How Does God Reveal? Five Christian Reasons to Doubt Biblical Inerrancy

The Patheos website is currently hosting a multi-blog conversation about progressive Christianity and Scripture which has generated numerous engaging and thoughtful contributions--such as this one by James McGrath. Because the relationship between progressive Christian faith and the Bible is one of my enduring interests, the sudden flood of interesting essays on the topic has inspired me to take a few minutes to reflect on the issue myself. 

As a philosopher of religion, the way I approach this topic is in terms of a philosophical question: What theory of revelation fits best with the Christian view of God? Put another way, if there is a God that fits the broadly Christian description, how would we expect such a God to reveal the divine nature and will to the world?

Many conservative Christians take it for granted that God has revealed the divine nature and will in and through a specific book. More precisely (although they aren't usually this precise), they believe that God inspired certain human authors at various times in history to write texts that inerrantly express divine truths--and then inspired other human beings to correctly recognize these texts and include all and only them in the comprehensive collection of Scriptures we call the Bible.

Let's call this the theory of biblical inerrancy.

Does this theory fit well with broader Christian beliefs? Is this a good Christian theory about divine revelation, culminating in a good Christian theory about what the Bible is and what sort of authority we should attach to it? I think there are a number of reasons to be skeptical.

Put more narrowly, I think there are a number of reasons why Christians should be skeptical, given their Christian starting points. Let's consider at least some of these reasons.

1. Christianity holds that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God

Traditional Christian teaching holds that Jesus is the Word made Flesh, the incarnation of God in history. And this means that for Christians, the primary and monumental revelation of God is in the person of Jesus, not in any book (however inspired). It is this fact which motivated George MacDonald to say of the Bible,

It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to him.

Biblical inerrantists might argue that nothing precludes God from both revealing the divine nature primarily in Jesus and authoring an inerrant book as a secondary revelation. This is true as far as it goes. But there are reasons for concern.

First, there's a difference between the kind of revelation that Jesus represents, and the kind that a book represents. A person and a book are different things, and we learn from them in different ways. Consider the difference between having a mentor in the project of becoming a better person, and reading self-help books.

Doesn't Christianity teach that God's preferred way of disclosing the divine nature and will is through personal, living relationship rather than fixed words? The problem with throwing in an inerrant book as a "supplemental" revelation is that it can lead to Bible-worship. Given human psychology, there is something alluring about having a book with all the answers. But if God primarily wants us to find the answers through personal engagement with the living God, as discovered in Jesus, isn't there a real danger that fixation on the Bible will distract the faithful from God's primary mode of self-disclosure?

None of this is to say that human stories--witness accounts of divine revelation in history--aren't important. They can motivate a desire to seek out the one whom the stories are about, and they can offer tools for discerning whether you've found the one you seek or an imposter. But once they are seen as secondary, as valuable as a means to an end, the need for inerrancy dissipates. If what really matters is my friendship with Joe, and if I sought out and formed a friendship with him because lots of people told me stories about him that revealed him as an awesome guy I wanted to meet, do I really need to insist that those storytellers were inerrant? Why?

2. The Jesus of Scripture was not an inerrantist

In John 8:1-11, we have the story of the teachers of the law coming to Jesus with an adulteress, and asking Him whether they ought to stone her to death as the Scriptures prescribe. The passage itself declares that this was a trap: If Jesus came out and directly told them not to stone her, He would be defying a direct scriptural injunction.

He avoided the trap: He didn't directly telling them to act contrary to Scripture. Instead, He told them that the one without sin should cast the first stone.

It is a stunning and powerful story (no wonder someone decided to write it into the Gospel of John, even though it didn't appear in the earliest versions). But notice that Jesus didn't tell them to do what Scripture prescribed. Instead, He found a powerful way to drive home exactly what was wrong with following that scriptural injunction--in a way that avoided their trap.

In short, Jesus disagreed with some of the teachings in the Scriptures of His day. In the Sermon on the Mount, he offered gentle correctives to earlier teachings--teachings which started in a direction but didn't go far enough. The lex talionis command to punish evildoers eye for eye and tooth for tooth may, at the time, have served as a restraint on retributive impulses: don't punish beyond the severity of the crime. But for Jesus, that level of restrain was insufficient. It was a start on a path, perhaps, but only that. Jesus followed the trajectory of that path to its conclusion, and enjoined His listeners to turn the other cheek.

