Can We Trust the New Testament? A Response to Bart D. Ehrman p.

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Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Johnson Bible College
9 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 the
opening decade of the twenty-first century he rose to semi-celebrity status with appearances on
the Colbert Report and The Daily Show. His more popular books include, Misquoting Jesus
(HarperCollins, 2005), and Jesus, Interrupted (HarperCollins, 2009), though he also publishes
technical or academic works with significantly less exciting titles, including, The Text of the New
Testament in Contemporary Research (Eerdmans, 1995), and A Brief Introduction to the New
Testament (Oxford University Press, 2004). Famously, he was once an evangelical (or perhaps
fundamentalist) Christian, attending such conservative institutions as Moody Bible Institute and
Wheaton College (Ill.). He earned his PhD under world-famous NT scholar Bruce Metzger at
Princeton University. Sometime during his education he came to question his religious
convictions, and he now considers himself an agnostic. In popular venues he is often portrayed
as dismissing his conservative Christian convictions on account of his text-critical research (and
some of his own rhetorical may encourage this portrayal), but he himself attributes his
repudiation of Christianity to his wrestling with the problem of evil.1

He presented his lecture, “Does the New Testament Contain Forgeries? The Surprising Claim of
Modern Scholars,” as the inaugural David L. Dungan Memorial Lecture. Briefly, David L.
Dungan was a NT scholar who spent his entire teaching career (1967–2002) in the Department of
Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dungan was perhaps most well-
known as a strong advocate of the Two-Gospel Hypothesis, which denies Markan Priority and
the hypothetical source, Q, and argues instead that Mark was written after and abridged the
longer gospels, 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 NT 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
almost certainly has no connection with the apostolic figure); the Letter of Peter to James (likely
a second-century pseudepigraphon with no connection to either Peter or James); the Apocalypse
of Peter (again dated to the second century); and many other texts (“forgeries”) written in the
name of Peter.

Thus Ehrman has established (convincingly, I think) that Christians in the early centuries did, at
times, write texts “in the name of” well-known and authoritative Christian figures. He then
moves on to ask the question, “Are There Forgeries in the New Testament?” Getting at this
question is a bit tricky, so Ehrman digresses a little to discuss the prominence of forgery as a
literary phenomenon in antiquity. Everyone—Christians, Jews, and pagans—engaged in forgery,
and we know it was common, Ehrman says, because ancient people talked about forgery a lot. 2

1
See his book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question—Why We
Suffer (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).
2
Here Ehrman raises the issue of low literacy levels in antiquity to explain how people might have thought
to get away with forging a document; “What are you going to do, compare my writing style with a real author’s
Can We Trust the New Testament? A Response to Bart D. Ehrman p. 2
Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Johnson Bible College
9 February 2011

Here he criticizes NT scholars for not engaging the ancient data about Greco-Roman comments
about forgery. Ehrman’s plan, then, is to establish attitudes toward forgery in antiquity, and he
adduces a handful of examples to do so (Galen,3 the Apostolic Constitutions, 2 Thessalonians4).

Ehrman then moves directly to the question of possible forgeries in the NT.5 He establishes some
basic vocabulary for “forgeries” in antiquity: pseudos, or nothos. Here he clearly states his
definition of forgery: “They’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
“surprising claim” that Ehrman thinks Peter couldn’t write. Next comes the letters of Paul, of
which Ehrman accepts seven as authentically Pauline and six as “forgeries.” Comparing writing
style, theology, vocabulary, etc., with the genuine Pauline letters, he finds it compelling that Paul
didn’t write the six deuteropauline letters.

Ehrman then offers, “A Common Scholarly View of the Final Tally,” in which he divides the NT
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

7 (or 8?) 1 (or none?) 8 11

He calls this a “common tally”; of course he means “common among NT scholars.” He then asks
some 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?6
 Why then was it practiced? [to get a hearing for your views when you’re not well-known]
 Could there be forgeries in Scripture?

writing style? How are you going to do that? You can’t even read!”
3
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 than
Galen’s genuine texts!
4
Notice how Ehrman has slipped into the question he’s trying to explore without explicitly acknowledging
so; the case of the Apostolic Constitutions is not really comparable to 2 Thessalonians.
5
Again, notice how tendentious is Ehrman’s description of the technical term, pseudepigrapha, and the
motivations for its use in academic writing (“They call them that because you won’t have a clue what they’re talking
about”).
6
Here Ehrman again makes a too-simplistic claim as if it supported his thesis straightforwardly: “Forgery
was 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. 3
Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Johnson Bible College
9 February 2011

This brings Ehrman’s lecture to a close; he did engage a lengthy (nearly hour-long) Q&A
session, 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
Testament directly, or his claims about what NT scholars know, or whatever? We could pose any
number of questions, though in general we should also appreciate that Ehrman could only
provide so much in terms of evidence (data) and historical reconstruction in a 45-minute
presentation. Nevertheless, I want to focus on two problems that, I think, undermine any
confidence we might have in Ehrman’s thesis.

