Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them)

by Bart D. Ehrman

  There are other key points on which Colossians and Ephesians vary from the historical Paul, including differences in vocabulary and differences in how certain terms common to Paul get used in these letters. But my intent is to give at least a sense of why most critical scholars doubt that Paul wrote either of these books. Like 2 Thessalonians, they appear to have been written after Paul’s death—maybe a decade or two later, by authors in Paul’s churches who wanted to address the Christian community and the problems that had arisen in it since the Paul’s death. They did so by claiming to be the apostle himself to fool their readers.

  The Pastoral Epistles

  Regarding the Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, there is even less scholarly debate than in the cases of Colossians and Ephesians. Among critical scholars teaching in North America, the United Kingdom, and western Europe—the leading areas of biblical research—the consensus of opinion for many years has been that Paul did not write these books.

  The books are called the Pastoral Epistles because in them “Paul” gives advice to Timothy and Titus, allegedly pastors in Ephesus and on the Island of Crete, about how they should conduct their pastoral duties in their churches. The books are full of pastoral advice on such topics as how these followers of Paul should run a tight ship, get false teachers under control, and choose appropriate church leaders.

  Could Paul have written these letters? Of course it is theoretically possible that he did, but the arguments against it seem overwhelmingly convincing to most scholars.

  It is generally agreed that the three letters all come from the same person. When you read 1 Timothy and Titus, that will be fairly clear: they deal with many of the same themes, often using the same or similar language. The book of 2 Timothy is different in many ways, but if you compare the opening lines with the opening of 1 Timothy, it, too, looks almost identical.

  That this author was not Paul is clear to some scholars on the basis of the letters’ vocabulary and writing style. There are 848 different Greek words used in these letters, of which 306 do not occur anywhere else in the letters allegedly written by Paul in the New Testament (even including 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians). This means that over a third of the words are not Pauline. Something like two thirds of these non-Pauline words are words used by Christian writers of the second century. That is to say, the vocabulary of these letters appears to be more developed, more characteristic of Christianity as it developed in later times.

  Some of the significant words that this author uses are the same as Paul’s, but he uses them in very different ways. Take the word “faith.” For Paul, faith meant having a trusting acceptance of Christ’s death in order to be put into a right standing with God. It is a relational term, meaning something like “trust.” In the Pastoral Epistles the word means something else: the set of beliefs and ideas that make up the Christian religion (Titus 1:13). It is not a relational term but a term that specifies a set of Christian teachings, the content of what has to be believed—which is how the term comes to be used in later Christian contexts. Thus, this is an example of how the Pastoral Epistles appear to stem from a later, non-Pauline setting.

  Arguments from vocabulary are notoriously tricky when one is trying to establish whether a particular author wrote a particular book: people use different vocabularies in different circumstances. But in this case the differences do seem pretty stark. An even more compelling argument, though, is the fact that the entire situation of the church presupposed in the Pastoral Epistles seems to differ from what we know about the church in Paul’s own day.

  We have a good idea of what Paul’s churches were like from such letters as 1 and 2 Corinthians, where he discusses the inner workings of his congregations, how they were organized and structured, and how they operated. By the time we get to the Pastoral Epistles, things have changed drastically.

  Paul’s churches were not hierarchically structured. There was no one leader or group of leaders in charge. They were communities of believers that were run according to the Spirit of God working through each member.

  It is important to bear in mind that Paul was thoroughly apocalyptic in his views. He believed that Jesus’ resurrection indicated that the end of the age was near. It would arrive any day, with the reappearance of Jesus from heaven; the dead would be raised and the living believers would be transformed into immortal bodies, and so live forever in the future kingdom.

  What was to happen in the meantime, while believers awaited the coming of the Lord? They were to meet together in communities for worship, edification, education, and mutual support. How were these communities to be organized? Paul thought they were organized by God himself, through the Holy Spirit; this is spelled out in 1 Corinthians 12–14. When people were baptized into the Christian church, they not only “died with Christ” but also were given an endowment of the Holy Spirit, God’s presence here on earth before the end came. Everyone at that point received some kind of “spiritual gift” that they could use to help out others in the community. Some people were given the gift of knowledge, others of teaching, others of giving, others of speaking prophecies from God, others of giving revelations in foreign or angelic languages that were not generally understood (“speaking in tongues”), others of interpreting these revelations (the “interpretation of tongues”). These gifts were meant for the common good, so that the community of believers could function peacefully and harmoniously in these last days before the end.

  Quite often, though, things did not go as planned, for example, in the church of Corinth. It was, truth be told, a real mess. Different spiritual “leaders” claimed to be more spiritually endowed than others and had their own sets of followers, leading to divisions in the church. These divisions had gotten completely out of hand: some members of the church were taking others to court and suing them. There was rampant immorality: some of the men in the church were visiting prostitutes and bragging about it in church; one man was cohabiting with his stepmother. The church services were pure chaos, as the “more spiritual” among the Corinthians had decided that the true sign of spirituality was the ability to speak in tongues and so were competing with one another during worship to see who could do so more loudly and more often than others. At the weekly communion meal—a real meal, not a matter of eating a wafer and taking a sip of wine—some members of the church were coming early and gorging themselves and getting drunk, and others had to come late (possibly the lower classes and slaves, who presumably had to work longer hours) and had nothing to eat or drink. Some members of the congregation were so convinced of their spiritual superiority that they claimed they had already been raised up with Christ and were ruling with him in the heavenly places (similar to the claim made much later by the author of Ephesians).

  Paul deals with the problems in the church by addressing the church at large and pleading with all the members to change their ways. Why doesn’t he address the bishop of the church, or the head pastor? Why doesn’t he write a letter to the leader of the church to tell him to get his troops in line? Because there was no ultimate leader of the church. There were no bishops or head pastors. In Paul’s churches, in this brief time between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all believers, the community was run by the Spirit of God working through each member.25

  What happens when there is no official hierarchy, no appointed leaders, no one to take charge? What typically happens is what happened in Corinth. A good deal of chaos. How can such chaos be brought under control? Someone needs to take charge. Over time, that’s eventually what happened in Paul’s churches. After he himself had passed off the scene, his churches assumed the kind of shape that you would assume, where there was someone at the top, someone who gave the orders, someone who had leaders under him who were appointed to keep everyone pulling together, to make sure that only the correct teachings were being given, to discipline those who were not behaving properly.

  You don’t find this kind of church structure in Paul’s day. Yo
u do find it in the Pastoral Epistles. These are letters written to the head pastors of the churches in two of Paul’s communities. These epistles give instructions for bringing false teachers into line; directions for appointing bishops who were evidently in charge of the spiritual oversight of the church, and deacons who were in charge of almsgiving and taking care of the physical needs of the community; and admonitions about how people in different social circumstances (husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and slaves) were to conduct themselves, so that the church could survive for the long haul.

  For Paul, on the other hand, there was not going to be a long haul. He thought the end was coming very soon. But the end didn’t come, and his churches had to get organized to survive. They did get organized, and the Pastoral Epistles were written in the context of this new situation, probably two or more decades after Paul had passed off the scene. In the new situation, an author wrote the three letters, claiming to be Paul so as to have Paul’s authority behind his message. But his message was not Paul’s. Paul lived in a different day and age.

  WHO WROTE THE OTHER BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT?

  Much of what has already been said can also be said of the remaining books of the New Testament. Some of them are anonymous, specifically the letter to the Hebrews and the books called 1, 2, and 3 John. As many authors already in the early church realized, there is no reason to think that Paul wrote Hebrews, but it was eventually included in the canon by church fathers who argued that it was Paul’s. In fact, the writing style is completely different from Paul’s; the leading themes of the letter are absent from Paul’s other letters, and the mode of argumentation is not at all like his. And why should one think Paul wrote it? Unlike his own writings, this book is anonymous.

  The so-called epistles of John also don’t claim to have been written by John; epistles 2 and 3 are by someone who calls himself “the elder,” and the author of 1 John doesn’t say anything about himself. The author could be almost any leader of the church near the end of the first century.

  Other books are homonymous. The author of James makes no claim to be any James in particular, let alone the James who is known from other traditions to have been Jesus’ brother. The book of Jude claims to be written by a Jude who is the “brother of James,” so this may be interpreted as a claim to be Jesus’ brother, since according to Mark’s Gospel two of his brothers were named James and Jude. But it is odd that if he wanted to be thought of as Jesus’ own brother, he didn’t come out and say so in order to invest his book with even more authority. Both Jude and James were common names in Jewish antiquity and in the Christian church. Later Christians who were establishing the canon claimed that these two were Jesus’ relatives, but they themselves never say so.

  It is also hard to believe that these letters could have been written by two lower-class Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee (whose more famous brother is not known to have been able to write, let alone compose a complicated treatise in Greek). The argument here is the same one set forth earlier for the Gospel of John: it is in theory possible that Jesus’ brothers—raised in the backwoods of rural Galilee, working with their hands for a living, never having time or money for an education—decided later in life to acquire a Greek education and to take courses in literary composition, so that they could write these heavily rhetorical and relatively sophisticated books. But it seems somewhat unlikely.

  The same thinking is applicable to the letters of 1 and 2 Peter. But these books, like the Deutero-Pauline epistles (2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians) and the Pastoral Epistles, actually claim to be written by someone who did not write them. They are pseudonymous in the strong sense of the term: they appear to be forgeries.

  What is certain is that whoever wrote 2 Peter did not also write 1 Peter: the writing styles are vastly different. Already in the early church there were Christian scholars who argued that Peter did not write 2 Peter. Today there is even less debate about the matter than there is about the Pastorals. The book called 2 Peter was written long after Peter’s death, by someone who was disturbed that some people were denying that the end was coming soon (one can understand why there might be doubters as the years rolled by); this author wanted to disabuse these people of their false notions, and did so by claiming to be none other than Simon Peter, Jesus’ right-hand man.

