Early Christian Counter Forgeries

Scholars have long known that a number of the earliest Christian writings are “forgeries”—books written by unknown authors claiming to be someone famous (e.g., one of the apostles). What is less known is that some of these forgeries were written to counter other books that were also forgeries. This talk will look at two such “counter-forgeries”—one that made it into the canon of Scripture (the first-century book of “James”) and one that did not (the second-century “Letter of Peter”). This was part of the Texts and Contexts DVD.