Forged by Bart D. Ehrman

in the place of torment or the place of eternal bliss. As sometimes happens in these personal tours of heaven and hell, the description of the realms of the blessed is a bit stereotyped and brief. There are, after all, only so many ways you can describe eternal, ecstatic joy. It’s fantastic ! What more can one say? The realms of the damned, however, are a different matter altogether. Anyone with any creativity and imagination can invent lurid and detailed descriptions of the torments of sinners.
    In Peter’s vision, a number of the damned are tortured in ways that befit their characteristic sins, so that the punishment fits the crime. Those who have blasphemed against the ways of God, for example—that is, sinned by what they’ve said—are hanged by their tongues over eternal flames. Women who have braided their hair in order to make themselves attractive to men so as to seduce them are hanged by their hair over eternal flames. The men they seduced are hanged by a different body part over the flames. In this case, the men cry out, as you might imagine, “We didn’t know it would come to this !”
    The overarching message of this book is quite clear and not altogether subtle: if you want to enjoy the amazing blessings of paradise and avoid the horrific torments of hell, don’t sin! This message conveys a reliable and incontrovertible truth: those who fail to follow God’s will face eternal torture. How do we know? Because someone who has observed the realms of the damned has told us, Jesus’s right-hand man, Peter himself. In order to get his point across, the author writes in the first person—not in his own name, but in the name of the chief disciple. Here again we have a forgery in the name of Peter.
    â€œPetrine” Writings in the New Testament
    T HE BOOKS I HAVE talked about here at some length—the Acts of Peter, the Gospel of Peter, the Pseudo-Clementine Writings, the Epistle of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter —are not the only fabrications about Peterand forgeries allegedly written by Peter from the early church. There were others: other “Acts” of Peter, a collection called the “Preaching” of Peter, two other apocalypses of Peter. And these are just the ones that we still have today. No one knows how many once existed. Producing books in the name of Peter was a virtual cottage industry in the early church.
    Is it possible, in light of this extensive use of Peter’s name to authorize others’ views, that any forgeries in the name of Peter made it into the New Testament? As it turns out, two books bear Peter’s name there as well, the letters of 1 Peter and 2 Peter. Both claim to be written by Peter, but there are solid reasons for thinking that Peter did not write either one.
    1 P ETER
    The book of 1 Peter is allegedly written by “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,” to Christians whom he calls “exiles” in five provinces in the western part of what is now Turkey. 17 There is no doubt that the author is claiming to be Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter. “Peter” was not a personal name before Peter was given it as a nickname by Jesus himself. According to the Gospels, this disciple’s real name was Simon. But Jesus indicated that he would be the “rock” (Greek petros ) on whom the church would be founded. So he called him “Rocky,” or “Peter” (see Matt. 16:13–18). 18 So far as we know, there were no other persons named Peter until later times when Christians started naming their children after the great apostle. So the author of 1 Peter is certainly claiming to be “that” Peter. This is borne out by his comment in 5:1, that he was personally a “witness of the sufferings of Christ.” 19
    This matter of suffering is the key theme of the book. In fact, the word “suffering” occurs more often in this short five-chapter letter than in any