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 wider body of early Christian writing and the practice of pseudepigraphy — writing a book under a famous name, in this case an apostle's. He notes that the communities producing such texts did not always regard the writers as frauds, though the practice was condemned once it was detected. His broader point for the chapter: the line between the books that made it into the (the official list of accepted scripture) and those that did not was drawn by later readers, and their main test — whether a book came from an apostle — often cannot carry the historical weight placed on it.
From the Bible
Greek: hos di' hemon
…or by a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.
Read it in their BibleGreek: dysnoeta tina
…there are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.
Read it in their BibleSources
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