In short, it's clear Jesus didn't have the inerrantist view towards the Scriptures of His day that conservative Christians have towards the Christian Scriptures of today. Conservatives might argue that Jesus would view the modern Bible--or maybe just the New Testament?--in the way they favor, even if the approach to Scripture that He actually modeled is at odds with their approach.

Allow me to treat such a speculative claim with suspicion. If Jesus is the primary revelation of God in history, then it strikes me as appropriate to follow His model for approaching Scripture, and respectfully look beyond the letters on the page to the deeper intentions that finite human authors might have missed, noticing trajectories and exploring where they might lead.

3. In the New Testament, Paul distinguished between his views and the Lord's

 In 1 Corinthians 7:10-12, Paul says the following:

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife. To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her...

I've talked about this passage before, so I won't go into details. What interests me is the distinction Paul makes between his own views and those of the Lord. In this passage, it's clear that Paul did not see Himself as taking dictation from God. He made a clear distinction between his own opinions and those of the Lord, and by making the distinction explicit was signaling to his readers that they should treat the injunctions differently--as if he didn't want to claim for himself the kind of authority that he took to accompany Jesus' explicit teachings.

But if inerrantism is true, then Paul's teachings are the inerrant word of God, and so have the same kind of authority as Jesus' words. In other words, if inerrantism is true, then Paul was wrong to make the distinction he made. But that distinction is made by Paul in a letter that's in the Bible. And if inerrantism is true, a distinction made in a letter that's in the Bible has to be accurate. But if it's accurate, inerrantism isn't true. Zounds!

An exercise in creative interpretation might offer the inerrantist the wiggle room to escape this logical trap, but inerrantists are routinely skeptical of such creative interpretation of Scripture. At best, then, this amounts to a difficulty for inerrantism, the sort of difficulty one often sees when trying to force a theory onto subject matter that doesn't quite suit it. Theories can perhaps weather some such difficulties, but if they become too common it is hard to reasonably persist in endorsing the theory.

4. Efforts to overcome apparent contradictions in Scripture lead to a false view of Scripture

Speaking of difficulties of this sort, the Bible isn't a neat, orderly, systematically consistent treatise. The Gospel narratives, for example, aren't identical. They tell the stories of Jesus' life in different ways. Details differ--for example, in accounts of the resurrection. Bart Ehrman does a fine job of cataloguing  many of these in Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible.

Mostly, these tensions aren't explicit contradictions but rather what might be called apparent ones: they don't seem as if they can go together, because you'd need to tell a rather convoluted story to make them fit.

Inerrantists have not been remiss in offering such convoluted stories. But if you need to tell enough of them in order to make your theory map onto what it's supposed to explain, the theory becomes increasingly implausible.

And there's another problem, one that should be of concern to Christians who care about the Bible. The convoluted tales that you have to tell in order to make disparate biblical narratives fit together end up leading you away from an honest appreciation of the message of the biblical authors. As Ehrman puts it, "To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story."

When you do this, you care more about preserving your theory about the Bible than you do about understanding and taking in its message. For me, this is one of the greatest tragedies of an inerrantist approach to Scripture: It makes it difficult for readers to engage with the Bible on its own terms. It's like someone who is so devoted to a false image of their spouse that they can't see their spouse for the person they really are. Likewise, the steps that need to be taken in order to preserve the doctrine of inerrancy in the face of the Bible's actual content means that it becomes impossible to have an intimate relationship with the Bible as it really is. This is not taking the Bible seriously. It is taking the doctrine of inerrancy seriously at the expense of the Bible.  

5. God is love

Christianity teaches that God is love. In fact, it is the closest thing Christians have to a scriptural definition of God:  "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." (1 John 4:7-8).

If God is love, then we experience God when we love. If God is love, then the primary way we can encounter God is through loving and being loved--that is, through cultivating loving relationships with persons. This may help to explain the Christian view that a person--Jesus--served in history as God's fundamental revelation, rather than a book. Books can't love you. And you can't love a book in the sense of "love" that Christians (and the author of 1 John) have in mind when we say God is love.

