Introduction: Facing the Truth

1. I am outlining here just the “orthodox” views that ended up winning the early Christian battles over what to believe. There were lots of Christians who held other views, as we will see later in the book. For further reflections, see my book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
2. Thus, for example, Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.2–4; 4.26; see also Tertullian Prescription Against Heresies.
3. This is why there is such a close connection in Christian antiquity between the content of a writing and its claim to authorship, as we will see. It was widely thought that if a writing promoted “false teachings,” then it certainly could not have been produced by an established authority. In other words, the decision about who authored a work (an apostle?) was often made on the basis of whether the teachings in the work were acceptable. See the discussion of the Gospel of Peter in Chapter 2.

Chapter 1: A World of Deceptions and Forgeries

1. The authoritative discussion of the Hitler diaries, told with flair and in precise detail, is found in Robert Harris, Selling Hitler (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986).
2. For a fascinating account by one of modern times’ most adroit forgery experts, see Charles Hamilton, Great Forgers and Famous Fakes: The Manuscript Forgers of America and How They Duped the Experts, 2nd ed. (Lakewood, CO: Glenbridge, 1996).
3. The story is told by the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Philosophers (5.92–93).
4. For a collection of some of the most interesting, see Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For a more comprehensive collection, see J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).
5. Tertullian On Baptism 17. See also the discussion of ancient fictions about Paul in Chapter 3.
6. This is my own count.
7. As we will see later in Chapter 3, some scholars have maintained that the allegedly forged writing the author of 2 Thessalonians is referring to is none other than 1 Thessalonians!
8. Eusebius Church History 7.25.
9. Jerome The Lives of Famous Men 4.
10. Didymus the Blind, Comments on the Catholic Epistles (never translated into English), in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca 39, 1774.
11. Clement of Alexandria Miscellanies 2.52.6.
12. This has recently been argued in Clare Rothschild, Hebrews as Pseudepigraphon: The History and Significance of the Pauline Attribution of Hebrews (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).
13. There may be some question, however, about Xenophon. The Greek philosopher Plutarch maintained that Xenophon used the pen name precisely to lend more credibility to his account by having it written by an outside party rather than writing about himself in the first person. If so, this is a pen name “with an edge.”
14. For reasons for thinking that the Gospel of Matthew was not really written by the disciple Matthew, see Chapter 7, and in greater depth, John Meier, “Matthew, Gospel of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 4:618–41.
15. Galen Commentary on Hippocrates’ On the Nature of Man 1.42.
16. Smith wrote two books about the discovery and its importance for understanding early Christianity and the historical Jesus, one an intriguing detective-like story for popular audiences, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel of Mark (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), and the other a hard-hitting analysis for scholars, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). Recent years, however, have seen a spate of publications by scholars arguing that Smith in fact forged the document. See especially Stephen Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005); and Peter Jeffries, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). See also my discussion in Chapter 8.
17. Josephus Jewish Wars 1.26.3; trans. William Whiston, The Works of Josephus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979).
18. See Wolfgang Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum (Munich: Beck, 1971), p. 145.
19. For an English translation, see R. J. J. Shutt, “Letter of Aristeas,” in James Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 2:7–34.
