Plagiarism and Forgery--Some Thoughts about Ehrman's FORGED

A number of advance reviews of Bart Ehrman's new book, Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are not who we Think they Are, have started coming out, including reviews by some bloggers I follow and appreciate. As expected, the responses to the book has been various--from those who see it as littered with uncompelling arguments and tricky rhetorical moves, to those who see it as a slightly sensationalist and overly confident repackaging of old research conclusions for a popular audience, to those who see it as making a useful new contribution to that same research, to those find it a welcome challenge to their faith journey. I'm sure many more find it an unwelcome challenge to their faith journey, but they probably won't read it or review it.

Not being a biblical scholar, I am not qualified to address Ehrman's more historical claims. And having not read the book yet (it's due out later this month), I can't speak to the merits of Ehrman's more philosophical arguments based on those historical claims. But I do think the preliminary discussion of Ehrman's book raises some interesting questions worth discussing on this blog.

For the sake of argument, I want to assume that the broad consensus among (at least the more progressive) biblical scholars is substantially correct: A number of New Testament epistles written as if they were being authored by one of the apostles (notably Peter and Paul) were in fact authored by someone else.  From what I can glean from the advance reviews, what Ehrman does beyond popularizing the scholarly case for this view is to make a case for a more challenging conclusion: This pseudonymous authorship, at the time that it was done, would have amounted to a misleading representation of one's work as someone else's, and would have been perceived as deceptive by readers at the time.

Here's what I take this to mean: the cultural context during which these "pseudepigrapha" were written was such that there was a presumption of accuracy in attributions of authorship, a presumption that was being violated in problematic ways. In other words, the attribution to someone else would not have been perceived at the time as simply a gesture of authorial humility and respect for the one in whose name one was writing. It would have been perceived as something like what we have in mind when we use the term forgery.

To reflect on this claim and its significance, I think it may be helpful to think about forgery in the light of a contrasting offense, one that seems more common today--namely plagiarism. Plagiarism involves passing off someone else's work as one's own, that is, writing as if someone else's ideas and arguments had originated with oneself. As I point out to my students just about every semester, you can plagiarize without deliberately setting out to deceive. If, simply through a kind of reckless disregard for which ideas and word choices originated with others, you write in such a way that it sounds as if the ideas and word choices are yours, you have plagiarized. Because in the absence of giving proper credit, the presumption is that you are sharing your own ideas--a presumption that will, among other things, frame a professor's grading of a student's paper. If you turn in a paper to me and write as if you came up with the ideas and arguments contained therein--because I am presuming that unless you indicate otherwise, this is the case--I will end up crediting you for coming up with those ideas and arguments. If the standard presumption is a false one, then you will be wrongly credited for someone else's work.

And this will be true whether or not you had any deliberate intention to deceive. Such an intent makes the plagiarism worse, of course. In OSU's official documents on the matter, deliberate plagiarism is academic dishonesty, which is a more serious offense than the lesser charge of academic misconduct. Your plagiarism amounts to the latter if you were simply careless about citing sources, if you simply forgot to put things in quotes or introduce borrowed arguments with the appropriate "According to so-and-so."  It's like the difference between murder and manslaughter--both are instances of criminal homicide, but the former involves the intent to kill and the latter involves a reckless disregard for life.

So what does all of this show? First, plagiarism is a function of cultural context. There are expectations in the academy concerning the crediting of sources, and there is a purpose to submitting written work (namely, the purpose of evaluating the intellectual accomplishments of the student) that is thwarted if these expectations are violated. Take away the former and the same document might no longer qualify as plagiarized. Take away the latter, and plagiarism ceases to be as big a deal. If I simply wanted to know something about penguins, and so my aunt wrote me an e-mail telling me all about them, it wouldn't appall me if I discovered that she'd cut and pasted much of the information from the internet without crediting sources. In part, I have no expectation that she will credit her sources when she sends an e-mail of this kind; and in part, it just doesn't matter anyway, since the e-mail's only function is to convey information to me.

