Tag Archives: Bart Ehrman

The Gospels and Other Fiction, part 1

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Christian apologists vigorously deny the idea that the Jesus story is fiction even though all of the evidence, both internal and external, points to the fact that it is. I’m not going to rehearse that evidence in this post (I address it in several earlier posts, including here and here, and there are always primary sources that, God forbid, defenders of the faith could read for themselves.) I’m interested here in looking at Christians’ defence of scripture as truth. What arguments do they have and better still, what evidence, that the gospels are historically accurate depiction of events in 1st century Palestine? Most of these arguments have been offered by our resident apologist, Don Camp, and although I’m fairly sure Don makes things up as he goes along, I’ll not reference other sources except where I’m introducing an argument he hasn’t offered.

‘Church Fathers believed the gospels were accurate, therefore, because they lived closer to the time of the gospels’ composition, they’re more likely to be right.’

Church Fathers, such as the unreliable Eusebius,, Papias, Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp were predisposed to believe the gospels were accurate; they had already converted to the faith and had a vested interest in seeing it promulgated and preserved. They were also steeped in the thinking of the age, typified by Paul and other NT writers, that the Earth was at the centre of a cosmic war between God and the forces of Satan. Above all, the Jesus story was theirs, a new revelation from God that didn’t, as far as they were concerned, belong to Jewish tradition or any other. It was new and it belonged to them: they wanted and needed it to be true. Later scholars, from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, did not come with these particular encumbrances and while of course not entirely free of prejudices of their own, considered the texts more dispassionately as history and found them to be wanting.

‘‘Mark’ is an accurate record of the disciple Peter’s time with Jesus.’

There is no evidence at all for this claim. Analysis of Mark (and also Matthew and Luke) demonstrates how the story is constructed around supposed prophecies from Jewish scriptures. Mark also incorporates much of Paul’s gospel to the Gentiles, a feature Matthew is at pains to ‘correct’. His Jesus is distinctly Jewish.

‘There was an oral tradition that accurately preserved the stories about Jesus until such time as they could be written down.’

There is no evidence that this tradition, if it existed, was accurate. It is, as Bart Ehrman shows in Jesus Before The Gospels, highly unlikely that it was. We know that stories conveyed orally are altered, embellished and modified with successive retellings.

‘There was an earlier document that preserved sayings of Jesus’ until such times they could be incorporated into the gospels.’

Then it simply vanished so that no fragment of it survived. The Church Fathers don’t appear to know anything about it. Wouldn’t such a priceless document have been preserved somehow, somewhere by someone? Q, as it’s called, is entirely hypothetical. It’s unlikely it existed. Even if it did, it is considered to have been a sayings gospel. It did not preserve details of Jesus’ life, death or resurrection. We’ll get to the so called ‘logia’ in part 3.

‘The gospels were written by eye-witnesses or associates of eye-witnesses.’

We know with certainty that this is not the case. All of them were written in Koine Greek and are carefully constructed literary creations. None was written in Palestine but much further afield and all reflect the concerns of the later cult. Over a hundred years after they were written, Irenaeus ascribed the names by which they are now known without any evidence that the authors were called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Later compilers of the New Testament didn’t even know of ‘Mark’s’ primacy, which is why ‘Matthew’s’ gospel appears first in the New Testament. ‘Matthew’ and ‘Luke’ are heavily dependent on ‘Mark’ (as is ‘John’ for its overall structure), an incongruous and inexplicable approach for Matthew to take, and John too, if they were eye-witnesses themselves. Eye-witnesses do not need to rely on the testimony of people who weren’t.

More next time…

Fakin’ It

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Here’s my dilemma. I got this letter from a group of students at the university of Selcuck in Turkey. Well, when I say I received the letter, it was addressed to Professor Paulson who was head of the Philosophy department here in the 90s. He’s been dead now over 20 years of course, so when I picked up the letter, I thought I’d just write back and tell them that and that they’d have to work out their problems for themselves. Then I thought, ‘well, hang on a minute, the Professor was your tutor back in the day. You know how he thought and how he’d address these particular problems. Hell, you’ve even got some of his old papers locked away in your filing cabinet. You could take one or other of those and with a bit of tweaking, concoct a reply yourself. That’d be perfectly legitimate wouldn’t it?’ I mean I occupy the chair he once did so I am in effect his replacement.

