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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Many biblical documents, among
early Christians, were widely
regarded as forgeries and fakes,
not "infallible," and generally
dismissed as political propaganda.
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Preview and Summary: Many in the first and second centuries after Jesus harbored no sanctimonious view of inerrancy regarding New Testament documents. Most of the writings were originally regarded as fakes and frauds.
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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.
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The research of British historians Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy is not easily set aside. Their books contain many hundreds of references to ancient works, all of which paint a much different picture of ecclesiastical history than that served up by Big Religion.
How many of us today know that several New Testament documents, among early Christians, were generally considered to be fakes, attempts by ecclesiastical politicians to rewrite history?
I would encourage you to read it for yourself, but here's just a comment or two from The Jesus Mysteries:
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The Acts of the Apostles may well have been ... an adaptation of [earlier] Gnostic texts. At the end of the second century, Irenaeus and Tertullian regard it as holy scripture - yet just a generation earlier, Justin Martyr has not even heard of it! Acts was fabricated in the form we now have it just in time to be a powerful tool against [competing] Gnosticism, which confirmed the historicity of the disciples and legitimatizing the bishops who claimed to maintain their lineage. It also portrayed Paul as an apostle of Literalism, and has him clearly acknowledging the primacy of Peter and the other apostles." Editor's note: Acts appears to represent a spin-doctor effort of damage-control. Establishment Religion needed to do something about Paul severely taking Peter to task in Galatians 2; that is, publicly, before the whole church, calling Peter a racial bigot and hypocrite.
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"The earliest collection of letters attributed to Paul does not contain the Pastorals [Paul's purported letters to church pastors]. In fact, we do not even hear of the Pastorals at all until Irenaeus (c. 190). They appear as a part of the Christian canon only after this time, always as a set... Even the great orthodox propagandist Eusebius does not include them in his Bible (c. 325)."
As one examines the broken pieces of the historical record, it begins to become clear what happened. Later ecclesiastical politicians inserted forged and fake documents into the canon as an attempt to put words in Paul's mouth to disavow the teachings of the earliest Christians. Paul in the Pastorals speaks against much of what he strongly asserted in his own first letters. The later rogue-church could not easily be rid of the famous Paul by simply branding him as a heretic-quack, as they attempted to do with Origen, given Paul's immense stature, so highly revered, among Christians - therefore, church politicians set upon fabricating a story in which Paul, effectively, spoke out against Paul! against himself!
- Editor's note: We should not be surprised at these propaganda tactics of altering records and misrepresenting testimony. Does not all this sound familiar? Do we not see these same examples of disingenuity in the political news today? We actually have present-day examples of video tape of a Presidential candidate being edited to say what was never said. If this is done in our age, with a full glare of scrutiny on such things, how much more likely would fakery have taken place during an age with zero fact-checking controls? Censorship is common now and only one narrative is allowed by the totalitarians to be presented to the public. These are the common strategies of "The Lying Teacher," evident everywhere in history. Even the art, every form of art, in the ancient world, we learn from art historians, is an example of "visual propaganda."
Today, 2000 years after the fact, fundamentalists are "sure," "certain," "confident," of the infallibility of holy writ; yet, those much closer to the great historical events were not nearly as impressed.
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"… 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.
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Father Robert Benson, More Light: "Orthodoxy has made havoc of the truth. The New Testament ... has undergone all manner of accident from interpolations, omissions, deletions, mistranslations, misstatements, and misinterpretations. Even as the books stand ... they represent but a sorry fragment of all that Jesus said and did. As it is now, the New Testament is one of the most dangerous of books since by its incompleteness it can so easily be misread... The New Testament is not inspired by God... How many Christian religions are there in existence upon earth this very day? There are literally [tens of thousands], and most of them are based upon wide variations of scriptural interpretations of some one text or another. [However,] they all have one feature in common -- monumental error."
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