Another point to make about plagiarism is this: The actual intentions of the plagiarist don't take it out of the class of things we call plagiarism, even if they do impact the severity of the case. We can, in other words, correctly identify something as plagiarized before we know whether there was any intent to take false credit, or whether the student simply did not know about the academy's expectations or understand their importance. These things are necessary for assessing degrees of culpability, but not for deciding whether a document is plagiarized.

One final point deserves mention as well. That something has been plagiarized does not affect our assessment of its actual merits. If a good idea is plagiarized, it's still a good idea. The problem lies with the fact that the good idea is being credited to someone who doesn't deserve credit. If a sound argument is plagiarized, it remains sound--but its soundness tells us nothing about whether the plagiarist knows how to put together a good argument. If an eloquent turn of phrase is plagiarized, it remains eloquent--but doesn't speak to the plagiarist's eloquence.

With plagiarism thus in place as a comparative foil, let's turn to forgery--which is a kind of inverse (converse?) of plagiarism. To forge a document, at least in the sense Ehrman has in mind, is not to take credit for writing something you didn't write, but to attribute credit for something you did write to someone else. Or, more precisely, it is to write in such a way that it appears as if the author is someone else.

Like plagiarism, forgery seems to be a function of context, including cultural context. If writing as if you were someone else is done in a context where no one supposes that the piece of writing is authored by the person it presents itself as being authored by, then there is no forgery taking place. For example, I write a fair of bit of fiction in my free time, and often enough I write in the first person. The story I'm working on now is written in the first person "by" a fifteen-year-old protagonist. I am not, however, a fifteen-year-old boy. So, am I guilty of forgery? What if I were to publish the story under a pseudonym, and chose as my pseudonym the name of my main character? Given that it's a kind of fantasy story and would be sold as young adult fiction rather than as memoir, would I be guilty of forgery then? Clearly not. But as soon as I write a realistic (if rather taudry and embarassing) first-person tale about a certain atheist biologist and sell it as memoir under the pen name "PZ Myers" (assuming I could get away with it), I would be guilty of forgery.

As such, it makes a great deal of difference whether, in the time at which the biblical epistles were written, there were an established literary convention in which authors would write in the spirit of someone they admired and then attribute what they wrote to that person. Given such a genre--whose existence would seem to require a clear means of distinguishing letters written within that genre from letters written by the person they seemed to be written by--no one writing within that genre and distributing it as a piece in that genre would be guilty of forgery. But even given the existence of such a genre, a piece of this sort would be a kind of forgery if it were represented as an eponymously authored piece. And in the absence of any such genre, but given a cultural expectation that authors represent themselves as themselves when they write letters, any pseudepigraphic letter would qualify as a forgery.

It appears that at least part of what Ehrman is attempting to argue in his new book is that the last of these conditions prevailed in the culture in which the purportedly pseudepigraphic epistles were composed. If this is right, it seems to be an important point to make, because it changes the moral significance of the authorial attributions: they are forgeries.

Unlike the case of plagiarism, its hard to imagine forgeries being unintentional. How exactly do you negligently end up attributing authorship of your work to someone else? Perhaps pseudonymously-authored first-person fiction might unintentionally get mislabeled as memoir, but that's not exactly analogous to unintentional plagiarism. In the former case, any negligence would occur post-production, so to speak, and I'm not sure we'd want to call it a forgery at all. Rather, we'd want to simply call it a work of fiction inadvertently passed off as memoir. Only if it is deliberately passed off as memoir would we be inclined to call it a forgery. In short, take away the intention to deceived, and I don't see that something can be called a forgery at all.

This point is important, because it means that if Ehrman is right about cultural context, then the pseudepigraphic epistles violate the conventional expectation of accurate authorial representation, and therefore were likely to mislead readers of that time. And it in the absence of genre pieces that could be erroneously mislabeled, it is hard to envision how the misleading of readers could be anything but intentional deception.

Of course, the deeper motives for such deception might be varied, and some of these motives might be more praiseworthy than others. But the way in which motives play into our assessment of actions is different from the way in which intent does. Contrast the student who says she didn't intend to plagiarize with the student who concedes that she meant to plagiarize, but that she had a really good reason. In the former case, if we believe her we'll label her act a lesser offense. In the latter case, things work differently. We'd want to know what the motives were and whether they gave her a good reason to do what would otherwise be a serious offense. I can think of few motives that would meet this standard--perhaps if she were deliberately plagiarizing as part of a university job to assess the effectiveness of professors' plagiarism detection skills.

