Bart Ehrman - Jesus Interrupted - Are there any forgeries in the New Testament

Extract from Bart Erhman's book - Jesus Interrupted

Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, only eight almost certainly go back to the author whose name they bear: the seven undisputed letters of Paul (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) and the Revelation of John (although we aren’t sure who this John was).

The other nineteen books fall into three groups.

• Misattributed writings
As we have already seen, the Gospels are probably misattributed. John the disciple did not write John, and Matthew did not write Matthew. Other anonymous books have been wrongly attributed to someone famous. The book of Hebrews does not name Paul as its author, and it almost certainly was not written by Paul. 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.

(Jesus Interrupted - Pages 112-113)
 
Bart Ehrman said on a radio broadcast that about 75 percent of the New Testament documents are supposedly forged. He has written a separate book on it - Forged.