Who Wrote the Bible?
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almost certainly was not written by Paul.11 But it was eventually admitted into the canon of Scripture (see chapter 7) because church fathers came to think it was written by Paul. • Homonymous writings. The term “homonymy” means “having the same name.” A “homonymous writing” is one that is written by someone who has the same name as someone who is famous. For example, the book of James was no doubt written by someone named James, but the author does not claim to be any particular James. It was an extraordinarily common name. Later church fathers accepted the book as part of Scripture because they claimed that this James was James the brother of Jesus. In the book itself there is no such claim. • Pseudepigraphic writings. Some books of the New Testament were written in the names of people who did not actually write them. Scholars have known this for well over a century. The term for this phenomenon is “pseudepigraphy”—literally, “writing that goes under a false name.” Scholars have not been overly precise in their use of this term and tend to use it because it avoids the negative connotations associated with the term “forgery.” Whichever term they use, biblical scholars have argued for a long time that there are New Testament books whose authors knowingly claimed to be someone other than who they were.
Pseudepigraphy in the Ancient World
To make sense of this situation we need to learn more about authorship and false authorship in the ancient world. Definitions
To begin with, it is important to be precise in our terminology. The term “pseudepigraphy” can refer to any writing that has a false