So that’s what I do. I take one of Professor Paulson’s papers and I use it as the basis of a letter. Of course, matters in philosophy have moved on a bit since the Professor’s time so I add quite a bit of my own stuff, which is all pretty good and in line with what he might have thought, had he lived this long. After all, I studied under him in the ’80s so I have a pretty good idea of what he might think today, if he were still with us. If I do say so myself, it’s pretty good stuff. Nobody could tell Paulson didn’t write it.

Now, I do consider admitting at the start of the letter, or maybe the end of it, that I wrote the letter and not the Prof. But then I think, well, these folk don’t know he’s no longer with us so what’s the harm? I’ll just send it and they can reach their own conclusions. I mean, it wouldn’t be my fault, would it, if they jumped to the wrong conclusion. And then I think, well, if they’re going to do that I might as well sign it as if it is from the Professor. I mean, who’s to know? And maybe I could add that bit at the beginning suggesting it was from him. Suggesting? Saying it is from him. That’s what I do, and off it goes.

I hear later, on the grapevine, it’s gone down pretty well. They like what it says and are convinced it’s from Paulson. Everybody’s happy.

And then I find out, a couple of months down the line, that it’s been published. The Selcuck students have had it published, in an influential journal no less, and the academic world is celebrating the final lost paper of Professor Paulson’s. And here’s my dilemma: it’s not, is it. It’s me. I’ve taken his old paper, embellished it and sent it out into the world as if it’s his. What do I do? What would you do? Confess it’s not what it seems? Or bask in the knowledge that what I’ve written is as good as anything he wrote in life? A fake, yes, for sure, but a damn good one that, with a bit of luck, no-one’s ever going to spot. Do you know, I think I’ll leave it, say nothing. The joke’s on them.

Of course such a thing could never happen. Or could it? The letter to the Ephesians in the New Testament claims to have been written by Paul. It starts with this greeting:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To God’s holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

and ends with some vaguely autobiographical details.

But it wasn’t written by Paul. Scholars think it was created in the 80s, about twenty years after Paul died. Much of the letter is a reworking of Colossians, the authorship of which is similarly disputed. Here’s the opening of Colossians:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, To God’s holy people in Colossae, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ: Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

The Ephesians opening is a direct lift. None of Paul’s genuine letters follow this format. The letter itself has a style and vocabulary unlike that in the genuine Pauline letters and there are significant differences in theology too. Here’s how Bart Ehrman summarises the problem (though note he is not the only scholar who disputes Paul’s authorship of Ephesians; it is the consensus view): 

Ephesians does not resemble Paul’s writing style and the letter contains an inordinate number of words that Paul does not use in any of his undisputed letters. As in Colossians, Ephesians suggests that the believer has already been raised with Christ-a view that contradicts Paul’s undisputed writings. The author of Ephesians, moreover, uses the term “works” differently than Paul. For Paul, “works” refers to adherence to the Jewish law, actions that cannot save. The author of Ephesians, however, understands “works” to mean those actions that demonstrate one’s faith.

Some generously describe Ephesians and other letters attributed to Paul that aren’t by him, as Deutero-Pauline: ‘in the tradition of Paul’. Some speculate that they were written by one of Paul’s disciples but there’s no way of knowing this for sure. Others prefer the term Pseudepigrapha, literally ‘false inscription or writing’, which is nearer the mark.

The author of Ephesians, like those of other pseudepigraphical letters, such as the pastorals (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) claims explicitly to be Paul knowing full well he is not. This is not some disciple trying to express the views of the master, this is someone passing themselves off as someone else, pretending they are the more well-known, revered and authoritative figure. Even if they were someone familiar with Paul’s teaching (the differences in theology suggest otherwise) would it be legitimate for him to claim he is Paul?

Like my fictional individual above, the author of Ephesians is a deceitful impostor, his work a forgery, designed possibly to ‘correct’ Paul’s position on certain issues. And yet here is his letter in the New Testament; God’s Holy Word no less. While there is a very human history of how works were selected for inclusion in the New Testament, how on Earth did God, in the guise of the Holy Spirit, allow this and other forgeries to become part of the canon?

Of course, God had nothing to do with it. The author of Ephesians duped not only the letter’s original audience, but also the later believers who included it in the Bible. He continues to deceive the faithful down to this day.  I know: I was one.