← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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A
Struggling with weight that doesn't respond to traditional dieting. Prolon's five day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it assists the body in entering a fasting like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat and supports healthy metabolic markers. In just five days, Prolon offers a structured, science backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork. Get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe@prolonlife.com today. Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin today on Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We're going to be talking about forgeries. Were the books of the New Testament written by Jesus disciples? What about the Apocrypha? How do we even know who wrote what? Before we get into that though, Bart, how are you doing today?
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B
Yes, I'm doing well. I have this morning routine where I get up and first thing I do is I read Greek.
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A
It's an excellent routine.
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B
I've been doing this for years, but lately I've been reading Homer, which is hard Greek for me. And so it's great. It's fantastic. So yeah, yeah, I know it's weird, but it's like the highlight of my day.
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A
It sounds like fun though.
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B
Oh, it's great fun. I started doing it because when my kids were little I had no, like no time during the day as loud the whole time. But if I got up early in the morning, like there was nothing, no noise. And so I could read, read languages. That's how I learned all my languages. So how are you doing?
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A
I'm okay. I'm not reading Greek in the mornings, but I have been enjoying some Homer recently. The other podcast I work on, we're doing the first season and it's looking at modern receptions and retellings of the Odyssey and the Iliad. It's been an awful lot of fun. So while we haven't really been looking at the original, we've been looking at what people have done with it.
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B
Oh, that's great because there's been a lot lately. What's this other thing you're doing?
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A
It's called the Reading Party Podcast and I do it with a classicist friend of mine it's very different to this. We don't do an awful lot of historical academic stuff, but it's two academics reacting to modern retellings of ancient myths. It's great.
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B
Oh my God. Fantastic. Good. We need to talk more about that.
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A
But first we should talk about forgeries and pseudepigraphy, because that's a fantastic topic. What for the uninitiated among us, is pseudepigraphy.
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B
Pseudepigraphy is one of those long words you use because, I don't know, I guess it makes sense. The word actually means false writing, pseudo, like in, you know, something as pseudo's fault and graphy, as in graphic, you know, graphite writing. And so it's a technical term that historians use for books that are circulating under the name of somebody who didn't actually write it. But it gets a little bit tricky because there are different kinds of pseudepigraphy. For example, some kinds of pseudepicore are completely innocent. You know, where somebody just uses a pen name. So like when Samuel Clemens writes Huckleberry Finn, he writes it as Mark Twain, but he's not trying. If he wrote the book and claimed to be Charles Dickens, but see, he picked a pen name and that, that happens in antiquity too. But other times you have, you have a book that be circulating in the name of somebody who actually did not write it. And so you have a number of treatises, for example, by ancient authors. And people wonder, well, did that person really write this or not? You know, and if somebody intentionally writes a book and names himself as somebody who's he's not, then that's. Yeah, that, that's, that's a kind of a hardcore case of pseudepigraphy.
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A
And why is this something we should care about?
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B
Well, I think generally we really do care about it. Even in the modern world, there's a lot of things like that going on now. And today we just call them forgeries because of forgeries. When somebody claims to be somebody, they're not. When I started teaching back in the Pleistocene age, otherwise known as the 1980s, there was a front page story, big, big news. They discovered the diaries of Adolf Hitler that he had been keeping all the way through the war, up to the very end. And they were verified by Hitler scholars as being authentic. And these things had been sold to a German magazine for millions of dollars. And then publication rights were sold to Rupert Murdoch. But about a week after they started, this started being headline news. All of a sudden other experts came and said, no, these are absolutely Forged. And they could prove it because they could show that the ink was after. The ink in the paper was dated after 1945. So we care today. You know, it would really matter if we had Hitler's diaries. That would be good. But turns just somebody's doing this for the money. Well, you get that in the ancient world as well, sometimes for money, but for lots of other reasons too, where people will write things claiming to be someone else for a variety of reasons I'm sure we'll get into. But the thing is, you know, if you want to know what the apostle Paul said, then if you're reading a letter that he actually did not write, that someone else wrote claiming to be Paul, well, you know, you like to know that. And so that's the situation.
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A
Thank you. You've touched briefly on this in your answer to the first question. Is there a difference between pseudepigraphy and forgeries?
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B
I think forgery is a kind of pseudepigraphy. And so technically, a pseudepigraphon is any book that is circulating under a false name, the name of somebody other than the author. And there's several kinds of that. You get the pen names and you. But you also get like, for example, you get anonymous book. Somebody will write a book and they, you know, they won't name themselves. It's just an anonymous book. But then later someone will say, oh, yeah, this was written by Cicero, or this was written by Plato, you know, or this was written by Homer, or this is written by the apostle Peter. So it's not the author claiming it, it's just somebody later attributing it. That's still a pseudonymous writing, but it's not the author's fault. And then there. Then there are these books where people claim to be someone they're not. They'd claim to be a famous person for whatever reason they have, which was to talk about. But those are all different kinds of categories, right? You get pen names, you get anonymous writings are misattributed, you get people claiming to be someone they're not, and other kinds of things like that.
