What Early Christian Text Wasn't Altered by Later Standards of Orthodoxy

A kind of stress-test on the category “forgery.” Starting from the observation that virtually every corner of the canon shows signs of revision or ideological shaping, it asks whether any biblical or early Christian text can honestly be called untouched. The Pentateuch is treated as a paradigm: the short, simple “do not lust” commandment reflected in Philo, Mark, and Clement is contrasted with the expanded Decalogue; Deuteronomy is cast as a secondary “second law” composed to suppress an earlier, more dualistic Sinai narrative in which one deity is seen on the mountain and another heard from heaven, a configuration the Samaritan Pentateuch and some Qumran readings allegedly preserve more clearly than the later Jewish text. On that view, Deuteronomy becomes the prototype of monotheizing forgery, and Joshua an even more brazen construction created to supply the story the Pentateuch pointedly lacks.

From there the same suspicion is extended forward: the four canonical gospels, Paul’s letters, Acts, Revelation, and major patristic writings are all described as forged, rewritten, or tendentiously expanded; canonical texts are not a pristine deposit but the winning side’s dossier, curated for polemical usefulness much as post-Pentateuchal Jewish literature elevates Jerusalem where Moses is silent. When someone suggests Luke–Acts as a rare non-forged case—a commissioned narrative for Theophilus that openly acknowledges earlier sources—this is rejected on the grounds that Luke is formally anonymous, its dedication no more transparent than other Christian prefaces, and Acts in particular reads like a harmonizing project that retrofits Paul into concord with Jerusalem in order to blunt Marcionite appeals to Paul’s distinctiveness. The upshot is not a carefully sorted list of “safe” and “unsafe” writings but a bleak question: if redaction, patching, and ideological repackaging are everywhere, what would a non-forged text even look like?

An older voice already sensed both the reality of tampering and the difficulty of total skepticism. Origen, reflecting on corrupt readings, writes that “the devil plots against the divine Scriptures, but we must not therefore rashly charge the text with error, as Marcion did, cutting away from the Gospel what he thought had been added” (Commentary on Psalm 77). That tension—between acknowledging real interpolation and refusing to declare the whole archive a write-off—is exactly where this discussion lives, pressing whether our modern talk of “forgery” clarifies that tension or just becomes another weapon in the same old confessional wars.