Was the Bible forged? Author claims some New Testament books were written by 'people pretending to be apostles'

by whereami 56 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  dgp

  Perhaps some degree of repetition is to be expected, considering how intertwined the subjects are.

  It would seem unbelievable to many of my relatives and friends now, but maybe here someone would have the sort of "YEAH" moment I had myself when I read something Ehrman wrote in "Forged". I felt the man was speaking the way I wish I could have spoken at the time. I was a Catholic, of course, and therefore I didn't study the Bible to the extent Ehrman did, or the extent Jehovah's witnesses do. Anyways, the feeling is the same.

  Here it is:

  "We were heavily committed to the truth at Moody Bible Institute. I would argue, even today, that there is no one in the planet more committed to truth than a serious and earnest evangelical Christian. And at Moody we were nothing if not serious and earnest. 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 were 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 the 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, 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 the 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 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 apologetis 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 evangelicals 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.

  The more I studied the evangelical truth claims about Christianity, especially claims about the Bible, the more I realized that the "truth" was taking me somewhere I very much did not want to go..."

  I won't continue copying because I think this is enough.
• 

  lifeisgood

  This isn't the worst part of what happened to the Bible. Originally, there were over 600 books, texts, whatever you want to call them, accepted by early Christians. These were whittled down by church rulers and Roman officials to 81, then in the late 1800s this number was whittled down again to 66.

  So, not only are some Bible books forgeries, but the vast majority of books accepted by early Christians are not part of the Bible canon.
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  Band on the Run

  Erhmann knows better. Stating that the Bible was forged bring headlines and is salacious. Most likely, the gospels were not written by the New Testament characters we know. Someone could use their name to indicate a teaching tradition withhin the Church associated with the apostle. We discussed Western thought vs. Eastern though in our Lenten Bible Study last night. The authors are Middle EAstern, not Roman. Different modes of thought are displayed. We believe in strict, written documentation in the West and a story line from early to late with many details. I am trained in Western thought as an American lawyer. An Eastern mindset is not inferior. No one would believe that these NT characters wrote the gospels. We don't know enough about their culture.

  Ehrmann knows better. He reminds of a birther. I don't despite those who out of ignorance believe Obama was born in Kenya in the deep jungle. It is sad that they are ignorant. When someone knows better and they play to a crowd for political points, I despise them. Hitler played to the German people in the same way.

  Just b/c we did not have the NY Times, Wall St. Journal and Vanity Fair cover New Testament times, it does not mean the people were stupid and dense. A lifespan was still a lifespan.
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  ProdigalSon

  Just b/c we did not have the NY Times, Wall St. Journal and Vanity Fair cover New Testament times, it does not mean the people were stupid and dense. A lifespan was still a lifespan.

  Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the world something like 90 percent illiterate under the Roman Empire?
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  Quentin

  Haven't read any of Ehrman books as yet. They sound interesting. Crtical analysis of the Bible has been going on for at least 100 yrs. Over that period of time several of Paul's wrtings and certian portions of others have been called into question. This is the frist I have heard of the Timothy books. Swiss cheese indeed.
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  dgp

  According to Ehrman, less than 1% of the people actually knew how to read. And this, in their own language. The number of people who were fluent in other languages was very, very small. Meaning it is highly unlikely, to say the least, that a poor fisherman like Peter would write a letter in what Ehrman calls sophisticated Greek, and would be able to quote other books as well.
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  metatron

  I have various problems with this sort of book.

  Don't get me wrong - I reject inerrant ideas and realize that the construction of the Bible - by the early Catholic Church - may involve some forgeries. That said, however.....I

  First, there is a certain logic to the Gospels , with Matthew written for Jews, supposedly first, Mark written for no nonsense Romans (lots of miracles) , Luke appealing to Greek intellectuals and John written as the last Gospel, to provide complimentary information, primarily for mystics and proto-Gnostics. Does a fragment of John suggest 90 -130 AD - as found in Egypt? So, wouldn't the Synoptic Gospels get written and well circulated before then - to trigger writing of a complimentary Gospel? And did the Christian community in Jerusalem leave (70 AD) and survive as a historical fact?

  Such books seem to start with the assumption that nothing miraculous ever happens and that prophecy is impossible, so everything that looks miraculous must be dated after the fact, arbitrarily. I have a problem with that. I also have a problem with the notion that Christians just hang around their congregations for what.... 50 years? .... and finally say. "Uh, guys, don't you think we should write a summary of Jesus' life for everybody to read or something? I mean what the heck".

  I know there are issues with Matthew being written first but as a Gospel to Jews, that would make sense and has historical testimony to support it, supposedly written in Hebrew first.

  I have a general problem with assertions that are broadly presented as hard fact, not as speculation. Could Peter have used a more literate secretary or Paul different secretaries? If Paul was blind, he must have depended on others to actually do the writing. - and speaks of 'his own hand' in one letter, as if others were not by his hand directly.

  I also have problems with the notion of a prominent speaker and writer - like Peter or Paul - somehow not leaving much of anything behind that was actually written by them. Instead, much is made of 'forgeries'.

  Finally, I have a philosophical problem with the unstated circular reasoning that may exist in many of these books - wherein, you can come up with an indefinite number of theories just by selectively accepting what you like for your theory - and then reject whatever doesn't fit as false, a forgery, etc. This sort of reasoning makes the whole enterprize pointless as one view can't be established above another.

