FORGED: CHAPTER FOUR— ALTERNATIVES TO FORGERY

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 11:15 pm by Guest Contributor

FORGED: CHAPTER FOUR— ALTERNATIVES TO FORGERY 2015-03-13T23:15:16-04:00 Guest Contributor

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three

As with previous chapters, Bart gives us a bit of his biography and how he came to leave behind the Evangelical faith and take a very different view of the Bible. Along the way he suggests that there are at least two forgeries in the OT—- Ecclesiastes and Daniel (pp. 117-18). One of the problems in the way Bart deals with both of these books is the failure to recognize the results of appropriate source criticism. For example, with Ecclesiastes, as with Proverbs, we are dealing with the tradition of Jewish wisdom literature, and as Proverbs shows perfectly clearly, this tradition involved including wisdom from numerous sources, including Solomon. Proverbs, is perfectly clear about this, mentioning in Proverbs 30 for example the saying of a man named Agur. Solomon is seen as the font or first major sponsor of the collecting of ANE wisdom, and while most scholars agree that Proverbs likely includes some sayings from King Solomon himself, wisdom was an international form of literature collected from all sorts of sources. This brings us to Ecclesiastes. It is quite true that again there is an indirect mention of Solomon, for example at the outset of this document, but to apply modern notions of authorship to such composite documents is anachronistic in the extreme. No one is claiming that all the material in Ecclesiastes was by Solomon himself. That would be unlike almost all the other collections of wisdom material we know of from the ANE. Indeed, we learn in Eccles. 12.9-10 that Qoheleth (‘the teacher’ not identified as Solomon) weighed, studied, and arranged proverbs. What we have, says vs. 11 is sayings of the wise (wise being plural), sayings of various sages, and so these are sayings collected by one ‘shepherd’, but not all composed by one person. Now most experts in Jewish sapiential literature recognize that in the document of Ecclesiastes itself, we have a collection of material from various sources.

In this case, it is quite inappropriate to call this an example of forgery, as there is no claim made in this document that it was all by Solomon. Indeed, the most referred to source is the collector himself, Qoheleth or the teacher. What about Daniel. It is true to say that Daniel is one of the more difficult books of the OT to pin down in terms of provenance. It seems to include some authentic stories about a 6th century prophet named Daniel and some of his visions, but it also includes later material towards the end of the book. As Van der Tooren points out, books like this often have a long history of composition and compilation, with scribes adding material for many decades. Isaiah for example is a book compiled of prophetic materials from several different periods of Jewish history. On top of all this, Daniel has both Hebrew and Aramaic sections to it, which may in itself suggest materials written down at different periods of Jewish history. All that would be required for this document to be authentically ascribed to Daniel is that it contain some material about and from the prophet and that case can be made. I have made it in my book Jesus the Seer, (Hendrickson) and I have made the case for Ecclesiastes in Jesus the Sage (Fortress). And I am following the lead of many experts in these books. But of such arguments Bart seems to be entirely ignorant, or else he is just ignoring them. I don’t object to the conclusion that the final form of the book of Daniel came in the 2nd century B.C. But what I do insist is that the argument it was all composed then and is a forgery is frankly very weak, and based on the assumption that this document was not compiled over a long period of time, which the internal evidence is strongly against in this case. The upshot of this is, we do not have a precedent in these OT books for a case that forgeries were already in the Bible before we ever get to the NT writings.

On pp. 119-21 Bart is mostly taking on more liberal scholars that think there were perfectly well know literary conventions in which pseudonymity was an acceptable and known practice and should not be seen as examples of forgery. While I do think that a case can be made for certain genre of literature, for example apocalyptic Jewish literature, often having pseudonymity as a well-known and recognized feature of it, this is a non-issue for NT study since John of Patmos is widely agreed to be the real name of the person responsible for the book of Revelation.

What about pseudepigrapha? Here I think Bart is likely right— there was no innocent practice of falsely attributed authorship when it came to the writing of letters (see my discussion in Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians Vol. One). And as Richard Bauckham has rightly shown, the likelihood of pulling off such a scam in the NT era is not good, because it would involve not only a falsely attributed author but also a falsely attributed audience as well.

