Can We Trust the New Testament? A Response to Bart D. Ehrman p. 1Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Johnson Bible College9 February 2011

Bart D. Ehrman has served as the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2003. During theopening decade of the twenty-first century he rose to semi-celebrity status with appearances onthe Colbert Report and The Daily Show. His more popular books include,

Misquoting Jesus

(HarperCollins, 2005), and

Jesus, Interrupted

(HarperCollins, 2009), though he also publishestechnical or academic works with significantly less exciting titles, including,

The Text of the NewTestament in Contemporary Research

(Eerdmans, 1995), and

A Brief Introduction to the NewTestament

(Oxford University Press, 2004). Famously, he was once an evangelical (or perhapsfundamentalist) Christian, attending such conservative institutions as Moody Bible Institute andWheaton College (Ill.). He earned his PhD under world-famous

scholar Bruce Metzger atPrinceton University. Sometime during his education he came to question his religious convic-tions, and he now considers himself an agnostic. In popular venues he is often portrayed as dis-missing his conservative Christian convictions on account of his text-critical research (and someof his own rhetorical may encourage this portrayal), but he himself attributes his repudiation of Christianity to his wrestling with the problem of evil.

He presented his lecture, ³Does the New Testament Contain Forgeries? The Surprising Claim of Modern Scholars,´ as the inaugural David L. Dungan Memorial Lecture. Briefly, David L. Dun-gan was a

scholar who spent his entire teaching career (1967±2002) in the Department of Re-ligious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dungan was perhaps most well-knownas a strong advocate of the Two-Gospel Hypothesis, which denies Markan Priority and the hypo-thetical source, Q, and argues instead that Mark was written after and abridged the longer gos- pels, Matthew and Luke. Choosing Ehrman to deliver the inaugural Dungan lecture is, perhaps, a bit counterintuitive. But UT doesn¶t need my approval for its invited speakers.Let me quickly, then, recap the contents of Ehrman¶s lecture. Of course, his basic point was, Yes,the

does

contain forgeries. But he did go into some greater detail than this. Ehrman¶s lecture begins by introducing a number of nearly certain early Christian pseudepigrapha (or falsely attributed writings), including: the

Gospel of Peter

(which claims to be written by Peter but almostcertainly has no connection with the apostolic figure); the

Letter of Peter to James

(likely asecond-century pseudepigraphon with no connection to either Peter or James); the

Apocalypse of Peter

(again dated to the second century); and many other texts (³forgeries´) written in the nameof Peter.Thus Ehrman has established (convincingly, I think) that Christians in the early centuries did, attimes, write texts ³in the name of´ well-known and authoritative Christian figures. He thenmoves on to ask the question, ³Are There Forgeries in the New Testament?´ Getting at this ques-tion is a bit tricky, so Ehrman digresses a little to discuss the prominence of forgery as a literary phenomenon in antiquity. Everyone²Christians, Jews, and pagans²engaged in forgery, and we

See his book,

God¶s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question²Why WeSuffer

(San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).

Can We Trust the New Testament? A Response to Bart D. Ehrman p. 2Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Johnson Bible College9 February 2011

know it was common, Ehrman says, because ancient people talked about forgery a lot.

Here hecriticizes

scholars for not engaging the ancient data about Greco-Roman comments about for-gery. Ehrman¶s plan, then, is to establish attitudes toward forgery in antiquity, and he adduces ahandful of examples to do so (Galen,

the

Apostolic Constitutions

, 2 Thessalonians

).Ehrman then moves directly to the question of possible forgeries in the

He establishes some basic vocabulary for ³forgeries´ in antiquity:

pseudos

, or

nothos

. Here he clearly states his defi-nition of

forgery

: ³They¶re people who are claiming to be writing as someone that they¶re not.´He then argues against Petrine authorship of 1 Peter and 2 Peter, especially on the ³surprisingclaim´ that Ehrman thinks Peter couldn¶t write. Next comes the letters of Paul, of which Ehrmanaccepts seven as authentically Pauline and six as ³forgeries.´ Comparing writing style, theology,vocabulary, etc., with the genuine Pauline letters, he finds it compelling that Paul didn¶t write thesix deuteropauline letters.Ehrman then offers, ³A Common Scholarly View of the Final Tally,´ in which he divides the

texts into four categories:

homonymous writings: Revelation? James?

falsely attributed writings: Matthew; Mark; Luke-Acts; John; Hebrews; 1, 2, and 3 John

literary forgeries: Ephesians; Colossians; 2 Thessalonians; 1, 2 Timothy; Titus; James (?);1, 2 Peter; Jude

authentic writings: Romans; 1, 2 Corinthians; Galatians; Philippians; 1 Thessalonians;Philemon; Revelation (?)authentic texts homonymous texts falsely attributed texts forgeries

(or 8?)

