Dr. Ehrman addresses the forgery issue in his lectures on "The New Testament," published by The Great Courses.

Editor's note: Allow me to summarize Dr. Ehrman's statements: Paul's apparently draconian view of women is found not only in I Corinthians but also I Timothy. You’ll want to get the full discussion from the professor’s lectures but, essentially, I Timothy, along with II Timothy and Titus (the “Pastorals”), are somewhat universally judged by scholars to be forged documents.

The subject of forged documents is complex all by itself. Paul himself in one of his writings warns that fake letters, allegedly from him, were circulating among the churches. There are many references to forged documents in ancient literature, as, for some, it constituted a cottage industry. Frequently, however, I am unimpressed with some of the reasoning for determining the illegitimacy of documents, but, I fully agree that these three documents are spurious. Here’s why:

In all of Paul’s letters, if he’s warning against false teachers, he engages the subject with full reasoning. However, in the Pastorals we find a “Paul” we launches into a petty name-calling fit and offers no cogent rebuttal; just ad hominem attack.

These three documents speak of a settled and rigid church hierarchy, of power positions, and a head-honcho ruling a particular church area. But this “merit-badge” mentality is foreign to Paul in his letters of acknowledged authorship.

In line with this power-structure mentality, "faith" in the Pastorals means "faith in the doctrines," and by extension "faith in the hierarchy of church government." But all this is very wide of the mark of how the real Paul defines "faith," which is linked to one's relationship with Christ.

Concerning the real Paul's decentralization and minimization of single-person authority, we see him honoring the abilities of all members of the church.

For example, in Corinthians we find Paul speaking of gifts of the spirit which all church members might receive, and this for the benefit of the church at-large. This is why in the Corinthian house-churches all were allowed and encouraged to share what God had done in their lives. There was no exclusive top-dog leadership. This is why Paul addresses his letters to the church as a group, not to some elevated and august pastor.

The untoward and small-minded evaluation of women in I Timothy is a reflection of attitudes that would develop in the church later in the second century – and not in Paul’s churches. Further, in Romans, we find Paul listing women in leadership positions, and even calling one of them an “apostle”! Clearly, there’s some fake-new in play here regarding Paul’s harsh reputation toward women.

Says Dr. Erhman concerning the questioned verse in Corinthians, the manuscript evidence suggests that it was added much later, probably centuries later, by a copyist who did not like women. This sort of interpolation of the text happened a lot by scribes who took it upon themselves to edit the biblical manuscripts. See many examples of this on the “Bible” page.

"… the forgery of letters has been such a common practice in the world, that the probability is at least equal, whether [biblical documents] are genuine or forged. One thing, however, is much less equivocal, which is, that out of the matters contained in those books, together with the assistance of some old stories, the church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty."  Thomas Paine, The Age Of Reason [a book the author began to write while he awaited death by guillotine during the French Revolution]

Editor's note: Let us appreciate the piercing logic of Paine: first, we live in world where forgeries are hardly unknown, especially when great power and control over others is involved; secondly, the entire church-system itself, a matrix of "pomp and of revenue," is so "very contradictory to the character" of Jesus Christ whom it purports to represent; in other words, the church-system itself, in terms of what it disingenuously represents, is a "forgery" and a fake, a con-artist's game, and therefore why must we be only a little doubtful that biblical documents, which the church struts as coming into existence under its pious domain, should also be fakes and forgeries?

Allow me to restate this in plain language. Consider the stark anomaly before us: gaudy and meretricious "pomp and revenue" are presented as standard bearers of Jesus, the archetype of humble living, non-ostentatiousness, and simplicity! Does anyone notice anything wrong with this picture? Those overtaken by a spirit of cultism might not allow themselves to see the supreme and terrible irony here.

Editor's last word: