Forged

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Marcion saw this contrast between the law of the Jews and the gospel of Christ in extreme terms and pushed the contrast to what he saw as its logical consequences. Where there is law, there is no gospel. The law and the gospel are fundamentally distinct. They are contrary things. The Old Testament has nothing to do with the gospel of Paul. The necessary conclusion, for Marcion, was that the God who gave the Jewish law must not be the God who saved people from their sins, which they incurred by breaking the law. In other words, the Old Testament God was not the same as the God of Jesus and his apostle Paul. There were literally two Gods.

  Marcion argued that the God of the Old Testament was the Jewish God who created this world, chose Israel to be his people, and then gave them his law. No one was able to keep this law, however. So the Old Testament God was perfectly justified in condemning everyone to damnation. He was a just, wrathful God—not evil, just ruthlessly judicial. The God of Jesus, on the other hand, was a God of love, mercy, and forgiveness. This good God, superior to the God of the Jews, sent Jesus into the world in order to die for the sins of others, to save people from the wrathful God of the Old Testament. Salvation comes, then, by believing in Jesus’s death.

  Marcion set out to prove his doctrine of the two Gods by writing a book called the Antitheses (i.e., the “contrary statements”). In it he showed that there were severe inconsistencies between the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus and Paul. The God of the Old Testament, for example, orders the Israelites to take over the promised land, first by destroying the city of Jericho (Josh. 6). He instructs them to go into the city and slaughter every man, woman, and child in it. Is this the same God, asks Marcion, who says, “Love your enemies,” “Turn the other cheek,” and “Pray for those who persecute you”? It doesn’t sound like the same God. Because it’s not.

  The God of the Old Testament sent his prophets, one of whom was Elisha. One day, we are told in the Old Testament, Elisha was verbally harassed by a group of boys making fun of his bald head. Elisha called the wrath of God down upon the boys, and two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of them to death (2 Kings 2). Is this the same God who said, “Let the little children come unto me”? No, there are two different Gods.

  Since the God of Jesus is not the God of the Old Testament and is therefore not the creator of the world, Jesus could not belong to this created order. He could not be born into this world as a flesh-and-blood being; otherwise he would belong to the God of the Jews, just as every other created being does. Jesus must have come from heaven, from the true God, directly. For that reason he was not an actual, physical human being. He only seemed to be. In other words, Marcion was a docetist (see Chapter 2). For this view he could again appeal to the writings of Paul, who stated that Jesus came into this world “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3). For Marcion, it was all an appearance.

  Marcion is the first Christian of record to have insisted on a distinct canon of Scripture, that is, a collection of books he considered sacred authorities. Marcion’s canon was remarkably short by most standards. Since the Jewish God was not the true God, his book was not part of the Christian Scriptures. There was no Christian Old Testament. The canon, instead, was made up of two sections. One part consisted of Paul’s letters. Marcion apparently knew ten of these, all the ones in the New Testament except 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, the so-called pastoral letters. Moreover, in his letters Paul constantly refers to his “gospel.” So Marcion included, as the other part of his canon, a Gospel account of the life of Jesus. This was apparently a version of the Gospel of Luke.

  The problem with this eleven-book canon is that even these books quote the Old Testament as an authority and seem to affirm the creation as coming from the true God. How could that be, if Marcion’s views of Paul and Jesus were right? Marcion had an easy answer to that. He believed that after Jesus left this earth, his followers, the disciples, changed his teachings and went back to their old Jewish ways, misinterpreting his gospel message and turning it around to affirm the goodness of the creator God and his creation. They never fully understood Jesus’s teaching that the creator was not the true God. That is why Paul had to be called to be an apostle. The apostles before him had altered Jesus’s teachings, and so Paul was commissioned to set things straight. According to Marcion, this wide misinterpretation of Jesus’s message had affected lots of other Christians, including the scribes who copied the writings of Paul and Luke. These eleven books had in fact been miscopied over the years. Scribes who did not understand the truth—that there are two Gods, that Jesus was not really born and is not really human, and so on—altered the texts and inserted false views into them. Marcion then edited his eleven books, eliminating from them portions that seemed too Jewish.

  In addition to these eleven books, Marcion and his followers had other books forged in Paul’s name. We know this from a fragmentary text that comes to us from the second century, a text that discusses which books belong in the true cannon of Scripture, as opposed to the canons of Marcion and other heretics. This text is called the Muratorian Canon, named after the Italian scholar, Muratori, who discovered it.5 Among other things the Muratorian Canon indicates that the Marcionites, the followers of Marcion, had forged two books in the name of Paul, a letter to the Christians in the city of Alexandria and a letter to those in the town of Laodicea. These letters to the Alexandrians and Laodiceans, regrettably, no longer survive. But we can be relatively certain that if they ever turn up, they will represent even more forcefully than the books of Marcion’s canon his distinctive views about the two Gods, the non-human Jesus, and the salvation he brought.

