Forged

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The account was first published in German, in Leipzig, in 1849. English editions, all claiming to be authentic, were published in 1907, 1919, and 1975. There were also translations into French and Swedish.

  The Latin letter was allegedly discovered on a parchment scroll in an old Greek monastery in Alexandria by a missionary who thought that its message was dangerous and so tried to destroy it. It was saved, however, by a learned Frenchman, who translated the account into German. The narrative was then brought to Germany by the Freemasons, understood to be modern-day descendants of the Essenes.

  According to the account, Jesus himself was an Essene. When he was crucified, according to this “eyewitness,” he did not expire. He was taken from the cross and restored to life by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, fellow Essenes, who knew the secret arts of healing preserved by the sect. When the women visiting the tomb thought they saw angels, these were Essene monks wearing their white robes. The women misunderstood that Jesus had been raised, when in fact he had never died. He did die, however, six months later, from the wounds he had sustained.

  It has not been difficult for scholars to expose this Gospel as another fraud. The “eyewitness,” allegedly an Essene, has no understanding of what the Essenes were really like. Today we know a good deal about this Jewish group, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were unavailable to the forger, since they were discovered nearly a century after he produced his account. Nothing in the story corresponds to the historical realities of the group. For one thing, there is no way an Essene in Jerusalem would write his account in Latin, of all things.

  There are other considerable problems. The account indicates that it was written seven years after the crucifixion, yet it explicitly mentions, by name, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which were not written until forty to sixty years after Jesus’s death. Moreover, these books were not known as a group of writings (“the four Gospels”) until the end of the second century. Finally the exclusion of everything supernatural in the account is a thoroughly modern, post-Enlightenment concern, not an ancient one.

  And, in fact, a modern scholar has shown where this concern, and indeed the entire story, came from. In 1936, a famous German scholar of the New Testament, Martin Dibelius, demonstrated that The Crucifixion of Jesus was virtually lifted, wholesale, from a now rather obscure work of historical fiction written by the German rationalist K. H. Venturini, The Natural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth (two volumes, 1800–1802). Here too Jesus was an Essene whose life had nothing supernatural about it and who did not actually die on the cross, but was revived by Joseph of Arimathea. The author of The Crucifixion of Jesus simply took Venturini’s two-volume work, condensed it into a readable booklet, and tried to pass it off as a historical account, when in fact it was a modern fabrication.

  THE DEATH SENTENCE OF JESUS CHRIST

  One of the striking and, to many people, surprising facts about the first century is that we don’t have any Roman records, of any kind, that attest to the existence of Jesus. We have no birth certificate, no references to his words or deeds, no accounts of his trial, no descriptions of his death—no reference to him whatsoever in any way, shape, or form. Jesus’s name is not even mentioned in any Roman source of the first century.4 This does not mean, as is now being claimed with alarming regularity, that Jesus never existed. He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees, based on clear and certain evidence. But as with the vast majority of all persons who lived and died in the first century, he does not appear in the records of the Roman people.

  That is why the alleged discovery of an official copy of Pilate’s Death Sentence made such an enormous impact in Europe and the United States when it was announced in the mid-nineteenth century.5 The discovery was first mentioned in the French paper Le Droit in the spring of 1839. It was soon exposed as a fraud, but it resurfaced again in Germany ten years later and repeatedly elsewhere, including the United States, for many decades afterward.

  The Death Sentence was allegedly found on a copper plate discovered in the southern Italian city of Aquila, near Naples, all the way back in 1280. A group of workers was said to have been excavating for Roman antiquities, when they uncovered an ancient marble vase. Inside the vase was a copper plate inscribed in Hebrew. When the text was translated, it was found to contain an official copy of Jesus’s death warrant issued by Pontius Pilate. On the reverse side were directions for the warrant to be sent to all the tribes of Israel.

