In early Christianity, the most beloved books of the new religion were read out loud in church. This was due to the illiteracy of most Christians but also to the need for the shared experience of hearing spiritually meaningful texts. There were no printing presses or photocopiers in those days. Each book had to be copied by hand, one at a time. It was a labor intensive and expensive task that was only done for free by the most devoted Christian scribe.

One consequence of this was that only those books that were most beloved, and therefore copied many many times, enjoyed the statistical likelihood that at least one copy might survive to modern times, to be found in a library or rubbish heap by a nineteenth or twentieth century scholar. Another implication is that every forgery, especially if it has survived to surface in the present day, had a community that not only revered it but also lovingly copied, preserved and even translated it. The kinds of forged books that were rejected by the church are of great interest to the author of "Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are," but he has caused the greatest controversy by openly discussing the evidence, some of it centuries old, that at least some of the books lovingly copied and preserved in the canonical New Testament are also forgeries.

Professor Bart Ehrman defines literary forgery, sensibly enough, as writing something in the name of someone else (more often than not, someone far more famous than the forger), and he makes the case that forgery was not only very common in ancient times, but that the ancients did not take kindly to it. Forgeries were called lies and compared to illegitimate children by ancient authors who discussed the subject.

Ehrman shows that common attempts to explain away forgery fly in the face of the evidence. For example, ancient writers generally did not allow their secretaries to compose letters in their names. In only one instance, Cicero is known to have had his secretary write a short form letter in his name, but no one is known to have pawned off an important letter in this way.

Ehrman shows that many fanciful writings existed in early Christianity, most of which were never accepted as scripture. There were a few notable exceptions such as 1CThe Gospel of Peter, 1D which was read as if it were scripture by some churches in Syria for a while. At first, the bishop of Antioch accepted it without reading it, but when he got around to reading it, he decided that it contained heretical teachings; whereupon he ordered that the book be discarded and no longer read. Ehrman rather thinks the book a forgery not only because of its theology but because its attitude toward Jews is anachronistic and belongs to the second century, which is when this gospel was probably written 14a hundred years after Peter 19s probable death. (We only have legends and guesses about the dates of death for Peter and Paul; they are both presumed to have been executed about 64 AD.)

What Ehrman reveals to the layman in this book 14something which scholars have long recognized 14is that some ancient forgeries found their way into the New Testament. One of the most blatant instances is 2 Peter (pronounced 1CSecond Peter 1D or, more formally, the 1CSecond Epistle of Peter 1D). It was actually widely considered to be a forgery by many churchmen in the second century. There was even a blind churchman among those who declared that someone falsely claiming to be Peter wrote the epistle, which entitles us to say that 2 Peter is so obviously a forgery that a blind man could see it; yet it made its way into the New Testament.

How can you tell a forgery? Grammar, sentence length and other stylistic clues play a role, but, also, when you compare an authentic text to a forged one, contradictory historical details or a difference in theology can make the forgery stand out. Of the thirteen letters in the New Testament that are attributed to Paul, seven are consistent in both style and theology, even though they are each about different topics and were written for different ends. Of the other six, the three so-called 1Cpastoral 1D letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are stylistically similar to each other but not to the seven authentic letters. These are sometimes thought to have been forged by the same person. The remaining three letters are each unique in style. The fourteenth letter sometimes attributed to Paul is Hebrews, but Paul did not write it and its author did not make much, if any, effort to persuade his readers that he was Paul.

Theological differences are very important. For example, the theology of Paul 19s letter to the Romans (authentic) contradicts his supposed letter to the Ephesians (a forgery) on the topic of resurrection. Rather than think that Paul changed his mind about such an important subject, the more obvious conclusion is that the letters were written by two different authors, one being Paul and the other only claiming to be him. Another issue that some letters forged in Paul 19s name get wrong is that they confuse works according to the Jewish law (Paul 19s concern) with ordinary good deeds (the concern of pseudo-Paul in Ephesians). Interestingly, this helps us to identify a non-Pauline forgery: the Epistle of James makes this same confusion, and it is also a forgery.

Ehrman argues that most of the books in the Bible were not written by the person to whom they have been attributed, but this does not prove forgery. In most cases, books in the Hebrew as well as Christian scriptures were composed anonymously and much later attributed to an author by copyists or readers. The authors of the New Testament gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, for example, do not explicitly name themselves. The names were assigned by churchmen who lived decades later. (The Gospel According to John has an epilogue that speaks of the author in the third person, identifying him with the figure of the Beloved Disciple, an unnamed figure within the gospel, but, even here, this dubious intra-textual attribution does not actually name the author.) The letters known as 1, 2 & 3 John as well as the Book of the Revelation to John get the benefit of the doubt because they never claim to have been written by John the apostle. That attribution appears to have been made by later churchmen.

The New Testament forgeries identified by Ehrman are 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, James, Jude and 14believe it or not 14the Acts of the Apostles. The author of the Gospel According to Luke is widely considered to be the author as well of Acts, but even though the gospel cannot be regarded as a forgery, Ehrman makes a persuasive case that Acts should be, because there are several indications within Acts that the author means for the reader to believe that he is a companion of Paul 14something he never does in his gospel. Ehrman argues that the author of Acts cannot have been a companion of Paul. 1CLuke 1D contradicts Paul 19s letters (e.g., Galatians) historically and theologically, suggesting that the author was not with Paul and has a completely different agenda from him.

