Fool's Book Review: Forged

 

Misjudgment, misfortune, or just plain foolishness.  Anyway, I had a little extra time to read this past vacation.   So when I opened ‘Forged’, Bart Ehrman’s latest popular level work on Biblical criticism, only minutes after finishing Sarah Held Evans’ ‘Evolving in Monkeytown’, I knew it would be a great lesson in contrast.   Both Ehrman and Evans tell a similar story of conservative roots.   Ehrman began his forge into academia a conservative, born again evangelical.  In fact, it was his love of Scripture that led him to his criticism of it.  He began his education at Moody, graduated from Wheaton, and earned his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary under the advisory of Bruce Metzger.  If Evans’ story is an illustration of how a faith can evolve in the face of adversity, Ehrman’s illustrates what can happen when faith is not free to converse with evidence.  In Ehrman’s case,  when his study began to conflict with what he believed to be true about God’s word, more was lost than just his view of Biblical inerrancy.

Let me begin by saying I like Ehrman.  I like his writing.  I like his honesty.  I like his perspectives.  I like his willingness make the discussions usually held among the egg-heads accessible to intellectual simpletons like myself.   He is both an expert and good communicator.  Forged is much like Ehrman’s previously popular books, Misquoting Jesus (an introduction to textual criticism that questions the reliability of the Gospels) and Jesus Interrupted (a look at Bible contradictions) in that it brings the issues and developments raised by modern NT textual criticism to the non-scholar.   He’s open about his now deceased faith as a ‘Fundamental Christian’ and uses his story as a bit of a straw man that fell hard in the face of reason and evidence. 

  

In Forged, Ehrman aims to inform [his] readers about an important ancient literary phenomenon, correct mistakes that other scholars have made, invoke the reader to think more deeply about the roles of lies and deception in the Christian religion, to show the irony in the fact that lies and deception have historically been used to establish the ‘truth’, make the reader aware that there may be forgeries in the New Testament, to share interesting stories about intriguing and relatively unknown writings from antiquity, and finally, to entertain [his ]readers.

The ancient literary phenomenon he speaks of, of course, is forgery, the production of a work not genuine to the claimed author.  Ehrman’s premise, which can be reasonably surmised from his not-to-subtle and intentionally provocative subtitle, Writing in the Name of God.  Why the Bible’s Authors are not Who We Think They Are, that the Bible shouldn’t be trusted as God’s word, rests on the fact that forgeries were not only both common and unacceptable in antiquity, but they made it into the New Testament Canon.   Though the underlying motives that brought about these forgeries were diverse, the forger in every case wrote with the purpose to deceive his reader.   Obviously, for someone believing the books of the New Testament to be God’s words, the claim of forgery to any of these books is a serious one.  If Paul didn’t really write 2 Timothy for example, God either lied and said he did, or the church fathers mistakenly included it with the canon, or of course, as Ehrman would conclude, the Bible shouldn’t be considered to be God’s word nor should it carry the authority as such.  A good percentage of the pages in Forged is devoted to the critique of non-canonical early Christian writings, though Ehrman is not shy about going after the authenticity of several NT books.   According to Ehrman, of the 13 books attributed to Paul in our Bibles, only 7 of them are certainly authentic.  Ephesians, Colossians, I and II Timothy, Titus, and 2 Thessalonians, were most likely written at a different time by a different person.  I and II Peter were forgeries as well, as the claim is that neither were written by Jesus’ most vocal disciple. The evidence against Paul’s authorship includes disparity in messages and concepts, word usage, and writing style when compared to the ‘authentic’ Pauline letters.  As far as I and II Peter is concerned, as Peter was a Hebrew fisherman, it is highly unlikely that Peter was educated in Greek and had the writing skills found by the author.  The argument is supported by clues to the timing of the writing from internal references that would place the authorship of the letters sometime after Peter’s death.

Of interest, the use of secretaries in the writing of 1^st century writings is downplayed significantly.  “Did Paul use a secretary for all of his letter?  It is impossible to say.  Did the secretaries contribute to the contents of the letter?  This is easier to say.  Despite what scholars often claim, all of the evidence we have suggests that the answer is no.  The same evidence applies to the authors of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and in fact to all the other early Christian writers.”

I imagine more can probably be said in critique of Ehrman and Forged, but I have no business doing so.  As a person who appreciates the importance of evidence though, I tend to get uncomfortable when I read words and phrases like most certainly, every true scholar agrees, and most certainly, all the evidence suggests.  If this were so, why make the need to make a case as he described despite what scholars often claim.  Are these other scholars lying, or could the evidence possibly be not as clear cut as it’s made out to be?   I find Ehrman a little hypocritical here.  He expends quite a bit of effort arguing for the underlying deceitfulness of forgeries, especially within the early Christian community (and rightly so) but then, he often goes on to exaggerate his own points without seriously weighing opposition, which could easily be seen as an attempt to deceive his own audience into the clear cut simplicity of the argument.  Titles such as Misquoting Jesus and Forged:  Writing in the Name of God, Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are are probably great for selling books, but not an honest description of the text.

Along those same lines, Ehrman is surprisingly silent on the views of early church fathers.  Ehrman makes the case that forgery was both prevalent and frowned upon in antiquity.  It seems to me then, that those in the first few centuries who held these works as authentic would certainly have been aware of circulating forgeries and weighed the available evidence for and against the authenticity of the manuscripts they held so dear.  Any claim of forgery should at least consider the opinions of early scholars who were convinced of their authenticity.

Overall, I found Forged both entertaining and thought provoking.  I love hearing the back stories of the Christian roots found in the details of the early Christian writings.  We tend to think of Christianity as uniform it its beginning, but diversity in approaches and beliefs have been around from the beginning.  Ehrman is great at bringing those stories alive.

A couple questions to consider.  Should the Bible be approached like any other book of antiquity?  Is it possible that some NT books are in fact forgeries?  If so, how does think affect our view of God and our approach to Scripture?