  The plate allegedly came to be lost, but it was rediscovered during the French occupation of the Kingdom of Naples in 1806–15. When it was published a couple of decades later, it was touted as “the most impressive legal document in existence.” In it, “Pontius Pilate, the acting governor of lower Galilee” states that “Jesus of Nazareth shall suffer death on the cross.” This is said to have happened in the seventeenth year of the reign of the emperor Tiberius (31 CE), on March 27, “in the most holy city of Jerusalem.”

  The reason for the death sentence was that Jesus had committed six crimes. He was a seducer; he was seditious; he was an enemy of the law; he falsely called himself the Son of God; he called himself the king of Israel; and he entered the Temple followed by a multitude carrying palm branches. The death warrant is signed by four witnesses: Daniel Robani, Joannus Robani, Raphael Robani, and “Capet, a citizen.”6

  A top-flight scholar such as Edgar Goodspeed had no difficulty exposing the entire document as a hoax. It made no sense for a Roman official to try to justify his conviction of a criminal to the Jewish people or to send the justification to the “tribes of Israel,” which had not in fact existed for many centuries. Pilate, a Roman official, would not have written in Hebrew, a language he didn’t know. Pilate was not the governor of lower Galilee, but of Judea. As a non-Jew, he never would have referred to Jerusalem as “the most holy city.” March 27 is a modern form of dating unknown to the ancient world. The term “Robani,” used for three of the witnesses, appears to be a mistaken form of “Rabban,” which means “teacher” the author probably made the mistake because in direct address, such as in John 20:16, the word is spelled “Rabbouni.” Joannus is not an ancient name in any of the relevant languages. Capet is a French name. And there is no Hebrew word for “citizen.”

  There are more problems, but these are enough to illustrate the case. Whoever made this account up did a rather poor job of it, even though his hoax had wide success, in both Europe and the United States, for over a century.

  THE LONG-LOST SECOND BOOK OF ACTS

  In 1904, the Anglican priest and physician Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie published a book called the Long-Lost Second Book of Acts, which, among other things, describes the teachings of Mary, the mother of Jesus, about reincarnation.7 It is called the “second book” of Acts, because it begins by describing what happened to the apostle Paul after the events narrated in the New Testament book of Acts.

  After being released from his Roman imprisonment, mentioned in Acts 28, Paul allegedly planned to go to Spain and then to Britain. But he eventually decides, instead, to go to Palestine. When he arrives, he goes to Jerusalem, to the house of the disciple John, where he finds Mary, the mother of Jesus, along with seven of the disciples. An elderly woman now, Mary prays for her death, and the angel Gabriel appears to tell her that her prayer is to be answered.

  From her deathbed, reflecting on her mortality, Mary then divulges the secret doctrine of reincarnation. She herself has gone through seven incarnations; among other things she has been the wife of Noah, the woman who loved Zarathustra, the one who loved Siddhartha, and later still the one who loved Socrates.

  Just before her death a storm comes, and Mary leads the disciples off to the Mount of Olives. Jesus appears from heaven and takes her in his arms. He tells the disciples that he too has had several previous incarnations, as Abel, Noah, Zarathustra, and Socrates.

  This book is so obviously a fiction that it is hard to imagine it
s author expecting anyone to take it seriously. But given the reading public, who knows? Goodspeed, at any rate, thought that it was “simply a modern effort to claim that the Virgin Mary and Jesus himself endorsed the doctrine of reincarnation,” and that “Guthrie doubtless thought it so transparent a device that it would deceive nobody.”8

  OTHER HOAXES AND DECEPTIONS

  There are of course many other modern apocrypha that try to report on what Jesus and those associated with him really did. A book called The Confession of Pontius Pilate tells the story of Pilate going into exile in Vienna, where he feels deep remorse for what he did to Jesus and eventually commits suicide. Among other things, this account refers to a story in which Mary Magdalene presents the Roman emperor Tiberius with an Easter egg dyed red.9 In The Gospel of the Holy Twelve Jesus is said to espouse a strictly vegetarian view in opposition to those who kill and eat animals. In this inventive narrative Jesus is said not to have eaten lamb at the Passover and to have fed the multitudes not with five loaves and two fish, but with five melons.10

  One could argue that hoaxes are created not only by obscure figures trying to sensationalize accounts of Jesus (Jesus studied with the Brahmins!) or to authenticate their particular worldviews (Jesus was a vegetarian!), but also by scholars who may have had obscure reasons of their own.