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A
Okay, so you've mentioned in the modern world, obviously we care about who wrote something. And with copyright law now, it is a crime to do various kinds of things, including forgery. Did this kind of writing carry the same moral judgment in the ancient world as it does in the modern.
- [06:54]
B
I've written two books on this topic of forgery in the ancient world. One is a trade book, a popular book for general audiences. It's just called Forged. And it's dealing mainly with the writings of the New Testament and which ones of those are probably not written by their authors. But another one is a deeper book that's for scholars called Forgery and Counter Forgery. And in both books, I go into, into some length about moral judgments. And one of the reasons I wrote these books is because most people, including most scholars of the New Testament, completely misconstrue the situation from the ancient world. When I went to graduate school, we all learned this was an accepted practice. People generally weren't fooled by it. Nobody thought it was a bad idea. It was just something they did back then. And sometimes you get more sophisticated answers. Like, you know, in the Greek philosophical schools, this was the tradition that if you were a disciple of Socrates, you'd write an essay, but you would sign off Socrates because you're just giving him the honor because he's the one who taught you this stuff. And so you don't, you know, it's an act of humility. So we learned this and, like, it was driven into our heads. And when I started doing the research on it, I realized that's completely wrong. And I'm not. I'm not the first one to say this. There's a lot of deep scholarship on this, especially in German. Maybe that's why my colleagues, I know they don't bother to read some of this stuff, I guess, but it is clear as day when you actually read what ancient authors say about this phenomenon, they condemn it. It's a form of literary deceit. They call it lying. They do not like it at all. So that you're right, there are no copyright laws. So it's not, like, illegal. But, you know, there weren't laws for lots of things that were bad. And the moral judgments are virtually unanimous that this is a bad activity. It's a form of lying and deceitful.
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A
When you have anonymous works being attributed to specific people, is that also considered deceit or is that something slightly different?
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B
It's usually different. It could be deceit, you know, it could be that you're attributing it to somebody for purposes of your own rather than just so, you know, somebody would know, oh, yeah, I think that this one's written by Aristotle. But like, if you say, oh, yeah, no, this, this one's definitely written by the Apostle John, you don't know that. But you're just saying that because you want people to accept the book. That's a kind of deceit too. But I would say with anonymous books, misattribution is. It's kind of a. It's a different thing. And it's certainly not the author's fault. That's the thing. It's like the author's not lying about something. It's just he's writing an anonymous book.
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A
Are there books of the New Testament that we know to be pseudepigraphic?
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B
Well, it depends what you mean by no. A lot of us know it, but a lot of us don't believe it. So, yeah, so I'll put it in stark terms. I'll put it in the starkest terms I can. So there are 27 books in the New Testament, and of those 27 books, we are relatively certain about seven of them being authentic. There are seven letters of Paul that people, scholars are pretty sure they call them the undisputed Pauline letters. So again, this isn't just kind of my crazy views. This is like standard stuff in the field. Paul has 13 letters in the New Testament. Seven of them are called undisputed because the other. The other six people doubt whether Paul wrote it. But then the rest of the New Testament, the only other book that is probably authentic in some sense is the Book of Revelation, which claims to be written by somebody named John. He doesn't tell you which John he is. He doesn't claim to be John the son of Zebedee, the disciple of Jesus later on. That's what people said, and that's why it got into the New Testament. But he doesn't claim to be that John. And in fact, he gives indications in the book he's not claiming to be John the son of Zebedee, but he names himself. The other books appear to be either books where people are claiming to be someone they weren't, which is the hardcore pseudepigraphy that we today would call forgery, or they're misattributed. They're assigned to people who probably did not write them.
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A
So when we're looking at ancient manuscripts, how do we know whether they were written by the person they claim to have been written by?
