Bart Ehrman is a first-class scripture scholar who began as a fundamentalist at the Moody Bible Institute and who is now an agnostic teaching at Chapel Hill. He is scrupulously accurate and typically fair-minded, but he does have an ax to grind: he is a man who feels he has been deceived by lies and misled by euphemisms, and consequently commits himself--at least in his non-scholarly books--to calling a spade a bloody shovel. The term pseudo-epigraphy--the scholarly term for works falsely, deliberately attributed to the apostles and disciples and others--should be replaced, he argues, with the term "forgery." Contrary to scholarly and popular assumption, the people of the ancient world were not comfortable with false attribution and condemned individual works when detected as "pseudos" ("lies") or "nothos"("bastards"). Most of them may be well-intentioned, and a more than few of them (certainly Paul's epistles to the Hebrews, arguably all four of the gospels) may even have made it into the canon, but this should not stop us from looking squarely and honestly at what they are.

This is an enjoyable and challenging book. Ehrman's brief summaries of the contents of many of the non-canonical "forgeries" are particularly informative and entertaining.