I think regardless of your religious beliefs, stories like this one are less about genuine historical and archaeological scholarship and more about firing another salvo in the Left's unending Culture War, in particular its hostility to the Christian tradition of the West.
(CNN) - A frail man sits in chains inside a dank, cold prison cell. He has escaped death before but now realizes that his execution is drawing near.
“I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come,” the man –the Apostle Paul - says in the Bible's 2 Timothy. “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.”
The passage is one of the most dramatic scenes in the New Testament. Paul, the most prolific New Testament author, is saying goodbye from a Roman prison cell before being beheaded. His goodbye veers from loneliness to defiance and, finally, to joy.
There’s one just one problem - Paul didn’t write those words. In fact, virtually half the New Testament was written by impostors taking on the names of apostles like Paul. At least according to Bart D. Ehrman, a renowned biblical scholar, who makes the charges in his new book “Forged.”
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/13/half-of-new-testament-forged-bible-scholar-says/I'm hardly a theological expert, but having traveled a rather circuitous journey of the mind and spirit over the better part of a decade -- including years as basically a Deist bordering on agnostic -- I returned to a faith in Christ because of an emptiness, or sense of something missing during those years that I arrogantly believed the human rational mind could have dominion over everything including the metaphysical. I guess the point being that the technicalities or "mechanics" surrounding the central premise of the faith -- salvation through Christ's sacrifice -- seem to me, in contrast to that central premise, immaterial after my time spent dismissing it because of such technical minutiae, as if it were somehow to be treated in the same manner as a police report where the finest and most mundane details could unhinge an entire argument.
What are your thoughts on this claim?