Ehrman documents references to forgery from more than two thousand years ago up until recently. The main differences between ancient and modern forgeries are that there were no laws specifically against forgery, as there are now, and, today, forgeries are almost always motivated by greed. In ancient times, there were occasionally cases of forgery for profit. (The Roman physician Galen was a prolific author, and several books were forged in his name, which drove Galen himself to write a book on how to tell whether a book was by him or not.) But ancient forgeries were more often made because an author named John Doe knew that if he wrote a book on philosophy, no one would pay much attention, but if he signed the book in the name of Aristotle or Plato, readers would be more likely to take the obscure author 19s ideas seriously. This was probably the motivation of those who wrote epistles in the names of Peter, Paul and other apostles during the first centuries of Christianity.

Why did the church let forgeries into the Bible? The early church was not capable of the kind of careful textual analysis that can reveal literary fraud in these texts. They mainly cared that the books were 1Corthodox 1D in their outlook (were consistent with the doctrines agreed upon by leaders of the church) and at least purported to be written by recognized authorities such as apostles or those who had known apostles in the first century. Unfortunately, discrimination was spotty when it came to recognizing that just because a book claimed to be written by an apostle, and just because its theology seemed unobjectionable to most church leaders, did not necessarily mean that it was authentic.

A leading motive for writing such books was to combat the teachings of some other Christian sect. Early Christianity was not unified. Even the authentic letters of Paul complain of false teachers within the church. Often the forged books take one side or another in a theological dispute 14sometimes leading to both opposing views being included within the New Testament. The forged Letter of James, for example, asserts that Christians must do good deeds in order to be saved, while the author of Ephesians, who falsely claims to be Paul, says that good deeds will not lead to salvation. Both seem to misunderstand the theology of the real Paul, who maintains that the works of the Hebrew law are not required for salvation, but urges Christians to follow a code of conduct.

Though Ehrman is primarily concerned with Christian examples of forgery and other kinds of literary fraud, outside and inside the New Testament, he mentions a couple of examples of forgery in the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the Book of Daniel that purports to be about four-hundred years older than it actually is. He cites many examples of forgery outside the New Testament to show that the phenomenon was common in the early Christian church. Though Christian forgeries appeared mainly during the first few centuries of the Christian era, Ehrman ends his book with some examples of nineteenth and twentieth century forgeries of Christian documents. ( )

Do all Bart Ehrman books have the same content? Not quite, but too close for comfort.

This one focuses on how the books of the Bible weren't written by the authors ascribed to them. ( )

Well argued with good sources but too long, could have said it in 100 pages less than the 265 he took. ( )

Once again, Ehrman demolishes any excuse anyone has for believing in the veracity of the bible. He shows conclusively that many of the books are not written by who they claim to be written by--and the evidence is plain to see, such as direct contradictions between books supposed to be written by the same person. Not to mention that textual analysis shows it was a different author, and so on. Folks with various agenda throughout the last two millennia have forged religious texts, and some were accepted into the New Testament. Ehrman also tells interesting stories about the four gospels--most notably that they weren't even called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John until decades after they were first written and circulated. Those names were applied to tie them to the apostles and give them more authority. I could go on, but I don't want to emulate Ehrman too much, since his worst habit, in his attempt to explain everything as clearly as possible, is to go on a bit too long. I will say that the audiobook is well read by Walter Dixon. ( )

Bart D. Ehrman is an accomplished and eminent scholar of biblical criticism. He is one of those "liberal" thinkers who has been able to get past the fiction that Jesus was a god, but not the contrivance that he was a man. In Forged Ehrman treats the subject of authorial mendacity in early Christian literature, not excepting the New Testament canon. As he demonstrates, there are scores of ancient Christian texts whose authors willfully misrepresent their identities, and are thus forgeries. He does carefully distinguish such forgery from false or merely erroneous attributions, all of which have been lumped customarily into the category of "pseudepigraphal" writings.

Ehrman importantly addresses the widespread misconceptions that the ancient world somehow possessed a more benign view of literary forgery, falsification, and plagiarism. As he shows, there are ancient writings which remonstrate against these practices. Just like modern readers, those of antiquity expected authors to represent themselves accurately in their texts.

In the final chapter of the book, Ehrman even jumps forward to the modern period with three examples of Christian pseudepigrapha from the 19th century, to demonstrate that the behavior we see in writings from early Christianity isn't alien to the sort of forgeries that have been created in later ages.

Forgery holds out as an "irony" the contrast between the stated ideal of Christianity in communicating divinely-ordained truth and the actual literary practices of the authors of Christian scripture. In his recurring discussions of motive, Ehrman tends to gloss over the obvious possibility that many, perhaps most, of these writers were in fact not sincere as they tampered with the facts in order to promote their preferred sects and doctrines.

While informed by extensive research and supplying references for further study, Forged is itself a popularizing rather than a scholarly book. It is a fast read and a valuable orientation to the realities of biblical authorship in the Christian world.