Nothing New Under the Sun

I had the opportunity, while browsing in my local Barnes and Noble, to skim through Dr. Bart Ehrman's new book Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. Books like this fascinate me, although never enough to actually buy them. In fact, this book is just part of the ongoing wave of material pushing the Baur hypothesis which has garnered quite a bit of attention from the a press and public generally uneducated about the issues involved.

Since I have not read the book thoroughly, this is by no means an extensive critique of the entire work. However, my reason for not immediately adding this book to my must-read list is that it really contains nothing I have not seen elsewhere, sometimes many times over. Ehrman seems to be attempting to popularize a strand of Biblical criticism that has long been known in student, professional, and academic circles. To some of his readers it will seem new and shocking, but it really is just old hat.

Ehrman goes through the boilerplate liberal criticism surrounding several of the NT books. He also reviews a number of books excluded from the NT canon, although they were known in the early days of the church. None of his material appears to be anything you would not learn from a standard "mainstream" NT introduction-or for that matter, from a standard conservative NT introduction, which would interact with the material. Going from Moody to Princeton certainly seems to have been a shock to Ehrman's system, although the impression he leaves is that of someone who was looking for a way around much of what he had learned and grateful to find it in other circles than those in which he had traveled.

The one aspect of the book for which I give Ehrman a great deal of credit is his honesty concerning pseudopigraphy. Most scholars who reject the traditional authorship of NT books, even liberal ones, make the case that pseudopigraphy isn't really a serious problem, because it was widespread and the readers knew it was being practiced. Ehrman calls it like it is on this; he claims any book that was written under an assumed name should be classified as a forgery, and its authority questioned. I strongly disagree with his evaluations, but he at least follows through consistently with what he believes about a book's authorship.

Rejecting the authority of many NT books allows Ehrman to go on to his usual arguments for "multiple Christianities," in which other belief systems (particularly Gnostic ones) that formed around orthodox Christianity are given equal weight and status with the orthodox consensus. This allows a scholar such as Ehrman to pick and choose what he believes "authentic" Christianity was in the patristic period, and to explore the implications of allowing these rejected systems to have an equal voice at the Christian table today. If most of the surviving NT has no more authority than the works of Gnostic writers or other heretical groups, Ehrman could make a case for this, which is why he argues the critical points so strongly.

This book covers no new ground, yet is sure to get a huge amount of attention from the mainstream press. I expect the History Channel special with Dr. Ehrman to be available sometime this fall. In the end, though, I doubt that Christianity or the authority of the NT will crumble under the featherweight of Ehrman's rehashed arguments.