Does The New Testament Contain Forgeries?

Are parts of the New Testament pseudonymous; that is, were they written under a false name? In Europe of the 1800s, scholars began to question whether Paul wrote the Pastoral Letters (1Tm, 2Tm, and Ti) because the vocabulary and syntax didn’t sound like Paul. They also began to raise other objections to his authorship, pointing to the Pastorals’ appeal to tradition or their emphasis on church hierarchy. While these secondary arguments are interesting, it is unlikely they would have raised the alarm of pseudepigraphy without the writing style matter.

Using the relatively new discipline of stylometry (the measure of stylistic elements present between writers, genres, or samples), scholars noted the Pastorals seemed “non-Pauline.” Later they made the same charge against 2 Thessalonians and Ephesians. Since then, better stylometric analyses—such as those conducted by Anthony Kenny in 1986—have rejected these earlier conclusions, demonstrating there is no subset of letters stylistically non-Pauline. The way that ancients used secretaries created sufficient variation in writing that renders style analysis unreliable for detecting forgeries. Apparently, ancients also used handwriting to gauge legitimacy. Paul noted, “I, Paul, am writing this greeting with my own hand, which is an authenticating mark in every letter; this is how I write” (2Th 3:17). Chariton said that to denounce a letter as a forgery, Paul would say, “That is not my handwriting” (Callirhoe 5.7.7).

Nonetheless, some scholars suggest a disciple of Paul wrote the Pastoral Letters and a disciple of Peter wrote 2 Peter. These disciples, the theories state, composed the letters as if the apostles themselves had penned them. And if this did indeed happen, they ask, how can a writing based on a falsehood then be argued to contain God’s truth?

Some contend that we are superimposing our modern values upon an acceptable ancient practice when finding fault with the idea that a disciple might have written as an apostle. They argue ancients would not have considered this wrong. Such a disciple, they suggest, wasn’t forging a letter; rather, he was giving credit where credit was due: the thoughts were his master’s.

Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. Arrian published his notes of Epictetus’s discourses. Yet, Arrian carefully explains in his preface that these are his “word for word” notes of Epictetus, and Arrian still lists himself as the author. He does not pretend that Epictetus wrote them. Hippocrates’s son Thessalus published two notebooks of his father under his father’s name, but these weren’t new writings by Thessalus; they were his father’s previously unpublished works. These examples are not the same as suggesting an ancient composed a letter written as if by someone else. That practice occurred often in antiquity.

Ancients, in fact, were very familiar with pseudepigraphy. They were also clear what they thought of it. When ancients discovered a document was written under a false name, they labeled it a lie (pseudos), a counterfeit (kibdelos), or illegitimate (nothos). Those who penned such things were denounced as thieves, not disciples. In antiquity, writing under someone else’s name was to deceive; it was forgery. When the church discovered forgeries, such as 3 Corinthians, the church rejected them. There is no compelling argument that any New Testament documents are forgeries.