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<H1 class=cnnBlogContentTitle><A
title="Permanent Link:Half of New Testament forged, Bible scholar says"
href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/13/half-of-new-testament-forged-bible-scholar-says/"
rel=bookmark>Half of New Testament forged, Bible scholar says</A></H1>
<DIV class=cnnBlogContentPost>
<P class=cnn_first>By <STRONG>John Blake</STRONG>, CNN</P>
<P><STRONG>(CNN)</STRONG> - 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.</P>
<P>“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.”</P>
<P>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.<STRONG> </STRONG></P>
<P>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 “<A
href="http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Forged-Bart-D-Ehrman/?isbn=9780062012616">Forged.</A>”</P>
<P>“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.<SPAN id=more-16150></SPAN>In “Forged,” Ehrman claims that:</P>
<P>* At least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries.</P>
<P>* The New Testament books attributed to Jesus’ disciples could not have been
written by them because they were illiterate.</P>
<P>* Many of the New Testament’s forgeries were manufactured by early Christian
leaders trying to settle theological feuds.</P>
<P><STRONG>Were Jesus’ disciples ‘illiterate peasants?' </STRONG></P>
<P>Ehrman’s book, like many of his previous ones, is already generating
backlash. Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar, has written a lengthy
online <A
href="http://www.patheos.com/community/bibleandculture/2011/03/30/forged-bart-ehrmans-new-salvo-the-introduction/">critique</A>
of “Forged.”</P>
<P>Witherington calls Ehrman’s book “Gullible Travels, for it reveals over and
over again the willingness of people to believe even outrageous things.”</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>“Forged” also underestimates the considerable role scribes played in
transcribing documents during the earliest days of Christianity,
Witherington says.</P>
<P>Even if Paul didn’t write the second book of Timothy, he would have dictated
it to a scribe for posterity, he says.</P>
<P>“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.”</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>He says none of the earliest gospels revealed the names of its authors, and
that their current names were later added by scribes.</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>“According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman,
were <EM>agrammatoi</EM>, a Greek word that literally means ‘unlettered,’ that
is, ‘illiterate,’ ’’ he writes.</P>
<P><STRONG>Will the real Paul stand up?</STRONG></P>
<P>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 <STRONG>– </STRONG>7 of 13 - were actually written by
him.</P>
<P>Paul's remaining books are forgeries, Ehrman says. His proof:
inconsistencies in the language, choice of words and blatant contradiction in
doctrine.</P>
<P>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).</P>
<P>“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.</P>
<P>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.”</P>
<P>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?”</P>
<P><STRONG>Why people forged</STRONG></P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>“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.”</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>Witherington concedes that fabrications and forgeries floated around the
earliest Christian communities.</P>
<P>But he doesn’t accept the notion that Peter, for example, could not have been
literate because he was a fisherman.</P>
<P>“Fisherman had to do business. Guess what? That involves writing, contracts
and signed documents,” he said in an interview.</P>
<P>Witherington says people will gravitate toward Ehrman’s work because the
media loves sensationalism.</P>
<P>“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.”</P>
<P>Ehrman, of course, has another point of view.</P>
<P>“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.</P>
<P>The New Testament wasn’t written by the finger of God, he says – it has
human fingerprints all over its pages.</P>
<P>“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.”</P></DIV></FONT></DIV><FONT size=2>
<DIV>______________________<BR>Wayne A. Fox<BR>1009 Karen Lane<BR>PO Box
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<DIV>PS: The Jesus Semiar composed of mainline, distinguished Christian scholars
thinks that about 85% of the words allegedly utter by Jesus weren't.</DIV>
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