Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · 1. Beginnings of Christian Scripture

Forgery in the name of the apostles

In short

1.Ancient Christians produced a large body of writing falsely attributed to apostles: Gospel of Peter, Acts of Paul, letters of Paul to the Laodiceans and to Seneca.
2.2 Thessalonians 2:2 already warns against a letter 'as though from us' — forgery was a live problem inside the first century.
3.Most critical scholars regard the Pastoral Epistles (1-2 Timothy, Titus) and 2 Peter as pseudonymous.
4.The Gospels themselves are formally anonymous; the names were attached later.

The claim being examined

The apostolic authorship of the New Testament books is treated as settled.

The Islamic position

The Qur'an distinguishes revelation from the writings of men, and warns against attributing to God what men composed.

Analysis

Ehrman surveys the range of early Christian literature and the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy, noting that ancient writers who produced such texts were not always seen as pious frauds by their own communities, but that the practice was condemned when detected. His broader point for this chapter: the boundary between the canonical and the non-canonical was drawn by later readers, and the criteria they used — apostolicity above all — cannot always bear the historical weight placed on them.

From the Bible

2 Thessalonians 2:2

Greek: hos di' hemon

…or by a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.

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2 Peter 3:15-16

Greek: dysnoeta tina

…there are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.

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Sources

Bart D. Ehrman · Bart D. Ehrman, *Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why* (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ch. 1, pp. 29-43

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