My view would be there are no forgeries in the NT at all, no pseudonymous documents, but that does not mean that all the documents of the NT meet a modern way of looking at authorship, which is what Bart is applying to the NT documents. There were definitely composite documents in antiquity named after the most important source for or contributor to that document. And in addition to that, the varied practices of scribes writing or copying on behalf of others must be taken into account.

One of the things Bart and I do have in common is Bruce Metzger as a teacher. And Bruce, a devout Christian did indeed ask: 1) how can you know there was no attempt to deceive when there was a pseudepigrapha; and 2) if no one was taken in by the falsely attributed label, it is difficult to see why it was used at all, for surely the use of an apostolic or famous name is to add authority to and increase the audience of the document (cited by Bart on p.123). I quite agree with this line of reasoning, and here Bart and I converge on the same conclusion about such practices. They were deceptive, and they were called deceptive in their own day. This is why people are angry when they discover after the fact they have been snookered, and not by just anyone, but by a supposedly truth telling fellow Christian. Earle Ellis in his Prophecy and Hermeneutics long ago made this point, and it still stands. Deception is not consistent with the high standard for truth God expects of his people then or now.

Further, the critique of Kurt Aland on pp. 123-25, who claimed there were Spirit inspired cases of pseudonymity. But if the Holy Spirit was in fact inspiring such a document, why indeed would one need to attribute it to a merely human authority like an apostle? If the Spirit is inspiring it, one can speak in one’s own name, because one has been made a prophet. There is no need for pseudonymity. Here again I think Bart has a good case.

In the following short section (pp. 125-29) Bart takes on the notion that there were those who wrote ‘in the tradition of Isaiah’ and the earlier Isaianic materials are sources for the later material, but are not claiming to be by the original author. They are simply reactualizing the earlier material and applying it to a later time. Actually, this practice is precisely what seems to be going on in the later part of Daniel, but Danielic material is being used and reaudienced and redirected in the later material. This is more an example of later editorial or redactional work on earlier source material. It does not actually involve either later persons making authorship claims that are deceptive. In describing the roles of scribes in the ancient Israelite world, Van der Tooren says they undertook the following tasks: 1) transcription of oral lore; 2) invention of a new text; 3) compilation of existing lore, either oral or written; 4) expansion of an existing text; 5) adaptation of an existing text for a new audience; and 6) integration of individual documents into a more comprehensive composition (p. 110, in Scribal Culture). Not only is it likely that we see examples of this sort of thing going on in the OT (see Baruch and the collection and editing of Jeremiah’s material), but it is also likely going on in a document like 2 Peter. Bart is apparently not prepared to take seriously any hypothesis but the single or jointly author authentic or pseudonymous document. This frankly seems to be because he is assuming an all too modern notion about authorship, and is ignoring the evidence of the way ancient scribes worked, compiling composite documents. In other words, he too quickly rules out whole ranges of possibilities that experts in ancient oral and scribal cultures have provided copious evidence for.

On pp. 129-33 Bart takes on the philosophical school hypothesis. He admits that there is an text in Iamblichus which says that the followers of Porphyry the philosopher did compose documents in his name ascribing the glory and credit to their teacher rather than to themselves. But Bart urges that this single text hardly provides some sort of massive literary precedent on the basis of which we could conclude that there was a school of Peter or a school of Paul. As Bart goes on to show, Iamblichus is well after the NT era, and there is no evidence of some sort of widespread influence of Prophyry or his followers on early Jews or early Christians. Bart then suggests that one reason NT scholars have latched on to this possibility is that they want to avoid the suggestion that we have forged documents in the NT. He may be right about this, but it’s hard to know.

Finally, on pp. 133-39 we come to his rebuttal to secretary or scribe theories. Bart relies on the work of E.E. Richards here, and he acknowledges Paul and others certainly used secretaries. What he disputes is that secretaries were given any latitude in the composition of documents, or at least, he wants to see the historical evidence for such latitude. This is a reasonable request, but there is more to attend to here. Bart wants to argue that what we have in Paul’s corpus is letter-essays. This however is not quite correct. What we have is rhetorical discourses within an epistolary framework. In the largely oral culture of the Greco-Roman world, Paul’s so-called letters and documents like Hebrews were orally delivered by Paul’s co-workers as speeches, and more importantly they reflect the structure and practices of ancient rhetoric. About this Bart is completely silent. He does not consider as an option, he does not rebut it as in error. He is simply silent. And here is the point—- secretaries took down speeches in a variety of ways, including using short-hand, taking notes and then filling out in a more elegant rhetorical form, and so on. We have an abundance of evidence about the taking down of ancient speeches by scribes. Of this Bart says nothing. Here then is a major fly in the ointment and flaw in the analysis in ‘Forged’. We don’t need to track down how secretaries handled philosophical essays, we need to track down how they dealt with speeches. And the previous comments of Thucydides and Polybius are relevant here as well.

