonians a Forgery Based on 1 Thessalonians?

In a previous post I began giving the scholarly version of why 2 Thessalonians is often considered to be non-Pauline – that is, to be forged in the name of Paul by someone wanting you to think he was Paul even though he was someone else. That discussion was taken from my book Forged, written for a broader audience Now that I have given a (very) brief sketch of the history of the scholarship on this problem (the previous post) I can begin to discuss the actual evidence, taken from my deeper analysis in Forgery and Counterforgery. This is where the discussion gets down to business with more serious argumentation. As you'll see, it's not that the ideas themselves are hopelessly complex (we're not talking astro-physics here....) but that to write at the scholarly level requires assuming lots of background not usually known to normal people, -- only to abnormal biblical scholars -- and, correspondingly that it requires the use of Greek. That's the only kind of approach that will convince. (Not that scholars [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 14th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

2 Thessalonians: When Scholars Began To Doubt It Was Authentic

Since I am in Greece (starting out in Thessaloniki) I have begun reposting some blogs from five years ago connected with the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, which claims to be written by Paul but appears to have been written instead by someone else who wanted his readers to *think* he was Paul. My last post gave the heart of the matter from my trade book for a general audience, Forged: Writing in the Name of God – Why The Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. In the next several posts I will show how I address the same question for scholars, in my scholarly monograph, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. I thought this would be worth doing for two reasons. First, I’d like you to know – if you’re interested – what the full reasoning behind the common critical view of 2 Thessalonians is, that is, what the really persuasive arguments are. Some of these are long and complex and not easily simplified for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:18-04:00June 9th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Early Christian Liars

Yesterday I started explaining in some depth how forgers in early Christianity – that is, authors who falsely claimed to be, say, Peter or Paul or James (as in the case of the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy, the Proto-Gospel of James, etc.) – could justify their lies. I need to stress, the idea that they were lying is not just a modern one. The ancients talk about forgery a good deal; they never approve of it and they explicitly called it lying. Yet people did it, producing forgeries far more often than happens today. How did they live with themselves – especially those Christians who insisted that nothing was more important than “truth”? I pointed out yesterday that there were very broadly speaking two views of lying in early Christainity: 1) that it was sometimes acceptable; 2) it was never acceptable in any circumstance whatsoever. It’s not hard to see where forgers lined up on the spectrum. Here I continue the discussion, repeating the final paragraph of yesterday’s post for context. This is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:40-04:00May 7th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Could Christian Forgers Justifying Lying?

Yesterday, in response to a question, I started to discuss the age-old problem of literary forgery (authors lying about their true identity), and specifically the question of why Christians would engage in it. In my two books on the topic I spend considerable time trying to demonstrate that forgery was indeed understood – in antiquity – to involve lying, and that the authors who claimed (falsely) to be Plato or Galen or Peter or Paul knew they were lying. But why would they do that? Especially the Christians? Here is a fuller answer that I give at the end of my book: Forged: Writing in the Name of God. It follows a discussion of a number of modern (mainly 19th century) forgeries of Gospels, including the ones that claim that, for example, Jesus went to India as a young man to learn the ways of the Brahmins…. ************************************************************** Christian Forgeries, Lies, and Deceptions This issue of modern hoaxes brings me back to a question that I have repeatedly asked in my study of forgeries: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00May 6th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Did Ancient Christian Forgers Commit Forgery?

Here is an intriguing question I received recently about the use of literary “forgery” in antiquity. A “forgery,” in the technical sense I’m using it, refers to a very specific phenomenon: it is not simply making up a false story or perpetrating some other kind of falsehood. It refers, specifically, to a book whose author falsely claims to be a (famous) person. If I wrote a novel and claimed I was Stephen King, that would be a forgery. Sometimes these books are called “pseudonymous” (which means “going under a false name”). That sounds less offensive, but it means the same thing (literally: “the name is a lie”). There were lots of forgeries in antiquity – many of which were uncovered back them, a number that have been exposed in modern times. My books Forged and Forgery and Counterforgery discuss the phenomenon more broadly but with a special focus on Christian texts of the first four centuries (the first book is for a general audience, the second is a scholarly analysis). Here is the question I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00May 5th, 2019|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

