Forgery in Antiquity Archives - Page 5 of 7 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

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|

My Book on Literary Forgery

I am in Houston for a few days, giving talks at Rice University on the use of literary forgery in early Christianity. To prepare for the talks I decided to read through my 2013 book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. Of all the books I’ve written, I am proudest of this one. It is the very best I can do in terms of real scholarship. I don’t believe I’ve talked about it much on the blog, since it’s not a book for general audiences. But I thought it might be worthwhile to say something about it in a post or two, and there’s no better way to do that than to give the opening few paragraphs. As will be obvious, the study was written for scholars, but there’s nothing too difficult about it, except a couple of unusual words. “Orthonymous” means “written under a correct name” so that an orthonymous writing is one that bears the name of the actual author – as opposed to a “pseudonymous” writing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 20th, 2018|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity|

A New Genre in Jewish Antiquity: The Apocalypse

I am in midst of starting to explain how a new view of the afterlife came into existence in Jewish circles right around the time of the Maccabean revolt, and to that end I have devoted one post to a brief narrative of what happened leading up to the revolt and a second post to two of our principal sources of information about it, 1 and 2 Maccabees. Now, I need to provide yet more background: it was at this time, and in this context, that a new genre of literature appeared within ancient Judaism, the “apocalypse.” As we will see, the first Jewish apocalypse we have is in the book of Daniel, the final book of the Hebrew Bible to be written. To understand Daniel (and its view of the afterlife) it is important to know something about the conventions of its literary genre. That’s what I will explain in this post, in terms taken (with only a little editing) from my textbook The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ******************************************************* Apocalypse as a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:05-04:00July 30th, 2017|Early Judaism, Forgery in Antiquity, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Touring Hell: The Apocalypse of Peter

I am about ready now (I think!) to dig more deeply into a thread on the Invention of the Afterlife – the tentative title of the book that I *hope* will be my next one. I’ve been putting off starting the thread in earnest because, in fact, I don’t feel particularly ready for it. I’m just at the preliminary stage of my reading and have many dozens of books I need to work through before I can even think about sketching out how I want to broach the subject in my book (I have about a hundred unread books on various aspects of the matter sitting on my shelf now, as we speak, and I’m collecting more virtually every day). But I think that I will be doing this book differently from others I’ve done – at least with respect to the blog. I’m thinking about using the blog as a way to think out loud about some of the topics I’m covering in my reading. I’m not sure that everything I read about will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 21st, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum|

My Work Habits the Letter allegedly by Jesus’ Own Brother: Mailbag 2/12/2017

I will be addressing two quite disparate questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about my work habits and one about the New Testament epistle of James: how do we know that the author expected his readers to think (or know) that he was actually the brother of Jesus himself? If you have questions you’d like me to address in a future Mailbag, send them along! QUESTION: I notice you seem to get quite a bit done in a day (more than most people I know,) and that you have been doing that from a fairly young age (at one point you even experimented with decreasing your sleeping hours, If memory serves). The biggest hindrance to productivity for me is procrastination (like right now for example). How do you deal with it? You must feel it too sometimes. Did you always have an easier time concentrating than other folks? Did you learn it early in life (maybe by watching your parents)? If so, what techniques do you employ to deal with it? RESPONSE: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:15-04:00February 12th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Ancient Secretaries Actually Compose Writings? A Blast from the Past

Here is the third (and last) post on the use of secretaries in the ancient world, in which I discuss the issue of whether illiterate people (like Simon Peter, or John the son of Zebedee) could have had someone else write their books for them – so that 1 Peter *could* in some sense actually be by Peter if he couldn’t write, or the Revelation of John be by John. These three posts are all blasts from the past, reruns from exactly four years ago on the blog. Here is what I said back then about secretaries. ********************************************************************************** THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF MY PREVIOUS POST ON SECRETARIES IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, DRAWN FROM MY FORTHCOMING BOOK FORGERY AND COUNTERFORGERY. IN THE EARLIER POST I TALKED ABOUT THE USE OF SECRETARIES IN TAKING DICTATION AND DOING LIGHT COPY-EDITING, BASED ON THE FINDINGS OF THE FULL STUDY OF RANDALL RICHARDS. THE DISCUSSION IS RELEVANT TO THE WRITINGS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT: COULD 1 PETER, OR EPHESIANS, OR ANY OF THE OTHER PSEUDEPIGRAPHICAL WRITINGS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:12-04:00August 8th, 2016|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