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B
Yeah, this is a great question, because a lot of people think, as kind of naturally, that you can kind of study the manuscript itself, like there's something about the handwriting or something, you know, it can't work that way because we don't have the originals for any of these books. It's not like if you can take a letter of Abraham Lincoln, which people do, you know, these letters turn up every now and then from Abraham Lincoln. And you have forgery experts who come and look Just look at the handwriting and the ink and stuff and can tell. And you can't do that with antiquity because you don't have the author's writings. And so. So there's a range of criteria that scholars use for this kind of evaluation. Let me just take one example from the New Testament, the letter of First Timothy. So First Timothy is this. It's one of the 13 Pauline letters. It claims to be written by Paul. It's emphatic that it's written by Paul. It's written by Paul. But scholars since the 19th century have recognized that there are real problems with that claim. So much so that today the majority of historical, by far the great majority of historical scholars say Paul did not write it. And the reasons are. There are a lot of reasons. The writing style itself, the style of Greek writing, is very different from what we know from Paul's own undisputed letters. The vocabulary is very different, uses a different set of vocabulary. This author uses some terms that Paul also uses and means different things by them. Technical terms like faith and so like. And he means something different from what Paul means. The letter stakes out views that Paul himself did not have that in fact, Paul sometimes argues against. And the historical situation that it presupposes is radically different from what we know about what was going on in Paul's day. 1 Timothy is about how the church is to be organized. Allegedly, Paul is writing to his companion Timothy, and he's explaining, okay, you need to get the right bishops. These are the qualifications for your bishops. These are your qualifications for your deacons. Women are supposed to be like this, this and that, and like, it's kind of going through this stuff. And when you compare everything that he says about these things with what's going on in Paul's day. For example, as Paul writes First Corinthians, which almost certainly is his letter, the whole situation is clearly, decades later. The church has developed significantly and developed a hierarchy, a structure where you've got church offices that you didn't have in Paul's day. And you have, you know, bishops and deacons and the widows. It's an office like almost everything speaks against it being by Paul. And so you use those kind of criteria, vocabulary, theology, writing style, etc.
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A
So how do you establish those criteria to begin with if you don't have the original manuscripts by the author to work with?
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B
It isn't a matter of having the manuscripts. It's having something that makes you think, this is probably pretty much what he wrote. We've got a lot of manuscripts of First Timothy, and we've got a lot of manuscripts of First Corinthians. And so we have a pretty good idea what was said line by line. There are lots of disputes, as we've said in an earlier episode. There'll be a verse that is worded differently, but never in a way that affects this kind of evaluation that we're dealing with now, which more on the macro level rather than on the micro level. We have these 13 letters claiming to be written by Paul, and it seems plausible that Paul did write letters, and there's a group of these letters that are internally consistent with each other. The writing style is very similar. Their thematic concerns are similar, their vocabulary is similar, their points of view, theology, everything is fairly similar. They're on different topics, but you can tell this is by the same guy. And the other six, to varying degrees, are different, and in most cases quite different. Sometimes like the letter of Ephesians, which Ephesians is many people's favorite Pauline letter. But there are very compelling reasons for thinking it wasn't written by Paul, both because the writing style is radically different. Let me just explain that about the writing stuff. If you're reading a novel by Mark Twain and somebody has inserted a page from a novel by James Joyce into this book, you're reading. If you're reading this and you're reading Mark Twain, and all of a sudden you're reading this kind of James Joyce in prose, whoa, this is. Nah, man, this didn't written by the same guy. So it's that kind of thing. And scholars do very, very detailed analyses of the grammar and syntax and style and stuff. If you've got books that are written by somebody, then you can tell whether this is like, plausibly. And of course, everybody has different writing styles. You know, we all know that. And it's not that, you know, you got to do the same thing every time. So it isn't like that. But that's how you know you've got. You've got a core of writings that you think is by this person. Then you evaluate it.
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A
I see. Thank you. When, in the canonization of the New Testament, did people become aware that some of these books were probably not written by the people that you thought they were written by?
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B
That was the big debate in early Christianity. As they were developing the canon, they were trying to decide who wrote which books. There was really no dispute about these letters of Paul. Of any serious note, there were people in early Christianity who said, yeah, First Timothy is not written by Paul. I mean, you do get People like that. But by and large, some things were accepted and some things were question marks. And so Second and Third John were question marks. Second Peter was a question mark. The book of Jude was a question. The book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation. We actually have an ancient author, Dionysius of Alexandria, who wrote a treatise trying to show that the book of Revelation was not written by John the son of Zebedee. He did it in kind of a way that wouldn't work anymore. What he did is he said, look, the Gospel of John's written by John, and the Book of Revelation can't be written by the same guy. The style is so different. For one thing, the author of Revelation doesn't write Greek very well. I mean, he makes mistakes, and it's like just grammatical mistakes. And he does, by the way. I mean, he does, and it's not at all the same style. And so he argued this is in the second century. He says, this could not have been written by the same author as John. And today scholars agree with that. These two are by different things, but they don't agree. The premise that he has is John, the son of Zebedee wrote the Gospel of John. And today's scholars don't think that's right either. But it is clear they are different authors.