The Books of Peter

I return now to the thread I had been working on before devoting the last few posts to the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. If you recall, some time ago I indicated that I had become a bit obsessed with a rather interesting if largely unasked question, of why the Apocalypse of Peter did not make it into the New Testament but the book of 2 Peter did. When I started on that thread, I thought it would take three or four posts, but as I got into it I realized that more and more background information was needed – and it turned into a rather longish thread, not only about what the Apocalypse of Peter is about (the first Christian account we have of a guided tour of heaven and hell, given to the apostle Peter himself, where he sees the glories of heaven for the saints and, in far more graphic detail, the torments of hell for the sinners) – but also about how we got the New Testament at all, that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 17th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity|

Do Any Forgeries Claim to be Written by Jesus?

I have received an interesting question about ancient forgeries. If we have lots of forgeries in the name of Peter -- and lots of others in the names of other apostles: Paul, James, Jude, Thomas, Philip, etc. etc. -- why don't we have any forgeries allegedly written by Jesus himself? As it turns out we do. The most famous was, at one time, well known indeed. Here is the question and my response. QUESTION: If Peter was named as an author of these works, why not name Jesus then of others(that we know of )? Was it understood within the community that, and why, he chose not to write his views down -- or was this too bold of a move even for a shameless forger? Or he was still deemed less accessible than his followers? RESPONSE: Yes indeed, there is a one-time famous correspondence between Jesus and a king who lived in Edessa in Syria named Abgar.. I have translated it anew for the book I published (on all earliest Christian Gospels) with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 3rd, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Could Peter Have “Written” 1 and 2 Peter Some Other Way?

Here is the last of my three posts digging down deeper into the question of whether Peter would have, or could have, written the books we now call 1 and 2 Peter, composed in highly literate Greek by someone skilled in Greek composition. ****************************** It should come as no surprise that Peter could not write Greek (or Aramaic, for that matter). As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter’s education level. 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.” And so, is it possible that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter? We have seen good reasons for him not writing 2 Peter, and some reason for thinking he didn’t write 1 Peter. But it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly educated, Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00November 30th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Who Wrote 1 Peter?

This post is to close out my discussion of 1 Peter, from the New Testament. Who actually wrote it? Spoiler alert: we don’t know, but it probably wasn’t Peter. On several occasions on the blog I’ve talked about the issue, most recently at length in a repost earlier this year: https://ehrmanblog.org/did-peter-use-a-secretary-for-his-writings-a-blast-from-the-past/ That’s where I give the fuller story. For now I give just the simple side of things, as I lay it out in my undergraduate textbook on the New Testament. Following this post I will start talking about how and why the books assigned to Peter did or did not make it into the New Testament. If you recall, the whole reason I got into this thread in the first place (which I foolishly thought would take 2-3 posts) is that I became intrigued by the question of why 2 Peter made it into the New Testament but the Apocalypse of Peter did not. As I will explain in the next post, I have far fewer questions about 1 Peter (which, like the other [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 26th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

The Situation Behind the (“Forged”) Book of 1 Peter

I am in the midst of talking about works attributed to Peter, the chief disciple, which have come down to us from the early church. I should be clear, I think each and every one of these writings was “forged.” I don’t think Peter himself wrote any of them – 1 Peter, 2 Peter, the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, or any of the other Petrine works that we now have. Each was written by a different author, but each author claimed to be Peter, Jesus’ right hand man. The book most widely accepted in the early church as having actually come from Peter is the book we call 1 Peter, from the New Testament. Yesterday I started talking about what is in it. Today I follow up on that discussion by explaining its apparent historical context and the approach the pseudonymous author takes in dealing with the problems he (and his ostensible audience) are confronting. Again, this is taken from my textbook on the NT. ***************************************************** The Context of Persecution Those [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 25th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Introducing the Book of 2 Peter

