In my last post, I examined how the Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea looked at the documents of the NT with a critical eye. He wasn’t just willing to accept what he had received before him. Catholicism has always encouraged critical thinking and looking at authoritative sources such as Scripture are no exception.
One might come across an Ehrman devotee who knows his specific arguments and uses them. I speak of arguments in regards to supposedly different writing styles. At this point, all one needs to do is take the presuppositional approach to the issues. A common argument is that the book of Ephesians has longer sentences than the other Pauline epistles and this puts Pauline authorship in doubt. Bart Ehrman really likes this argument as it appears in both Forged and Forgery and Counter-Forgery.
Can one use a different writing style in one letter and a different one in another. There is absolutely no reason to think why this would be a problem. The best example is to look at the writings of Bart Ehrman himself. Let’s look at his biographies of Jesus Christ. He’s written two books. One was an earlier academic publication and the other one is a more recent popular book for Harper One. In 1999 Ehrman published Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium and in 2013 he wrote Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.
These books were published 14 years apart but they cover a lot of the same material. However, when one reads these books, they both sound very different. One could even suggest the theory that they’re written by two people. One is Bart Ehrman and the other one is someone pretending to be Bart Ehrman. A more sober analysis of the situation is that while Ehrman is covering a similar message, he is writing to two different audiences and is therefore writing differently. There is absolutely no mystery if you take that into account.
When people write they often cater their literary style to different audiences. This is the same in modern times as it was in ancient times. If you’re writing to an academic audience as opposed to a popular audience, you’re going to write differently. If you’re writing to the Church of Ephesus, you’ll write differently than if you’re writing to the Church of Rome. Once this is pointed out, they’ll either concede defeat of fall back to the almight “majority of scholars disagree with you” argument which is easy to refute.
I hope that I’ve been able to help my readers with the last four posts. My readers who are standard church goers probably weren’t aware that this argument existed. Well, it does and our enemies don’t hesitate in bringing it up. I may write more on this in the future, especially since it seems to be the number one topic that Muslims like to read from Bart Ehrman. I just want to show the faithful that a bit of research and critical thinking can sink these poorly thought out theories of non-Pauline authorship.
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