Bart D. Ehrman - Forged: Writing In The Name Of God - Why The Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are by Unknown

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Language: eng
Format: epub
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MlSATTRIBUTIONS BY MISTAKE

Often in early Christianity anonymous writings were assigned to certain authors for fairly neutral reasons—readers simply wanted to know who wrote them. Just to give a simple example, in the third and fourth centuries there was a book in circulation called Against All Heresies. The book, which we still have today, gives a description of thirty-two individuals or groups who held beliefs that the anonymous author considered false. One of the great heresiologists—that is, heresy hunters—of the early Christian centuries was Tertullian, from the early third century. Some readers of Against All Heresies came to think that even though the book was anonymous, it must have been written by him. So scribes who copied the book identified Tertullian as the author, and the book was added to the collection of Tertullian's writings, even though it never claims to be written by him.

Modern scholars are convinced on stylistic grounds that Tertullian did not write the book. Who then did? We do know of a

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book with this title written by the church writer Victorinus of Pettau, who was active around the year 270 CE, half a century after Tertullian. Some scholars have thought that this is the book we have. 1 Others have argued that it was written by an unknown author seventy years earlier, in Greek rather than in Tertullian's Latin, so that the book we now have is a translation into Latin of an originally anonymous work. The reality is that we will never know for sure. The readers and scribes in the ancient world who thought that Tertullian wrote it were almost certainly wrong, but there may not have been any ulterior motive in their assigning it to him. They may simply have made a mistake.

Attributions Made to Increase the Authority of a Writing

In other instances the attribution of a writing to an author may have been made in order to add greater weight to its significance. For example, one of the earliest Christian writings from outside the New Testament is a letter sent from the church of Rome to the Christians of Corinth, urging them to reinstate a group of church elders who had been unceremoniously removed from office. Traditionally the book has been known as 1 Clement. This is a long letter—sixty-five chapters in modern editions—that uses numerous scriptural and rhetorical arguments to make its point, which is that leaders of the church have divine authority and are not to be replaced at the whim or on the vote of a local congregation. Anyone who acts against the leadership of the church is doing so out of profane jealousy. The church of Corinth is to restore its leaders to their rightful place.

Even though the letter claims to be written by the "church" that is in Rome, obviously someone wrote it, not hundreds of people serving on a letter-writing committee. Eventually the

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letter came to be attributed to a figure we have met before in our study, Clement of Rome, allegedly the fourth bishop of Rome, who

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