To make sense of the difficulty I’ve been having in figuring out what they Apocalypse of Peter did not make it into the NT, but the book of 2 Peter did, I need to say a bit about the latter – and probably about *other* Petrine books that did or did not make It (which also claim to be written by Peter even though the author was someone else). Here is a brief introduction to the book of 2 Peter, taken from my textbook on the New Testament. ******************************************************************* 2 PETER For a variety of reasons, there is less debate about the authorship of 2 Peter than any other pseudepigraphon in the New Testament. The vast majority of critical scholars agree that whoever wrote the book, it was not Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter. As was the case with 1 Peter, this author is a relatively sophisticated and literate Greek-speaking Christian, not an Aramaic-speaking Jewish peasant. At the same time, the writing style of the book is so radically different from that of 1 Peter that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:56-04:00November 13th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Did Peter Use a Secretary for his Writings? A Blast from the Past

Looking through some posts of blogs-past I came across this interesting one from six years ago now! I think it's an intriguing question, and the answer is not what most people would probably think. QUESTION: What do you make of the author's reference to a Silvanus in 1 Peter 5:12? Could it be that this really is Peter saying he used a secretary to write this letter? I know you said there is little to no evidence that people used secretaries, but what do you make of this reference to a Silvanus? RESPONSE: Yes, this is a question that I deal with in my book Forged, and that I deal with at yet greater length in the book coming out in the fall, Forgery and Counterforgery. Several points are important to make about the question, but first a bit of background. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! Background. Scholars have long noted that the book of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:57-04:00July 26th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

The Different Terms for Literary Deception

In the Seminar on Ancient Forgery at Rice University a few days ago, I made a presentation in which I urged (all of us) scholars to decide on which terms we use to describe different kinds of literary phenomena associated in one way or another with literary deceit. My view is that since there are different phenomena (even if these can overlap), we ought to have distinct terms to refer to them – otherwise it just gets confusing. It can be confusing to have so many different terms as well, but if we don’t differentiate the phenomena from one another, it makes matters only worse. And so if we have not only distinct phenomena but also distinct terms for referring to each of them, that should provide clarity to what it is we’re doing (at least in theory). It certainly does not help to call an act of plagiarism also a falsification, if by falsification we mean something other than plagiarism. The following are the terms that I have proposed we use for the various [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:51-04:00April 24th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Forgery in Antiquity|

Different Kinds of Literary Deceit

In my presentation to the seminar on forgery at Rice University a few days ago, I dealt with a problem facing scholars who study literary deceit in antiquity. On the most basic level, no one – even experts – seems to agree even on which terms to use to describe this or that kind of ancient deceptive practice. It would be worth devoting a couple of blog posts to the issue. As it turns out, it was also subject of a lecture I gave at a conference at York University in Toronto a few years ago. Here is how I began the lecture. ************************************************************* All of us who labor in the fields of early Christian apocrypha know they are white for harvest. But even as significant advances are made in producing critical editions, new translations, and significant studies, there are still some preliminaries that require our attention. One of them involves devising and agreeing upon a sensible taxonomy of literary deceit, a set of discrete terms to refer to the wide range of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:51-04:00April 23rd, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Forgery in Antiquity|

A Forger Fooled By Forgery

In my previous post I talked about my scholarly book on forgery (Forgery and Counterforgery) and gave some of the opening paragraphs of the Introduction. Here I’ll give the very first part of the first chapter. I wanted to start out on a light and humorous note, even though I was writing at a scholarly level. And so I began with an amusing anecdote from the annals of ancient forgery, a case where a forger was intentionally deceived by someone else’s forgery, to his deep chagrin. ************************************************************ Heraclides Ponticus was one of the great literati of the classical age. As a young man from aristocratic roots he left his native Pontus to study philosophy in Athens under Plato, Speusippus, and eventually, while he was still in the Academy, Aristotle. During one of Plato’s absences, Heraclides was temporarily put in charge of the school; after the death of Speucippus he was nearly appointed permanent head. His writings spanned a remarkable range, from ethics to dialectics to geometry to physics to astronomy to music to history to literary [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:51-04:00April 22nd, 2018|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

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