- [17:15]
A
This is a little bit further removed from your personal specialization because it's more of a modern Christianity question, but I would be interested to hear your opinion. Opinion. Why do you think now that we know so many of the books of the New Testament are probably forgeries or misattributed, then why are they kept in if these letters aren't written by Paul, for example?
- [17:37]
B
Yes. Well, so this is a problem. The deal is that most people who accept the writings of the New Testament don't know that this is the kind of thing scholars are saying, which is the purpose of this podcast, to bring information to the world at large. The scholars know and they don't because this is commonplace among scholars. But there are big debates among scholars as well. It's not that there's one view of things, you know, within the world of biblical scholarship. In our country, in the United States, the majority of scholars who devote their lives to studying the New Testament and get paid to do it are evangelical Christians or conservative Christians of one kind or another. Some of the very conservative ones won't agree with me that Paul did not write first and Second Timothy and Titus. Historical scholars are pretty agreed on that. But evangelical scholars who have a commitment to the Bible, not having mistakes in it are not going to say. They just, they won't and they'll argue. No, actually Paul did write these things. And so there are disputes. The church at large continues to affirm the authorship of these books. And in part because, of course, I mean, if it's right that these are not written by the people who are claimed to be the authors, then in the modern world that is seen as a form of lying. And you obviously can't have lying in the New Testament. And so that's the problem tends to get brushed away rather than looked at, you know, as a historical problem. It's dealt with as a theological problem, and which is completely understandable. But if you're dealing with that as a historical problem, historical scholars, they doubt six of these letters. They doubt that Peter wrote second Peter and they don't think, you know, John wrote Revelation, etc.
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A
Going back then to the ancient world. Is pseudepigraphy restricted to the New Testament, Greek, Roman writings, or is it kind of more widely known through the ancient world?
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B
It's widespread throughout the ancient world. So when Christians were doing this, they weren't doing anything different from what everybody else is doing. It was more common in the ancient world than it is today, largely because we have such advanced ways of detecting forgeries that they simply didn't have in the ancient world. And so it's much harder to get away with it today, although people do get away with it sometimes, including with Christian books. In my book forged, the one for a general audience, my last chapter was the most fun one for me to write because I dealt with forgeries of Gospels, 19th century Forgeries of gospels. And so people often hear things about how when Jesus was a young man, he went off to India and he studied with the Brahmins and that's where he acquired all of his wisdom or, you know, so you. And where did he get that from? Well, there were gospels that were published in the 19th century that claimed to be ancient gospels that have been exposed as forgeries by scholars. But a lot of people read these things. It just, they assume they were true. And so it's still, it's still a modern thing in the ancient world. In my, both of my books actually, I discuss lots of incidences from the Greek world, from the Roman world, mainly the Greek and Roman world, because that's, those are the worlds that you have within Christianity originated in. But also in the Jewish world, we have all sorts of Jewish forgeries as well. Two of them in the Old Testament. The book of Ecclesiastes claims to be written by Solomon. So, you know, in the 900s BCE. And there's no way it was written in the 900s BCE. It's dependent on Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus was a 4th century Greek philosopher. And the book of Daniel, the first six chapters claim to be written by this figure, Daniel during the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE. But even scholars in antiquity knew this thing was written in the second century bce. So somebody claiming to be Daniel, who's not. Yeah. My point is it's fairly widespread and people had different reasons for doing it.
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A
That's a great segue, actually into my next question, the million dollar question. Why did ancient authors borrow other people's names for their writings?