How Did Ancient Writers Use Secretaries? A Blast from the Past

Here is the second of a series of three blasts from the past -- from four years ago when I was dealing with how secretaries were and, especially, were not used in the ancient world by authors when producing their work. Did authors (such as John for the book of Revelation, or Peter for either 1 or 2 Peter) use a secretary to write their books for them? To answer the question with something other than common sense (that is, common guessing), we need to know about secretarial practices in antiquity. As it turns out, we do know some things, as I'll explain in this post and the next. This is what I said four years ago now: ****************************** I have received some comments and emails about my claims about Silvanus as a secretary (or rather, NOT as a secretary) for the book of 1 Peter, and realized it would help if I could give some more detail about what we know about secretaries in the ancient world. The following is from an excursus in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:12-04:00August 5th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Accuracy of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

I’m a couple of days behind on my Weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I’ve been so caught up in talking about the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity that I forgot all about it! So here is last week’s a day late. IN it I deal with one question which turns out to be three questions, all of them related to the the historical accuracy of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.. QUESTION: Bart, quick question that’s bothering me. You often say that we can’t be sure of the gospels’ accuracy (due to intentional and unintentional changes over time and location). The idea is that we can’t know what the original really said (even if it names its author (e.g. 1 Tim, 2, Tim, etc.). You often say there are so many changes that we can’t really know what the original was. I always assume you mean in the small details and that you assume the main sense of the texts are fairly accurate to the original. Anyway, I’ve heard you say emphatically that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 22nd, 2016|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Were Paul’s Views of Women Oppressive?

In my post yesterday I discussed the first debate topic assigned to my undergraduate class on the New Testament, on the relationship of Paul and Jesus, and the question of whether they represented fundamentally the same religion or not. Of all the debate topics that I assign, I think that one is the most central to the understanding of the New Testament and the history of Christianity, as it deals with the root of the very problem of Christianity itself as it developed into a new religion, separate from Judaism. But the other debate topics are really important too – extremely important – and a bit more, well, controversial. The students enjoy that first one well enough – but not perhaps as much as they could, since they don’t really yet see what an enormous issue it is. (And because since it is the first debate, students tend not to prepare for it as much; once the rest of the class sees what a big deal these debates are, they tend to prepare a lot [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:36-04:00March 15th, 2016|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Women in Early Christianity|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 16, 2016

It is time for the weekly mailbag. This week there are only two questions, but the first has two parts: why (many) Christians are so pro-Israel and how can they be pro-Jewish and still worship Jesus. The second question involves how we know which letters of Paul were actually written by him. If you would like me to address any question you have, just add a comment here or at any other time on the blog, or send me an email ********************************************************************** QUESTION: Why are Christians so Pro Israel? Seems like to me if they agree with Judaism they couldn't be a Christian. Because of the first commandment. RESPONSE: I’ll answer the second part of the question first. What the reader is saying (I think) is that since the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me,” then Christians cannot be pro-Jewish because they also worship Jesus – therefore two gods. I have two responses to that. The first is that the commandment is *not* that: “You must believe that I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 16th, 2016|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Fifty Ways to Forge a Gospel

Last month I attended a small conference on the early Christian apocrypha (that is, the Gospels, epistles, Acts, and Apocalypses from early Christianity that were not accepted into the canon of Scripture) at York University in Toronto. The special topic for the conference was the use of forgery in early Christianity, and I was asked to give the keynote address. This is a topic, of course, I have been long interested in. I spent several years working on my (rather long) scholarly monograph on the topic: Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics; and in the process or writing that book for fellow academics, I wrote a shorter and simpler account for popular audiences: Forged: Writing in the Name of God. Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. Among other things, in my talk I stressed that people in the ancient world considered forgery to be an act of literary deceit, a form of lying. I really don’t think there should be much question [...]