20. Martial Epigrams 7.12; 7.72; 10.3; 10.33. I am not saying, of course, that in this or any of the other cases I mention we actually know the real motivations of the forger. What we do know is that Martial read his motivations in this way.
21. Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers 10.3.
22. Pausanius Description of Greece 6.18.5.
23. The New Testament book of Revelation, written by an unknown John, is a very rare exception.
24. One of the most interesting discussions is in the writings of the church father Tertullian, who asked how the book of Enoch, written by the famous figure Enoch—a man who never died, but was taken up to heaven while still living seven generations after Adam—could have survived down to his, Tertullian’s, own day. If there was a worldwide flood after Enoch’s time in the days of Noah, wouldn’t the book have perished? Tertullian goes out of his way to explain how it could, in fact, have survived the flood. Why does Tertullian have to go to the trouble of explaining this? Because he genuinely believed that it was written by Enoch. Tertullian was no dummy—far from it. He was one of the real intellectuals of the Christian third century. It is anachronistic for modern-day scholars to think that ancients must have seen through the ruse of apocalyptic forgery and recognized that the books produced were simply following the requirements of the genre.
25. Porphyry Isagoge pr. I.
26. For the letter and a full discussion of it, see A. E. Haefner, “A Unique Source for the Study of Ancient Pseudonymity,” Anglican Theological Review 16 (1934): 8–15.
27. It is almost always claimed by scholars dealing with Christian pseudepigrapha that the author of the so-called Acts of Paul (or Acts of Paul and Thecla) was caught and punished. That is true, but his crime was not committing forgery. As I point out in Chapter 3 in greater detail, the Acts of Paul is not a book that claims to be written by Paul; it claims to be a true account about Paul. The author was punished not for lying about his identity, but for fabricating a fictitious account and trying to pass it off as a historical record.
28. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
29. See Raffaella Cribbiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
30. In Chapter 4 I deal with other explanations that try to sanitize the practice as well, including the claim that apparent forgeries can be explained by authors having used secretaries who used a different writing style and altered the content of what the authors wanted to say.
31. In addition, some ancient authors described the penning of works in a name other than one’s own with the Greek and Latin equivalents of our verb “to make” (as in “to create,” “to forge”) or “to make up” (i.e., to “fabricate”).
32. The most thorough examination is now forty years old, but it has never been equaled, let alone surpassed. Most New Testament scholars, alas, have never read it—Speyer’s Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum. Also valuable, though considerably less thorough, is Norbert Brox, Falsche Verfasserangabe: Zur Erklärung der frühchristlichen Pseudepigraphie (Stuttgart: KBW, 1975). Most work on forgery in early Christianity focuses on the question of whether any pseudepigraphical writings made it into the New Testament. The most recent work along these lines is Armin Baum, Pseudepigraphie und literarische Fälschung im frühen Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). Together these authors give a comprehensive survey of all the ancient sources on forgery. And all of them agree that forgers intended to deceive their readers.
33. Herodotus Histories 7.6.
34. Plutarch The Oracles at Delphi 407B.
35. Athenaeus The Banqueters 13.611B.
36. Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung, p. 3; translation mine.
37. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 4.7.
38. Xenophon Memorabilia 4.2.14–18.
39. Plato Republic 382C; 389B; Heliodorus Ethiopica I.26.6.
40. The fullest and most compelling study of Augustine’s view of lying is David J. Griffiths, Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2004).
41. Origen in his lost book the Miscellanies, discussed by Jerome in Against Rufinus 1.18; Clement Miscellanies 7, 9, 53, 1–4.