  3 CORINTHIANS

  It was quite common for “orthodox” Christians (i.e., Christians who accepted the theological views that eventually became widely accepted throughout Christianity) to charge “heretics” (those who taught “false teachings”) with forging documents in the names of the apostles in order to support their views. We will see much more of this phenomenon in Chapter 6. The Gospel of Peter, for example, was charged with being heretical, as teaching a docetic view of Jesus. But orthodox Christians forged documents of their own. We have far more of this kind of forgery, since orthodox writings were more likely to be preserved for posterity, even if they were not actually written by their alleged authors.

  Everyone familiar with the New Testament knows that it contains two letters by Paul to the church in Corinth, called 1 and 2 Corinthians. What most people do not know is that outside of the New Testament is a book called 3 Corinthians. It is a fascinating book, penned in the name of Paul to oppose heretics like Marcion. But Paul did not write it. It is an orthodox forgery of the second century.6

  Like the stories of Thecla, 3 Corinthians is now found in the Acts of Paul. According to the account, two heretics came to Corinth propounding their false views, Simon the Magician, whom we have met before, and Cleobius. The Corinthian Christians were disturbed by what they were hearing and wrote to Paul asking him to correct the heretical teachings and to come in person to straighten out those who had succumbed to them.

  This letter to Paul, forged in the name of the Corinthians, is the first part of 3 Corinthians. It sets out the claims of the two false teachers, namely, that it is wrong to appeal to the Old Testament prophets, that God is “not almighty” (i.e., that the creator God is not God over all), that there will be no future resurrection of the flesh, that the world was not created by God, that Christ did not come to earth bearing real flesh, that he was not born of Mary, and that the world was not created by God, but by angels.

  Much of this sounds like the teaching of Marcion. As we have seen, Marcion devalued human “flesh,” because he rejected the idea that the creator of this world is the true God. And the creator, of course, is the one who made fleshly beings. As a consequence, the followers of Marcion did not believe that the afterlife would be lived “in the flesh” there would be no physical resurrection at the end of time. So too Christ could not have had real flesh and was not
actually born. Since the Old Testament is not part of the Christian Bible, for Marcion, one cannot appeal to the prophets, and the creator God is not the true God.

  At least one aspect of the alleged teachings of Simon and Cleobius, however, does not sound like Marcion, their teaching that the world was created “by angels.” Marcion maintained that it was created by the God of the Old Testament. Either some of Marcion’s followers thought that the Jewish God had created the world through powerful angelic intermediaries, or the fictitious opponents of the Corinthians are not followers of Marcion per se, but are “heretics” with views very similar to Marcion’s.

  The rest of 3 Corinthians is Paul’s letter in response. This letter is much longer than the one from the Corinthians, and in it “Paul” argues strongly against the heretical views being propounded by the false teachers. Paul stresses that the message he preaches is the one that he received from the other apostles, “who were together with the Lord Jesus Christ at all times.” In other words, his message is not unique to him. This stands in contrast to Marcion, who saw Paul as the apostle par excellence, who opposed the false teachings of the other apostles who corrupted Jesus’s message. Paul goes on to stress that Jesus really was born of Mary and came in the flesh in order to redeem all flesh and to raise people from the dead in the flesh. The true God is the creator, and the prophets were his spokespersons.

  This emphasis on the “flesh” is very interesting, but also a bit ironic. One recent study of 3 Corinthians has shown that the forger, who was intent on opposing the false teachings of the heretics, does so by teaching ideas about the flesh that are contrary to what the real, historical Paul taught.7 Paul himself certainly believed that God had created this world and that at the end of time he would redeem it. Paul, like most Jews and Christians in his day, thought that at the end of this age there would be a bodily resurrection. That is to say, humans would face judgment, either reward or punishment, in their own bodies, which had been raised from the dead (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 15). But Paul did not call the body the “flesh.” On the contrary the “flesh” meant something completely different for Paul. It meant that part of human nature that is controlled by sin and is alienated from God (see, e.g., Rom. 8:1–9). For Paul, the “flesh” needed to be overcome, since it was controlled by sin. The human body would be raised from the dead, but the flesh had to die.

  This somewhat technical understanding of the term “flesh” came to be lost in later orthodox Christianity, when theologians began thinking that flesh and body were the same thing. And that has happened here in 3 Corinthians. Unlike Paul, this author emphasizes the importance of flesh as a creation of God that will be raised. In other words, this is an instance in which a forger claiming to be Paul represents a point of view that is contrary to Paul’s, even though he is trying to correct, in Paul’s name, teachings he thinks are false.

  THE LETTERS OF PAUL AND SENECA

  A completely different agenda is found in a much later forgery of Pauline letters that was destined to become quite influential on later Christian thinking about Paul. By the end of the second century, many Christians—not just Marcion—considered Paul to be the most important figure in the religion after Jesus. Paul was understood as the great apostle, the great spokesperson, the great theologian of the church. His writings were widely read, and his thought was deeply appreciated. But over the years Christians wondered why, if Paul was such a brilliant and astute thinker, none of the other great thinkers of his day mentions him. Why does he appear to have been a great unknown in the Roman Empire, outside of the Christian church itself?

