BOOK IS 357 PAGES LONG THIS IS Just 5 pages
We were heavily committed to the truth at Moody Bible Insti¬tute. I would argue, even today, that there is no one on the planet more committed to truth than a serious and earnest evangelical Christian
Along with our commitment to truth, I believed in objectivity. Objective truth was all there was. There was no such thing as a “subjective truth.” Something was true or it was false. Personal feelings and opinions had nothing to do with it. Objectivity was real, it was possible, it was ONE COULD ARGUE THAT the obsession with truth in parts of evangelical Christianity today was matched by the commit¬ment to truth in the earliest years of Christianity. This is one of the features of Christianity that made it distinctive among the re¬ligions of antiquity.
Most people today don’t realize that ancient religions were al-most never interested in “true beliefs.” Pagan religions—by which I mean the polytheistic religions of the vast majority of people in the ancient world, who were neither Jewish nor Christian—did not have creeds that had to be recited, beliefs that had to be af¬firmed, or scriptures that had to be accepted as conveying divine truth. Truth was of interest to philosophers, but not to practition¬ers of religion (unless they were also interested in philosophy). As strange as this may seem to us today, ancient religions didn’t require you to believe one thing or another. Religion was all about the proper practices: sacrifices to the gods, for example, and set prayers. Moreover, because religion was not particularly concerned with what you believed about the gods and because all of these religions allowed, even encouraged, the worship of many gods, there was very little sense that if one of the religions was right, the others were wrong. They could all be right! There were many gods and many ways to worship the gods, not a single path to the divine.
This view—the dominant view of antiquity—stands com-pletely at odds with how most of us think about religion today, of
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course. In our view, if Free-will Baptists are right, Roman Cathol¬ics are wrong; if Jews are right, Buddhists are wrong; if Muslims are right, Christians are wrong; and so on. But not in the ancient world. The worship of Zeus was no more “right” than the worship of Athena, Apollo, your city gods, or your family gods.
Another key difference between religions today and in an¬tiquity is that the ancient polytheistic religions were not overly concerned with the afterlife. They were concerned about the present life, how to survive in a hard and capricious world, and how to live well: how to make sure the rain came and the crops grew; how to survive illness or combat; how to get enough to eat and drink; how to lead productive and fruitful lives; how to make the boy or girl next door fall madly in love with you.
Among the many things that made Christianity different from the other religions of the Roman Empire, with the partial excep¬tion of Judaism, is that Christians insisted that it did matter what you believed, that believing the correct things could make you “right” and believing the incorrect things could make you “wrong,” and that if you were wrong, you would be punished eternally in the fires of hell. Christianity, unlike the other reli¬gions, was exclusivistic. It insisted that it held the Truth, and that every other religion was in Error. Moreover, this truth involved claims about God (there is only one, for example, and he created the world), about Christ (he was both divine and human), about salvation (it comes only by faith in Christ), about eternal life (everyone will be blessed or tormented for eternity), and so on.1
The Christian religion came to be firmly rooted in truth claims, which were eventually embedded in highly ritualized for¬mulations, such as the Nicene Creed. As a result, Christians from the very beginning needed to appeal to authorities for what they believed. Do you believe that this view is true instead of that one? What is your authority for saying so? The ultimate authority was God, of course. But the majority of Christians came to think that attainable, and we had access to it. It was through our objective knowledge of the truth that we knew God and knew what God (and Christ, and the Spirit, and everything else) was.
One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer have led many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads—and where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. So if, in theory, you can verify the “objective” truth of religion, and then it turns out that the religion being examined is verifiably wrong, where does that leave you? If you are an evangelical Christian, it leaves you in the wilderness outside the evangelical camp, but with an unrepentant view of truth. Object¬ive truth, to paraphrase a not so Christian song, has been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know, I’m one.
Before moving outside into the wilderness (which, as it turns out, is a lush paradise compared to the barren camp of funda¬mentalist Christianity), I was intensely interested in “objective proofs” of the faith: proof that Jesus was physically raised from the dead (empty tomb! eyewitnesses!), proof that God was active in the world (miracles!), proof that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, without mistake in any way. As a result, I was de¬voted to the field of study known as Christian apologetics.
The term “apologetics” comes from the Greek word apologia, which does not mean “apology” in the sense of saying you’re sorry for something; it means, instead, to make a “reasoned defense” of the faith. Christian apologetics is devoted to showing not only that faith in Christ is reasonable, but that the Christian message is demonstrably true, as can be seen by anyone willing to suspend disbelief and look objectively at the evidence.
The reason this commitment to evidence, objectivity, and truth has caused so many well-meaning evangelicals problems over the years is that they—at least some of them—really are confident that if something is true, then it necessarily comes from God, and that the worst thing you can do is to believe something that is false. The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don’t want to go there.