Chapter 2: Forgeries in the Name of Peter

1. In the fuller account of the story, George’s father is so proud of his son for speaking the truth in the face of possible adversity that he takes him into his arms and praises him to the heavens.
2. There are a number of interesting books on lying for a general audience. One of the most influential has been Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1999).
3. For lying in antiquity, see especially the collection of essays in Christopher Gill and T. P. Wiseman, eds., Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).
4. Exceptions may be some kinds of fantasy and science fiction, but even there plausibility is an important feature; postmodern novels, to no one’s surprise, are a different kettle of fish.
5. Polybius Histories 2.56.10–12; trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library (New York: Putnam, 1922).
6. For English translations of these stories, collectively known as the Acts of Peter, see J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 390–430; and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, trans. R. McL. Wilson, from the sixth German edition, 2 vols. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991–92), 2:271–321.
7. Eusebius Church History 6.12.
8. For an English translation, see Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Plese, Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
9. It is debated among scholars whether it is the “evildoer” who is punished by not having his legs broken or Jesus. I tend to think the former, since it doesn’t make as much sense to think that the soldiers got angry at Jesus for something the other fellow said.
10. Some scholars have argued that these verses are not actually docetic. Here I’m not arguing that the author intended them to be read docetically. I’m simply saying that a hostile reader like Serapion may well have thought they were meant docetically, even if they were not.
11. Note again the relation of an “author” to “authority” and vice versa. In Serapion’s view a false account such as the Gospel of Peter could not have been written by an authority such as Peter. And so the book was pseudepigraphical, written “under a false name” by someone else.
12. For English translations, see Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, trans. R. McL. Wilson, from the sixth German edition, 2 vols. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991–92), 2:493–94. I have taken my quotations from there.
13. Though not in Paul’s own writings. See the discussion of Gal. 2:11–14 in the section on the noncanonical Epistle of Peter in Chapter 6.
14. I deal with the matter for a general audience in my book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For a more thorough and heavy-hitting study, see Harry Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985). For a fully authoritative account, see Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
15. English translations can be found in Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 593–612; and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2:620–38.
16. Eusebius classifies the Apocalypse of Peter among the notha—the “bastard,” forged writings—rather than among the books he accepts as canonical. But the fact that he has to mention the book at all in this context suggests that there were other Christians who maintained that it should be accepted as Scripture, as with most of the other books he classified as notha, such as the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas. The Apocalypse of Peter is also received as canonical (tentatively) in the late second-century Muratorian Canon, a document I discuss in Chapter 3.
17. For a discussion of the book, which includes evidence that it was not written by Peter, see J. H. Elliott, “Peter, First Epistle of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:269–78.
18. Jesus of course would have been speaking Aramaic. The Aramaic word for “rock” is Kephas, and that is how Peter’s name occurs when given in its Aramaic form. I am not saying that I think the account in Matthew is historically accurate in describing Peter as the “rock” of the church, but I do think it highly probably that Jesus renamed Simon “the Rock” during his public ministry.
19. It should not be objected that Peter did not actually see the crucifixion of Jesus and so was not a “witness” to his sufferings. Whoever wrote this book almost certainly did not have the Gospels to read; we can’t know what he thought about Peter’s involvement in Jesus’s last hours.
20. For a discussion of the book, which includes evidence that it was not written by Peter, see J. H. Elliott, “Peter, Second Epistle of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, 5:282–87.
21. Simeon appears to be the Hebrew form of “Simon.” Why the author mixes Hebrew (Simeon instead of Simon) with Greek (Peter instead of the Aramaic Kephas) is a puzzle.
22. Paul himself did not think that he was writing “Scripture.” He was writing personal letters to his churches. They too treated these writings, when they received them, as personal correspondence. It was only later, after Paul’s lifetime, that different churches and individuals collected these letters and started regarding them as Scripture. For insightful comments on the early collections of Paul’s letters, see Harry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 58–65.
23. There are other reasons for assuming Peter did not write this letter. In 3:2 the author slips and refers to “your apostles” as if he is not one of them. Moreover, the author uses the book of Jude and so must have written later than that forged letter. And he knows 1 Peter (since he refers to this book as his “second” letter), which, as I will argue more fully now, could not have been by Peter either, but was written later, at least after the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70.
24. William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
25. Among the many excellent studies of ancient education systems, see especially the study of Raffaella Cribbiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
26. Catherine Hezser, Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).
27. Mark Chancey, The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); see also his more recent study, Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
28. Jonathan Reed, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), pp. 140–69.
29. The famous synagogue that tourists see on the site today was built centuries later.