  One of the wildly popular books about Jesus during the 1960s and 1970s was Hugh Schonfield’s The Passover Plot: A New Interpretation of the Life and Death of Jesus.11 Schonfield was a brilliant and widely acknowledged scholar of ancient Judaism, with a complete set of bona fide credentials. But his historical reconstruction of what really happened to Jesus reads more like a Hollywood production than serious scholarship.

  The short story is that Jesus from an early age “knew” that he was the messiah and so manipulated events during his public ministry to make it appear that he was fulfilling prophecy. In particular, he plotted with his disciples to feign his own death for the sins of others. He arranged to be drugged on the cross (when he was given the gall and vinegar, it was medicinal), so that his vital signs would slow down and he would appear dead. He would then be revived and appear to have been raised from the dead. The plot failed, however. Jesus had not counted on a Roman soldier spearing him in the side on the cross. He revived only briefly and was removed from the tomb by prior arrangement with coconspirators (not the disciples). He died of his wounds soon thereafter and was reburied elsewhere. The disciples, however, discovered the empty tomb and mistakenly thought they saw Jesus alive afterwards. They then proclaimed that he had been raised from the dead. And thus started Christianity.

  The Passover Plot is not a forgery, of course. The author of the account, who writes in his own name, is a serious historian and lets his readers know it. And it is not exactly a fabrication, in that he claims that he is basing his account on historical research. Moreover, he presents it as a historical study. But as creative as it is, the major premise of the account is completely made up; there is no historical truth to it.

  As a final example I might mention, again, the case involving one of the twentieth century’s truly eminent scholars of early Christianity, Columbia professor Morton Smith. Smith claimed to have discovered a lost, alternate version of the Gospel of Mark. The account of the discovery appeared in two books Smith published in 1973, one a detective-like narrative for popular audiences and the other an erudite, hard-hitting research monograph for scholars.12 In them Smith stated that in 1958, while visiting a monastery near Jerusalem, he discovered a handwritten copy of a letter, in Greek, by a second-century church father, Clement of Alexandria, in which he claimed that the author of Mark had published a second edition of his Gospel. This “Secret Gospel,” as it came to be known, included a couple of stories not found in Mark, stories that sound mysterious and strange, about Jesus and his relationship with a young man he had raised from the dead.

  Smith argued that this relationship was homosexual and that it provided evidence that Jesus had engaged in sexual activities with the naked men that he baptized during his ministry. Needless to say, Smith’s books caused quite a stir. His scholarly book provided serious evidence that this really was a letter from Clement of Alexandria and that Clement really did know of such a Gospel. But since Smith’s death in 1991, a number of scholars have come forward to argue that the letter is not authentic, that it was forged by none other than Smith himself. Two books have been published on the matter in recent years, both coming to the same conclusion, but on different grounds.13 Other scholars, including those who knew Smith well, do not think so, and the debate goes on.14

  Christian Forgeries, Lies, and Deceptions

  THIS ISSUE OF MODERN hoaxes brings me back to a question I have repeatedly asked in my study of forgeries: “Who would do such a thing?” I hope by now you will agree with my earlier answer: “Lots of people.” And for lots of reasons. And not just modern people. We have instances of Christian forgeries not only today, but also in the Middle Ages, in late antiquity, and in the time of the New Testament. From the first century to the twenty-first century, people who have called themselves Christian have seen fit to fabricate, falsify, and forge documents, in most instances in order to authorize views they wanted others to accept.

