[Vision2020] Good News for Christians

[Joe Campbell]

The Lord works in strange ways!

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 3:36 PM, Art Deco <deco at moscow.com> wrote:

>  Half of New Testament forged, Bible scholar says<http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/13/half-of-new-testament-forged-bible-scholar-says/>
>
> By *John Blake*, CNN
>
> *(CNN)* - A frail man sits in chains inside a dank, cold prison cell. He
> has escaped death before but now realizes that his execution is drawing
> near.
>
> “I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time of my
> departure has come,” the man –the Apostle Paul - says in the Bible's 2
> Timothy. “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have
> kept the faith.”
>
> The passage is one of the most dramatic scenes in the New Testament. Paul,
> the most prolific New Testament author, is saying goodbye from a Roman
> prison cell before being beheaded. His goodbye veers from loneliness to
> defiance and, finally, to joy.* *
>
> There’s one just one problem - Paul didn’t write those words. In fact,
> virtually half the New Testament was written by impostors taking on the
> names of apostles like Paul. At least according to Bart D. Ehrman, a
> renowned biblical scholar, who makes the charges in his new book “Forged.<http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Forged-Bart-D-Ehrman/?isbn=9780062012616>
> ”
>
> “There were a lot of people in the ancient world who thought that lying
> could serve a greater good,” says Ehrman, an expert on ancient biblical
> manuscripts.In “Forged,” Ehrman claims that:
>
> * At least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries.
>
> * The New Testament books attributed to Jesus’ disciples could not have
> been written by them because they were illiterate.
>
> * Many of the New Testament’s forgeries were manufactured by early
> Christian leaders trying to settle theological feuds.
>
> *Were Jesus’ disciples ‘illiterate peasants?' *
>
> Ehrman’s book, like many of his previous ones, is already generating
> backlash. Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar, has written a lengthy
> online critique<http://www.patheos.com/community/bibleandculture/2011/03/30/forged-bart-ehrmans-new-salvo-the-introduction/>of “Forged.”
>
> Witherington calls Ehrman’s book “Gullible Travels, for it reveals over and
> over again the willingness of people to believe even outrageous things.”
>
> All of the New Testament books, with the exception of 2 Peter, can be
> traced back to a very small group of literate Christians, some of whom were
> eyewitnesses to the lives of Jesus and Paul, Witherington says.
>
> “Forged” also underestimates the considerable role scribes played in
> transcribing documents during the earliest days of Christianity,
> Witherington  says.
>
> Even if Paul didn’t write the second book of Timothy, he would have
> dictated it to a scribe for posterity, he says.
>
> “When you have a trusted colleague or co-worker who knows the mind of Paul,
> there was no problem in antiquity with that trusted co-worker hearing Paul’s
> last testimony in prison,” he says. “This is not forgery. This is the last
> will and testament of someone who is dying.”
>
> Ehrman doesn’t confine his critique to Paul’s letters. He challenges the
> authenticity of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John. He says that none
> were written by Jesus' disciplies, citing two reasons.
>
> He says none of the earliest gospels revealed the names of its authors, and
> that their current names were later added by scribes.
>
> Ehrman also says that two of Jesus’ original disciples, John and Peter,
> could not have written the books attributed to them in the New Testament
> because they were illiterate.
>
> “According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a
> fisherman, were *agrammatoi*, a Greek word that literally means
> ‘unlettered,’ that is, ‘illiterate,’ ’’ he writes.
>
> *Will the real Paul stand up?*
>
> Ehrman reserves most of his scrutiny for the writings of Paul, which make
> up the bulk of the New Testament. He says that only about half of the New
> Testament letters attributed to Paul *– *7 of 13 - were actually written
> by him.
>
> Paul's remaining books are forgeries, Ehrman says. His proof:
> inconsistencies in the language, choice of words and blatant contradiction
> in doctrine.
>
> For example, Ehrman says the book of Ephesians doesn’t conform to Paul’s
> distinctive Greek writing style. He says Paul wrote in short, pointed
> sentences while Ephesians is full of long Greek sentences (the opening
> sentence of thanksgiving in Ephesians unfurls a sentence that winds through
> 12 verses, he says).
>
> “There’s nothing wrong with extremely long sentences in Greek; it just
> isn’t the way Paul wrote. It’s like Mark Twain and William Faulkner; they
> both wrote correctly, but you would never mistake the one for the other,”
> Ehrman writes.
>
> The scholar also points to a famous passage in 1 Corinthians in which Paul
> is recorded as saying that women should be “silent” in churches and that “if
> they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home.”
>
> Only three chapters earlier, in the same book, Paul is urging women who
> pray and prophesy in church to cover their heads with veils, Ehrman says:
> “If they were allowed to speak in chapter 11, how could they be told not to
> speak in chapter 14?”
>
> *Why people forged*
>
> Forgers often did their work because they were trying to settle early
> church disputes, Ehrman says. The early church was embroiled in conflict -
> people argued over the treatment of women,  leadership and relations between
> masters and slaves, he says.
>
> “There was competition among different groups of Christians about what to
> believe and each of these groups wanted to  have authority to back up their
> views,” he says. “If you were a nobody, you wouldn’t sign your own name to
> your treatise. You would sign Peter or John.”
>
> So people claiming to be Peter and John - and all sorts of people who
> claimed to know Jesus - went into publishing overdrive. Ehrman estimates
> that there were about 100 forgeries created in the name of Jesus’
> inner-circle during the first four centuries of the church.
>
> Witherington concedes that fabrications and forgeries floated around the
> earliest Christian communities.
>
> But he doesn’t accept the notion that Peter, for example, could not have
> been literate because he was a fisherman.
>
> “Fisherman had to do business. Guess what? That involves writing, contracts
> and signed documents,” he said in an interview.
>
> Witherington says people will gravitate toward Ehrman’s work because the
> media loves sensationalism.
>
> “We live in a Jesus-haunted culture that’s biblically illiterate,” he says.
> “Almost anything can pass for historical information… A book liked ‘Forged’
> can unsettle people who have no third or fourth opinions to draw upon.”
>
> Ehrman, of course, has another point of view.
>
> “Forged” will help people accept something that it took him a long time
> to accept, says the author, a former fundamentalist who is now an agnostic.
>
> The New Testament wasn’t written by the finger of God, he says – it has
> human fingerprints all over its pages.
>
> “I’m not saying people should throw it out or it’s not theologically
> fruitful,” Ehrman says. “I’m saying that by realizing it contains so many
> forgeries, it shows that it’s a very human book, down to the fact that some
> authors lied about who they were.”
> ______________________
> Wayne A. Fox
> 1009 Karen Lane
> PO Box 9421
> Moscow, ID  83843
>
> waf at moscow.com
> 208 882-7975
>
> PS: The Jesus Semiar composed of mainline, distinguished Christian scholars
> thinks that about 85% of the words allegedly utter by Jesus weren't.
>
>
>
> =======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet,
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
>               http://www.fsr.net
>          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20110513/d060cb76/attachment.html