  I haven't read everything by Ehrman, so I'm generalizing here.

  metatron
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  Morbidzbaby

  I loved Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted.... Gonna have to see if I can find this most current gem at the library. Bart Ehrman was partially responsible for me opening my eyes and really critiquing the bible. Now when I do read it (which I do on occasion...my hunny likes to debate and we both thoroughly enjoy the banter!), I read it merely as a book of a people's history. It's great when you don't take it all so literal.

  I actually was talking about this with my mother today (among other things) and she was doing the JW "not everything in the bible is literal...some of it is SYMBOLIC" (ooooh...aaaaaah! ). So I asked "How do you know what's symbolic and what's literal??" She responded "Well when you have the holy spirit, you know...". So I asked her how she'd know she had holy spirit...She started talking about how the JW's are the only ones who understand Revelation, and then she turned to a box in the Revelation book that says:

  To

  understandthebookofRevelationweneed

  ? To receive the help of Jehovah’s spirit

  ? To discern when the Lord’s day began (1914, wasn't it?? )

  ? To recognize the faithful and discreet slave today

  So, according to her, she knows they have holy spirit because they "understand Revelation" and "see the signs of the times we're living in".

  But the way I see it, there's no way in hell the JW's can understand Revelation because they don't meet the 2nd and 3rd criteria, which means they don't meet the 1st! Huh! Interesting!
• 

  dgp

  I have a general problem with assertions that are broadly presented as hard fact, not as speculation. Could Peter have used a more literate secretary or Paul different secretaries? If Paul was blind, he must have depended on others to actually do the writing. - and speaks of 'his own hand' in one letter, as if others were not by his hand directly.

  Metatron (hiya!), I think I can't copy the entire book here (maybe it would amount to violation of copyright; the book was available for sale only on March 21, ten days ago - I got mine as a Kindle book which I paid for in advance), but Ehrman does discuss this issue of the secretaries and the like. If I understand correctly, Ehrman says that yes, secretaries were used by some people, as, for example, Cicero, but:

  1) we don't know IF that was the case with Peter; that is to say, we would be speculating whether he did, and would assume he did, when in fact we don't know.

  2) that doesn't solve the problem that Peter didn't speak Greek. Did he "dictate" in a language he didn't speak?

  3) A person who does more than copy the text is not a secretary or a simple writer, but at the very least a co-author. If you claim to have been a secretary, then whatever it is that you write can't sound different from other texts purportedly written by the person you're helping. If I were to WRITE, or, as we would say today, TYPE, something that Vidia Naipaul dictated to me, then the style, the words and, particularly, the culture and the points of view would still be Sir Vidia's, never mine. If the letter that was purportedly copied by a secretary sounds different, then we're in the face of a text that is attributed to a higher authority, not to the real writer.

  4) Peter was not a prominent WRITER, that we know of at least. The man was a fisherman. Fishermen were not literate at the time. If you go to many a developing country, they still aren't. Do we have to suppose he wrote, and then in Greek?

  Apparently Paul did use a secretary, at least one time. But they made sure Paul wrote something at the end of the letter, so people familiar with his hand would be able to recognize it, and they mention the guy's name. And the vocabulary and words are really Paul's.

  If I remember correctly, Ehrman says Peter couldn't have written 2 Peter, for the simple reason that we have to assume he was dead by the time Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. Peter is said to have died in the year 64, in Rome; Titus destroyed Rome in the year 70. How come 2 Peter says Jerusalem was destroyed in response to the killing of Jesus by the jews? And then in Greek?
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  Terry

  I worked in the Art business for more years than I can recall (at least twenty) and I know something about forgery since it is rampant.

  Art forgery refers to creating and, in particular, selling works of art that are falsely attributed to be work of another, usually more famous, artist.

  The essential element is passing off your own work as somebody else's.

  In the context of New Testament writings---let's stand back and look at the blackboard.

  The only thing even barely close to a Holy Bible in the days immediately following Jesus ministry was the Septuagint. Neither Jesus nor his apostles walked around carrying bookbags like JW's do today. People did not think of books as portable..THEY WEREN'T.

  Books weren't written and sold like we think about them today. There is no comparison.

  But, persons writing apologetic works, religious propaganda and apocalyptic works were TRYING TO PERSUADE OTHERS.

  If nobody is going to listen to what you have to say (because you aren't famous) how are you going to persuade?

  Writing AS THOUGH you ARE a known personage is the trick.

  Another possibility is taking an already existing anonymous piece of writing which you agree with and passing it off as the writing of a KNOWN, respected authority.

  Back to art work.

  If your purpose is to make money and you can copy the style and images of a FAMOUS artist but nobody will buy your work---the next step would be passing off your work as the FAMOUS name and putting your earnings in the bank.

  I worked in Los Angeles for an unsavory character who ran galleries in New York and L.A. I didn't know at the time he was crooked. But, I found out the hard way. He would invite artists to bring in their work for him to look at and evaluate to see if he might hire them and commission works for his galleries.

  The unsavory man would then copy and print up thousands of copies as lithographic prints and sell them in Europe. They never got a penny for it.

  Why am I bringing this up?

  There are all kinds of strategies for self-promotion in this world and exploiting others has always been at the top.

  Bart Ehrman is one of (if not THE) the Top scholars alive and active in the world today. He is courageous to the point of endangering himself. I kid you not. He is the boy who kicked the hornet's nest. Evangelicals feel the sting of his exposing the fragility of their inerrancy claims most keenly.

  The evangelial community will try to destroy him any way they can.