(or none?)

8 11

He calls this a ³common tally´; of course he means ³common among

scholars.´ He then askssome summary questions to conclude his lecture:

How prevalent was the practice [of forgery] in the Roman world?

How prevalent was it among the early Christians?

Was it actually condemned?

Here Ehrman raises the issue of low literacy levels in antiquity to explain how people might have thoughtto get away with forging a document; ³What are you going to do, compare my writing style with a real author¶swriting style? How are you going to do that? You can¶t even read!´

Here the evidence of Galen seems to contradict the polemical point noted in the previous footnote; one of the disputants Galen encounters apparently understood a questionable text exhibited a different writing style thanGalen¶s genuine texts!

Notice how Ehrman has slipped into the question he¶s trying to explore without explicitly acknowledgingso; the case of the

Apostolic Constitutions

is not really comparable to 2 Thessalonians.

Again, notice how tendentious is Ehrman¶s description of the technical term,

pseudepigrapha

, and themotivations for its use in academic writing (³They call them that because you won¶t have a clue what they¶re talkingabout´).

Here Ehrman again makes a too-simplistic claim as if it supported his thesis straightforwardly: ³Forgerywas condemned so thoroughly that forgery is condemned in books that are forged.´

Can We Trust the New Testament? A Response to Bart D. Ehrman p. 3Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Johnson Bible College9 February 2011

Why then was it practiced? [to get a hearing for your views when you¶re not well-known]

Could there be forgeries in Scripture?This brings Ehrman¶s lecture to a close; he did engage a lengthy (nearly hour-long) Q&A ses-sion, much of which wasn¶t very helpful or even respectful. This, I think, is too bad.So how, then, should we respond to Ehrman¶s claims, whether his claims about the New Testa-ment directly, or his claims about what

scholars know, or whatever? We could pose any number of questions, though in general we should also appreciate that Ehrman could only provide somuch in terms of evidence (data) and historical reconstruction in a 45-minute presentation. Nev-ertheless, I want to focus on two problems that, I think, undermine any confidence we mighthave in Ehrman¶s thesis.First,

Ehrman insists on using the pejorative term,

³forgery,´

and chastises

scholars for hiding behind the technical term,

pseudepigrapha.

He claims that people in antiquity referredto pseudepigraphal texts as

pseudoi

(³lies´) or

nothoi

(³spurious texts,´ though Ehrman translatesthis as ³bastards´). I have two, or possibly three, objections to Ehrman¶s point here. First, it ishardly the case that

scholars refer to any ancient text, canonical or otherwise, as

pseudepigrapha

out of any desire to hide what we¶re saying or to insulate the texts of the

from charges of forgery. While

studies certainly exhibit a vibrant and thriving range of faith perspectives, bothliberal critics (who are less invested in the authenticity of the texts¶ claims to authorship) and se-cular scholars (who are not invested at all in such claims) use the term

pseudepigrapha

preciselyto avoid prejudicing the question of whether or not a ³falsely attributed writings´ are forgeries.For example, at some point in the second century

BCE

someone wrote a text we call,

Testamentsof the Twelve Patriarchs

, which claims to be the final words of the twelve sons of Jacob andwhich is modeled on Jacob¶s last words in Gen. 49.

The

Testaments

is clearly pseudepigraphal;these are certainly

not

the words of Reuben, Judah, Levi, or any other of Jacob¶s sons. But is

Testaments

a ³forgery´? Did the author seriously entertain the thought that anyone would havethought his text handed down words from Israel¶s ³founding fathers´? I doubt it. And while Imay not be able to

prove

my suspicions that

Testaments

is a thinly veiled deception (rather than agenuine attempt to mislead), we use the term

pseudepigrapha

²rather than

forgery

²precisely toavoid overstating or sensationalizing the data.Second, the designations of pseudepigraphal texts as

pseudoi

nothoi

did not have in mind theattribution of a written text to a famous person. The problem with texts that were

pseudoi

no-thoi

was the

ideas

and

claims

they attributed to a person. In his example of the second-centurymedical writer, Galen, you can hear even in Ehrman¶s polemical description of the situation thatthe problem wasn¶t the attribution of a spurious

text

to Galen but the attribution of a

spurious

text to Galen. Similarly with the

Apostolic Constitutions

. How can the author castigate other texts as apostolic forgeries when he himself is writing in the names of the Twelve Apostles (andis

not

one of said apostles)? Whether or not we would agree with him, the author of the

ApostolicConstitutions

clearly saw himself as writing down the apostles¶ teachings and instructions for thechurch. So this text, in the author¶s view, must have been authentic (= not-spurious, neither a

See H. C. Kee, ³Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,´

OTP

1.775±828.