When we feel the profound presence of the divine showering love upon us--or when we feel the joy of being loved by others--we are encountering the divine nature as something coming to us from the outside. But when we love our neighbors as ourselves, we are channeling divine love, and experiencing it "from within" (so to speak). The divine nature is moving within us, more intimately connected to us than any mere object of experience. I think this is what the author of 1 John means when he says that whoever does not love does not know God. To love others is to be filled with the spirit of God. It is to let God in.

If any of that is true, then it is by encouraging us to love one another that God makes possible the most profound revelation of the divine nature and will. And while the Bible does encourage us to love one another, the theory about the Bible which takes it to be the inerrant revelation of God may actually be an impediment to love.

We end up focusing more attention on the Bible than on our neighbors. We are more committed to "doing what the Bible says" than we are to loving those around us. Out of a desire to be connected with God, we insist that homosexuality is always and everywhere sinful--and when the gay and lesbian neighbors we are supposed to love cry out in despair, their lives crushed by these teachings, we stifle our compassion, shutting out love in fear that loving them as ourselves might lead us to question the inerrancy of the Bible.

If God is love, then any theory of revelation that tells us to find God by burying our noses in a book is a problematic theory. If God is love, we must look for God in the love we see in the world. The Bible, understood as a flawed and finite human testament to the God of love working in history, can be a deeply meaningful partner in our quest to encounter God and live in the light of divine goodness. But as soon as it is treated as inerrant, it is in danger of becoming a bludgeon used to silence those neighbors who want to share experiences that don't quite fit with this or that verse.

The Bible points away from itself. Respect for it demands that we look up from the page and engage with our neighbors and the creation. God is alive in the world. The Bible tells us that God is alive in the world. In so doing, the book is telling us that if we want to find God, we need to look into our neighbor's face with love, and at the natural world and all its creatures with love.

Because God is there. God is there, revealing Himself in the vibrancy of life and the child's laugh and the mother's tender kiss. God is there, in the gay man who sits by his longtime partner's hospital bedside, gently stroking his brow. God is there, in the joyous wedding vows of the lesbian couple that can finally get a legal marriage after years together.

And any time a too-literal allegiance to the letter of the biblical text causes someone not to see the face of God in that tenderness and joy, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy has blocked divine revelation, impeding God's effort to self-disclose to the world.

Cosmic Gratitude and Ways of Seeing

In the recent post outlining my overall “philosophy of religion,” I offered the following comment: “With respect to the origins of the cosmos, we have to decide whether to adopt a stance of gratitude—the kind of stance that makes sense if reality is the product of loving agency.”

My point here was to given an example of how ways of seeing the world are implicated in the practical choices we need to make in our lives. Among many examples I might have chosen, I considered the act of being grateful for the existence of the cosmos and everything in it. We might call this "cosmic gratitude." I chose this example because I wanted to be clear that some practical decisions are more matters of inner stance than outward action. While being grateful might express itself in concrete gestures (saying “Thank you,” for example), it is first and foremost an internal attitude that one adopts.

And adopting this attitude of cosmic gratitude clearly makes sense if the whole of our reality is seen as the product of loving agency. It might not make sense given certain other ways of seeing--in fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. But since I hadn’t thought about the issue deeply enough to decide whether adopting this attitude makes sense only if reality is the product of loving agency, I deliberately chose not to say that.

At this point, as a philosophy teacher, I can’t resist pausing to offer a brief mini-lecture about the kind of basic logic you're likely to learn in a critical thinking course. (And I don't mean to be condescending in doing this. Even those of us who know this stuff quite well can sometimes benefit from taking the time, every once in awhile, to walk through it deliberately, like a novice). A proposition of the form, “If x, then y,” is called a conditional. the statement that appears in place of "x" is often called the antecedent of the conditional, while the statement in the "y" place is called the consequent. Unlike conjunctions ("x and y") and disjunctions ("x or y"), switching the placement of x and y makes a difference.

When you do switch the antecendent and the consequent, what you get (“If y, then x”) is called the converse of the conditional, and it is logically distinct from the original conditional—in other words, they’re saying different things, which means that formally speaking the truth value of a conditional and its converse needn’t be the same.

Unfortunately, things get a bit messy because conditional statements can be expressed in a variety of ways. For example, “If x, then y” is also sometimes worded as “x only if y.” Even though the "if" here appears before the statement in the "y" place, the "only" has a logical function such that "y" is still the consequent. But if someone says, “x if y,” they mean “If y, then x.” In other words, “x if y” is the converse of  "if x, then y," and so is the converse of “x only if y.”

