HEY HEY, LOOK AT ME! I'M BART D. ERHMAN! I'M AN ICONOCLAST! WHEE, WHAT WILL I SAY NEXT THAT TEARS DOWN YOUR MOST CHERISHED BELIEFS!?!
The above is really the best summary that one could give of Erhman's latest column (written in support of his latest book), but since most, if not all, of you will have no idea of who he is, perhaps I should provide some more context.
From his writings I have come to the conclusion that Erhman is the type of professor/scholar that goes far beyond the normal and appropriate role of one who challenges her/his student in their beliefs. Erhman is that type who enjoys the role of iconoclast so much that instead of merely asking uncomfortable questions and requiring that students prove their long-held beliefs - as well as knocking down those for which there is no proof at all - he has moved into drawing conclusions, declaring that "this is not so" and "this is so" when there is still too much of a controversy to be able to do so.
Erhman's latest shtick is that many of the books of the New Testament were not actually written by the persons traditionally granted authorship. Much of the Pauline corpus was not written by Paul, John's by John, etc. This is hardly shocking to anyone in the field. Erhman's hook, though, is that this makes much of the New Testament based on LIES LIES LIES:
[H]ere is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle -- Peter, Paul or James -- knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.
The "modern parlance" bit is a huge tip-off that Erhman is not doing responsible scholarship. In fact, he's wrong about the "modern parlance" bit. What he should have said - would have said were he a better scholar - is that in "modern Western parlance" it's a lie. There's also the fact that Erhman is accusing anyone who uses a psuedonym of forgery, which would decimate the required reading lists of high school and college English courses.
The standard explanation is that ancient peoples had different ideas of what constitutes a lie versus the truth, and that it wasn't considered a big deal for someone who considered themselves a member of a school of thought to publish under the name of that tradition's founder. Erhman attacks this, saying
Scholars may also tell you that it was an acceptable practice in the ancient world for someone to write a book in the name of someone else. But that is where they are wrong. If you look at what ancient people actually said about the practice, you'll see that they invariably called it lying and condemned it as a deceitful practice, even in Christian circles. 2 Peter was finally accepted into the New Testament because the church fathers, centuries later, were convinced that Peter wrote it. But he didn't. Someone else did. And that someone else lied about his identity.
I can't be the only person who figures the Huffington Post had enough spare bits and bytes lying around for Erhman to be able to provide one shred of supporting evidence for this claim. Perhaps his book is full of this evidence and he didn't want to give it away for free, but even then he could have made some mention of it.
But that's Erhman's way. He is an iconoclast with a fundamentalist mindset: this is not so simply because I declare it not to be so.
It's suble, but Erhman also misapprehends the nature of the Christian canon and the way it was formed. He claims that "the church fathers, centuries later, were convinced that Peter wrote" 2nd Peter and therefore accepted it into the canon. Perhaps there was some debate about authorship and what swayed the debate was acceptable, to their minds, evidence that Simon Peter did actually write the letter.
But what us moderns who live on a planet with 2 billion Christians and a powerful Church hierarchy need to understand is that all this did not exist 1,600 years ago when the canon was finally being hammered out. There was no powerful, centralized church hierarchy that would publish a new volume of holy scripture that had been dictated by the voice of God.
In fact, no part of the Christian Bible, Old or New Testament, makes any claim to have come straight from God as Holy Writ to be authoritative for the people. The famous verse from 2 Timothy about "all scripture being inspired by God" wasn't referring to itself, but to the writings accepted as scripture by the Jews, what Christians now call the Old Testament.
The claims about the Bible were always made after the fact, by people who had decided, after centuries of use by the Church, that here was writing which was valuable, which was worth keeping, which could be described as having been inspired by God. Much of the time authorship was established in a similar way; the ancient Christian Church had all sorts of letters and books floating around, some with known authors and many not.
The value of these writings, therefore, was found in the writings themselves and not in the famous author to whom they were ascribed. I don't have the evidence at hand, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding has long been that authorship was at times ascribed later on, not claimed at the time of writing. Personally, I think that makes much more sense than the idea that a bunch of people - hundreds, when you count all the potential* authors of the Jewish canon - across centuries all decided that they were going to write them some holy scripture and lie about who they were - and then actually got their forgeries accepted by thousands of people living hundreds of miles apart, speaking different languages from one another and belonging to entirely different cultures, ultimately finding their falshoods turned into the Bible.
*I say potential because, while I have no problem with the idea that Isaiah as we have it is the work of many people across decades, perhaps even a century, and that the Paul found in Acts didn't write everything credited to him, it seems the height of Western arrogance to claim that we know for absolute fact something that people who lived much close to the historical Paul didn't know. Further, our claim to knowing this is based largely upon the modern assumption that human society has always advanced and become more complex - with us as the pinnacle, natch - and that writers never change their style, ever, so any stylistic or vocabulary changes between 1 Corinthians and Philemon prove that they were not written by the same author.