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B
Yeah. So in the modern world, it is a million dollar question. In the ancient world, not so much, because they didn't have booksellers very often. In the ancient world, usually when you wrote a book, you would circulate it among your friends and they would circulate it among others and eventually, you know, might go on sale. But usually authors didn't make money from their books. And so forging one didn't. Except there were some exceptions. There were a couple of places, big urban centers that wanted to establish libraries. These weren't like lending libraries like we have now, but they'd be repositories for books so scholars could go and do research in, in one place and have all the books in one place. And so there was a very famous library, for example, in, in Alexandria, and there's another one in a place called Pergamum. They were building up these libraries and the librarians wanted to have original copies of writings because of the problem we've talked about on the podcast already, that when scribes copy things, they tend to make mistakes. And so you want the original copy. Well, if you're a library and you're starting up a collection and you want original copies of major works, you'd be amazed how many original works of Plato start showing up on your doorstep because you're buying these things. And so Galen, an ancient author, talk about this, about how these libraries had to contend with these forgeries because there's so for those authors forging those things just to make money. That was fairly rare, though, because most books weren't being sold. Some people forged documents for rather nefarious purposes. I mentioned Epicurus a little minute ago in another context. Epicurus was a rather infamous philosopher, and people thought that he was a complete hedonist because he believed in living a life of pleasure. But he didn't mean what we mean. When we say pleasure, he meant pleasure like having friends around you and having intelligence conversations like that kind of pleasure. But he had a. He had a reputation for being a hedonist. He had an enemy, lots of enemies. But one of his enemies was a guy named Diotimus who wrote 50 obscene letters and circulated them, signed them Epicurus, and then circulated them. And so it's a trash, his enemy. And, you know, people didn't have ways of evaluating it as well as we do. So, like, it worked. And so sometimes people had very nefarious purposes. There are lots of other reasons I talk about in my book, but one reason that I think was maybe the most important reason, especially in philosophical and religious circles, was that people had points of view that they thought were really important, and they wanted them to be circulated, and they wanted people to read them and to accept them. But they were a nobody. Nobody had ever heard of them before. You know, your name is Theopompus or something, and nobody's heard of who Theo Pompous is. But you want to write. You know, you want to write a treatise and you want somebody to read it. And so you. You sign off Plato, you know, because then people will read it. Or if you're a Christian, you've got ideas about Jesus that you want to be propagated. You write your gospel and then you sign it. You know, you sign it Philip, or you sign it Bartholomew, or you sign it, you know, James, or you pick a name of an apostle, or if you got a letter, you know, you write a letter you want. People are really messing up here, and you got to straighten them out. You write the letter and you sign it Peter, because your name is whatever, John Schwartz, and nobody's heard of you. And so you're not going to sign up with your name because you want people to read it. I think in Christianity, that was the most prominent reason for people forging documents.
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A
So when people are forging documents like that, how do they try and avoid detection?
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B
Yeah, this is one of the most interesting things, because, of course, when people write something, they want people to believe it. And so how do they do it? There's this really interesting book by Anthony Grafton on forgers and critics, which argues that in the ancient world, what happened is forgers would forge them, but the critics would figure out, you know, they develop ways of figuring it out. So the forgers had to get better and improve their methods, which meant the critics had to improve their methods, who escalated like that over the centuries. And one thing is, if you just claim to Be somebody. You write a letter and you claim to be Paul, People just kind of naturally assume it's Paul, unless there's some obvious reason not to think so. So just claiming the name helps. It helps if you, if you address the kinds of issues that the author would typically address. It helps if you're able to imitate a writing style that really helps. A lot of people can't, but some, some people tried and did okay with that. Other things you would do even craftier, you put in what scholars call verisimilitudes. A verisimilitude, that's word that very means where was truth and similitude similar to truth? It's a statement that looks similar to what this person would write. And so you make some off the cuff remark that has nothing to do with anything. Like you're writing a letter in the name of Paul and you say, oh, by the way, you know, I left my coat back in this town. Bring my parchments too, because there's some parchments I want to read, you know, and you just say that that isn't Timothy. It tells Timothy to do and so in second Timothy. And so. And people say, well, obviously it's by Paul because, you know, why would a forger do that? What do you mean, why would a forger do that? A forger do that precisely because it throws you off the scent of his deceit. And the most interesting ploy of all of that kind of verisimilitude is when forgers tell you not to read books that are forged. It happens in early Christian writings. There's a book called the Apostolic Constitutions that claims to be written by the apostles. And there'll be passages where they'll address you in the first person. I, James, say to you this, that, and the other thing. I, John, say to you this, that, and the other thing. You know, I talk, you know, you go through these apostles, they're saying things. But at one point in the book, the author warns you not to read books that claim to be written by apostles but aren't. That's exactly what he's doing. But the most interesting thing of all is that appears to happen in the New Testament in the book of second Thessalonians. Second Thessalonians is one of the disputed Pauline letters. It's a letter that there are very good reasons for thinking Paul didn't write it. For one thing, it develops the view of what's going to happen at the end of times that is just precisely contrary to the view in First Thessalonians. But in Second Thessalonians, chapter two, the author claiming to be Paul warns his readers against a letter that's circulating in his name that he did not write. Okay, so allegedly Paul's saying, don't read this other letter that's circulating in my name. That's That I didn't write. But that creates this great situation that proves that there were forgeries in Paul's name floating around. It proves it because if Paul did write Second Thessalonians, then he knows there's a forgery in his name circulating in his lifetime. If Paul did not write Second Thessalonians, then it's a forgery circulating in Paul's name. Either way, you've got a forgery in Paul's name. But one other thing I want to emphasize about this, people often say, well, look, you couldn't have a forgery circulating in Paul's name during his lifetime. People would know it. Paul would say, don't do that. People who say that haven't read much about the ancient world. We have authors who complain about forgeries in their names. The poet Marshall writes a number of sonnets about people who are doing this to him, writing things in his name. Galen wrote an entire book trying to show you which books he actually wrote as opposed to the ones circulating in his name that he didn't write. So the idea that you couldn't have this in his lifetime is just bogus. Yeah.