There is another assumption in Bart’s argument that surfaces here, namely it is only the elites who have secretaries that have literary skills and could produce Pauline like documents (or Petrine ones). This is forgetting how many slaves were not only educated but trained to be excellent secretaries. We must remember that many persons who had become slaves in the Empire, had previously been teachers, land owners, and in fact amongst the elite in their own region. There were many slaves who became Christian converts, some from elite households. For example, Paul mentions in Romans 16 people from the household of Aristobolus, or the Herodion slaves, and indeed Philippians mentions Caesar’s own household had converts. Various of these persons were domestic slaves, and some of them were likely able scribes. In other words, the social situation was such that Paul and Peter and others could definitely have access to very competent, and rhetorically skilled former slaves who were secretaries.

Bart concludes this section by referring again to the unlikelihood that Peter used a skilled and rhetorically and Scripturally knowledgeable scribe to compose 1 Peter in Greek with Peter perhaps speaking in Aramaic and giving the gist of what he wanted to say. Really? Let us consider for a moment what Papias says about the composition of the Gospel we know as Mark’s Gospel.

“And the elder used to say this, Mark became Peter’s interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered, not, indeed, in order, of the things said and done by the Lord. For he had not heard the Lord, nor had followed him, but later on, followed Peter, who used to give teaching as necessity demanded but not making, as it were, an arrangement of the Lord’s oracles, so that Mark did nothing wrong in thus writing down single points as he remembered them. For to one thing he gave attention, to leave out nothing of what he had heard and to make no false statements in them.” (quoted in Eusebius H.E. 3.39.4ff). It also goes on to say Peter spoke in Aramaic, and Mark translated it into Greek. A detailed and helpful analysis of this can be found in Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

What is of importance to say here is the following: 1) the Gospel of Mark is a long document and the composer of the document is indeed Mark; 2) Mark is translating from Aramaic, but he is making his own arrangement of the material, in fact he is making it into rhetorical chreiae among other things; 3) Mark gave attention to detail but made his own arrangement of things. While this is not a testimony about a letter or a rhetorical speech, it is a testimony about one Christian using source material from another Christian and composing something in his own Greek style with his own arrangement of material. He is not simply taking down verbatim what Peter says as Bauckham shows.

As it turns out, Bart’s argument about there being no evidence to help us figure out what sort of liberties secretaries might have had in composing things is not quite correct. We not only have the evidence from Papias, we have the evidence amassed by Van der Tooren about earlier scribes and their creativity and literary skills, and if that were not enough we have the evidence about rhetorical education and the taking down of speeches.

Bart’s parameters of either single or joint authorship or forgery and fabrication, are much too narrow to account for what we find in the NT itself, and in its era. And finally, it will not do to suggest that with Cicero and Tiro we have some sort of isolated and singular example of where a scribe might compose a document for his master. Read Anthony Everett’s fine life of Cicero or William Johnson’s excellent monograph (both reviewed on this blog), Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, (Oxford 2010). There are lots of good reasons to question Bart’s conclusions about secretaries and for that matter about what counted as authorship or forgery in antiquity. At the end of the day, I do think Paul mostly dictated his letters— all of them with the possible except of the Pastorals. This didn’t mean that the secretary would not put it into a more apt rhetorical form after he had taken notes for the composition of the document in a fair hand. We do need to make some allowance for the contrast in 2 Corinthians where the Corinthians say Paul’s letters are powerful and rhetorically impressive, but his ethos and in person speech was weak.

Introduction | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four

Uncategorized

Previous Post

April 6, 2011

Coming Soon--- My new Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on Philippians

Next Post

April 7, 2011 In a Tricksy Move, Hobbit Movies to be Co-Directed by Gollum!

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz