Forged

by Bart D. Ehrman

  THE GOSPEL OF PSEUDO-MATTHEW

  The same can be said of the stories found in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. It is called this because it was thought in the Middle Ages to have been written by Matthew himself. Originally, however, the book was a heavily reworked version of the Proto-Gospel. It too claimed to have been written by Jesus’s half brother James.13

  Among the more interesting accounts of this narrative are the miracles Jesus performs when the Holy Family flees to Egypt after his birth. We learn, for example, that en route they stop to rest outside a cave. To the terror of Joseph and Mary, out of the cave come a troop of dragons. The two-year-old Jesus, however, is not the least bit afraid. He waddles and stands before the fearsome beasts. When they see who he is, they bow down in worship before him. The author tells us that this fulfilled the predictions of Scripture: “Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet in the Psalms, who said, ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, O dragons and all the places of the abyss,’” a reference to the Greek version of Psalm 148:7.

  Later on their journey, the family stops to rest under a palm tree, and Jesus’s mother, Mary, looks wistfully at the fruit in the high, upper branches, wishing there were a way to get some to eat. Joseph upbraids her, since there is obviously no way to climb the tree. But the young Jesus intervenes and orders the tree to bend down to give its precious fruit to his mother. And it does so. Mary eats to her heart’s content, and Jesus blesses the tree for its obedience, telling it that as a reward one of its branches will be carried to heaven and planted in paradise. Straightaway an angel descends and removes a branch to take it to its new heavenly home.

  Once the family arrives in Egypt they have no place to stay, and so they go for shelter into a pagan temple. Inside this temple are 365 idols representing the gods who are to be worshiped, one for each day of the year. But when Jesus enters, the idols all fall over on their faces in obeisance to the true divinity in their midst. Once the local ruler learns what has happened, he comes himself and worships the child, telling all his friends and his entire army that now the Lord of all the gods has come into their midst.

  THE INFANCY GOSPEL OF THOMAS

  At roughly the time the Proto-Gospel of James was starting to circulate, another fabricated account of Jesus appeared, today known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.14 Driving this narrative is a question that has been asked by numerous Christian throughout the ages: If Jesus was the miracle-working Son of God as an adult, what was he like as a child? The Infancy Gospel contains stories about Jesus between the ages of five and twelve.

  The account begins with Jesus as a five-year-old playing by a stream near his home in Nazareth. The young Jesus gathers some of the water of the stream into a pool and orders it to become pure. And it does so, by his word alone. Jesus then stoops down and forms twelve birds out of the mud. A Jewish man who is walking by becomes upset, because it is the Sabbath and Jesus has violated the law by “working.” The man heads off to tell Joseph what his son has done, and Joseph rushes to the stream to upbraid the boy for breaking the Sabbath. In response, Jesus claps his hands and cries out to the birds to come to life and fly away, and they do so. Here Jesus is shown to be above the law and to be the lord of life. Beyond that, he has gotten off the hook with his father by destroying, in effect, any incriminating evidence. Mud birds? What birds?

  Another child who is playing beside Jesus takes a branch and scatters the water he has carefully gathered together. This angers the young Jesus, who tells the boy, “You unrighteous, irreverent idiot! What did the pools of water do to harm you? See, now you also will be withered like a tree, and you will never bear leaves or root or fruit.” The child immediately withers on the spot.

  In the next story Jesus is said to be walking through his village when another child runs up to him and accidentally bumps him on the shoulder. Jesus is irritated and says to the boy, “You’ll go no farther on your way.” And the child falls down dead. The parents of the boy carry him off with some harsh words for Joseph: “Since you have such a child, you cannot live with us in the village. Or teach him to bless and not to curse—for he is killing our children!”

  Eventually Joseph decides that Jesus needs to receive an education, and on three occasions he sends him off to teachers who try to instruct him, but to no effect. In one instance the teacher tries to teach Jesus the alphabet, in Greek, and practices reciting with him. But Jesus will not respond, until finally he says to the teacher, “If you are really a teacher and know the letters well, tell me the power of the Alpha [i.e., the first letter of the alphabet], and I will tell you the power of the Beta [the second letter].” The teacher gets angry and smacks Jesus upside the head. Big mistake. Jesus curses him, and he dies on the spot. Joseph takes Jesus back home with instructions to Mary: “Do not let him out the door; for those who anger him die.”

  Eventually, however, Jesus starts using his power not to harm, but to help: raising children from the dead, curing his brother James of a deadly snakebite, and proving to be remarkably handy with his miraculous skills around his father’s carpenter shop. The account ends with Jesus as a twelve-year-old in the Temple in Jerusalem, showing his intelligence and spiritual superiority in his discussions with the teachers of the law, a story otherwise known from the Gospel of Luke.