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A
How do we. Or how did ancient people resolve the kind of tension between the importance of truth, specifically in the New Testament, and the fact that there are these forgeries? I'm thinking specifically of an example that you use in Forged of Ephesians, which talks repeatedly about the importance of truth, but is itself a forgery.
- [29:31]
B
I know. Yeah. This is. This is the question that kind of moves. Moves a little bit beyond just the pure kind of purely historical data kind of stuff to like, wow, you know, what are these people. People thinking? It's especially troubling within the Christian tradition because Christianity has always been a religion that embraces truth. I suppose every religion does. But, you know, most ancient religions, Roman religions, Greek religions, truth wasn't really the issue in religions. It was an issue in philosophy. It wasn't that they were into lying or anything. It's just like it doesn't like their emphasis. But Christianity, man, that is a lot about the truth. And the book of Ephesians itself emphasizes the importance of truth and speaking the truth. Truth and embracing the truth. And yet it's written by somebody claiming to be Paul. And there are really good reasons for thinking Paul didn't write it. It's the historical scholars who look at this evidence generally say, yeah, Paul didn't write it. So how does that work? So this guy's lying while he's embracing the truth. And so here's my view of that. Most people today agree that sometimes it's appropriate to lie. If somebody's banging on your door, asking after your child because they want to do harm to your child, and they want to know if the child is at home, you're going to say no, you're going to tell a lie. Because there are times when it's appropriate to lie. In the opinion of most people throughout history, it was always thought that there were appropriate times to lie. You have explicit discussions of this in Plato's dialogues and in, you know, Socrates saying, talk about when it's appropriate to lie. You get explicit discussions of this in Christian writings. And what changed? It was St. Augustine. Augustine was the first one on record who said, it is never right to lie in any circumstance whatsoever, even if it means your spouse is going to be suffering eternally in hell. Don't lie. It's better for that person to suffer in hell forever than for you to tell a lie. Whoa. So he wrote two treatises, argue that. Okay, so my point is sometimes it's appropriate to lie. And so I think what happens with these authors who want you to read their books because they think that they're telling you something that's really important, in their view this message is more important than their lie, which they probably see as a white lie. This white lie is getting you to read the book. And understanding the truth of what they're saying is more important to them than the truth about their own identity. It's this ironic situation where they decide to tell a lie in order to promote the truth.
- [32:01]
A
It's a question of working towards the
- [32:03]
B
greater goods, you know, and justify the means.
- [32:06]
A
Interesting. I have one last question before we go for our break. So you mentioned that there are several letters written supposedly by Paul that don't really line up with what he says elsewhere. Are there instances where we have suspected forgeries that match more closely with what we might expect from that author?
- [32:27]
B
Oh, absolutely. And that's the case with Paul, including in. In the New Testament. And so let me just say, for people who doubt the Christians would ever do this, there is no doubt. Nobody who actually looks into this doubts it, because we have. We have letters from outside the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul that he certainly didn't write and you could just read them yourself. 3rd Corinthians I mentioned in an earlier podcast we did a letter to the Laodiceans. Allegedly it's not written by Paul and we have a correspondence between Paul, Seneca. Seneca was like the premier philosopher of his day. And we have 14 letters that go back and forth that people thought were actual letter and now they are such forgeries. And, and so there's no doubt that the people forging these things and so some of these letters with the letters outside the New Testament, there's really no debate about them at all. But within the New Testament, as I said, there are debates. So the three letters that almost all, not all, but the vast majority of historical scholars would say are not Pauline are first and second Timothy and Titus. The so called pastoral epistles, Ephesians, Colossians and second Thessalonians are more debated. Most historical scholars agree he did not write Ephesians. But Colossians is closer to Paul in many ways in terms of not quite, but it is closer, it's closer and Second Thessalonians is closer. And so the arguments for those have to be more nuanced and a little bit more complicated. You know, of course I started out thinking that none of these things were forgeries. I didn't start out wanting these to be for I started out just the opposite. And for a while there I finally agreed about first and second Timothy and Titus, but I was reluctant on the others. And finally when I just read all the evidence and looked at both sides, I just caved in. Yeah, these are forgeries. So they are closer though. They are closer. When I'm talking about these books though, I want to emphasize that books like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John don't claim to be written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So I'm not talking about every book in the new so the Gospels are a different camp, different thing. And we'll talk about, we're going to be talking about in different but I'm not calling those things forgeries because the authors didn't claim to be anybody.
