"Quid est Veritas": Gospel Truth? – 2

No comment, will just let the book speak for itself through excerpts that should make you think of getting a copy of the book for yourself.  It is downloadable from amazon.com on a kindle, or kindle app on your computer device.—NSB@S6K

 

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Image from amazon.com

Image from amazon.com

FORGED by Bart D. Ehrman

 

Subtitle:

Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They are.  

 

 

The back page cover adds: The Untold Story of Forgery in the Bible:  “In Forged, leading Bible authority Bart D. Ehrman exposes one of the most unsettling ironies of the early Christian tradition: the use of deception to establish the truth.  With the scholarly expertise and provocative claims for which he’s known, Ehrman reveals which texts were forged in the name of Jesus’s disciples and considers how the deceptions of an unnamed few have prevailed for centuries.  The untold story of widespread forgery in the ancient world sheds new light on how documents of scandalous origin became part of the Bible we have today.

 

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From the INTRODUCTION: Facing the Truth

 

We were heavily committed to the truth at Moody Bible Institute. . . . Truth to us was as important as life itself.  We believed in the Truth, with a capital T.  We vowed to tell the truth, we expected the truth, we sought the truth, we studied the truth, we preached the truth, we had faith in the truth.  “Thy Word is truth,” as Scripture says, and Jesus himself was “the way, the truth, and the life.”  No one could “come to the Father” except through him, the true “Word become flesh.”  Only unbelievers like Pontius Pilate was confused enough to ask, “What is truth?”  As followers of Christ, we were in a different category altogether.  As Jesus himself had said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

 

Along with our commitment to truth, we believed in objectivity. Objective truth was all there was.  There was no such thing as “subjective truth.”  Something was true or it was false.  Personal feelings and opinions had nothing to do with it. Objectivity was real, it was possible, it was attainable, and we had access to it.  It was through our objective knowledge of the truth that we knew God and knew what God (and Christ, and the Spirit, and everything else) was.

 

One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer have led many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads—and where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity.  So if, in theory, you can verify the “objective” truth of religion, and then it turns out that the religion being examined is verifiably wrong, where does that leave you?  If you are an evangelical Christian, it leaves you in the wilderness outside the evangelical camp, but with an unrepentant view of truth.  Objective truth, to paraphrase a not so Christian song, has been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know, I’m one.

 

Before moving outside into the wilderness (which, as it turns out, is a lush paradise compared to the barren camp of fundamentalist Christianity), I was intensely interested in “objective proofs” of the faith:  proof that Jesus was physically raised from the dead (empty tomb! eyewitnesses!), proof that God was active in the world (miracles!), proof that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, without mistake in any way.  As a result, I was devoted to the field of study known as Christian apologetics.

 

The term “apologetics” comes from the Greek word apologia, which does not mean “apology” in the sense of saying you’re sorry for something; it means, instead, to make a “reasoned defense” of the faith.  Christian apologetics is devoted to showing not only that faith in Christ is reasonable, but that the Christian message is demonstrably true, as can be seen by anyone willing to suspend disbelief and look objectively at the evidence.

 

The reason this commitment to evidence, objectivity, and truth has caused so many well-meaning evangellicals problems over the years is that they—at least some of them—really are confident that if something is true, then it necessarily comes from God, and that the worst thing you can do is to believe something that is false.  The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don’t want to go there. . . .

Eventually I came to realize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes.  It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies.  That is what this book is about.

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Truth in the History of Christianity

Most people today don’t realize that ancient religions were almost never interested in “true beliefs.”  Pagan religions [polytheistic] . . . did not have creeds that had to be recited, beliefs that had to be affirmed, or scriptures that had to be accepted as conveying divine truth. Truth was of interest to philosophers, but not to practitioners of religion . . . ancient religions didn’t require you to believe one thing or another. Religion was all about the proper practices: sacrifices to gods  . . . set prayers . . . all of these religions allowed, even encouraged, the worship of many gods, there was very little sense that if one of the religions was right, the others were wrong.  They could all be right! There were many gods and many ways to worship the gods, not a single path to the divine.