  The book called 1 Peter is more hotly debated among scholars than 2 Peter. But again, how likely is it that a simple fisherman from rural Galilee suddenly developed skills in Greek literary composition? It is sometimes argued that Peter had someone else write the letter for him, for example, Silvanus, who is named in the letter (5:12). But the letter itself doesn’t say that. And if someone else wrote the letter, wouldn’t he, rather than Peter, be the real author? The sophisticated use of the Old Testament in this book suggests that whoever wrote it was highly educated and very well trained, unlike Simon Peter. And it is worth pointing out that we have an extraordinary number of books from early Christianity that claim to be written by Peter that were not written by him—for example, a Gospel of Peter, a letter of Peter to James, several “Acts” of Peter, and three different apocalypses of Peter. Forging books in Peter’s name was a virtual cottage industry.

  CONCLUSION: WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?

  I return now to my original question: Who wrote the Bible? Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, only eight almost certainly were written by the authors to whom they are traditionally ascribed: the seven undisputed letters of Paul and the Revelation of John, which could be labeled homonymous, since it does not claim to be written by any particular John; this was recognized even by some writers of the early church.

  My views about the authors of the New Testament are not radical within scholarship. To be sure, there are debates among scholars about this book or that. Some very fine scholars think that Paul wrote 2 Thessalonians, or that Jesus’ brother James wrote James, or that Peter wrote 1 Peter. But the majority of critical scholars has long doubted these ascriptions, and there is scarcely any debate about some of the books of the New Testament, such as 1 Timothy and 2 Peter. These books were not written by their putative authors.

  Doubts about the authorship of writings that became the canon were raised in the early church, but in the modern period, starting in the nineteenth century, scholars have pressed the arguments home with compelling reasoning. Even now many scholars are loath to call the forged documents of the New Testament forgeries—this is, after all, the Bible we’re talking about. But the reality is that by any definition of the term, that’s what they are. A large number of books in the early church were written by authors who falsely claimed to be apostles in order to deceive their readers into accepting their books and the views they represented

  This view that the New Testament contains books written under false names is taught at virtually all the major institutions of higher learning except strongly evangelical schools throughout the Western world. It is the view taught in all the major textbooks on the New Testament used in these institutions. It is the view taught in seminaries and divinity schools. It is what pastors learn when they are preparing for ministry.

  And why isn’t this more widely known? Why is it that the person in the pew—not to mention the person in the street—knows nothing about this? Your guess is as good as mine.

  FIVE

  Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? Finding the Historical Jesus

  A couple of years ago I started receiving some very peculiar e-mail messages from Sweden. I’ve never been to Sweden, and these were from people I had never met elsewhere. They all wanted to know if it was true that I thought Jesus never existed. I thought this was an odd question. Several years ago I had written a book about the historical Jesus, indicating what ancient sources give us information about his life and outlining what I thought we could say about the things he said and did. Not only did I think there was a historical Jesus, I also thought we could make historically credible statements about him. Why, then, was I being asked if it
was true that I thought he never existed?

  These e-mails were not aggressive attempts to convince me that he had existed. Just the opposite: these people did not believe he had existed and had heard that I, as a New Testament scholar, lent my support to their view. This view may seem strange to an American audience, where the majority of people think not only that Jesus existed but that he was, and is, the Son of God. But in parts of Scandinavia the majority of people thinks that Jesus is a completely fabricated figure, that he never actually existed but was invented by a group of people intent on starting a new religion.

  After puzzling for some weeks over why anyone would put me in this camp, I came to realize what the source of the confusion was: a misinterpretation of an article that had been written about me in the Washington Post in March 2006.

  The Post had decided to do a profile on me, my work, and my turn to agnosticism in light of my recently published book, Misquoting Jesus. The newspaper had sent a sharp and clear-minded reporter, Neely Tucker, down to Chapel Hill to tail me for a few days. We hung out in my office and talked, he came to see my study at home, we had some meals together, and he came to one of my undergraduate classes. On the basis of our acquaintance he wrote and published the profile, entitling it “The Book of Bart.” I read the piece when it came out, found it mildly amusing, and then more or less forgot about it.

  But there was a paragraph in Neely’s article that could easily be misunderstood, and that’s what had led to problems in Sweden. Neely had come to hear me lecture to my large undergraduate class on the New Testament on the day that I happened to be talking about the Gospel of John. I pointed out that day in class—as I have several times in earlier chapters—that John’s is the only Gospel in which Jesus is explicitly identified as divine. To be sure, he is called the Son of God in all the Gospels. But to ancient Jews, being the “son of God” did not make a person God; it made the person a human being in a close relationship with God, one through whom God does his will on earth. The Gospel of John goes beyond this. In John, Jesus is the preexistent Word of God through whom the universe was created, who has become human (1:1–14); he is equal with God (10:30); he can claim God’s own name for himself (8:58); he is himself God (1:1; 20:28). John’s Gospel is the only one with this exalted a view of Christ.