  It is hard to know what to make of these stories of Jesus the wunderkind.15 Some modern readers have thought that they portray Jesus in a very negative light indeed. But it is not clear that early Christian readers would have seen them that way. The stories may have been designed simply as good Christian entertainment. Or they may have been serious attempts to show how the miracle-working Son of God was active and filled with divine power even in the early years, long before his public ministry.

  FABRICATIONS WITHIN THE CANON

  It should not be thought that Christians started fabricating stories about Jesus only after the New Testament was completed. In fact, there can be little doubt that some accounts were manufactured in the early years of the Christian movement. Some of these fabrications made their way into the New Testament.

  We could go to great lengths to talk about New Testament narratives that purport to present historical events, but are in fact invented stories. Such narratives can be found among the stories about Jesus’s birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection as well as in stories about his followers, such as Peter and Paul, after his death in the book of Acts.

  With regard to the stories of Jesus’s birth, one does not need to wait for the later Gospels, mentioned above, to begin seeing the fabricated accounts; they are already there in the familiar versions of Matthew and Luke. There never was a census under Caesar Augustus that compelled Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem just before Jesus was born; there never was a star that mysteriously guided wise men from the East to Jesus; Herod the Great never did slaughter all the baby boys in Bethlehem; Jesus and his family never did spend several years in Egypt. These may sound like bold and provocative statements, but scholars have known the reasons and evidence behind them for many years. Since I devote considerable attention to them—and to other fabricated accounts of the Gospels—in another recent book, however, I will not go into the details here.16

  It is almost impossible to say whether the people who made up and passed along these stories were comparable to forgers, who knew full well that they were engaged in a kind of deception, or whether they, instead, were like those who falsely attributed anonymous books to known authors without knowing they were wrong. My guess is that most of the people who told these stories genuinely believed they happened. Even so, we should not say that these storytellers were not involved in deception. They may not have meant to deceive others (or they may have!), but they certainly did deceive others. In fact, they deceived others spectacularly well. For many, many centuries it was simply assumed that the narratives about Jesus and the apostles—narratives both within and outside the New Testament—described events that actually happened. Most readers still read the canonical acc
ounts that way. But many of these stories are not historical narratives. They are, instead, fabricated accounts, whether made up intentionally in order to prove a point or simply brought into being, somehow, when Christians passed along “information” about Jesus and those connected to him.

  Falsifications

  IN ADDITION TO FORGERY, false attribution, and fabrication, there is another kind of deceptive literary activity that can be called “falsification.” This occurs whenever someone copies an author’s text by hand, but alters it in some way, omitting something, adding something, or just changing the wording. If someone were to copy Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and add a few extra verses that he thought up himself, then the next person to read that manuscript would naturally assume that Paul himself had written the inserted words. That is very similar to what happens with forgery: someone writes his own words, but attributes them to someone else. In this case, however, rather than composing an entire document in someone else’s name, a copyist has written a portion of a document and included it in the other person’s book.

  The practice of altering texts in the process of copying them happened all the time in antiquity.17 In a world without electronic means of publication, photocopy machines, or even carbon paper, it was well-nigh impossible to ensure that any copy of a text would be 100 percent accurate, without changes of any kind. This is true for all books copied in the ancient world. That is why, when great kings wanted to start significant libraries in their cities, they were sometimes willing to pay sizable amounts of money for “originals” of the great classics. You could never be sure if copies would be completely true to the original.

  All of the early Christian writings were, necessarily, susceptible to the vicissitudes of copying. We don’t have any original copies of any books of the New Testament or of any other early Christian book. What we have are copies that have been made from copies of the copies of the copies. In most instances our earliest complete copies are from centuries after the originals.

  Just about every copyist made mistakes in copying. As a result, if you were to copy a copy of an original, in most instances you would copy not just the words of the original, but also the mistakes your predecessor made in copying the original. And whoever came after you and copied your copy would reproduce both your mistakes and the mistakes of your predecessor as well as introduce some mistakes of her own. And so it goes, year after year, century after century. The only time mistakes are removed is when a copyist realizes that a predecessor had copied something incorrectly and then tries to correct the mistake. The problem is that there is no way to know whether the copyist corrects the mistake correctly or not. He may also correct it incorrectly, that is, change it to something that is different from both the copy he is copying and from the original that was first copied. The possibilities are endless.

  We do not need to speculate that Christian scribes altered the texts they copied. You can take any book of early Christianity and compare the surviving copies, whether it is a book from the New Testament, say, one of the Gospels or Paul’s letters, or a book from outside the New Testament, say, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas or the Epistle of Barnabas. The copies will all differ, often in lots of minor insignificant ways and sometimes in big ways.