 

This view—the dominant view of antiquity—stands completely at odds with how most of us think about religion today . . . . Among the many things that made Christianity different from the other religions of the Roman Empire, with the partial exception of Judaism, is that Christians insisted that it did matter what you believed, that believing the incorrect things could make you “wrong,” and that if you were wrong, you would be punished eternally in the fires of hell.  Christianity, unlike the other religions, was exclusivistic.  It insisted that it held the Truth, and that every other religion was in Error. Moreover, this truth involved claims about God (there is only one, for example, and he created the world), about Christ (he was both divine and human), about salvation (it comes only by faith in Christ), about eternal life (everyone will be blessed or tormented for eternity), and so on.

 

The Christian religion came to be firmly rooted in truth claims, which were eventually embedded in highly ritualized formulations such as the Nicene Creed.  As a result, Christians from the very beginning needed to appeal to authorities for what they believed. . . . they insisted that God had revealed his truth in earlier times through Christ to his apostles.  The apostles at the beginning of the church were authorities who could be trusted.  But when the apostles died out, where was one to go for an authority? . . . . a reality that early Christians may not have taken into account, but that scholars today are keenly aware of: most of the apostles were illiterate and could not in fact write.  They could not have left an authoritative writing if their souls depended on it.

 

. . . . writings started to appear that claimed to be written by apostles, but that contained all sorts of bizarre and contradictory views.  Gospels were in circulation that claimed to be written by Jesus’s disciples Peter, Philip, and Mary and his brothers Thomas and James. . . . Some writings emerged that claimed to be written by Jesus himself.

 

In many instances, the authors of these writings could not actually have been who they claimed to be, as even the early Christians realized.  The views found in these writings were often deemed “heretical” (i.e., they conveyed false teachings), they were at odds with one another, they contradicted the teachings that had become standard within the church.  But why would authors claim to be people they weren’t? Why would an author claim to be an apostle when he wasn’t?  Why would an unknown figure write a book falsely calling himself Peter, Paul, James, Thomas Philip, or even Jesus?  . . . . if you wanted someone to read it, you called yourself Peter. Or Thomas. Or James. In other words, you lied about who you really were.

 

. . . . Many early Christian writings are “pseudonymous,” going under a “false name.” The more common word for this kind of writing is “forgery” . . . The crucial question is this:  Is it possible that any of the early Christian forgeries made it into the New Testament?  That some of the books of the New Testament were not written by the apostles whose names were attached to them?  That some of Paul’s letters were not actually written by Paul, but by someone claiming to be Paul?  That Peter’s letters were not written by Peter?  That James and Jude did not write the books that bear their names? Or—a somewhat different case, as we will see—that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?

 

Scholars for over a hundred years have realized that in fact this is the case.  The authors of some of the books of the New Testament were not who they claimed to be or who they have been supposed to be.  In some instances that is because an anonymous writing, in which an author did not indicate who he was, was later named after someone who did not in fact write it.  Matthew probably did not write Matthew, for example, or John, John; on the other hand, neither book actually claims to be written by a person named Matthew or John. . . .

 

Let me conclude this introduction simply by saying that I have spent the past five years studying forgery in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, especially but not exclusively within Christianity.  My goal all along has been to write a detailed scholarly monograph that deals with the matter at length.  The book you’re reading now is not that scholarly monograph.  What I try to do in the present book is to discuss the issue at a layperson’s level, pointing out the really interesting aspects of the problem by highlighting the results of my own research and showing what scholars have long said about the writings of the New Testament and pseudonymous Christian writings from outside the New Testament. The scholarly monograph to come will be much more thoroughly documented and technically argued. The present book, in other words, is not intended for my fellow scholars, who, if they read this one, will be doing so simply out of curiosity.  It is, instead, intended for you, the general reader, who on some level is, like me, interested in the truth.

 

Next:  Early Christian Forgeries

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