To sum it up: "x if y" is the converse of "x only if y." The two are not logically equivalent. Contrast the following: (a) “A thank you letter is polite if you receive a birthday gift”; (b) “A thank you letter is polite only if you receive a birthday gift.” Based on the conventions of etiquette in the US, (a) is true while (b) is false. Likewise, we need to clearly distinguish “Cosmic gratitude makes sense if reality is the product of loving agency” from “Cosmic gratitude makes sense only if reality is the product of loving agency.” It was my intention in the earlier post to say the former (a view which I am confident is true), not the latter (since I haven't considered it carefully enough to say for sure what I think of it).

But it is quite easy on a quick reading of someone’s argument to confuse a conditional statement with its converse--especially when the positioning of the "antecendent" and "consequent" are out of their usual order, as was the case in my earlier post. And, judging by recurring comments on my previous post, many readers apparently did just that. For example, SecularDad asked, “Why can’t someone have this sense of gratitude without belief in a loving agency?” Burk said, “The fact is that we can feel gratitude in any case.. it is all about us, not about the cosmos. We are here, and have feelings, so we can feel gratitude, and do so. The idea that we need a conjured ‘father’ or other totem on the other end, whose existence is, as above, hypothetical at best and utilitiarian in origin ... that is simply absurd.” More cautiously, Bernard said, “I, like Burk, feel hugely grateful for my own existence without having any conception of that beyond the physical, and readily accept it doesn’t work this way for you.”

But even if these comments were sparked by a misreading of my original remark, they raise an interesting set of questions. After all, this cosmic gratitude--this sense of gratitude for one’s existence and for the world in all its mystery and wonder—is a common human experience that seems to cut across religious and philosophical differences. And there is at least some reason to think that this sort of gratitude is healthy. People who cultivate cosmic gratitude (as opposed to very selective gratitude) are more likely to be at peace with themselves and their lives, even if things aren’t perfect.

Given the ubiquity and value of this attitude, it is worth digging deeper into the conditions for its coherence. What I said explicitly in my earlier post was that such cosmic gratitude is coherent under the traditional theistic view that existence is a gift of love. Given this way of seeing things, cosmic gratitude “makes sense.” Implicitly, of course, my remark suggested that there might be ways of seeing things where such gratitude wouldn’t make sense. (While I’ll resist another critical thinking mini-lecture, I will point out that this latter suggestion emerges based on principles of “conversational implication”: In ordinary conversation, one doesn’t typically point out that A is true under condition B if one thinks A is true under ALL conditions—and so, while one cannot make this assumption in formal logic, when someone asserts a conditional it is usually fair in conversation to impute to them the belief that the “consequent” of the conditional isn’t true under all conditions.)

In any event, I think it is pretty clear that there are ways of seeing reality such that, given those ways of seeing, an attitude of cosmic gratitude makes little sense. Here's an example: Suppose you see the cosmos and everything in it as the product of a supremely powerful Devil who created the universe solely for the sake of having targets for his malevolence. Everything exists purely so that this supreme Devil can achieve his goal of a universe teeming with endless conscious torment of the worst conceivable kind. And this Devil, being supremely powerful, will not fail to achieve this goal: In the end, every conscious being will be brought to a state of eternal suffering so horrific that it would have been better not to have existed at all. Those who at present enjoy their lives, who experience love and happiness, are afforded this glimpse of goodness only for the sake of making possible some special sort of torment later: perhaps the torment of having precious goods decisively and permanently ripped away, or the anguish of witnessing the crushing ruin of loved ones, etc. Ultimate affliction, we might suppose, is so much worse when there are points of contrast, so that endless, hopeless yearning for lost love and joy can be an additional source of anguish in the Devil’s arsenal.

And yes, I am fully aware of just how close this worldview I’m describing is to views actually embraced by some Christians—specifically, strict double-predestination Calvinists, as well as those who see eternal hell as the fate of all those who die without having explicitly accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior. In fact, I think an important objection to such versions of Christianity might be built around what I am saying in this post. But I won't develop that argument now.

