MUST READ: A World of Deceptions and Forgeries – 1

[First posted May 26, 2014.

This is from our MUST READ/MUST OWN book by Bart D. Ehrman, Forged. There are 4 posts from this book, please check them all out:

This author, just like James D. Tabor (Restoring Abrahamic Faith), has greatly influenced us Sinaites in seriously re-examining with utmost scrutiny the roots of our Christocentric faith and its foundational scriptures, the New Testament. Admittedly, these 2 books among many others, were instrumental in making us rethink the direction we had been on, some of us for almost a lifetime of loyalty to the religion we had embraced and shared. In fact each of us had our own following, most of whom still acknowledge us as “the one who introduced me to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior” . . . then quickly distanced from us, like we suddenly contracted a contagious disease like spiritual leprosy.

Not a surprise, our turnabout has not drawn anyone from those circles. We had not expected anyone else to take a leap of faith like we did, but we did hope that truth-seekers as they are, they would do their own investigating even if only to prove us wrong! Instead we have lost friends and colleagues and even got shunned by family. Intolerance does that, you know?

In fact, one colleague has recently written that when he shared his Sinaite faith with his daughter while visiting her abroad, her reaction was: “where we are now is a dangerous path to tread” and she warned him not to proselytize her children. Even as the daughter trusted her parents’ judgment, she did not trust them enough to check out why they had taken this new path away from their former faith.

So this is what we keep wondering about: people who have known each of us for decades now, who know we have been faithful to Christ for decades, should be intrigued and question what is it that we’ve discovered or rediscovered such that we would take such a radical step in turning away from our long-held faith toward a totally different direction and a God that has not been acknowledged except by observant Jews! (That’s where the Jew-wannabe conclusion about us comes from.)

Yes, we’ve lost not only friends but family as well . . . but then, look at WHO we have we gained!!

The Creator God Himself,
YHWH the One True God
Who still reigns supreme,
Who has never changed from what He declared about HImself in His Sinai revelation and the Torah of the Hebrew Scriptures.
He is knowable through the Scriptures of His chosen people.

Everyone should check HIM out and begin to understand why we have arrived at where we are now.

This post features excerpts from Chapter One of the book; we encourage all Truth-seekers to include this book in your library, it is worth reading through the whole book and not just the few chapters we have featured here. Reformatted and highlighted.—Admin1.]

————————————————–

Chapter One

Forgeries in the Ancient World

WHEN I GIVE PUBLIC LECTURES ON FORGERY, I am often asked, “Who would do such a thing?” The answer is, “Lots of people!” And for lots of different reasons. The most common reason today, of course, is to make money. . . . The forgery trade continues to thrive; forgeries in the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, and many, many others continue to flood the market, as recent literature on modern forgery so aptly attests. These forgeries are almost always produced in order to be sold as authentic. There was a good deal of that kind of activity in the ancient world as well (and far fewer forgery experts who could detect a forgery if they saw one), although it was not a major factor within early Christianity. This was for a simple reason: Christian books were not, by and large, for sale.

Other scoundrels today will occasionally forge a document just to see if they can get away with it. This too is something that occasionally happened in the ancient world. . . . there is scant evidence to suggest that any Christian authors forged documents, probably for lots of reasons. As I pointed out in the Introduction, we still have numerous forged documents that emanated from the early church, numerous Gospels, Acts, letters, and apocalypses (these are the four literary genres of the New Testament), all of them claiming to be written by apostles.

Many of these noncanonical books are fascinating and still worth reading. Among the Gospels for example, there is an account allegedly written by Peter that gives a detailed narration of the resurrection. This is striking because—most readers have never noticed this—the New Testament Gospels do not narrate the resurrection. They do say that Jesus was buried and indicate that on the third day his tomb was empty, but they do not narrate the account of his actually emerging from the tomb. There is such an account in the Gospel of Peter; however. In it Jesus walks out of the tomb supported by two angels who are as tall as mountains, although Jesus is taller still; behind them, out of the tomb, emerges the cross, which speaks out to God in heaven. Other “apostolic” Gospels tell yet other amazing stories about Jesus or record bizarre teachings supposedly spoken by him, Gospels allegedly written by Jesus’s brother Thomas, his disciple Philip, and his female companion Mary Magdalene. All of these books claimed to be authentic, but each of them was classified as a “forgery” by other early Christians who did not believe the apostles had actually written them.

There are also noncanonical Acts, books that narrate the adventures of Jesus’s apostles after his ascension, such as the Acts of Paul, in which Paul preaches that, to have eternal life, followers of Jesus must refrain from sex even if married and avoid marriage altogether if single. This book was fabricated by a church leader in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the second century. We know about it because a famous church father Tertullian, indicates that the person was caught and put on trial in the church for producing the account and then unceremoniously removed from is leadership position. Most church leaders did not appreciate fabricated documents. But there were plenty to go around. Today we still have extensive copies of Acts of John, Peter, Andrew and Thomas as well as fragments of earlier works that no longer survive intact.

There were also forged letters, including a set of letters between Paul and the most famous philosopher of his day Seneca, which showed not only that Paul was on intimate terms with the greatest minds of the empire, but also that he was respected and revered by them. Some later church leaders maintained that these letters were authentic, but others thought they had been forged for the purpose of making Paul look good. There were also debates over the authenticity of other letters of Paul and of Peter, and even of Jesus. Some of these other writings still survive.

So too forged apocalypses dotted the Christian literary landscape, including a fascinating account discovered in 1886 in a tomb in Egypt, a firsthand account allegedly written by Peter in which he is given a personal guided tour, by Jesus himself, of heaven and hell and the respective blessings of the saved and the gruesome torments of the damned. This book, as it turns out, almost made it into the New Testament, as there were church leaders well into the fourth century who claimed that it was Scripture. Others, though, claimed it was forged.

These are just a few of the documents that were disputed in the ancient world. Some early Christians claimed they were really written by apostles and belonged in the New Testament. Others insisted that they were not written by apostles, but were forgeries. How many other such documents were there? We will never know. At present we know of over a hundred writings from the first four centuries that were claimed by one Christian author or another to have been forged by fellow Christians.

Part II: Early Christian Forgeries

Source: Exodus/Shemoth 24 – "the sight of the Glory of YHVH (was) like a consuming fire" -- We gentiles living in this 21st century are able to experience that climactic moment [God appearing on Sinai] by reading and studying this portion of the TORAH. Indeed, we see YHWH not quite as dramatically as the mixed multitude did, but perhaps even better through these accounts recorded in Exodus. There is a saying that hindsight is 20/20 vision, i.e., we begin to see and understand the question marks in our past only later in our lives, as we mature and hopefully become wiser and more introspective about the meaning or seeming meaninglessness of happenings in history, whether personal, national, or universal. Søren Kierkegaard adds a twist to this: “Only 20:20 vision is hindsight. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” As we endeavor to understand each portion in the TORAH of YHWH, much of it will seem irrelevant to our current situation but if we see beyond the time-bound cultural and religious situations and begin to understand what truly has not change—human nature and the Great Revelator who designed the perfect blueprint for living in peace, happily and contentedly with family, community, country and the nations, the unquestionable conclusion is: TORAH is relevant to ALL humankind, not just to Israel, to this very day.

Join the Conversation... Cancel reply