First, Ehrman insists on using the pejorative term, “forgery,” and chastises NT scholars for
hiding behind the technical term, pseudepigrapha. He claims that people in antiquity referred
to pseudepigraphal texts as pseudoi (“lies”) or nothoi (“spurious texts,” though Ehrman translates
this as “bastards”). I have two, or possibly three, objections to Ehrman’s point here. First, it is
hardly the case that NT 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 NT
from charges of forgery. While NT studies certainly exhibit a vibrant and thriving range of faith
perspectives, both liberal critics (who are less invested in the authenticity of the texts’ claims to
authorship) and secular scholars (who are not invested at all in such claims) use the term
pseudepigrapha precisely to avoid prejudicing the question of whether or not a “falsely
attributed writings” are forgeries. For example, at some point in the second century BCE someone
wrote a text we call, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, which claims to be the final words of
the twelve sons of Jacob and which is modeled on Jacob’s last words in Gen. 49. 7 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 “forgery”? Did the author seriously entertain
the thought that anyone would have thought his text handed down words from Israel’s “founding
fathers”? I doubt it. And while I may not be able to prove my suspicions that Testaments is a
thinly veiled deception (rather than a genuine attempt to mislead), we use the term
pseudepigrapha—rather than forgery—precisely to avoid overstating or sensationalizing the
data.

Second, the designations of pseudepigraphal texts as pseudoi or nothoi did not have in mind the
attribution of a written text to a famous person. The problem with texts that were pseudoi or
nothoi was the ideas and claims they attributed to a person. In his example of the second-century
medical writer, Galen, you can hear even in Ehrman’s polemical description of the situation that
the 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 (and
is not one of said apostles)? Whether or not we would agree with him, the author of the
Apostolic Constitutions clearly saw himself as writing down the apostles’ teachings and
instructions for the church. So this text, in the author’s view, must have been authentic (= not-
spurious, neither a pseudos nor a nothos), even as he was aware that he was writing the text
rather than Peter or Bartholomew or Thaddeaus.

7
See H. C. Kee, “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” OTP 1.775–828.
Can We Trust the New Testament? A Response to Bart D. Ehrman p. 4
Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Johnson Bible College
9 February 2011

Ehrman recognizes this nuance during the Q&A that followed his lecture, and at one point he
claims only to have in mind the claim of authorship when he calls a text a “forgery.” He claims
not to deny the truth-value of the NT forgeries. This is my third criticism: Ehrman is being coy,
and it isn’t helpful. Ehrman well knows that when we hear the word, forgery, we’re thinking of
falsified, spurious texts, whether a “forged check,” a “forged will,” or a “forged signature.” The
term forgery already discounts the possibility that a text written in someone else’s name (a
pseudepigraphon) might genuinely transmit that person’s teaching and/or ideas. The same
problem, by the way, can be raised against his use of the word corruption in his book, The
Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Ehrman prefers forgery over pseudepigraphon because the
former has sensationalist possibilities, and he’s being a bit disingenuous if he denies it.

The second problem I want to raise is more straightforward: Ehrman’s “Common Scholarly
View of the Final Tally” is misleading and, again, sensationalist. The New Testament contains
twenty-seven distinct texts, and he has categorized these texts basically into three groups:
authentic (= seven or eight), forgeries (= eleven), or “falsely attributed” (= eight). This tabulation
clearly gives the impression that there are significantly more forged texts than authentic texts in
the NT (8 :: 11, and perhaps even 8 :: 19). If so, the real question is, “Does the New Testament
Contain Authentic Texts”! But a closer look changes things quite dramatically. First, his math is
wrong. His table should read:

authentic texts homonymous texts falsely attributed texts forgeries

7 (or 8?) 2 (or 1?) 9 9 (or 10?)

Then, we could ask if Jude is homonymous, written by someone named Jude (Ἰούδας, not an
uncommon name) who had a brother named James but who was not necessarily the brother of
Jesus (see Jude 1). If this is possibility (n.b., I’m only suggesting a possibility), then we have:

authentic texts homonymous texts falsely attributed texts forgeries

7 (or 8?) 3 (or 2 or 1?) 9 8 (or 9 or 10?)

Then, we need to step back and realize that neither “homonymous texts” nor “falsely attributed
texts” are forged (i.e., they do not claim to be written by someone who didn’t write them), and so
there’s nothing distinguishing them from the “authentic texts.” And so we really only have two
categories, and our table now looks like this:

authentic texts forgeries

19 (±?) 8 (±?)

Suddenly the tally isn’t nearly so bleak. Many of us will still have theological problems with the
possibility that we’re dealing with eight or nine or ten pseudepigraphal texts. But even here
there’s room to allow for “authentic pseudepigrapha,” that is, texts that faithfully convey the
ideas and/or teachings of a revered teacher, perhaps in new situations. So even if (if) Ehrman is
right that Simon Peter, the fisherman from Galilee, isn’t responsible for the elegant, rhetorical
Can We Trust the New Testament? A Response to Bart D. Ehrman p. 5
Rafael Rodríguez, PhD Johnson Bible College
9 February 2011

Greek prose we find in 1 Peter, we still have to ask how the contents of 1 Peter relate to the
apostle’s teaching. And here the evidence—what little we may find—allows for considerably
less confidence than Ehrman’s use of forgery conveys.

So, Can we trust the New Testament? If, by that question, we mean, Can we trust that the figures
named in the various texts of the New Testament actually dipped their styli into inkwells and
inscribed words onto papyrus, words that came to be known as 1 Timothy, 2 Peter, etc.?, then
probably not. But if, instead, we mean, Do the texts of the NT accurately convey the teachings of
Jesus and his earliest (apostolic) followers?, then nothing Ehrman said convinces me otherwise.