So what would motivate someone to forge a letter? Since forgery requires the existence of conventions about accurate authorial ascriptions, conventions that are being violated by the forger, one way to approach this question is to ask what purpose these conventions are meant to serve. Conventions against plagiarism exist in order to give due credit, and avoid giving improper credit to those who haven't earned it. To some extent, conventions against forgery might serve a similar function--if an uncredited ghost writer authors a Sarah Palin memoir, I might inadvertently attribute to Sarah Palin an eloquence and cleverness with language that she may not actually possess. But in such cases of ghost-writing, we have a kind of collusion between the actual author and the one who is credited for authorship: The latter is plagiarizing, and the former is collaborating with the plagiarism.

This is presumably not what Ehrman is concerned is happening with the pseudepigraphic epistles--although some opponents of Ehrman seek to defend the legitimacy of these epistles by, in effect, supposing some sort of innocuous "ghost-writing" analogue (Peter told an educated friend or follower what to write while he was languishing in prison, and the friend went home and wrote it).

So, do the conventions that forgery violates serve functions other than preventing us from inaccurately crediting someone with the merits of written work that isn't theirs? Arguably, one of the most significant purposes of the conventions in question is to discourage a different kind of misattribution of merit. If a particular painter has earned a place of honor that has made his works enormously valuable, then a forger is likely to make considerably more money by bringing a newly discovered work by this painter to the market than by bringing a painting "in the style of" the artist to the market. Here, the prestige of the artist is being "borrowed" through misattribution so as to increase the perceived worth of the work.

And here, of course, is the most obvious motive for the deliberate deception that takes place in the case of forgeries: Someone wants what they have written to carry the kind of weight, to be given the sort of credibility or the kind of hearing enjoyed by the letters of revered figures such as Peter and Paul. And so they write as if they were Peter or Paul, hoping to mislead the communities that honor Peter and Paul.

And why do that? Not to get credit. The motives in such cases are not self-serving ones in the ordinary sense. But they might still be egoistic. I might think that what I have to say is just as significant, just as important, as what Peter or Paul had to say--but no one is giving me the kind of hearing I deserve. But I want to prove to myself just how great my ideas really are, and so I forge a letter--and everyone responds to my ideas as if they came from the mouth of an apostle. What an ego rush!

Or, more plausibly, I might really care about my community and my faction's ideological convictions about what is best for the community. I might think that certain influential voices in my community are dangerously misguided in their views concerning women's equality. My faction's ideology tells me that if their views prevail it will be disastrous. So I put my misogynistic ideology into the mouth of Paul, hoping the misattribution will be believed so that the honor in which Paul is held will spill over onto my ideas for the community's future. It works, and my faction prevails.

What these examples show, I think, is that there are good reasons why communities that attach special reverence to the words of particular leaders might adopt conventional expectations of authenticity in authorial attribution, especially in relation to these revered leaders. That doesn't mean that early Christian communities did adopt such conventions--but it's a point in favor of Ehrman's claim that they did. All else being equal, early Christians would presumably prefer to be able to tell when a letter was actually written by Paul or Peter.

But here is something to keep in mind: Just as the merits of an argument don't change just because the argument was plagiarized, so too with forgery: An idea can be compelling, a poem beautiful, and argument sound, even if it is attributed to someone other than the real author. While Ehrman's points in Forged have bearing on certain legalistic ways of conceiving the authority of Scripture ("if it's in Scripture, it must be profoundly true even if it appears to be banal or misguided"), they do not prevent anyone from finding things of value in the pseudepigraphic texts. No matter who the author, and no matter what the author's motives for attributing authorship to someone else, if the idea is a good one, it's a good one. But in a book where authorship is in question, we cannot decide that and idea is a good one simply on the formal basis that it was presumably authored by someone taken to be a rich source of good ideas.