Is the New Testament Actually Filled with Forgeries?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2024
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
In our previous episodes on "literary forgery" in early Christianity, we have never yet talked about the elephant in the room. Why are there so many in the New Testament?
In this episode we will not be going over the old ground of what forgery is (an author falsely claiming to be a famous person) or how it was justified in the ancient world, even among writers who urge high ethical standards (!). We are instead interested in the startling scholarly claim that of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, only eight of them were probably written by the person to whom they are attributed.
In some cases the attributions are made by later readers (the author of Mark does not claim to be Mark); but in many cases the authors themselves make the false claim (2 Peter claims to be written by Peter). We might understand how one or two books like this managed to get into the Christian New Testament. But nineteen?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:07.3 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, |
| 0:13.3 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. |
| 0:23.4 | I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Hello everybody and welcome back to misquoting Jesus. We've spoken about forgeries |
| 0:30.7 | in early Christian writings before, and today we're revisiting the subject, but don't worry, |
| 0:35.9 | we're not going to cover old grounds. |
| 0:37.8 | In previous episodes, we've talked about why an ancient author might want to forge a document, |
| 0:42.8 | how we know if it is a forgery, and how a forger might try and avoid detection. |
| 0:47.6 | This week, we're focusing solely on the New Testament, |
| 0:51.1 | exactly how much of it is made up of forged writings. |
| 0:55.8 | Does the New Testament change at all if we remove that forged material? And what can these forgeries tell us about early |
| 1:00.8 | Christian debates and disputes? Before we get into that, though, but hello, how are you doing? |
| 1:06.6 | Yeah, I'm doing well. As you know, we're recording this just pretty new into the new year. |
| 1:12.3 | And I'm still in London since classes are over and Christmas is over. I'm able to get back to my routine, which is right now first thing in the morning. |
| 1:22.0 | When I get up, I read some Greek, ancient Greek. And I've been reading Plato's Euitherto. And we, you know, we ought to do a session on this kind of thing. It's a really interesting thing. I'm not sure you want to hear of this, but you're going to, where Plato tries to show in this thing where Socrates is in this dialogue with somebody. And as always, he's showing that the person doesn't know what he's talking about. But he deals with this number of issues that are really relevant |
| 1:44.8 | for Christians. You know, he's a pagan. In this dialogue, this person, Yutherford pro thinks he knows |
| 1:51.5 | what it means to be pious, to be righteous before the gods. And he says it's by doing the things |
| 1:56.3 | that the gods love. And Socrates says, well, is something good because the gods love it, or do the gods love it |
| 2:04.6 | because it's good? |
| 2:06.9 | That's a big difference. |
| 2:08.9 | And it's a really good question. |
| 2:10.5 | And the whole dialogue is trying to deal with that kind of issue. |
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