FreedomBen2025-09-10T12:53:19-04:00November 22nd, 2015|Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum|

On Falsification and Forgery

On Friday I will be giving a talk at a symposium at York University in Toronto that will be focusing on the use of forgery in the early Christian apocrypha, sponsored by Tony Burke of York U. and Brent Landau at the University of Texas. Website is here: http://tonyburke.ca/conference/ I thought it might be interesting to excerpt a portion of my talk here, as it covers some ground that I recently have gone over on the blog, but from a different perspective. (More on the bloody sweat! But in relation to early Christian practices of literary deception.) In any event. Here is a portion of what I’m planning to say. *************************************************** I first became interested in the field of apocrypha and early Christian literary forgery about 25 years ago, when I was principally obsessed with New Testament textual criticism. Almost everyone else at the time who was also obsessed with the manuscript tradition of the New Testament was principally obsessed with one question only: how do we establish the original text of the New [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:55-04:00September 23rd, 2015|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Google Cambridge Lecture on Forged

On April 7, 2011, I visited the Google Cambridge l in Cambridge, MA to discuss my book Forged. In my talk I explain how ancient writers sometimes falsely claimed to be a famous person in order to encourage people to read their books. This practice of "literary forgery" was relatively common in the ancient world, but it was also widely condemned. In my book I focus on instances of this practice in early Christianity -- some of them appearing within the New Testament. Please adjust gear icon for high-definition.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:02-04:00July 19th, 2015|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum, Video Media|

Lost Christian Writings: The Letters of Paul

QUESTION: What lost early Christian books would you most like to have discovered? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a tough one. There are lots of Christian writing that I would love to have discovered – all of the ones that have been lost, for example! But suppose I had to name some in particular. Well, this will take several posts. To begin with, I wish we had the other letters of Paul. Let me explain. In the New Testament there are thirteen letters that claim Paul as their author. But scholars since the nineteenth century have argued that some of these do not go back to Paul. There is no absolute consensus on the issue of course; fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals argue that all thirteen go back to Paul; some critical scholars agree (not many!); others think that ten go back to Paul. But the most widespread view is that six claim to be written by Paul even though he didn’t write them. The six are ... THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:39-04:00March 11th, 2015|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

The Book of Revelation and the Apocalypse Genre

I’m devoting a thread to the book of Revelation and its interpretation. This began by my raising the issue of what 666 stands for, which led me to say a few things about the symbolism of the book, which occasioned several comments from readers wanting to know what my broader take is on how to interpret it. Yesterday I began to stress the importance of knowing what an “apocalypse” is before trying to interpret any one particular apocalypse. Today I pursue that a bit more, by talking about this genre which has numerous representatives in ancient Jewish and Christian writings. Here is how I begin to describe the genre more fully in my textbook on the New Testament: ************************************************************ Despite their wide-ranging differences, our surviving apocalypses typically share specific literary features. The most common of these are the following: Pseudonymity. Almost all of our ancient apocalypses were written pseudonymously, in the name of a famous religious person from the past (the book of Revelation, interestingly enough, is a rare exception). Among our surviving Jewish apocalypses [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:22-04:00February 21st, 2015|Forgery in Antiquity, Revelation of John|

My Forgery Seminar (Syllabus)

The academic semester, alas, has begun, as of this past Wednesday. As usual, I’ll be teaching two courses. My undergraduate class, as is true every spring, is “Introduction to the New Testament.” My PhD seminar, this term, is “Literary Forgery in the Early Christian Tradition.” I’ve taught this class twice before, but now I have my book (Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literacy Deceit in Early Christian Polemics) to structure the course. I’ve never had one of my books as the focus of a PhD seminar, but there’s really nothing else out there that can be used. The first time I taught the class I used Wolfgang Speyer’s classic, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum as the main text. It, obviously, is in German. The students were not thrilled. Or convinced that it was a good idea. But their German certainly got better. So even though there’s a ton of reading this term, I won’t be entertaining any complaints! Here’s this semester’s syllabus for the course, for your reading pleasure. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:46-04:00January 10th, 2015|Forgery in Antiquity, Teaching Christianity|

2 Thessalonians as a Forgery: The Theological Argument

I have decided, you may be glad to learn, that this will be my last post giving the reasons that scholars widely consider 2 Thessalonians not to be written by Paul, even though it claims to be written by Paul. In order to make this the last post, I have had to make it unusually long. Again, the point is both to show why scholars think what they do and to show the level at which they have to make their arguments, as opposed to the simple summary that I provide in my trade book Forged. This is the same argument that I make there (the only one I make!) only it is given in the length and depth that I have directed it to scholars. This is, once more, taken from my monograph Forgery and Counterforgery. In it, by the way, I answer many of the objections readers have been raising to my view that 2 Thessalonians is forged. ******************************************************************* The Theology of 2 Thessalonians As recognized already by J. E. Chr. Schmidt over [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:45-04:00December 23rd, 2014|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

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