The first is to avoid using the word “forgery” at all cost and use abstruse words like “pseudepigraphy” and “pseudynomity” instead. The second step is to claim that the disciples of Paul (or Peter or James or Jude) wrote under their master's name because the letter “was intended as an extension of his thought—an assumption of the great apostle's mantle to continue his work.”90 The final step is to then say that the ancients accepted pseudepigraphy as something normal and would not consider it negatively as we would today.
