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Bart Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor in the religion department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, inaugurated the Irene E. Marold Lectures in Biblical Studies on October 1 with a day on the topic, “Is the New Testament Forged? Reflections on the Early Christian Authors." Contrary to the conventional wisdom in most biblical scholarship that claiming that one’s own work had been written by a more prominent author was an accepted practice in the ancient Mediterranean world, Dr. Ehrman argued that forgery was recognized and condemned as such (and “forgery” was one of the nicer words used to describe it). Many books of the New Testament, in fact, make no claims at all about their own authorship (only later were the gospels ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, for instance), while others, like Ephesians, Colossians, and I and 2 Timothy were actually forgeries written by people who “were absolutely convinced that they were saying what the purported author would have said” if he had lived in the writer’s own time and place.
The criteria by which the early church detected forgeries were the same as the ones by which it received books into the canon of the New Testament—writing style, historical inaccuracies, the “orthodoxy” (or otherwise) of the ideas expressed, and continuous usage from the early days of Christianity. In other words, the formation of the Bible was a long and complex process of negotiation and adaptation to local circumstances. This means that “the formation of the canon is a matter of tradition,” a fact that is a commonplace among biblical scholars and theologians but that remains largely unknown to “people in the pew and people in the street.” Far from eroding peoples’ faith, Professor Ehrman contended, this fact should “drive you to a new understanding of the Bible,” one that, for Christians, means listening for the Word of God through what is, in many ways, a fascinatingly human book.
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