- [34:30]
A
We're going to take a brief break and then we'll be back with Bart's weekly updates.
- [34:37]
B
If you're enjoying the Misquoting Jesus podcast, you'd probably like my online courses as well. I've produced a number so far with multi lecture courses on the New Testament Gospels and the books of the Pentateuch, stand alone lectures on the Christmas story and the earliest Christian views of Jesus, and a six hour debate on whether Jesus was actually raised from the dead. If you're interested, check them out@Barterman.com you'll receive a discount on your purchase simply by entering the code mjpodcast. Are you interested in learning about important academic topics but don't want to go back to school? You need to check out Wondrium, the service that streams university level courses taught by top scholars who are also skilled communicators. I've done nine courses for them and can tell you for high level adult learning, there's really no other game in town. For a free trial, go to barturman.com wondrium if you decide to subscribe to Wondrium, this podcast will receive a referral fee, but that'll have no effect on the cost of your subscription and you'll be supporting our show. This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ermenblog.org happenings, and online course launches.
- [36:14]
A
And we are back. Bart, what is going on for you this week?
- [36:18]
B
As many listeners know, I I have this blog, the Bart Ehrman Blog. I post on it five times a week on all these kinds of things. Everything having to do with the New Testament, early Christianity. And I've been having a lot of fun this week because I've been posting on the Golden Rule, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. And what's interesting, and a lot of people don't know, this statement was found in a lot of cultures before Jesus. Jesus didn't come up with this. And it would differences in each one. But the more interesting thing is that some scholars don't think Jesus said it. And so I'm like exploring that. Come on. This is like the center of his teaching, right? But I actually do think he said it. But it's worthwhile considering their arguments. And my view is that he either said it, if he didn't say it. It really does summarize his teachings. And so he should have said it. But I actually do think he's. But I've got to explore, you know, why would somebody say he didn't say that? And that's been fun.
- [37:14]
A
Fantastic. The blog is bart ehrman.com is it forward slash?
- [37:19]
B
It's just if they just look up the Barterman blog. I forgot. Yeah, I guess it's Bart Erman. I don't know. I never, I never go into my blog. Except you're out for it. Sor. Just look up the Bart Erma blog. You'll find it. Google it.
- [37:34]
A
And we have a slight change of pace this week. Instead of taking listeners questions, we have a new segment called Bart Gets on His Soapbox in which Bart will take a few minutes to talk about something that irks him, which I'm looking forward to. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm looking forward to this.
- [37:50]
B
Well, there are a lot of things that irk me. Good thing I have a sense of humor because otherwise I'd be depressed the whole time. Take cover. Fundamentalist Christians and mythicists. It's time for Bart Gets on His Soapbox, the segment where Bart exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most. I mentioned in the previous episode. Among the nerdy things I've been doing is I've been reading ancient philosophy, ancient moral discourse. And I've especially liked this stoic philosopher whose name was Epictetus, who was a first century. He had been a slave, but he was trained and he was educated. He's a famous philosopher. I ran across a line of his this. This week I'm trying to read him in Greek and I'm reading this. Oh my God, that's fantastic. So I translated this line because it seems so relevant to today. I couldn't believe it. It's this. What he says is when someone takes a stand against a view that is simply true, it's not easy to find any kind of reasoning that will make them change their mind. That's not because they aren't intelligent or that you're not explaining things clearly. When someone is imprisoned by their views, they harden into stone. How can you deal with them by using reason? That's my translation. And I oh my God. That's something I think about all the time today. It has gotten so hard to have a reasoned discussion with anyone because you can't agree on anything. And it's like it doesn't matter what the argument is or the evidence is, they just, they're not going to listen. One of the things I immediately thought about, actually this happens to me on a number of different levels. I thought about scholars for one thing. And with respect to this issue of forgery, when I wrote these two books on forgery, I got flack from scholars who said you can't use the word forgery, it's negative. And they didn't think badly of this in the ancient world and it was a common practice. And they keep spouting this stuff off. And every time somebody says to me, every time a scholar says to me that it was commonly accepted in the ancient world. I said, what makes you think so? I said, which authors do you know from the ancient world who said it's an acceptable practice? If I asked them that, they don't have an answer because there are not authors in this time period who say it's an acceptable practice. Every author comes down against it, but these scholars won't hear it. They just won't hear it. And it doesn't matter what the evidence is. And so, you know, that irritates me because if there's evidence, you ought to look at the, especially if you're a scholar. The other second area that it really bothers me is when I have these, these arguments with my opponents on theological ground grounds. Most of my debating opponents who are Christian apologists, they're