  My particular interest in this book, of course, is with the forgeries of the early Christian church. No one doubts that there were lots of them. Today we have only a fraction of the ones that were produced in antiquity, as the vast majority of them have been lost or destroyed. But what we have is more than enough to give us a sense of how prominent the practice of forgery was. We have numerous Gospels, letters, treatises, and apocalypses that claim to be written by people who did not write them. The authors who called themselves Peter, Paul, John, James, Philip, Thomas, or—pick your name!—knew full well they were not these people. They lied about it in order to deceive their readers into thinking they were authority figures.

  Some of these writings made it into the Bible. There are New Testament letters claiming to be written by Peter and Paul, for example, and James and Jude. But these books were written by other, unknown authors living after the apostles themselves had died. When the real authors of these books claimed to be apostles, they were consciously involved in deception. This practice was widely talked about in the ancient world and was almost always condemned as lying, illegitimate, and just plain wrong. But authors did it anyway.

  I’m not saying that the authors who engaged in this activity were necessarily violating the dictates of their own conscience. We have no way of knowing what they really thought about themselves or about what they were doing. All we know is that when ancient people talked about the practice, they did not say positive things about it. Books that were forged were called false and illegitimate.

  But one can imagine that the authors themselves may not have seen it this way. Whenever we have a record of those being caught in the act, they try to justify what they did. The second-century author who fabricated the story of Paul and Thecla, mentioned earlier, claimed he did it out of “love for Paul.” The fifth-century forger Salvian of Marseille claimed he thought no one would think he meant it when he called himself Timothy and that he didn’t mean any harm by it. And after all, no one would take seriously a book written by Salvian, whereas a book by Timothy might be widely read (see Chapter 1).

  It is possible that many of the authors whose works we have considered, both within and outside of the New Testament, felt completely justified in what they were doing. If so, they were accepting the ancient view, held by many people still today, that lying is the right thing to do in some instances (as mentioned in Chapter 1). In the ancient world, this view was based on the idea that there could be such a thing as a “noble lie,” a lie that serves a noble cause. If a doctor needs to lie to a patient in order to get her to take the medicine she needs, then that can be a good form of deception. If a commander-in-chief needs to lie to his troops that reinforcements are about to arrive in order to inspire them to fight more courag
eously, then that can be a good thing. Some lies are noble.

  Other Christian authors, most notably Augustine, took precisely the opposite line, arguing that lying in all its forms was bad. Very bad. Very, very bad. It was not to be engaged in, no matter what. For Augustine, even if a lie could guarantee that your young daughter would not spend eternity in the fires of hell, but would enjoy the eternal bliss of heaven, that was not enough to justify telling the lie. You should never lie, period.

  Most early Christians probably disagreed with Augustine, which is why he had to argue his point so strenuously. And most people today probably disagree as well. Most of us see lying as a complicated matter. Ethicists, philosophers, and religious scholars all disagree, even today, on when lying is appropriate and when it is not.15 At the end of the day, this is a question that each and every one of us needs to decide for ourselves, based on our own circumstances and the specific situations we find ourselves in. Maybe sometimes it is okay to lie.

  Maybe it is okay for parents to lie to their children about their own religious beliefs, to tell them that God exists even though they don’t actually think so. Maybe it is okay for a spouse to lie to her partner about her extramarital affair, if it will prevent him from going through great turmoil and pain. Maybe it is okay to lie to one’s parent about the prognosis after surgery, if it will keep the beloved parent from worrying about dying before their time. Maybe it is okay for church leaders to lie to their congregations about their personal beliefs or their less than perfect past, if they have to be seen as respected and stalwart leaders of the community. Maybe it is okay for elected officials to lie about budgets or deficits, shortfalls or windfalls, possible outcomes of policies, foreign intelligence, or the known outcomes of war—if the ends are sufficiently important to require lies instead of the truth.