"Quid est veritas?" – Gospel Truth – 3

Image from www.azquotes.com

The previous article Gospel Truth? – 2  featured excerpts from the Introduction of the book FORGED by Bart D. Ehrman.

For further information of our readers, the Table of Contents of the book include:

1. A World of Deceptions and Forgeries
2. Forgeries in the Name of Peter
3. Forgeries in the Name of Paul
4. Alternatives to Lies and Deceptions
5. Forgeries in Conflicts with Jews and Pagans
6. Forgeries in Conflicts with False Teachers
7. False Attributions, Fabrications, Falsifications: Phenomena Related to Forgery
8. Forgeries, Lies, Deceptions, and the Writings of the New Testament

In case you’re wondering if the author has questioned only the New Testament, he has questioned the Old Testament as well, but not in this book.  This book is downloadable on a kindle app from amazon.com.

NSB@S6K

——————————————————-

Featured here are excerpts from Chapter I where Ehrman defines certain terms:

• “Orthonymous” (literally, “rightly named”) writing is one that really is written by the person who claims to be writing it.  There are 7 letters of Paul, out of the 13 in the New Testament that bear his name, that virtually everyone agrees are orthonymous, actually written by Paul.
• “Homonymous” (literally, “same named”) writing is one that is written by someone who happens to have the same name as someone else.  In the ancient world, the vast majority of people did not have last names, and a lot of people had the same first names.  This was as true among Christians as it was for everyone else.  Lots of people were named John, James, and Jude, for example.  If someone named John wrote the book of Revelation and simply called himself John, he wasn’t necessarily claiming to be anyone but himself.  When later Christians assumed that this John must be the disciple John, the son of Zebedee, it wasn’t really the author’s fault.  He just happened to have the same name as another more famous person.  The book is not forged, then.  It is simply homonymous, assuming that John the son of Zebedee did not write it, a safe assumption for most critical scholars.  It was included in the canon because of this mistaken identity.
• “Anonymous”  literally “having no name.”  These are books whose authors never identify themselves.  That is, technically speaking, true of 1/3 of the New Testament books.  None of the Gospels tell us the name of its author.  Only later did Christians call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; and later scribes then added these names to the book titles.  Also anonymous are the book of Acts and the letters known as 1,2, and 3 John.  Technically speaking, the same is true of the book of Hebrews; the author never mentions his name, even if he wants you to assume he’s Paul.
• “Pseudonymous” (literally, “falsely named”) is a little more slippery, and I need to explain how I will be using it.  Technically it refers to any book that appears under the name of someone other than the author, but there are two kinds of pseudonymous writings.
  • Sometimes authors simply take a pen name.  When Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn  and signed it “Mark Twain,” he was not trying to deceive his readers into thinking that he was someone famous; it was just a pen name to mask his own identity.  So too where Mary Ann Evans wrote Silas Marner and signed it “George Eliot.” This use of a pen name did not happen a lot in the ancient world, but it did happen on occasion.
  • The other kind of pseudonymous writing involves a book that is circulated under the name of someone else, usually some kind of authority figure who is presumed to be well known to the reading audience.  For this  particular kind of pseudonymous writing I will be using the technical term “pseudepigraphy” (literally, “written under a false name”).  A pseudepigraphal writing, then, is one that is claimed to be written by a famous, well-known, or authoritative person who did not in fact write it.
  • But as it turns out, there are also two kinds ofpseudepigraphal writings.
    • Sometimes a writing was published anonymously, with no author’s name attached, for example, the Gospel of Matthew.  But later readers and copyists asserted that they knew who had written it and claimed it was by a well-known, authoritative person, in this case the disciple Matthew.  In writings of this sort, which are wrongly attributed to a well-known person, the author is not trying to deceive anyone.  He or she remained anonymous.  It is only later readers who claimed that the author was someone else.  This kind of pseudepigraphy, then, involves a “false ascription”; a work is “ascribed” to someone who didn’t write it.
    • The other kind of pseudepigraphy does involve a kind fo intentional deceit by an author.  This is when an author writes a book claiming to be someone else.  This is what I am ehre calling forgery.  My definition of a forgery, then, is a writing that claims to be written by someone (a known figure) who did not in fact write it.

Over the years I have had several people object to my use of the term “forgery,” and I well understand the hesitancy of other scholars to use the term.  In modern times, when we think of forgery, we think of highly illegal activities . . . . Ancient forgers were not as a rule thrown in jail, because there simply weren’t laws governing the production and distribution of literature.  There were no copyright laws, for example.  But ancient authors did see this kind of activity as fraudulent, they recognized it as deceitful, they called it lying (and other even nastier things), and they often punished those who were caught doing it.  So when I use the term “forgery,” I do mean for it to have negative connotations, in part because, as we will see, the terms used by ancient authors were just as negative, if not more so.