Forgery in the early church

The forgery of the WHOLE New Testament can be dismissed out of hand, simply because forgery is by its nature an attempt to capitalise on the already existing authority of other works. If you want authority, you forge a letter by Paul The Blessed Apostle Of The Lord Jesus Christ rather than by, say, Bruce of Whom Nothing Is Known. If there are no early Christian documents, there is no power-grab to be made from them. Forgery requires a functioning 'canon' of authority.

So we can turn now to the question of partial forgery. Tertullian (fl. 170-200 CE), the brilliant, ascetic and rather legalistic apologist of North Africa, in the course of arguing that women cannot perform baptisms, offers an example of just this kind of event:

But if certain Acts of Paul, which are falsely so named, claim the example of Thecla for allowing women to teach and to baptize, let men know that in Asia the presbyter who compiled that document, thinking to add of his own to Paul's reputation, was found out, and though he professed he had done it for love of Paul, was deposed from his position.

Two things here are worth noting: The first is what he clearly means to communicate: because the Acts of Paul was a forgery, it carried no authority, and its author deserved the ecclesiastical discipline that he received for writing it. The second is what he assumes: He is treating Paul's letter to the Corinthians (ch. 12-14) as completely and universally authoritative for Christian practice. If Paul does not permit the Corinthian women to teach in their churches (which Tertullian clearly accepts), then this embodies a general principle, which may be applied to baptism, and must be universally authoritative and binding. He is treating Paul's letter as if it were a scripture, and he expects his readers to see this premise as axiomatic in this passage, since he argues from it, instead of to it.

These points together suggest that the church, by Tertullian's time is familiar with attempts at forgery (which were numerous, and frequently supported views they disagreed with, such as Gnosticism), but anathematized the practice, precisely because of their regard for the genuine articles. On the one hand this is an extension of the reverence the Early Christians had for the Old Testament. On the other hand, it is an application of the new concepts of 'canon' and 'orthodoxy', as exemplified in Tertullian's Rule of Faith arguments, whereby Christians came to view the New Testament as not merely authoritative, but a unified collection of scripture, like the Old.

When this is borne in mind, their attitudes to forgery are not at all surprising.

In radically skeptical circles, it is commonly assumed that 'The Church' (deep voice), especially after Constantine, was able to freely rewrite the gospels (and the rest of the New Testament) in whatever manner they desired. Obviously this is a conspiracy theory, of the first order, with all the attending problems of evidence and circularity (since the conspirators would obviously have destroyed all the evidence). But having noted this, let's examine this theory in more detail. Two historical comparisons will be instructive:

In early Islam, when it was discovered that minor variations of the Qur'an had developed, the Caliph Uthman standardized the text and ordered any variants destroyed, an action which met with approval and compliance. This was possible in Islam on account of a strong and centralized religious government. The absence of any such structure in early Christianity, together with the widespread distribution of its texts, removes the possibility of any similar rescension.

Now consider an example of Christian history being rewritten: The Testimonium Flavianum is a paragraph by the Jewish and Roman historian Josephus which deals with Jesus. It seems to have been edited by some unknown author around 300 CE, at which time Josephus' opinion of Jesus receives a boost. This offers a useful parallel with the New Testament documents. The key difference between the two cases appears to be that most people didn't even know about Josephus’ writings, let alone revere them or read them in their churches week to week, all over the Mediterranean world -- the changes to Josephus could plausibly have been made on the quiet. This was not true of the New Testament, for several reasons:

1. The New Testament was progressively assembled through the sharing of letters and documents between scattered Christian communities over the hundred years or so after Christianity emerged from Judaea. Its distribution and collation was not centrally organized, because there was no single, central organization. The emergence to a recognized position of authority of the church in Rome was a phenomenon of the second and third centuries.
2. By the time the church was at all centrally organized, the gospels and letters of the New Testament were copied in churches all over the mediterranean world. (For example, the John Rylands fragment of a copy the Gospel of John, traditionally thought to have been written in Ephesus (Turkey) in the 90s, is often dated to the 120's, and comes from Egypt. And when Clement writes from Rome to Corinth in 95 CE, he quotes from 1 Corinthians, amongst a number of Paul's other letters to other churches.) Tertullian, in North Africa around 200, quotes from virtually every book of the New Testament, and most chapters of the large ones. Such examples could be multiplied endlessly.
3. The task of tracking down and fixing all of these, while leaving neither any trace of earlier versions, nor any record of their recension must be considered. It would also mean updating all of the books by the Christian writers who had already quoted from the New Testament (tens of thousands of times by 300 CE). The cost of the exercise would have been astronomical, but that is not the major problem, nor is the fact that Gnostics and other independent groups will have had copies too.
4. The major problem is that all this would have demanded the consent and the precise cooperation of thousands of widely distributed people. If it were attempted in secrecy, it would have blown up in controversy -- there were enormous disputes amongst these people over what now seem the most mundane points of theology, and they wrote volumes against anything they saw as heresy.
5. Moreover, by 300 CE, one heavily debated issue was the margins of the New Testament Canon: whether books like Revelation or the Shepherd of Hermas merited inclusion. The content of even these peripheral books was the basis of a larger debate, and so was well and truly fixed.

There are numerous documents from 100-300 CE which we know existed at one time, but which we no longer have copies of. Some may well have been destroyed by Christians, Gnostics, Romans (the third century persecutions required them to be surrendered for burning), or other groups, or by the general ravages of history (fires, wars, and so on), or by mere neglect, since documents not being copied actively would only last a few centuries at the most unless in desert caves or similarly dry conditions.

We can have confidence, however, that no centralized re-editing of New Testament was ever performed: the scale of the required conspiracy beggars belief.

A number of passages in the New Testament are particularly unlikely to have been invented by the later church, since they clash dramatically with its increasingly political and ecclesiastical interests.

• The later heroes of the Church, Peter and Paul, come across as very humanly fallible: Peter denies Jesus, and never seems to 'get it'; Paul is constantly defending his authority against the accusations of others, and is abandoned by many of his fellow workers. Their deaths in Rome around 65 CE, repeatedly called on to justify Roman pre-eminence, are not even mentioned.
• The 'Council of Jerusalem' in Acts 15, which practically invites a church hierarch to insert his Master Plan For Church Government ends with James summing up an apparent consensus view, and declining to issue more than a bare minimum of instructions.
• The biggest issues of the second and third centuries -- Gnosticism and the question of which books were authoritative, and the church-splitting issues of whether and how believers who lapsed under persecution should be readmitted to fellowship, which quickly spilled over into questions of what constituted a valid church -- are simply not addressed. Paul flirts with gnostic-sounding terms in several places. No-one has any concept of a centralised church government as the end in sight. Most NT references to ἐκκλησια (church) for instance, mean the local congregation; the early church fathers more often refer to the universal church.
• There are passages that no-one in the early church had any idea what to make of. Things like 'baptism for the dead' in 1 Cor 15, or predictions of Jesus' return that seem on the face of it to have been unfulfilled. They spend their time trying to find some explanations for these passages.

These are just a few examples of a larger group, but it should be clear that arguments to the effect that the gospels were freely edited to serve the apologetic purposes of the institutionalised second-century church need to offer an explanation for passages of this kind.

The clearest thing about them is that they would have been the first to go under such editing.