My point here is this: If you see the joys of this life as fleeting moments in a whole existence definitively stripped of worth by neverending, soul-crushing anguish--and if, furthermore, you see the purpose of existence to be the realization of such states of torment in every conscious being--well, it hardly makes sense to adopt a stance of cosmic gratitude for existence. If, by contrast, you think that the sufferings of this life, no matter how serious, are but fleeting moments in a whole existence definitively imbued with worth by neverending, soul-uplifitng goods--and if, furthermore, you see the purpose of existence to be the bestowal of such goods on every conscious being--well, it clearly makes sense to adopt a stance of cosmic gratitude.

But these extremes are hardly the only two options. There are numerous alternatives, some of which make cosmic gratitude coherent, others of which don't.  The interesting question raised by the comments on my previous post is whether you need to see the cosmos as having loving agency at its root--whether, in other words, you need to see the cosmos as a benevolent creation--in order for cosmic gratitude to be a coherent response to existence.

In addressing this question, I first want to consider a line of argument that won't work. Specifically, the argument that of course gratitude makes sense without adopting this condition, because we exist and have feelings, and so can feel gratitude, and may do so. This won't work because the question is not whether we can feel cosmic gratitude no matter how we see the universe. The question is whether cosmic gratitude makes sense no matter how we see the universe. It is a question of coherence--over whether every way of seeing the universe can coherently undergird a grateful attitude.

I've already argued that seeing the universe as wholly the product of malevolent agency can't be coherently conjoined with cosmic gratitude. But few see the world in such a hideous way (although it may prove to be more common than one might think, once one digs below the surface of certain theistic beliefs). The more interesting question is whether gratitude makes sense given a naturalistic worldview. And here, rather than try to give an answer of my own, I want to consider something Bart Ehrman has to say on the matter.

For those unfamiliar with Ehrman, he is a religious studies scholar who has authored a number of highly successful popularizations of work in biblical studies. In one of those works, God's Problem, Ehrman devotes several pages to reflecting on his own deconversion from evangelical Christianity--a process that occurred in stages, and that took him from a "Bible-believing" Christian intent on saving souls from damnation, to being a progressive Christian, to being an agnostic who views the Bible as wholly a human artifact. In discussing this deconversion process, he reflects on some of its more painful aspects. One of those aspects has to do with gratitude. Here is what he says:

Another aspect of the pain I felt when I eventually became an agnostic...involves another deeply rooted attitude that I have and simply can't get rid of, although in this case, it's an attitude that I don't really want to get rid of. And it's something I never would have expected to be a problem when I was still a believer. The problem is this: I have such a fantastic life that I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it; I am fortunate beyond words. But I don't have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a void deep inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don't see any plausible way of filling it. 

Now let me stress here that I'm not at all sure that Ehrman is talking here about cosmic gratitude, that is, the sense of gratitude for existence as such--both one's own and the existence of the universe. It seems to be more a case of gratitude for the kind of existence that he has come to enjoy. We might call this "specific gratitude." And he rightly notes, a bit later on, that this species of gratitude is problematic. As Ehrman puts it, "If I have food because God has given it to me, then don't others lack food because God has chosen not to give it to them? By saying grace, wasn't I in fact charging God with negligence, or favoritism?" 

These concerns are, of course, bound up with the problem of evil--which is Ehrman's focus in God's Problem. And it seems to me that the theist's only escape from these concerns is to deny that God is directly responsible for the precise distribution of blessings and challenges in this life. If this is right, then gratitude for specific blessings may not make sense within a coherent theistic framework.

But my concern here is with cosmic gratitude, and with the question of whether seeing the world as the product of loving agency is a necessary condition for such gratitude to make sense. And here, a different aspect of Ehrman's discussion becomes relevant. Specifically, gratitude is a feeling with what might be called a "double-intentionality." There's what we're grateful for, but there's also who we're grateful to. Is gratitude possible without the latter? And can the object of the latter be anything other than an agent who meant well in providing what one is grateful for?

If not, then while an atheist or agnostic might be happy for existence, or take delight in it, or have feelings that are in some sense analogous to gratitude, they couldn't be genuinely grateful (at least not coherently so). And that would mean that anyone who was genuinely grateful for existence itself would thereby be operating, at least implicitly, as if there were someone to be grateful to: an agency responsible for existence itself.

But this conclusion follows only if we give negative answers to the questions I just posed (Is gratitude possible without the latter? And can the object of the latter be anything other than an agent?). So--what do you think of these two questions?

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.