  In the vast majority of the cases, the changes that copyists made were simply an accident: the slip of a pen, the misspelling of a word, the accidental omission of a word or a line. Sometimes, though, scribes changed their texts because they wanted to do so, either because they thought their scribal predecessors made a mistake that needed to be corrected or because they wanted to add something to the text (or take away something or change something). As I’ve indicated, this kind of falsification is close to forgery; it is one author passing off his own words as the words of a respected authority.

  I have talked about these kinds of changes in a couple of my earlier books and don’t want to belabor the point here. Instead, I simply give a few examples of the kind of thing I mean from the pages of the New Testament. In Chapter 5 I talked about the famous story found in later manuscripts of the Gospel of John about the woman who was caught in the act of adultery and brought to Jesus for judgment. This is the account in which Jesus delivers one of his most famous sayings: “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” The story, however, is not found in the oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Moreover, the writing style (in the Greek) is significantly different from the writing style of the rest of the Gospel. In addition, the story breaks the flow of the narrative of John 7–8, where it is found. In other words, if you take the story out of John, the context makes much better sense, as the story immediately before the account flows better directly into the story immediately after it. For these and numerous other reasons there is virtually no debate among New Testament scholars that this story, as wonderful, powerful, and influential as it is, was not originally part of the New Testament. It was added by a scribe.

  In this instance we are dealing with both a falsification of the text (making it say something different from what it originally said) and a fabrication (since it is a story that has been made up). There are many other instances of this kind of thing in the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. Another famous example occurs at the end of the Gospel of Mark. It is sometimes said by people who have not read the concluding chapter of Mark’s Gospel closely enough that it “lacks a resurrection narrative.” Strictly speaking, that is not true. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus is certainly raised from the dead. The women go to the tomb three days after he was buried in order to give his body a proper burial, but the body is not there. Instead, there is a man in the tomb who informs them that Jesus has been raised from the dead. Mark, therefore, believes that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, and he tells his readers as much. But what is most astonishing is what happens next.

  The man at the tomb instructs the women to go to the disciples and tell them that Jesus will go before them to Galilee and that they are to meet him there. But instead of telling the disciples, “the women fled from the tomb…and they did not say anything to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8). And that’s where the Gospel ends. There is definitely a resurrection of Jesus here. But the disciples never learn of it, and there is no account of Jesus’s meeting with any of them.

  This ending is brilliant. It brings readers up short and makes them say, “What??? How could the women not tell anyone? How could no one learn of Jesus’s resurrection? How could Jesus not appear to anyone afterwards? That’s it? That’s the end? How could that be the end?”

  Scribes felt the same way. And, different scribes added different endings to the Gospel. The ending that became the most popular throughout the Middle Ages was found in the manuscripts used by the translators of the King James Version in 1611, so that it became widely familiar to English Bible readers. In an additional twelve verses the women (or at least Mary Magdalene) do go tell the disciples, who do then see Jesus and become convinced he has been raised. It is in these verses that we find the famous words of Jesus that those who believe in him will be able to speak in foreign tongues, pick up serpents, and drink poison without suffering any harm.

  But Jesus never said these words, and Mark never claimed he did. They were added to Mark by a later scribe and then recopied over the years.18 This is a fabricated story that has been put into the Bible by a copyist who falsified the text.

  There are hundreds of significant changes in the manuscripts of the New Testament, but let me here just mention one other. In the previous examples one could argue that the falsifications were not exactly the same as forgeries, since both John from the first example and Mark from the second were written anonymously. Technically speaking, the scribes who changed the texts were not saying their words came from the pen of a known authority figure. I would dispute that claim, I think, because by the time scribes made these changes, it was widely thought that the Fourth Gospel was in fact by John and the Second by Mark. But there is no ambigui
ty about my final example, since it involves one of the undisputed letters of Paul.

  One of the most hurtful passages for the cause of women who want to be active in the Christian church occurs in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. Here Paul is recorded as saying:

  Let the women in the churches keep silent. For it is not permitted for them to speak; instead let them be submissive, just as the law itself says. If they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

  Women are to be silent and submissive to their husbands. They are not to speak at all in church. This obviously makes it impossible for a woman to utter a prophecy in church, pray publicly and openly in church, or teach in church. Women are not allowed even to ask a question in church.

  These verses are very much like what one reads in one of the Pauline letters that is not authentic, 1 Timothy, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, also indicates that women are to be subject to men and not to exercise any authority over them (2:11–15). But just as 1 Timothy is forged, so too has this passage in 1 Corinthians been falsified. These verses in chapter 14 were not written by Paul. Someone added them to the passage later, after the letter had been placed in circulation.

  Scholars have adduced many reasons for this view. For one thing, the verses seem to intrude in the passage in which they are found. Immediately before these verses Paul is talking about prophecy in the church; immediately afterwards he is talking about prophecy. But this passage on women interrupts the flow of the argument. Take them out, and it flows much better.