Loading...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 forms of literary deceit, with a brief explanation of what each term stands for:
Falsification…
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Did the authors of Matthew and Luke plagiarize Mark?
Not exactly. Plagiarizing involves taking someone else’s work and claiming it as your own, under your own name. But whoever wrote Matthew and Luke did not write under their own name — their books are anonymous; so they are not claiming (taking personal credit for) someone else’s work as their own.
Which 13 New Testament books, Bart, do you consider to be forgeries?
Many thanks! 🙂
Acts, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude. Wait a second — that’s twelve!!
Hebrews is falsely attributed to Paul, but it is anonymous, isn’t it? So we’re down to 11?
A book by NT scholar Claire Rothschild argues that the reference to Timothy in the conclusion of the letter is meant to make the reader think that they author is Paul. But since the author doesn’t declare his (pretended) name, this is a case of what I would call a non-pseudepigraphic forgery.
Wait, Acts a forgery, and not Luke? How is that possible? Are they not a two-part work?
They were published at different times. One of them claims to be by a companion of Paul. The other does not.
Did the writers of the new testament believe the stories in Genesis were true events
ABsolutely.
How do scholars come to a consensus or agreement to define such terms of nomenclature? Is it just by scholarly recognition in the literature over a long period of time with scholars citing other scholars? Are such matters ever raised in widely attended forums for scholars and how would agreement be enacted?
Yes, that’s how. And yes, sometimes scholars make a plea for nomenclature, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Dr. Ehrman, this is an off-topic question, but have you watched the documentary Wild, Wild Country on Netflix? If you have not, I could not recommend it more that you do watch it. I found it an invaluable window into the creation, workings and ultimate corruption of a religious mass movement. And as it pertains to the topic of forgeries, it paints an excellent portrait of how the true believer will rationalize and justify behaviors that most people would consider unethical (such as forgery), believing that it is for a greater purpose, a greater good.
Nope, never have!
One additional category might be called “legendary” (for lack of a better term), to refer to the content of a document…that is: stories and teachings that have no author at all which come from that which is handed down by word-of-mouth in what we call “oral tradition” and then compiled into a single document as a narrative or compilation of teachings, saying and events, etc.
I think most of the NT is of this type of material regardless of whose name is attached as the author.
Yes, that would be an additional literary / oral category — but I was only giving kinds of literary *deceit*.
For “falsification”, is it safe to assume you only mean intentional changes? Deception implies intent, so a scribal error that changed the meaning would not be considered “falsification”, correct?
Yes, the “deceitful” changes of the text made intentionally are what I have in mind; there are lots of other falsifications of texts (accidental) which are not meant to change the meaning (even though they may well do so)
So, consider John 21. It sounds like the gospel ends in chapter 20, and 21 was added later. At the end of 21 it says, “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and wrote these things, and we know that his testimony is true.” Would this be a false attribution, or a redactional forgery? Or something else? Does it make a difference if the author of 21 really believed John was the original source of the material? Or can you apply these terms without reference to the author’s actual intent?
It’s important to note that the author is not claiming to be that disciple, but to have gotten his information from that disciple. So it’s hard to say if that’s an act of forgery or not (maybe the redactor *did* get traditions that originated with that disciple). But in any case it is a redactional claim, not the claim of the original author.
Bart, do you suggest overlapping categories here? If not, please distinguish these three:
Pseudonymity: This … means written under the name of a famous person other than the actual author.
Pseudepigraphy: This is when a writing is published under … the name of some other person, usually famous,
Forgery: This refers to a writing produced by an author who claims to be a well-known person,
Thanks,
Raemon Polk
They are not overlapping but sequenced (as subcategories). Forgery is a kind of pseudepigraphy and pseudepigraphy is a kind of pseudonymity.
Bart – This is probably a dumb question but are you familiar with Matthew Wade Ferguson? He quotes your work often in this piece about the authorship of the gospels:
https://infidels.org/library/modern/matthew_ferguson/gospel-authors.html
This is another of his works:
https://infidels.org/library/modern/matthew_ferguson/gospel-genre.html
No, I’m not familiar with him.
The Gospel of Luke and The Book of Acts are particularly puzzling because if the author wasn’t a companion of Paul, where did he get such a wealth of information?
From oral traditions. In that he was just like all other authors decades later who were writing about Paul, or Jesus, or Peter, or anyone else . (Just as people today write books on Paul without personally knowing him.)
Given your understanding of forgery in the ancient world…in order to be accepted, would the Daniel author(s) have fooled 2nd century Jews into thinking the book of Daniel was written 4 centuries earlier, and just recently discovered?
Yes, that’s pretty much exactly what he did — he and all the authors of the various apocalypses (1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, etc.)
Bart,
Have you seen or heard of the new documentary ‘Fragments of Truth’?
Subtitled, ‘Can we trust the Bible?’. It was released today, 4/24.
Seems like damage control in the considerable wake of your own literary output.
No, hadn’t heard about it!
