Name: Forged
ISBN: 9780062012623

Forged

author, Bart Ehrman, reveals another hidden scandal of the Bible. For centuries, scholars have known that not all of the books in the New Testament are authentic while the general public has been blissfully unaware. The books of the New Testament are widely assumed to be written accounts of Jesus's life by those who knew him best. However, if the Gospels and letters were not written by memebers of Jesus's inner circle--but by later writers with differing agendas in rival communitites--then the authority of the Bible collapses. Based on new, original research, Ehrman takes the reader on a journey to the ancient world and the forgery battles that raged throughout the Roman Empire. The popular myth is that "writing in the name of another" was a common, accepted practice in antiquity. Not so argues Ehrman. Forgery was as scandalous then as it is now. And yet, at a time when all documents and letters where copied by hand and circulated freely with little or no authorial control, identifying who actually penned a piece of writing-be it political, historical, or religious-was fraught with uncertainty. FORGED exposes the forged letters written in the name of Jesus's disciples for the expressed purpose of gaining acceptance in the early church...which is exactly what happened and why we have the Bible we read today"

What Hacker News says

DonGateleyJan 2014

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe

Be Here Now - Ram Das

Whole Earth Catalog - Stewart Brand

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Savage Continent - Keith Lowe

Forged - Bart D. Ehrman

Young Stalin - Simon Sebag Montefiore

Court of the Red Czar - Simon Sebag Montefiore

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mustacheemperorMay 2023

This is correct - I don’t have as much knowledge about Jewish law and its usual interpretation circa 0AD, but Matthew was one of the first gospels to have its traditional authorship questioned because it is written in masterfully crafted classical Greek - not anything accessible to a rural Aramaic speaker. Since the birth of Biblical exegesis scholarship in the 19th century it has been widely accepted that none of the gospels were authored by the traditionally associated apostles, or any apostles, or even any first-hand witnesses to Jesus. The book I immediately recall about this is Forged by Bart Ehrman, but gospel authorship is one of the most well tread and thoroughly analyzed areas of biblical scholarship and the fact that the apostles didn’t write them is one of the points closest to consensus in the field.

I am intrigued to learn more about how Roman currency was managed in Judea at that time. As far as I know Jewish law did forbid carrying coinage with images of the emperor, but obviously many Jewish pilgrims to the temple had to exchange some kind of currency for shekels.

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