The Holy Art of Lying

Forged: Writing in the Name of God by Bart D. Ehrman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


If you've read the rest of Ehrman's oeuvre, there won't be a great deal more in this book to sink your teeth into.  Right now I suspect Ehrman's a popular New Testament exegesis factory but even a factory turns out good material, even if it all starts to look the same.  He does, however, footnote everything.  He gives you the location of his source material in English so you can check up behind him.  He does not make things up (as colorful as Borg and Crossan's book might have been, they made stuff up, just showing how easy it is to extrapolate, infer, and they produce a factual lie) and it doesn't lose anything for being relentlessly factual because of Ehrman's easy-going, highly readable style.
A better title for this book, though, might have been "Forgeries and Other Bare-Faced Lies."  Ehrman stretches the definition of "forgery" to the breaking point over Acts. Perhaps the title as it stands is the last punch pulled.  Ehrman's gloves are off (as my husband pointed out) as he makes no bones about lies perpetuated in the name of an alleged "Greater Truth."  Normally we call such lies "Fiction," or perhaps "Politics As Usual."  At no time does Ehrman deny the existence of an historical Jesus.  All he's saying is that the people who were inspired by his story fibbed about some things.  And if they fibbed about who wrote what or made up false attributions, what else might they have fibbed about, eh?
The last chapter of the book does make a person think about Lying.  Do you side with Augustine, that a lie is never excusable?  Do you permit small social lying?  Where do you draw the line?  To get a child to take its medicine?  (To get my mother to the hospital to have her tonsils taken out, my grandmother told her she was going to get a pony.  My mother felt utterly betrayed and refused to lie to us kids about anything like that.)  Is a lie permissible to save someone from eternal damnation?  It might depend on how hard you believe in that damnation to make you think it's not just okay, but imperative, to lie in the name of Truth.



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