forgery Archives - Page 2 of 2 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Early Doubts about the Pastorals

In my discussion of the role of women in the early church, I discussed the fact that women are ordered to be silent in 1 Timothy, one of the Pastoral epistles, but that this view should not be attributed to Paul himself because, despite the fact that 1 Timothy *claims* to have been written by Paul, it almost certainly was not -- that is, its author was lying about his identity. A lot (a *whole* lot) of modern-day scholars and lay readers object (strenuously) to the idea that the author was actually “lying,” but I go to great lengths in my two books on forgery (one written for a general audience, the other written for scholars) to show that in the ancient world, pseudepigraphic writing (that is, when an author claims to be a famous person, knowing perfectly well that he was someone else) was considered a form of literary deceit and was in fact denounced as a form of lying. Be that as it may, the reality is that the majority of NT scholars [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T17:35:02-04:00August 5th, 2013|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Paul and His Letters, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

A Third Forgery in the Name of Peter

As I mentioned in the two previous posts, in my talk at Unity Village the other night, I introduced my discussion of whether there could be forgeries in the New Testament by introducing three forgeries from *outside* the New Testament; the first was the Gospel of Peter with its giant Jesus and walking-talking cross at the resurrection and the second was the letter of Peter to James in which he attacks “the man who is my enemy,” a transparent reference to the apostle Paul. The third is the one I’ll mention here: another book allegedly, but not really, written by Peter, this time an apocalypse, the Apocalypse of Peter. As it turns out we have three “apocalypses” allegedly written by Peter. The one I dealt with in my talk is the most famous of the three, one discovered in 1886, in the same book in which the Gospel of Peter is found. It is a 66-page book that contains four texts. In some ways the Apocalypse of Peter is the most interesting. It is the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T17:33:28-04:00April 8th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Forgery and the Gospel of Peter

So in my talk on forgery last night, I introduced the question of whether there could be forgeries inside the New Testament by talking about forgeries that definitely exist *outside* the New Testament; and to do that I began by speaking of three books that Peter, the disciple of Jesus, allegedly wrote. My definition of forgery is a fairly technical one. When I speak about forgery I’m not talking about books whose contents have been made up or fabricated, and I’m not talking about books whose contents have been falsified and modified over the years. I’m talking purely about authorial claims. A forgery is a book whose author claims to be a (famous) person when in fact he is someone else – and he knows full well he is someone else. If some writes a book claiming to be Paul, but in fact he is not Paul, that’s a forgery. The phenomenon was widely known, widely practiced, and widely condemned in antiquity, as I’ve talked about on this blog before. To read this blog post [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T16:04:18-04:00April 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Dead Sea Scrolls Scandal

A few years ago I was asked to give a speech at a museum in Raleigh NC in connection with an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been long in the works and had finally become a reality. I will be the first to admit, I'm not the first person you should think of to give a lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s not my field of scholarship. But the lecture was to be one of a series of lectures, and the other lecturers actually were experts, including my colleague Jodi Magness, a world-class archaeologist who happens to teach in my department (well, she doesn’t “happen” to teach there; I hired her when I was chair of the department) and who has written the best popular discussion of the archaeology of Qumran, the place where the scrolls were found, and my colleague at cross-town rival Duke, Eric Meyers, another archaeologist famous for his work in ancient Israel. The organizers of the exhibit wanted me to give a talk because they wanted a [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:48:21-04:00February 16th, 2013|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Religion in the News|

A Common Criticism (of me!)

QUESTION: I want to ask your thoughts on something quickly because I think it points out one of the concerns I have with what you write and say. It seems that you have a willingness to take different positions (or maybe emphasize different positions is the right way to say it) depending on where you are and what you're advocating. In your interview with the Infidel Guy and other places, you talk about how ancient writings were dictated all the time. On the Infidel Guy show, for example, you said the following: "Every person who wrote epistles in the ancient world dictated them to scribes". But in your debate with Darrell Bock on the Unbelievable radio show (August 6, 2011) you try and argue the case that there is no evidence for dictation having happened in the ancient world (specifically in response to this claim about 1 and 2 Peter). I have also been told that when you speak in scholarly circles, the sensationalistic claims you make about the unreliability of the Bible when speaking [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:14:28-04:00November 5th, 2012|Bart's Critics, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: Another New Development