God did not speak the truth about what to believe directly to in¬dividuals. If he did, there would be enormous problems, as some could claim divine authority for what they taught and others could claim divine authority for the completely opposite teach¬ing. Thus most Christians did not stress personal revelation to living individuals. Instead, they insisted that God had revealed his truth in earlier times through Christ to his apostles. The apostles at the beginning of the church were authorities who could be trusted. But when the apostles died out, where was one to go for an authority?
One could claim—and many in fact did—that the leaders of the churches who were appointed by the apostles could pass along their teachings, so that these leaders had authority equal to God himself. God sent Jesus, who chose his apostles, who in¬structed their successors, who passed along the sacred teachings to ordinary Christians.2 Several problems with this view arose, however. For one thing, as churches multiplied, each of them could no longer claim to have as its leader someone who had known an apostle or even someone who knew someone who once knew an apostle. An even bigger problem was the fact that differ¬ent leaders of churches, not to mention different Christians in their congregations, could claim they taught the apostolic truths. But these “truths” stood at odds with what other leaders and teachers said were the teachings of the apostles.
How was one to get around these problems? The obvious an¬swer presented itself early on in the Christian movement. One could know what the apostles taught through the writings they left behind. These authoritative authors produced authoritative teachings. So the authoritative truth could be found in the apostolic writings.3
Even though this might sound like a perfect solution to the problem, the solution raised problems of its own. One involves a reality that early Christians may not have taken into account, but
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that scholars today are keenly aware of. Most of the apostles were illiterate and could not in fact write (discussed further in Chapter 2). They could not have left an authoritative writing if their souls depended on it. Another problem is that writings started to ap¬pear that claimed to be written by apostles, but that contained all sorts of bizarre and contradictory views. Gospels were in circula¬tion that claimed to be written by Jesus’s disciples Peter, Philip, and Mary and his brothers Thomas and James. Letters appeared that were allegedly written by Paul (in addition to ones that he actually did write), Peter, and James. Apocalyptic writings de¬scribing the end of the world or the fate of souls in the afterlife appeared in the names of Jesus’s followers John, Peter, and Paul. Some writings emerged that claimed to be written by Jesus himself.
In many instances, the authors of these writings could not ac¬tually have been who they claimed to be, as even the early Chris¬tians realized. The views found in these writings were often deemed “heretical” (i.e., they conveyed false teachings), they were at odds with one another, and they contradicted the teach¬ings that had become standard within the church. But why would authors claim to be people they weren’t? Why would an author claim to be an apostle when he wasn’t? Why would an unknown figure write a book falsely calling himself Peter, Paul, James, Thomas, Philip, or even Jesus?
The answer should seem fairly obvious. If your name was Je-hoshaphat, and no one (other than, say, your parents and sib¬lings) had any idea who you were, and you wanted to write an au¬thoritative Gospel about the life and teachings of Jesus, an au¬thoritative letter describing what Christians should believe or how they should live, or an inspired apocalypse describing in de¬tail the fate of souls after death, you could not very well sign your own name to the book. No one would take the Gospel of Je-hoshaphat seriously. If you wanted someone to read it, you called
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yourself Peter. Or Thomas. Or James. In other words, you lied about who you really were.
It is often said—even by scholars who should know bet-ter—that this kind of “pseudonymous” (i.e., falsely named) writ¬ing in the ancient world was not thought to be lying and was not meant to be deceitful. Part of what I’ll be showing in this book is that this view is flat-out wrong (see Chapter 4). Ancient authors who talked about this practice of writing a book in someone else’s name said that it was both lying and deceitful and that it was not an acceptable practice.
Many early Christian writings are “pseudonymous,” going un¬der a “false name.” The more common word for this kind of writ¬ing is “forgery” (I give more precise definitions of these terms in Chapter 1). In the ancient world forgery was a bit different from today in that it was not, technically speaking, against the law. But even though it was not an illegal activity, it was a deceitful one that involved conscious lying, as the ancients themselves said.
The crucial question is this: Is it possible that any of the early Christian forgeries made it into the New Testament? That some of the books of the New Testament were not written by the apostles whose names are attached to them? That some of Paul’s letters were not actually written by Paul, but by someone claim¬ing to be Paul? That Peter’s letters were not written by Peter? That James and Jude did not write the books that bear their names? Or—a somewhat different case, as we will see—that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
Scholars for over a hundred years have realized that in fact this is the case. The authors of some of the books of the New Testament were not who they claimed to be or who they have been supposed to be. In some instances that is because an an¬onymous writing, in which an author did not indicate who he was, was later named after someone who did not in fact write it.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Sunday, October 5th 2014 at 10:29PM
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