An 11-Day Study On Challenges To Biblical Authorityಮಾದರಿ

DID THE BIBLICAL WRITERS LIE ABOUT THEIR IDENTITY?

FORGERIES IN THE ANCIENT WORLD AND THE EARLY CHURCH

When it comes to forged documents in the ancient world and the early church, there are three things Christians should know:

1. Forgeries existed in the ancient world, but they were rejected when discovered.

2. Forgeries occurred among some early Christian writings, but Christians rejected them when they were discovered.

3. We have no reason to think that a known forgery made it into the New Testament canon.

Let’s consider each of these truths. First, forgeries existed in the ancient world, but they were rejected when discovered. It was no small matter in the ancient world to forge a document. Writing in the first century BC, the Roman author Vitruvius is characteristic of the ancient attitude toward pseudonymous writings:

It was a wise and useful provision of the ancients to transmit their thoughts to posterity by recording them in treatises so that they should not be lost.

So, while they deserve our thanks, those, on the contrary, deserve our reproaches, who steal the writings of such men and publish them as their own; and those also, who depend in their writings, not on their own ideas, but who enviously do wrong to the works of others and boast of it, deserve not merely to be blamed, but to be sentenced to actual punishment for their wicked course of life. With the ancients, however, it is said that such things did not pass without pretty strict chastisement. What the results of their judgments were, it may not be out of place to set forth as they are transmitted to us.

Clearly, such spurious documents were seen as deceptive and were met with a swift and public rejection. As we will see, the earliest Christians shared that sentiment.

Second, forgeries occurred among some early Christian writings, but Christians rejected them when they were discovered. Right out of the gates we need to clearly state that the earliest Christians held to the thoroughly Jewish conviction (rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures) that God does not lie, and He hates deception. As the Scriptures declare, “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight” (Proverbs 12:22); “You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another” (Leviticus 19:11). Lying—even in the name of an apostle, done in love and for the greater good—would not be tolerated.

Also, we need to recognize that there were plenty of forgeries being circulated in the early Christian literature. However, once discovered, each forgery was immediately dealt with. There was an instance concerning the Gospel of Peter that was initially allowed to be read until it was more carefully investigated, When about AD 200 Serapion, bishop of Antioch, first read Gospel of Peter, he thought it might be genuine.

When further investigation led him to conclude it was not, he rejected it and provided a rationale for the church of Rhossus in Cilicia: “For we, brothers, receive both Peter and the other apostles as Christ. But pseudepigrapha in their name we reject, as men of experience, knowing that we did not receive such [from the tradition]” (Eusebius Hist. Eccl. 6.12.3; cf. 2.25.4–7—widely cited in the literature).

Lastly, the New Testament writings include an instructive example. The author of 2 Thessalonians 2 is aware that certain forgeries and false teachings are circulating and seeks to address it: “Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come” (vv.1–2). To further authenticate this instruction, he writes, “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the sign of genuineness in every letter of mine; it is the way I write” (2 Thessalonians 3:17).

Third, given what we have already seen concerning the establishment of the core of the canon, we have no reason to think that a known forgery made it into the New Testament canon. The reason for this is that the church fathers understood that the apostles were the authorized agents of the new covenant message and documents. Therefore, if the writings were not apostolic in origin, they were not regarded as authoritative. Period.