Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Forged Books, Anonymous Books, and the Use of Secretaries as Authors in the NT by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:13] My Books Forged for Normal Human Beings and Forgery and Counter Forgery for Abnormal Scholars. Both deal with issues of the authorship of the writings of the New Testament and other books in early Christianity, and with why there are good reasons for thinking that some of them were forgeries written in the name of famous people like Paul or Peter, by people who knew full well they were not Paul or Peter.
[00:00:37] Others are anonymous, though later attributed to famous people who didn't write them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
[00:00:44] It also deals with why I don't think we can explain any of these writings on the popular but based on my research, totally unfounded idea that secretaries wrote them for these famous people.
[00:00:57] In my book the New A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 8th Edition with Hugo Mendez, I address such issues only briefly on sidebar boxes to give students a brief sense of the issues. Here they are, Box 25.3. Another glimpse into the past. Authors and their Getting some concepts Straight all books have authors, but the relationship of a book to its author can vary depending on how or if the author names him or herself. So, for example, some of the books of the New Testament were written by people who did not identify themselves. This is true, for example, of all four Gospels. Even though the titles of these books given to them later by someone other than the authors call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the authors themselves never mention their names, and so, technically speaking, these books are anonymous.
[00:01:55] Most anonymous books from early Christianity, including the Gospels, were assigned authors names by later writers or scribes. Now, if later traditions ascribed these books and other books to people who did not in fact write them, that is not the fault of the authors themselves. They simply didn't sign their own names to the books. And so books like that anonymous writings later wrongly attributed to known persons, involve false attributions.
[00:02:24] False attributions need to be differentiated from forgeries or pseudepigrapha. In a forgery, an author actually claims to be someone other than who he is for reasons I talk about in this chapter. And so whoever wrote one Timothy claimed to be Paul, but he wasn't Paul. Ancient peoples, pagans, Jews, and Christians would have said that this kind of false authorial claim was deceptive. Such books were often called lies.
[00:02:52] In other instances, a person writes a book and signs his name to it, but it's a common name, and later readers assume that the author is a famous person who had that name. This May be the case with the Book of Revelation. As we will see, it was written by someone named John, but he didn't tell us which John he was. Modern scholars have mounted convincing arguments that it could not have been the most famous John of early Christianity, the disciple of Jesus, John the son of Zebedee, as I will show in chapter 30. But later Christians thought that it was that John. This kind of confused identity is different from anonymous books and falsely attributed books and forged books. We might call this a case of homonymy. Well, if we ever used words like homonymy, that's a term that means having the same name. It refers to a book attributed to a famous person who has the same name as the actual author.
[00:03:47] Finally, some books are actually written by the person who claims to be writing it. The apostle Paul really did write Romans. In order to differentiate this kind of book from the others we've considered, scholars sometimes call them orthonymous, meaning that they go under the correct name of the author.
[00:04:06] Box 25.2. Another glimpse into the past. The Secretary hypothesis.
[00:04:12] For a very long time, there have been scholars who have argued that the reason books like 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles are so unlike Paul's other writings, both in writing style and contents, is that in these instances Paul used a secretary and that this other person, his secretary, actually did the writing for him after Paul gave some instructions about what to say. This is a view that I myself was taught in graduate school. It is still widely taught today. The problem is that there is almost no evidence for it. By that I do not mean that there is no evidence that Paul ever used a secretary. He obviously did. Look at Romans 16:22.
[00:04:58] I, Tertius, the one who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord Tertius was not the real author of the Book of Romans. That was Paul. Tertius was the scribe to whom Paul dictated the letter. And so we know that Paul used scribes or secretaries on occasion. So what is wrong with the theory that sometimes these secretaries were the ones who wrote the letters in a different writing style and with different contents from those written by Paul?
[00:05:27] As it turns out, we know a lot about secretaries from the ancient world, both because they are mentioned and discussed in ancient texts and because we have references to them in other ancient documents that have surv in the sands of Egypt? There have been full and exhaustive studies of the phenomenon by scholars who have looked at every reference to them by ancient authors and at the numerous letters written by secretaries that have been discovered, we now know that secretaries typically wrote down what was given them by dictation, word for word. On rare occasions, secretaries could be asked to copy edit a letter to make it grammatically correct. And among illiterate persons, secretaries were used to produce legal documents, or four very short letters, usually under a hundred words.
[00:06:13] What we have no evidence for in any of our sources is of a secretary being asked to write a long document, such as the book of Ephesians or first Timothy, that is filled with valuable and important content in the name of someone else.
[00:06:29] In the ancient world, someone who did such a thing, who wrote such a book and then signed someone else's name to it, would have been called a forger, even if he was a secretary. The reason is clear. The person whose name was attached to such a book was not the one who wrote it.
[00:06:47] And so, even though the secretary hypothesis seems attractive, there is no evidence that it is right. On the contrary, all the evidence points in just the opposite direction. Even though we do not know of any instances from antiquity in which secretaries would, with impunity, write long treatises in the name of someone else at their instruction, we know of many, many instances, hundreds, in which an author wrote a book claiming to be someone other than who he.