conservative evangelical Christians. And I'll say up front, most of them are friends of mine. I mean, there's like, you know, not most, about half of them are friends of mine. But there'll be something that's staring them in the face and everybody knows it's staring them in the face, and they just deny it. And I had people ask me, why won't they just admit it? I said, well, they can't. I'm not saying that I'm pure. It's not like I accept, you know, everybody's argument fair. But at least I look at the, the evidence, and if it makes me change my mind, I change my mind. Why don't people change their mind? You have people who are saying the same things they said when they were 17 years old, and they're just not going to change their minds. It doesn't matter what when it comes to theology, and I don't think that's right. But the other area is, of course, politics. I'm not going to talk politics on this broadcast. I, I don't think, you know, we all have our views and that's, that's fine. I just get really upset that people can't look at the other side. Even though I have very decided views about most issues, I believe in looking at the other side and hearing what the other person has to say and considering their point of view. And often in the political, they've got a closed system that makes an internal, coherent sense. And it's important to understand that. I think people need to look at both sides, whatever side they're on, and be open to the views of others and the evidence of others, others, even if they firmly disagree. So at least you have common ground that you agree on what you're disagreeing on. And the problem in politics today is we just can't agree on what the facts are and what the history is. I don't think we've ever been in this situation before. We've always. We know what the facts are. We just disagree what to do about them. So, anyway, so Epictetus is speaking to me today.
- [42:18]
A
Before we say our goodbyes today, then, would you mind briefly summarizing what we've talked about and maybe point people in the direction of further reading if they want to go and look some more?
- [42:28]
B
Yeah. So we've been dealing with a very important phenomenon from the ancient world, including Christianity, where people write books claiming to be a famous person when they're not. Scholars tend to call that pseudepigraphy because they don't want people to know what they're talking about. Pseudobig is not a word anybody uses. It sounds nice and innocent when you say, well, that's pseudepigraphy. But they don't tell the people they're saying this to that that means is a writing inscribed with a lie, which is what it means. Things. We call it forgery. It does happen in early Christianity. It's certainly. We have books from outside the New Testament that are forged. An apocalypse allegedly by Peter, an epistle allegedly by Peter, a gospel allegedly by Peter, and that's just Peter. And so it happens outside the New Testament. And the big issue in scholarship is how often does it happen inside the New Testament. I think this is a historical question. You have to evaluate on historical grounds. And you can't do it on the basis, well, I don't want to believe that. You have to just kind of look at the evidence. I'm a big proponent of evidence. So I have a book on this that includes other bibliography that people can. Can look at. It's called Forged, and the full title is Forged Writing in the Name of God why the Biblical Author Is not who We Think They Are. It's kind of a long title, but I also talk about this a lot on my blog. So those are places people could go to for a start.
- [43:46]
A
Wonderful. And for people watching or listening who are maybe not academically trained, I just want to add that the bibliography of books such as Bart's are fantastic places to get further reading recommendations. You can Google, and sometimes Google is very helpful. But if you have a book like this, like Forged, go flip to the back, and there will usually be a bibliography full of other resources that you can go and have a look at at your leisure. And they are very, very useful tools. I also wanted to say if you're more of a YouTube type of person, which I know some people are, you can watch our recordings in all of their technicolor glory over at Bart's YouTube channel, which is www.YouTube.com Bart Erman. It's exactly the same content except you get to see our smiling faces.
- [44:34]
B
May I add something too?
- [44:35]
A
Of course.
- [44:36]
B
We have an exciting thing coming up. Next time we're going to be doing an episode on the Gospels. We're going to have lots of episodes on the Gospels but this is going to be like hitting the really key interesting issues like who really wrote those things and when did they write them and are they accurate and do they agree with each other and that that'll be our next episode.
- [44:55]
A
It will be very exciting. I'm looking forward to it. And I know I keep saying this, but if you are interested in things we touch on in these episodes but we don't go into enough detail for you, I promise we are planning on doing this for a long time. There will be subsequent episodes. So next week we're looking at the four canonical Gospels. We will also do individual episodes, at least one for each gospel and the non canonical stuff as well. I promise we will get to it. So the New Testament and early Christianity is a very large field and it might take us some time, but we will get there. One final thing from us before we say goodbye. Remember, if you do want to watch any of Bart's courses, you can use the code mjpodcast which will give you a discount. And all of the courses can be found over@www.barterman.com. we will be back next week. Thank you all and goodbye. This this has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favourite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.