Chapter 3: Forgeries in the Name of Paul

1. For an English translation, see J. K. Elliot, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 350–89; and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, trans. R. McL. Wilson, from the sixth German edition, 2 vols. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991–92), 2:213–70.
2. For a full account of the Thecla traditions, see Stephen Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
3. Tertullian On Baptism 17.
4. The classic study of Marcion, which is still worth reading today, was published by the great German scholar Adolf von Harnack in 1924; it has been partially translated into English by John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma as Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1990). The most recent overview is Heikki Raïsänen, “Marcion,” in Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen, eds., A Companion to Second-Century Christian “Heretics” (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 100–124.
5. For an English translation, see Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 305–07. Some scholars date the Muratorian Canon to the fourth century, but this view has not proved convincing to most.
6. For an English translation, see Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 380–82; and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2:254–57.
7. Benjamin White, “Reclaiming Paul? Reconfiguration as Reclamation in 3 Corinthians,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 17 (2009): 497–523.
8. For an English translation, see Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 547–52; and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, 2:46–52. My quotations here follow Schneemelcher’s translation.
9. For a fuller description of Gnosticism, see Chapter 6.
10. The scholarly literature on the pastoral letters is so massive that it is difficult to know where to refer interested readers who want to see the basic arguments about their authenticity. Possibly it is best to start with Jerome D. Quinn, “Timothy and Titus, Epistles to,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Friedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 6:560–71. As is true of everything I talk about in this book—as is true, in fact, for virtually anything any biblical scholar talks about—there are differences of opinion even here. For a representative of the minority view that Paul actually was the author of the pastoral letters, see the lively discussion in the introduction in Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
11. For example, Michael Prior, Paul the Letter Writer in the Second Letter to Timothy (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1989).
12. Among other things, this means that if any one of these letters is forged, they’re all forged.
13. A. N. Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921).
14. This is the case even with scholars who want to argue that Paul did write the letters. One of the most recent studies is Armin Baum, “Semantic Variation Within the Corpus Paulinum: Linguistic Considerations Concerning the Richer Vocabulary of the Pastoral Epistles,” Tyndale Bulletin 59 (2008): 271–92. Baum points out that in the other letters of Paul, the fewer total number of words that can be found in a letter means that there are fewer different words used. But not with the pastoral letters, which have fewer words than many of Paul’s letters, but more different words. Baum still wants to think that these books are written by Paul, however, and so comes up with an explanation that sounds perhaps like a case of special pleading. In his view, Paul took more consideration and time with these letters than his others, since he was composing them in writing rather than orally. That seems highly unlikely to me. Paul certainly put a lot of time and effort into composing letters like Romans and Galatians. Moreover, Baum doesn’t cite any evidence to suggest that the Pastorals were composed in writing by Paul rather than dictated, by Paul or anyone else.
15. Unfortunately, the article is available only in German: Norbert Brox, “Zu den persönlichen Notizen der Pastoralbriefe,” Biblische Zeitschrift 13 (1969): 76–94.
16. Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983).
17. Once again, the scholarship on this question is voluminous. A good place to start is Edgar Krenz, “Thessalonians, First and Second Epistles to the,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 6:515–23.
18. F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977).
19. J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980).
20. See J. Christiaan Beker, Heirs of Paul: Paul’s Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).
21. See Victor Paul Furnish, “Ephesians, Epistle to,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 2:535–42.
22. See Victor Paul Furnish, “Colossians, Epistle to the,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1:1090–96.
23. Unfortunately, the book has never been translated into English: Walter Bujard, Stilanalytische Untersuchungen zum Kolosserbrief: Als Beitrag zur Methodik von Sprachvergleichen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973).

