The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

New Book Time – Forged by Bart Ehrman

I just received my copy of Bart Ehrman's new book, Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. This isn't going to be a full review - while I hope to have time to write one, it's more realistic for me to assume that I won't.  Instead, it's going to be a brief treatment of what Ehrman is doing when he writes books like this, and why I think his work is relevant.

Ehrman's popular books are usually very accessible, and I expect Forged to be the same.  In broad terms, it looks at issues of authorship and attribution of various books within the Bible.  Many people assume that the traditional attributions are correct, but for many reasons, most modern scholars don't believe that to be the case.

I've seen criticism directed at Ehrman for overstating the significance of the material he presents.  Such criticism often comes from individuals who end up arguing for inerrancy¹ or infallibility.  Typically, though, Ehrman is clear and forthright, and caveats his criticisms appropriately.

Some critics also attempt to paint his work as the fringe research of a disgruntled ex-fundamentalist with an axe to grind, as if he's attempting to justify his shift from fundamentalism to agnosticism by nit-picking the Bible.  Rather than discrediting Ehrman, this approach simply reveals the ignorance of his critics.  The topics that he writes about, far from being Bart's wild ideas about why the Bible isn't God's word are instead distillations of the last century or so of critical Biblical scholarship.  He's not making this stuff up.  He's pulling together a vast amount of information that's already in the literature and putting it out there for non-specialists to discover.

That's important.

It's important because most people who claim to put a lot of value on the Bible have never read it cover to cover.  Or if they have, they tend to read the constituent books in relative isolation from one another.  It's fairly common during a church service or Bible study group to read from the Bible with the desire to figure out what God might be trying to say². If you happen to find yourself in a fairly liberal church, you might be encouraged to consider this question in the context of when the particular part of the Bible you're reading was written.  There are numerous problems with this approach, but one of the biggest is that it masks the fact that the books of the Bible have numerous and often fatal contradictions with one another, and that (far from presenting a unified theology with consistent underlying messages) they present a largely incoherent jumble of orthodoxies that is more reflective of the turmoil and struggle for identity within the early Christian churches than of a transcendent divine message.

Let's consider Paul, both because Paul is arguably the single most important figure in the New Testament behind Jesus and because Ehrman treats Paul at some length in Forged.

There are 13 books in the New Testament that are traditionally ascribed to Paul.  Of these, seven (Romans, Philippians, Galatians, Philemon, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians) are considered by most scholars to be authentic - they were actually written by Paul.  The other six (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians³) are generally considered to have been written by others - that is to say, they're forgeries⁴ written in the name of Paul.  The reasons for this division are straightforward - the seven works that are considered authentic are consistent in their theology and their structure.  The others aren't.  If we are to consider all 13 to have been written by the same individual, then we have to explain why, in many important respects, Paul can't seem to agree with himself⁵. If you read these books in isolation from one another, it's very easy to miss the fact that they are poles apart on many key issues.  (To be fair, much of the linguistic structure of the Bible gets lost in translation, so people reading the Bible in English can certainly be excused for not being aware of issues in that arena.  However, the theological differences are plain to see for anyone who bothers to read closely.)

There are many reasons why the authors of these works might have written in Paul's name.  But regardless of how they justified their forgeries at the time, we have to deal with the inconsistencies they introduce now - if in one set of letters, Paul claims that males and females are equal, that marriage and sex are bad, and that Jesus is going to return soon and unannounced, and in others "Paul" claims that church leaders should be married, that women should keep quiet and stay pregnant, and that Jesus will only return after lots of signs and observable events happen, clearly both can't be correct.  And since both can't be correct, any statement of faith that tries to claim that the Bible is inerrant is simply wrong before it even gets out of the gate.

And at the heart of it, that's why Ehrman's work is important - he's pointing out why the Bible shouldn't be unquestioningly assumed to be God's Little Instruction Manual.  It's demonstrably not a coherent, clear guide to how the world works, but is rather an often disjoint, contradictory, and internally inconsistent collection of works written to address different needs and situations in times long past.  More importantly, people today are using that collection of works to justify wars, subjugation of women, and demonstrations at the funerals of dead soldiers.  People use that collection to rationalize withholding medical care from their children, to claim that natural disasters are some sort of punishment, and to assert that dinosaur fossils only look ancient because Satan made them look that way⁶.

I suspect the largest part of Ehrman's readership consists of people who have already rejected many of the traditional claims about the Bible.  Some small part probably consists of people who have made an a priori decision that anything that he has to say is wrong, and are merely looking for ways to discredit his conclusions.  But some people will read his material with an open mind and, even though his conclusions might make them uncomfortable, will realize that his points are valid.

That can be a difficult step to take.

-Jay

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¹And inerrancy often gets phrased in terms of "inerrant in the original monographs", which is a useless term.  We don't have the original monographs -the Rylands Papyrus P52, usually dated to around 125 AD, is generally considered the earliest fragment from the New Testament - so the point is moot.  I suspect that such phrasing isn't much more than a tacit acknowledgement that the Bible as we have it now is anything but inerrant...

²There are several crucial presuppositions to this approach, but perhaps the most obvious one is that God could come up with no better way to communicate with mankind than a collection of documents cobbled together a couple of thousand years ago.

³Hebrews has, in the past, been postulated as one of Paul's epistles. Modern scholars are nearly unanimous in rejecting Pauline authorship, though.

⁴I'm adopting Ehrman's use of the word forgery here: the author knowingly claims to be someone else.

⁵Examples include the role of women, the acceptability of marriage and sex, and the nature and timing of Christ's second coming.

⁶During the homily today at the Catholic church I belong to, the priest made a reference to a 4+ billion-year-old Earth.  Such a reference shouldn't have raised an eyebrow, but it did, and he knew it would because he paused as soon as the words left his mouth and looked around to gauge the reaction.