(CNN) - A frail man sits in chains inside a dank, cold prison cell. He has escaped death before but now realizes that his execution is drawing near.
?I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come,? the man ?the Apostle Paul - says in the Bible's 2 Timothy. ?I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.?
The passage is one of the most dramatic scenes in the New Testament. Paul, the most prolific New Testament author, is saying goodbye from a Roman prison cell before being beheaded. His goodbye veers from loneliness to defiance and, finally, to joy.
There?s one just one problem - Paul didn?t write those words. In fact, virtually half the New Testament was written by impostors taking on the names of apostles like Paul. At least according to Bart D. Ehrman, a renowned biblical scholar, who makes the charges in his new book ?Forged.?
?There were a lot of people in the ancient world who thought that lying could serve a greater good,? says Ehrman, an expert on ancient biblical manuscripts.In ?Forged,? Ehrman claims that:
* At least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries.
* The New Testament books attributed to Jesus? disciples could not have been written by them because they were illiterate.
* Many of the New Testament?s forgeries were manufactured by early Christian leaders trying to settle theological feuds.
Were Jesus? disciples ?illiterate peasants?'
Ehrman?s book, like many of his previous ones, is already generating backlash. Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar, has written a lengthy online critique of ?Forged.?
Witherington calls Ehrman?s book ?Gullible Travels, for it reveals over and over again the willingness of people to believe even outrageous things.?
All of the New Testament books, with the exception of 2 Peter, can be traced back to a very small group of literate Christians, some of whom were eyewitnesses to the lives of Jesus and Paul, Witherington says.
?Forged? also underestimates the considerable role scribes played in transcribing documents during the earliest days of Christianity, Witherington says.
Even if Paul didn?t write the second book of Timothy, he would have dictated it to a scribe for posterity, he says.
?When you have a trusted colleague or co-worker who knows the mind of Paul, there was no problem in antiquity with that trusted co-worker hearing Paul?s last testimony in prison,? he says. ?This is not forgery. This is the last will and testament of someone who is dying.?
Ehrman doesn?t confine his critique to Paul?s letters. He challenges the authenticity of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John. He says that none were written by Jesus' disciplies, citing two reasons.
He says none of the earliest gospels revealed the names of its authors, and that their current names were later added by scribes.
Ehrman also says that two of Jesus? original disciples, John and Peter, could not have written the books attributed to them in the New Testament because they were illiterate.
?According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agrammatoi, a Greek word that literally means ?unlettered,? that is, ?illiterate,? ?? he writes.
Will the real Paul stand up?
Ehrman reserves most of his scrutiny for the writings of Paul, which make up the bulk of the New Testament. He says that only about half of the New Testament letters attributed to Paul ? 7 of 13 - were actually written by him.
Paul's remaining books are forgeries, Ehrman says. His proof: inconsistencies in the language, choice of words and blatant contradiction in doctrine.
For example, Ehrman says the book of Ephesians doesn?t conform to Paul?s distinctive Greek writing style. He says Paul wrote in short, pointed sentences while Ephesians is full of long Greek sentences (the opening sentence of thanksgiving in Ephesians unfurls a sentence that winds through 12 verses, he says).
?There?s nothing wrong with extremely long sentences in Greek; it just isn?t the way Paul wrote. It?s like Mark Twain and William Faulkner; they both wrote correctly, but you would never mistake the one for the other,? Ehrman writes.
The scholar also points to a famous passage in 1 Corinthians in which Paul is recorded as saying that women should be ?silent? in churches and that ?if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home.?
Only three chapters earlier, in the same book, Paul is urging women who pray and prophesy in church to cover their heads with veils, Ehrman says: ?If they were allowed to speak in chapter 11, how could they be told not to speak in chapter 14??
Why people forged
Forgers often did their work because they were trying to settle early church disputes, Ehrman says. The early church was embroiled in conflict - people argued over the treatment of women, leadership and relations between masters and slaves, he says.
?There was competition among different groups of Christians about what to believe and each of these groups wanted to have authority to back up their views,? he says. ?If you were a nobody, you wouldn?t sign your own name to your treatise. You would sign Peter or John.?
So people claiming to be Peter and John - and all sorts of people who claimed to know Jesus - went into publishing overdrive. Ehrman estimates that there were about 100 forgeries created in the name of Jesus? inner-circle during the first four centuries of the church.
Witherington concedes that fabrications and forgeries floated around the earliest Christian communities.
But he doesn?t accept the notion that Peter, for example, could not have been literate because he was a fisherman.
?Fisherman had to do business. Guess what? That involves writing, contracts and signed documents,? he said in an interview.
Witherington says people will gravitate toward Ehrman?s work because the media loves sensationalism.
?We live in a Jesus-haunted culture that?s biblically illiterate,? he says. ?Almost anything can pass for historical information? A book liked ?Forged? can unsettle people who have no third or fourth opinions to draw upon.?
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I'll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one.: LBJ's Ghost
Surely you can dig deeper into your ditch of liars than to pick a professed atheist to represent Jesus! Is it here where I refer back to the thread, "Just How Stupid Are Atheist"?
Bart D. Ehrman (born 1955) is an American New Testament scholar, currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ehrman writes about the early Christians, using the term "proto-orthodox" to describe the Christian traditions that would later be defined as orthodox. He describes 1st- and 2nd-century Christians as not yet having a unified, orthodox tradition. He is the author of a number of books in this area, including Misquoting Jesus (2005), God's Problem (2008), and Jesus, Interrupted (2009).
In his books, he recounts his youthful enthusiasm as a born-again evangelical Christian, sure that God had inspired the very words of the Bible and protected them from all error. His graduate studies, however, eventually convinced him that the Bible makes more sense when one acknowledges its contradictions than when one creates elaborate explanations to reconcile them. He remained a Christian for 15 years but later became an agnostic because of the problem of evil and suffering. (Wikipedia) Dr. Ehrman is now an atheist.
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A nobody telling everybody about Somebody.
however, eventually convinced him that the Bible makes more sense when one acknowledges its contradictions than when one creates elaborate explanations to reconcile them.
I suppose atheist in large red letters renders him irrelevant? I have to agree with him in the quote. The concoctions created to sidestep science like Identity Design make them look foolish.
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I'll believe corporations are persons when Texas executes one.: LBJ's Ghost
I suppose atheist in large red letters renders him irrelevant?
Irrelevant, no.....wrong, yes! Using your vernacular, you don't go cat fishing with an ax and you don't go searching for Godly truths with an atheist!
Acts 20:29?30 (NKJV)
29 For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. 30 Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves.
1 Timothy 4:1?2 (NKJV)
4 Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, 2 speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron,
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A nobody telling everybody about Somebody.
well, without reading any of that .................
I'm assuming "that" includes the Bible. Even the most misinformed atheist know the Bible was authored by God. That doesn't mean you must believe it but....
2 Timothy 3:16 (New International Version)
16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,
Consider yourself "taught, rebuked, and corrected".
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A nobody telling everybody about Somebody.
I wonder how many people start studying religion and then realize how much of a load of crap it is and turn atheists, granted the simple bible stories are absurd enough.
and there was one poll done recently where atheists knew more about various religions then religious people do:
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