Chapter 4: Alternatives to Lies and Deceptions

1. It didn’t occur to me at the time that the author of 2 Timothy would have been speaking only about the Scriptures he knew, the “Old Testament,” and that his doctrine of inspiration may not have coincided with my own view that the Bible was completely without error, a view that in fact came into existence only in modern times.
2. A partial exception may be the view of evangelical scholar Donald Guthrie, who tries to argue on historical, rather than dogmatic, grounds that there can be no forgeries in the New Testament; see his “The Development of the Idea of Canonical Pseudipigrapha in New Testament Criticism,” Vox Evangelica 1 (1962): 43–59.
3. These views of Daniel and Ecclesiastes are almost universally held by critical scholars today. For an introductory discussion, see two of the leading textbooks on the Hebrew Bible in use throughout American universities today: John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004); and Michael Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
4. Another approach is to acknowledge that false authorial claims do indeed constitute forgery—lies with the intent to deceive—but to insist that the Bible should not have such books in it. This is the claim of one of the most recent scholars of forgery who has come out of Germany, Armin Baum, who thinks that if it can be shown that a book really is forged, it should be removed from the New Testament (implied in his book Pseudepigraphie und literarische Fälschung im frühen Christentum [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001] and confirmed by private correspondence). As you might imagine, given such a view, Baum is reluctant to consider too many of the books of the New Testament forgeries. But he is willing to concede, for example, along with the vast majority of scholars, that 2 Peter is.
5. A. N. Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 12.
6. A. W. Argyle, “The Greek of Luke and Acts,” New Testament Studies 20 (1974): 445.
7. M. J. J. Menken, 2 Thessalonians (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 40.
8. Andrew Lincoln, Ephesians (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990), p. lxx.
9. R. McL. Wilson, Colossians and Philemon (London: Clark, 2005), p. 31.
10. For an assessment of how certain books came to be considered part of the canon of Scripture, see my study Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). A fuller discussion can be found in Harry Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).
11. Bruce M. Metzger, “Literary Forgeries and Canonical Pseudepigrapha,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972): 15–16.
12. Norbert Brox, Falsche Verfasserangabe: Zur Erklärung der frühchristlichen Pseudepigraphie (Stuttgart: KBW, 1975), p. 81; translation mine.
13. Wolfgang Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum (Munich: Beck, 1971), p. 3; translation mine.
14. Kurt Aland, “The Problem of Anonymity and Pseudonymity in Christian Literature of the First Two Centuries,” Journal of Biblical Literature 12 (1961): 39–49.
15. James Dunn, “The Problem of Pseudonymity,” in The Living Word (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), pp. 65–85.
16. David Meade, Pseudonymity and Canon: An Investigation into the Relationship of Authorship and Authority in Jewish and Earliest Christian Tradition (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986).
17. Markus Barth and Helmut Blanke, Colossians (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 123.
18. Margaret Y. MacDonald, Colossians and Ephesians (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2000), p. 8.
19. Two additional sources come from centuries later still and are of almost no historical worth, as I argue below.
20. The passage is discussed at some length, for example, in Baum, Pseudepigraphie und literarische Fälschung, pp. 53–55.
21. Ibn Abi Usaybi’a, Kitab ‘uyun al-anba ’fi tabaqat al-atibba’, ed. ‘Amir al-Najjar, 4 vols. (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 2001), 1:244–45.
22. Iamblichus Life of Pythagoras 31.
23. See Leonid Zhmud, Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Religion im frühen Pythagoreismus (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), p. 91.
24. See, for example, Holger Thesleff, Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic Period (Åbo: Åcademi, 1961).
25. Two later Neoplatonic philosophers, Olympiodorus and Elias, living some two and a half centuries after Iamblichus, make roughly similar comments (Olympiodorus Prolegomenon 13.4–14.4; Elias In Porphyrii Isagogen et Aristotelis Categorias Commentaria 128.1–22). But they are so long after the fact that they cannot help us know what was happening in the time of the New Testament, half a millennium earlier (any more than the editorial practices in vogue today can tell us what was happening in the 1500s). Moreover, the comments of Olympiodorus and Elias may ultimately derive from the tradition starting with Iamblichus, some two hundred fifty years earlier.
26. E. Randolph Richards, The Secretary in the Letters of Paul (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991).
27. Richards, Secretary, p. 108.
28. Richards, Secretary, pp. 110–11.

