Ancient Christians Who Wanted to Lie

[00:00:01] Ancient Christians who Wanted to Lie By Bart Ehrman Is it ever okay to lie in order to promote the truth, even in Christian circles? [00:00:11] In my previous post, I talked about an evangelical Christian who flat out lied about things I've said and written. [00:00:18] It's also possible, of course, that he simply repeated a complete falsehood he had heard about my views without bothering to take a minute to check. That too, will be bad but different. [00:00:28] But to give him the benefit of the doubt, so to say, I'll assume that as an influential speaker on scholarly matters and a representative conservative evangelical Christianity, he usually does his homework whether he himself was lying or not. The phenomenon of lying to convey the truth is interesting and worth thinking about. [00:00:47] I've thought and read a lot about it over the past 10 to 15 years, especially when I was writing my books on forgery in the ancient world. [00:00:55] By forgery I mean specifically a book written by an author who falsely claims to be a famous person in order to deceive his reader. [00:01:03] Lots of people say that this was not actually considered lying in the ancient world, but I spend many pages in both of my books, Forged and Forgery and Counter Forgery. The latter's a much fuller, longer academic version, showing that they are wrong about that. It certainly was considered lying. [00:01:20] Then why would people, especially incredibly devout Christians, do it? [00:01:26] On one level, of course, the question is silly. Everyone does what they know is wrong. But I mean the question at a deeper level. Did the forgers who perpetrated their fraud think that they were justified in lying? Is lying ever justified? It raises an interesting question. What do people in antiquity think about lying and deceit? [00:01:48] Asking what ancient people thought about lying is like asking modern people. It depends completely on whom you ask. [00:01:55] Some people think lying is never acceptable under any circumstances. Others think that in some circumstances it's the ethical thing to do. And yet other people think nothing at all about lying whenever they feel like it. Thank you very much. [00:02:08] There were ancient Greek philosophers, notably Aristotle, who stressed the importance of always being truthful. [00:02:15] Other philosophers thought that there could be exceptions. [00:02:17] Xenophon, for example, reports Socrates as saying that it's a good thing to lie to a sick friend or a son who wants to commit suicide, if you can stop them by doing so. [00:02:27] Socrates also said that it's useful for a field general to lie to his disarmed troops in battle, telling them that support troops were soon to arrive in order to drive them to fight with greater valor, or for a parent to deceive a child into taking some unpleasant medicine that will be good for her, Plato taught that some lies can be useful, such as those of a doctor who might tell a patient something for her own good. Or lies that a ruler or country might tell their people in order to ensure the healthy functioning of society. [00:02:57] As one ancient writer, Heliodorus, put it, a lie is good when it benefits the one who speaks it without doing harm to the one who hears it. [00:03:06] But what about Christians? Weren't they taught always to tell the truth? [00:03:12] That's certainly what the great 5th century church theologian Augustine taught in his two treatises devoted to lying, it's never ever under any circumstances permissible to lie. [00:03:24] This view of Augustine's was not based on a simplistic sense that it's always good to tell the truth, but on deep theological understandings about what it means to be truly human in relationship to the God of truth, who himself became fully human. [00:03:37] But lots of other Christian thinkers, both before and after Augustine, thought otherwise. [00:03:43] Some, such as the important Christian thinker Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century, as well as his Alexandrian compatriot at the beginning of the third century, Origen, arguably the most important theologian of the Church before Augustine. They agreed with Plato about the medicinal lie. If a doctor's lie will impel a patient to take her medicine, then it's ethically justified. [00:04:07] Both Clement and Origen also pointed out that in the Old Testament, God himself appears to use deception at times. [00:04:14] When God told Jonah to proclaim to the city of nineveh that in 40 days it would be overthrown, he obviously knew full well the people would repent and that he would stay his hand of judgment. God never did plan then to overthrow the city, even though that's what he told his prophet to proclaim. [00:04:30] Sometimes a deceptive statement can do a world of good. [00:04:35] There are plenty of other times in Scripture where the lies of God's chosen ones lead to good ends. [00:04:41] If Abraham had not lied about his wife Sarah, she's my sister, he would have been killed and the nation of Israel would never have come into existence. See Genesis 12. [00:04:50] Or if Rahab the prostitute had not lied about where the Israelite spies were hiding, they may have been killed and the children of Israel may never have been able to conquer the promised land. See Joshua, chapter 2. [00:05:02] Examples could be multiplied. Sometimes lying is the right thing to do. [00:05:07] Now, is that what forgers thought? That lying about who they were was worth it? That the good effects of their deception outweighed the negative? That the end justified the means? [00:05:17] I'm afraid we may never know what drove these people to do what they did. We simply can't peer into their hearts and minds to see what they were thinking deep down when they decided to hide their own identity and to claim deceitfully that they were someone else. [00:05:31] Their readers, had they known, would probably have called them liars and condemned what they did. But in their own eyes, their conscience may well have been free from blame, and their motives may have been as pure as the driven snow. They had a truth to convey, and they were happy to lie in order to proclaim it. [00:05:48] I'll add some further reflections in my next post.