Hello, Bart did you published any article which deals with this particular issue? That would be an interesting lecture. Regards,
It’s an essay in a collection of essays called
Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha: Proceedings from the 2015 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium
In F&CF, Chap.3, pg.34 you described “embedded” forgeries in addition to “redactional” and “non-pseudoepigraphic” types, but you don’t mention it in your post. Are you now including “embedded” in the “non-pseudoepigraphic” category?
No, I still hold to my same views — I just didn’t want to get too complicated int he post!
I could not understand why these were classified as ‘deceit’.
Orthonymity: This literally means “written under the correct name” and refers to writings that are produced in an author’s actual name (as when Charles Dickens published Great Expectations naming himself as the author)
Anonymity: This literally means “written under no name” and refers to writings that have no author’s name attached.
Homonymity: This literally means “written under the same name” and refers to a writing produced by someone who has the same name as some other famous person, leading, sometimes, to the mistaken assumption that it was the famous person who wrote it. (As if someone who really was named John Grisham, but was not that John Grisham, published a book using his own name)
Those three are striking for standing in *contrast* to forms of deceit.
Example of homonymity: many years ago I worked with someone called Dennis Wheatley. I made some kind of feeble joke about the popular author and he told me that he himself had written a novel, which he brought in to the office the next day. The subject matter was nothing like the satanic mystery writer’s but I often wondered if he had written the book (and the publisher published) in the hope that it would sell whatever its merits by trading on the reputation of his famous namesake.
Got it. So, Eusebius inserting the Testimonium in the text of Antiquities would be called a “falsification”. Right? Did you identify it as such in “Forgery and Counter – Forgery”?
No, because I think the bulk of the passage is authentic. For me it’s a case of falsification: a scribe altered the text to make it affirm Christian faith claims.
For a number of reasons, including the work by Paul Hopper and Ken Olson, I consider the complete TF passage a interpolated fabrication. Therefore, the Testimonium, to me, does not serve as evidence for an historical Jesus.
I don’t like the word author. People who could read and write were educated scholars and had points of view based also on their school of thought? Often more Greek or Roman even Rabis? Gospel 1.0 set the basic tone and after that others glossed their viewpoints some well outside the various Jewish thinking? Who that was we don’t know but, while the sects did fight with each other, the common enemy was Rome. Is this an attempt to align with the winning side before or after 70AD?
Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re asking.
I am the keeper of a very small church library. Is there a subject heading under which I could group together non-canonical writings…apocrypha, books about dead sea scrolls, other gospels, epistles, apocalyses, apostolic fathers. I thought about “pseudepigrapa”, but I don’t think anyone lnows what it means.
How about “Other Christian Writings” or “Non-canonical books”?
On another (though non-biblical) example of literary ‘deception’
This is a topic which I find particularly interesting and one about which distinctions I was completely unfamiliar until I saw them here. Their importance for biblical scholarship is obvious. But I suspect that many readers would not guess that, historically, these varied forms of literary deception have played out in other quite significant ways.
The case I’m most familiar with from study concerns an author we usually assume as very well-known: “William Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare’s example is interesting in how it relates to some of the categories above. Because, as with biblical texts, there are divergent opinions about the author of texts ascribed or attributed to the name William Shakespeare and there have been controversies–again, as with biblical texts–over which works properly belong to the “canon” of the work and which do not, the following types of falsification are arguably going on.
I’ll offer my personal opinion as to how they apply in this case.
From well before the Tudor period of English history, it had been part of the well-established but informal code of nobles’ conduct that their social class placed many of the ordinary activities of commoners beyond the pale of a noble’s practice. This included essentially all forms of labor (esp. of course physical labor) and any “work” which was done specifically and mainly for purposes of providing a supporting income. For example, a nobleman could be (and often wanted to be) a soldier (officer with a military command) but he should not do this out of a mercenary motive.
The realm of writing and literature is complicated by the fact that it can be done for mercenary purposes or for other entirely “noble” motives. In addition, in and before Tudor times in England, the theater was, prior to ‘Shakespeare’ largely a private affair–done at the royal court, at university or the Inns of Court (where law study was carried out by apprentices to legal professionals). So, a noble might compose poetry, for example, and circulate it among his peers for (usually) his and for their pleasure and amusement and he could take a certain pride in having a recognized talent as a poet. But he (and of course noble women, too,) should not write poetry for open publication and sale for the sake of an income interest. To do that would be scandalous and there was a taboo against doing this which was universally understood and accepted by nobles—one which they learned in via early education and formation at home.
When it comes to drama writing, plays were especially subject to a social stigma because the theater itself was extremely disreputable as an occupation and as a place. Actors were classed with vagabonds, beggars and thieves. So, if a noble had to be careful about what he or she wrote and from what motive, he especially had to beware of being a known playwright. No respectable noble could be known outside the private confines of his court circle of peers as a writer of plays.
But in Tudor England, most people who wrote and had their work printed wrote in Latin and were either university scholars–commoners in social origin–or they were part of the nobility, and also almost always university-educated. This implies that for these nobles a pen-name was the usual necessary means by which they wrote and had their writings published.