In earlier posts I talked about the “discovery” of the tiny credit-card sized fragment of a Coptic Gospel, with several lines of text on it, in one of which Jesus is recorded as speaking the words “my wife.” The text has been named “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” As I mentioned in a previous blog, there are heated discussions of the fragment’s authenticity, with a large number of experts contending that it is a modern forgery. We will probably not know for certain until the tests on the ink have been conducted and published. But in the meantime there is one interesting development. In my last post on the topic I discussed an article by Francis Watson of the University of Durham, England, and author of Text and Truth, and Gospel Writing, who argues that every word and phrase of this fragment could easily have been lifted from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas – with one exception: the very phrase that everyone is interested in, “My wife.” Watson’s argument is that someone (recently) who is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-30T13:31:45-04:00October 13th, 2012|Christian Apocrypha, Religion in the News|

Is the New Gospel Fragment a Modern Forgery?

The so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” has been publicly available for only three days now, and already New Testament scholars and scholars of Coptic and Gnosticism are hard at work on it. Most of the effort so far has been in deciding whether it is authentic or forged. And it ain’t lookin’ good for those who think it’s authentic! Some have pointed out that the fragment looks too neat around the edges to be believable; others have noted that the writing looks fake; others have argued that there are grammatical problems; and some have thought that it really is just absolutely too good to be true that of eight lines out of an entire Gospel, with only a couple of words surviving per line, two of those surviving words would just happen to involve Jesus saying “My wife”! As this all is unfolding, I am reminded once again that there are some *amazing* scholars out there who can do brilliant work on very short notice. The following was sent out by my colleague at Duke [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:21:47-04:00September 21st, 2012|Christian Apocrypha, History of Biblical Scholarship, Religion in the News|

Peter as Literate? Part 2

THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF MY POST FROM YESTERDAY ON WHETHER PETER COULD HAVE WRITTEN 1 PETER, BASED ON THE QUESTION OF HIS POSSIBLE LITERACY. READ THE FIRST POST FIRST, OR THIS ONE WON'T MAKE AS MUCH SENSE! In pursuing this line of inquiry, we might ask what we can know about Peter as a person, prior to his becoming a disciple of Jesus. The answer is that we do not know much at all. The Gospels are consistent only in portraying him as a fisherman from the village of Capernaum in rural Galilee. We can assume that since he was a common laborer, he was not from the landed aristocracy; and since he was from rural Galilee, he would have spoken Aramaic. What can we say about his home “town” of Capernaum? The historical and social insignificance of the place can be seen by the fact that it is not mentioned in any source, including the Hebrew Bible, prior to the writings of the New Testament. In the Gospels it is portrayed as a [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:28:29-04:00August 7th, 2012|Book Discussions, Catholic Epistles|

Peter as Literate?

IN RESPONSE TO MY POSTS ON SECRETARIES AND THE BOOK OF 1 PETER, SEVERAL PEOPLE HAVE RAISED THE QUESTION OF WHETHER PETER WAS HIMSELF LITERATE (ABLE TO READ, OR MORE SIGNIFICANTLY, TO WRITE). THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF WHAT I SAY IN MY BOOK FORGERY AND COUNTERFORGERY; THE SECOND PART WILL BE IN THE NEXT POST. ************************************************************************************************************************ In his now-classic study of ancient literacy, William Harris gave compelling reasons for thinking that at the best of times in antiquity only 10% or so of the population was able to read [Ancient Literacy; Harvard University Press, 1989]. By far the highest portion of readers was located in urban settings. Widespread literacy like that enjoyed throughout modern societies requires certain cultural and historical forces to enact policies of near universal, or at least extensive, education of the masses. Prior to the industrial revolution, such a thing was neither imagined nor desired. As Meir Bar Ilan notes: “literacy does not emerge in a vacuum but rather from social and historical circumstances.” Moreover, far fewer people in antiquity [...]

BDEhrman2021-01-20T01:06:19-05:00August 6th, 2012|Book Discussions, Catholic Epistles|

Ancient Secretaries (Part 2)

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 have been produced by secretaries rather than their reputed authors? ****************************** It is Richards‘ third and fourth categories that are particularly germane to the questions of early Christian forgery. What is the evidence that secretaries were widely used, or used at all, as co-authors of letters or as Ersatz composers? If there is any evidence that secretaries sometimes joined an author in creating a letter, Richards has failed to find or produce it. The one example he considers involves the relationship of Cicero and Tiro, cited earlier by Gordon Bahr as evidence for co-authorship. In Bahr’s words [...]

BDEhrman2022-10-15T13:49:46-04:00August 5th, 2012|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, New Testament Manuscripts|

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