  Sometime in the fourth century an unknown author sought to address the issue and did so by forging a series of fourteen letters between Paul and the Roman philosopher Seneca.8 Seneca was widely recognized as the greatest philosopher of his day, one of the real intellectual giants of the early Roman Empire. He was in the upper crust of elite and powerful society, as he was the tutor and later the adviser of the emperor Nero. A number of Seneca’s philosophical writings were widely read in antiquity, and a good number of them survive today. But nowhere in these writings does he mention the existence of Christianity or refer to Jesus or any of the great leaders of the new faith.

  These fourteen letters repair the damage. Eight of the fourteen are allegedly Seneca’s letters to Paul; the other six are Paul’s responses. Modern readers of these letters are often a bit disappointed that their contents are so meager. One would hope for some good juicy gossip between the greatest thinker of the first century and the greatest apostle of the church. But with one exception the letters are not meant to provide fabricated stories about life in the imperial palace, for example. They are meant to show that Paul was well placed and well respected by intellectuals of his time.

  “Seneca” in his first letter praises Paul for his “wonderful exhortations to the moral life” and indicates that these are divine teachings not spoken so much by Paul as through him by God. Paul, in his response, simply indicates that, yes, Seneca has spoken the truth! In another letter Seneca praises Paul’s “sublime speech” and his “most venerable thoughts” and indicates that the emperor Nero himself has read the letters and has been moved by Paul’s sentiments. All of this, of course, is historically bogus. Seneca had almost certainly never heard of Paul. But it makes for a good story three hundred years later.

  In only one letter is there any historical reference of interest. In Letter 11 (sometimes numbered 14, since it appears to be the last one chronologically) Seneca expresses his sincere regret that Paul has been condemned to death even though he is innocent. This is a reference to the tradition that Paul was among the Christians martyred by Nero, who blamed them for starting the fire that burned the city of Rome, which he himself may have had started. Seneca states that the fire burned for six days, destroying 132 palaces and 4,000 apartment buildings. And he indicates his distress that Christians and Jews were being executed because of it by Nero, an unjust ruler “who takes pleasure in murder and uses lies as a disguise.” But the emperor’s days were numbered, and he would pay the penalty by enduring eternal torment: “This accursed one will be burned in the fire for all.”

  Here we have, then, not just a set of forgeries written in the names of Paul and Seneca centuries after they were dead, but also a fabricated account of how such an eminent philosopher both appreciated Paul and held him and his fellow Christians innocent of the charges of arson brought against them in 64 CE. Christians of later centuries took these writings with extreme seriousness. It later became a commonplace that Seneca knew the apostle Paul and his Christian message, and that the famous philosopher, the greatest mind of his day, was entirely open to the gospel of Christ.

  “Pauline” Writings in the New Testament

  AS WITH PETER, SO with Paul. Outside of the New Testament there are numerous fabricated stories told about him and a number of writings only allegedly by him. All of the writings attributed to Paul from outside the New Testament were forged. Are there any Pauline forgeries within the New Testament?

  Here again there is a broad scholarly consensus. There are thirteen letters that claim to have been written by Paul in the New Testament, nearly half of the New Testament books. But six of these were probably not written by Paul. Scholars have called these six the “deutero-Pauline” letters, meaning that they have a “secondary” standing in the corpus of Paul’s writings.

  Virtually all scholars agree that seven of the Pauline letters are authentic: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. These seven cohere well together and appear stylistically, theologically, and in most every other way to be by the same person. They all claim to be written by Paul. There is scarce reason to doubt that they actually were written by Paul.

  The other six differ in significant ways from this core group of seven. Three of them—1 and 2 Timothy and Titus—are so much alike that most scholars are convinced that they were written by the same person. The other three are usually assigned to
three different authors. There is greatest scholarly agreement about the first group of three, and so I begin by discussing why scholars have long considered them to be forgeries.

  THE PASTORAL LETTERS: 1 AND 2 TIMOTHY AND TITUS

  The letters of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus have been grouped together and called the “Pastoral epistles” since the eighteenth century. The name derives from the subject matter; the author, who claims to be Paul, is allegedly writing to church leaders, his companions Timothy and Titus, to instruct them on their pastoral or ministerial duties in their respective churches. The three letters have many striking similarities to one another, as I show in a moment; but they are also three distinct letters with, probably, three distinct purposes, just as the authentic letters of Paul each has a distinct purpose. Before showing why most scholars consider them to be written by someone other than Paul, I should give a brief summary of each letter.

  Summary of the Letters

  First Timothy claims to be a letter from Paul to his junior colleague Timothy, whom he has left behind to be the leader of the church in the city of Ephesus. In the letter “Paul” gives Timothy instructions pertaining to how to run and organize the church. He is to oppose groups of false teachers who propound wild theories involving “myths and genealogies” and who promote a kind of rigorous ascetic activity as a spiritual exercise, in which, for example, marriage is forbidden and certain strict dietary restrictions must be observed. He is to make sure that only the right kind of person is appointed to the church offices of bishop and deacon. In particular, the offices are to be occupied only by men who are married, are not recent converts, and live upright lives. Most of the letter provides instruction on how Christians are to conduct themselves and interact with one another, for example, how to pray, how to behave toward the elderly and widows, and how to relate to material wealth.