Were Forgeries Acceptable In Ancient Times?

[Neon Genesis]

I've been reading the book Who Wrote the New Testament? by Burton Mack and he argues that the the Pastoral epistles weren't forged with ill intentions and it was perfectly acceptable and commonly accepted knowledge for students of a teacher in ancient times to write books in the name of the teacher as a dedication to them even though they aren't the teacher themselves. He uses the followers of Pythagoras writing forgeries in his name in honor of him as an example. On the other hand, Bart D Ehrman has argued in Jesus Interrupted that there were people in the ancient world did know it was forgery and didn't accept it. He uses the example of a famous Roman physician named Galen who found a forged copy of one of his works, so he wrote a book on how to tell forgeries of his works apart from the authentic one. So did everyone know that people made forgeries all the time in the ancient world and everyone was accepting of it or did people hate forgeries just like they do in modern times? Did he Pastoral epistles author have shady motives when writing them or did they write them to honor the real Paul?

[JadedAtheist]

I'll post more when I get home but it's probably a combination of both. Assuming their actions were "benevolent" they chose Paul's name because they assumed he would of believed what they believed and thus as his "students" didn't want to take credit from him.

 

Personally though it seems to me the author/s went to a lot of effort to convince their audience it was really Paul. Such effort seems to be more deceptive than honorary but that could be from my 21st century perspective. From what I was taught in bible college though, their seems to be a unified front that such actions even in those times would have been deceptive and they used Galen as an example.

[oddbird1963]

Or maybe ppl knew it was a shady, but tolerated practice.

 

For instance, I have always heard that in Latin America it is quite normal for government officials at various levels to accept bribes to get things done for citizens who need favors from the government. I'm not saying this is true. I'm saying this is what I have heard is the practice in Latin American countries.

 

I think in such cases it is so pervasive that it's just accepted that this is the way to do business. It's normal, but not necessarily something to to be proud of.

 

I wonder to whom the practice of using "forgeries" was "acceptable." Was it acceptable among the scholars and church leaders, but not really known about among the everyday church parishioner who worked hard all week or month and assembled regularly with the church? Who even knew about the practice to consider it "acceptable?"

[stryper]

While I am not sure about forgeries, it was "common" practice when people started writing down the oral traditions to change the stories as they were writing them. The most obvious were the Norse sagas. Many of them were hijacked by Jesus. Norse scholars believe the character of Baldur was not orginally a Jesus expy but the earliest written records were done by monks who slipped in many Jesus analygoies.

 

So like oddbird said, It was probably pretty common though "known" not all the books were writtne by the same person.

 

A alternative history piece in the 1632 series goes into this. Basically, a 20th century town in WV get transported to 1632 Germany in the middle of the 30 years war. A journalist worked at the town's paper becomes quite famous. He is often ammused at how many times he comes across newspapers with a article written by him that weren't. So, it would seem it was more of a way for someone to borrow the legitimacy of someone else.

 

Just look at Plato's Republic. Plato put his name on it, but the entire text is just Socrates talking.

 

Its kind of like the modern pratice in movies of getting like Steven Speilberg to produce the movie so they can put his name on it even though he had very little to do with it besides putting up some of the money.

 

After all Coraline was orginally a book by Neil Gaiman. It got made into a stop motion picture by the producers of Nightmare Before Chrisitmas the iconic Tim Burton moive. At some point it became confused that Tim Burton made Coraline when he actually had nothing to do with it. But the association gave the movie credibility.