Chapter 5: Forgeries in Conflicts with Jews and Pagans

1. See John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995).
2. For an English translation of the Gospel of Nicodemus, see Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Plese, Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
3. For an English translation, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
4. For an English translation, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
5. For an English translation, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
6. Tertullian Apology 21.24; Eusebius Church History 2.2.
7. For an English translation, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
8. Tertullian Apology 21.24.
9. For an English translation, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
10. For a fuller discussion, see my Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: Harper-SanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 63–65.
11. In the history of the interpretation of the passage the question has always been, “What was he writing?” Some have thought that he must have been writing out the sins of the woman’s accusers. Or a particularly apt quotation of scripture. Or a declaration of condemnation of unjust judges. Or something else!
12. Chris Keith, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
13. Augustine On the Harmony of the Gospels 1.10.
14. Other writings allegedly written by Jesus are referred to in several church fathers, such as Augustine (Against Faustus 28.4) and Leo the Great (Sermon 34.4).
15. My reasoning in this case is that it is not a letter that existed outside of its fictional context, a piece of correspondence that circulated independently as a writing of Jesus.
16. For English translations of both letters, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
17. An English translation of excerpts of Egeria’s diary is provided by Andrew Jacobs in Bart Ehrman and Andrew Jacobs, Christianity in Late Antiquity, 300–450 CE: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 333–46.
18. Tertullian Apology 40; trans. S. Thelwell, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers (reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995).
19. Minucius Felix Octavius 9.6–7; in G. W. Clarke, ed., The Octavius of Minucius Felix (Mahway, NJ: Paulist, 1974).
20. Minucius Felix Octavius 9.5.
21. For English translations of a range of accounts, see Herbert Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
22. Eusebius Church History 9.5.
23. Ovid Metamorphoses 14.136–46.
24. For an excellent study of the Sibyl and her oracles, see H. W. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity, ed. B. C. McGin (London: Routledge, 1988).
25. For a full analysis and translation of the surviving oracles, see John J. Collins, Sibylline Oracles, in James Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1983–85), 1:317–472.
26. All translations are by Collins, in Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.
27. Justin First Apology 20.
28. For example, the pagan critic Celsus around 177 CE, as quoted by the church father Origen in his book Against Celsus (5.61.615; 7.53.732; 7.56.734); also see a Latin oration attributed to the (Christian) emperor Constantine found in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, in which the emperor claims that the pagan charges of forgery are false.

Chapter 6: Forgeries in Conflicts with False Teachers

1. John J. Gunther, St. Paul’s Opponents and Their Background (Leiden: Brill, 1973).
2. Thomas Sappington, Revelation and Redemption at Colossae (Sheffield: JSOT, 1991); Richard DeMaris, Colossian Controversy: Wisdom in Dispute at Colossae (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1994); Clinton Arnold, Colossian Syncretism: The Interface Between Christianity and Folk Belief at Colossae (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995); Troy Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit: Colossians as Response to a Cynic Critique (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
3. I have taken all translations of the Pseudo-Clementine Writings from Thomas Smith, “The Pseudo-Clementine Literature,” in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8 (reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995).
4. They are called this because they consist of twenty sermons allegedly given by Clement, in which he tells his tales of journeys and adventures with the apostle Peter.
5. There has been a spate of books on the historical James in recent years. For a competent treatment by a good scholar (with whom I disagree on a number of points), see John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition (Edinburgh: Clark, 1997).
6. See, for example, the discussion in my Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), pp. 53–58.
7. Scholars have come up with four major possible explanations for these “we passages.” Three of the four explanations simply don’t seem to work. The traditional explanation is that the author really was Paul’s companion. That view is problematic though, since the author makes so many mistakes about Paul’s life and teachings that he doesn’t seem to be a close companion. Other scholars have maintained that the author, whoever he was, had access to a companion of Paul’s travel itinerary and inserted it in a few places, creating the odd use of “we” on occasion (since that was how the itinerary was worded). This is an attractive option, but it does not explain why the writing style and vocabulary of the “we passages” is virtually the same as the rest of Acts. If the itinerary came from a different author, you would expect the style to be different. Other scholars have argued that the author is using an age-old technique of describing travel narratives—especially those involving sea journeys—in the first person. But still other scholars have pointed out that there are lots of sea-travel narratives not written in the first person, so this does not seem to explain these passages. The fourth explanation is the one that seems to me to have the fewest problems: the author has edited these sections of Acts to make his readers assume that he was actually with Paul for these parts of the story, even though he was not. This would explain why the “we” sections begin and end so abruptly: it was just a stylistic device used by the author to insert himself into the story in a few places.
8. Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.14.1.
9. See note 6.
10. Scholars today are widely split on how to discuss Gnosticism or even whether to consider Gnosticism a single broad phenomenon. For three very different perspectives from leading scholars, see Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures: Ancient Wisdom for the New Age (New York: Doubleday, 1987); and Birger Pearson, Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).
11. For a fresh translation of the Nag Hammadi writings, see Marvin Meyer, ed., The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007).
12. Epiphanius The Medicine Chest 26.
13. Whether Epiphanius actually knew and read these other books or instead was making them up is anyone’s guess.
14. Both Didymus and Thomas mean “twin” Jude was his name. He is talked about as the twin of Jesus in the ancient Syrian book the Acts of Thomas, which describes his missionary journey to India after Jesus’s death.
15. For an English translation, see Meyer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, pp. 487–97. I have taken my quotations from there.
16. For an English translation, see Meyer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, pp. 235–45. I have taken my quotations from there.
17. For an English translation, see Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, trans. R. McL. Wilson, 2 vols. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991–92), 1:249–84.