Ben Jonson could write and publish plays under his own name because he was not a nobleman. Some social stigma could and did attach to this in the eyes of some. But a nobleman could not do what Jonson did without losing–forfeiting–his noble class standing.
So what about “Shakespeare” ‘s status?
I (and others) see the name’s use as being a strange mix of part pen-name, pseudepigraphy, non-pseudepigraphic forgery and literary fiction used by a nobleman, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as a mask and one which, at first, for the near totality of both his noble peers and, certainly, the general public, had no known living person corresponding to it. That’s because it isn’t clear how or with what precise knowledge of another similarly-named person he first took on that pen-name. Was he was inventing a pen-name for which he knew no living person as its counterpart–and certainly no famous person?– or did he knew at the time of its first adoption that a particular William Shakespeare (variously spelled) could eventually become associated with the authorial name? In any case, this was not something he, Edward Oxford, tried to foster. He made no effort to imply that the pen-name was associated with any living person.
“Shakespeare,” when first published as an author name–attached to the poetry and sonnets–was rendered “Shake-speare” in print, the hyphenation suggesting a pseudonym with no particular individual attaching to it. Thus, it might as well have been “by Anonymous” for all practical purposes. The person William Shaksper of Stratford on Avon was not only not famous, outside of Stratford itself he was virtually unknown to the general public. Only his acquaintances from Stratford knew of him. One of them was Richard Field who later became an important London printer– and whose print work would later include some work bearing the name “Shake-speare” and, only later, “William Shakespeare”.
Few nobles ever published anything under their own names within their own lifetimes. Oxford wrote a few surviving poems under his own name but these were not published until after his death. Numerous others of his peers, men and women, similarly wrote under pen-names and these were usually the names of real people who, themselves, did not write anything but who were typically aware of and consented to the use of their names as a mask for a noble. It seems likely that in most or all such cases, they either lent the use of their names as a favor to a noble or they received a nominal payment for this use from the noble. Thus they’d have voluntarily made this concession and they certainly had no desire to divulge the fact of the pseudonymous use of their names by another.
It’s thought by some (notably, Stephanie Hopkins Hughes) that Oxford wrote a great deal under other pen-names and one of these was “Robert Greene”–which he used to invent the first known mention of the implied existence of “Shake-peare” in his “Greene’s Groats Worth of Wit” reference to an “upstart crow” :
Quote:
“for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.”
I’m looking forward to the day when all believers (such as myself) get on board with the idea that what we’ve got in the NT, with the exception of Paul’s authentic letters and perhaps Revelation, are a bunch of documents that, for the biggest part, simply show us what Christian “thinking” was in the first century. The Book of Hebrews is an utterly magnificent writing, regardless of who wrote it. And, of course, for all we know, it was written by just some “fellow believer” who held no particular “position” of note in the early church.
But the most important thing for believers to understand – and, I credit authors like Dr Ehrman with this – is to make them come to a realization that not one bit of writing done by anybody – regardless of how accurate or inaccurate it may be, or how correct or incorrect it may be – alters the *facthood* of whether Jesus was resurrected or not. If he was, he was, and nobody’s writing, no matter how well-worded, well-researched, and well-reasoned it is, can change that. And, of course the converse is true: If Jesus was *not* resurrected, then no matter what kind of verbage anyone throws at the topic, it would not change *that* fact, either.
So, the very best thing I believe a student can learn is that no matter how much one dissects the biblical texts, and no matter how much of (for example) the NT is shown to be forgery, or pure fiction – and, no matter how eloquently one writes and how much one writes on this, that, or the other theory, it simply doesn’t change what did, in fact, happen in history – whatever that might have been.
That facthood can *not* be determined by looking at NT texts. Nor can it be determined (or altered) by reading Dr Ehrmans texts (or, by those of, say, Bill Laine, et al).
It always boils down to this: Either Jesus was resurrected, or, he wasn’t. I, myself, believe he was, but it’s not based on anything I read in the Gospels. In fact, one might even say I believe Jesus was resurrected *despite* the Gospels. But, my reasons for believing are another topic.
My strong hope is that Dr Ehrman will continue in his work, because ultimately, it will bring about a powerful refinement among believers, causing the many of them that have a “false dependency” on NT “scripture”, as if it were almost equated with God Himself. Rather, those “scriptures” will begin to be regarded as the believers agreed-upon “basis for an orthodoxy of the faith”, but not as some kind of “earthly expression of God”, in which the bible itself becomes almost an idol.
Hear! Hear!
ftbond:
Excellent comment! You wrote “my reasons for believing are another topic.” I myself am a “seeking agnostic” and would sincerely like to learn your reasons for believing if you care to share.
Very Delayed Response: I’d love to tell you why I agree with those that, long ago, quoted the creed found in 1 Corinth 15 – that Jesus was crucified, died, buried, raised from the dead, and seen first by Peter, then a list of others…
Unfortunately, it’s not just “one thing”, but many things “tied together” (so to speak), and the Word Limit is just not gonna give me enough room to finish the story….
However, it all starts with one basic “proposition”… But, that’ll show up in my book, once I’m finished… 🙂
*sigh*