Battle over the Bible: Forgeries

A recent posting by John Blake entitled, "Half of New Testament forged, Bible scholar says," reports on a new book by Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.  According to Blake, Ehrman's thesis is that the New Testament contains a significant number of books that are outright forgeries, books whose actual author wrote as if they were someone else—a more well-known someone else—in order to gain an audience.  They did so with the intent to deceive.  Ehrman further contends that forgery was no more acceptable in ancient times than it is now.  Blake concludes his posting by quoting Ehrman:

“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. The New Testament wasn’t written by the finger of God, he says – it has human fingerprints all over its pages. “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.”

Forged, in other words, is still another artifact of that branch of our contemporary culture wars devoted to religion and the Bible.  An evangelical scholar, Ben Witherington, has issued a series of detailed blog postings critiquing  Forged and defending the integrity of the Bible.  He argues that the actual situation is more complex.  In the end, it comes down to this: the disillusioned scholar who no longer believes in God doesn't see God's hand in the writing of the New Testament forgeries or, presumably, any other books of the Bible.  The faithful scholar who does believe in God does see God's hand in the writing of the Bible.  Each makes good points from their perspective.  We can only hope that something concrete will come out of all of this that is more than the dueling beliefs of two scholars, each with an agenda.

Granting that some New Testament books are forgeries and that there are more complicated factors involved, it is important to remember that we have the New Testament we have today because each book in it won the general acceptance of churches and church leaders over a period of centuries in what was an almost brutal process of elimination.  Far more candidates for inclusion failed to make the cut than did.  That is, the churches saw spiritual value in each book, and while they may have been "duped" into believing that Peter or Paul wrote certain books that they actually didn't the point is that they also saw a value and need for those books in their time.  Like any human process informed by the subterranean tugging of the Holy Spirit, the process for selecting the books of the New Testament was messy and imprecise.  One can say, indeed, that the Bible as we have it today is the product of an evolutionary process that is still going on, and like any evolutionary process there are all sorts of back eddies, missed opportunities, vestiges, and false starts; and there is also incredible beauty and profound meaning.  God, as best as we can understand these things, evidently chooses to work through and with human ways of doing things in an evolutionary way, and the formation of the Bible is but one more example.

Ehrman is correct that the presence of forged books in the New Testament points to the fact that the Bible is a very human product.  As an agnostic, it does not occur to him that they don't prove anything one way or the other about the sneaky ways by which the Spirit works in, through, and around human agency.  We really, really have to dispense with the idea that something inspired has to be "perfect".  God, as best as we can understand these things, doesn't work that way.