Chapter 7: False Attributions, Fabrications, and Falsifications: Phenomena Related to Forgery

1. Thus Johannes Quasten, Patrology (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1950), 2:412–13.
2. It is included as part of the canon of the New Testament, for example, in a famous biblical manuscript of the fifth century, Codex Alexandrinus.
3. For the variety of expectations of what the future messiah would be like, see John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star (New York: Doubleday, 1995) and my brief discussion in Chapter 5.
4. Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.7.11.
5. Papias indicates that he received this information from someone who had known the apostles; that is, it comes to us third-hand. See the next note.
6. For the full text of Papias’s comments, see Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 2:103.
7. Tertullian Against Marcion 4.5.
8. I argue this case in my book Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), pp. 102–12, and probably don’t need to give all the arguments and information yet again here.
9. For an argument that the author intends to make his readers think he was Paul, see Clare Rothschild, Hebrews as Pseudepigraphon (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).
10. For an English translation, see Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 2:3–83.
11. For an English translation, see Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Plese, Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
12. See David Dungan and J. K. Elliott, Art and the Christian Apocrypha (New York: Routledge, 2001).
13. For an English translation, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
14. For an English translation, see Ehrman and Plese, Apocryphal Gospels.
15. The fullest, most recent study is Reidar Aasgaard, The Childhood of Jesus: Decoding the Apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009).
16. See my Jesus, Interrupted. As I stress there, this view that the Gospels contain nonhistorical accounts is not just my idiosyncratic idea; it is the consensus of modern critical scholarship and has been for a very long time.
17. This is the subject of my earlier book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005). Here I summarize just a few of the most important points.
18. See my Misquoting Jesus, pp. 65–68.
19. See the discussion in Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987) or, more briefly, Misquoting Jesus, pp. 183–86.
20. Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, eds., The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 22.
21. The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, trans. Joseph Gwilt (London: Priestley and Weale, 1826).
22. Polybius Histories 9.2.12.
23. Martial Epigrams 1.66; trans. Walter C. A. Ker, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
24. Diogenes Laertius Lives 2.60; 5.93; 8.54; trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).

Chapter 8: Forgeries, Lies, Deceptions, and the Writings of the New Testament

1. Edgar J. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha (Boston: Beacon, 1956); Per Beskow, Strange Tales About Jesus: A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983).
2. Discussed in Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, pp. 3–14; and Beskow, Strange Tales, pp. 57–65.
3. See Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha; Beskow, Strange Tales, pp. 20–28; 42–50.
4. By Roman source I mean any source written by a pagan author of the Roman Empire; Jesus is mentioned in Christian sources, of course, and twice in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, though by no other source of the first century.
5. See Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, pp. 92–96; Beskow, Strange Tales, pp. 16–24.
6. I have taken the translation from Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, pp. 92–93.
7. See Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, pp. 97–101.
8. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, p. 101.
9. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, pp. 45–49. This tale is based on old traditions, especially popular in the Byzantine Christianity, about Mary and a red egg, which arguably provide the origin for the custom of coloring Easter eggs.
10. According to Beskow, this account was written by the Anglican clergyman Gieon Ouseley (1835–1906), a committed vegetarian who wrote ten books on vegetarianism and the occult.
11. Hugh Schonfield, The Passover Plot (New York: Bantam, 1965).
12. See Chapter 1, n. 16.
13. See Chapter 1, n. 16.
14. One of Morton Smith’s most avid supporters, who argues vehemently that the letter of Clement is authentic, is Scott Brown; his fullest study is Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery (Waterloo, ON: Laurier University Press, 2005).
15. For a popular treatment, see Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1999).