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Bart Ehrman’s latest book studies the widespread practice of pseudepigraphy in early Christianity, a phenomenon familiar to scholars but rarely the subject of concentrated investigation. Ehrman is unequivocal in his view of the nature of the phenomenon: pseudepigraphy is deliberate forgery; it means writing a text with the intention to deceive the reader about the real identity of the author. He has little patience with those who claim that writing pretending to be someone else was a respectable literary convention in Antiquity, or that notions of intellectual property are a modern invention. Ehrman builds upon, and underlines his debt to, Wolfgang Speyer’s fundamental work on this topic, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum from 1971, which effectively laid to rest any notion that people in antiquity cared little about authorial authenticity. The fact is that ancient sources offer no basis for such a claim, whereas evidence to the contrary is abundant. The same conclusion has been reached more recently by others who have bothered to read what ancient writers actually have written about the issue, most notably, perhaps, Armin D. Baum, in his Pseudepigraphie und literarische Fälschung im frühen Christentum (2001; see also his highly useful survey providing a collection of source texts and an annotated bibliography, ‘Authorship and Pseudepigraphy in Early Christian Literature’, in S. E. Porter and G. P. Fewster [eds.], Paul and Pseudepigraphy [Pauline Studies, 8; Leiden 2013], 11–63). Reaction to this emerging consensus, however, has been rather slow in certain areas, not least in New Testament scholarship, where assertions that pseudepigraphy was motivated by reverence rather than by an intention to deceive still continue to be made.
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