Critical Bible scholars claim that several NT documents (as well as OT documents) are forgeries. Bart Ehrman wrote a book on the subject. There's nothing original about Ehrman's allegation, but he's an influential popularizer for the gullible masses. In the computer age, it's tempting to develop "rigorous, "scientific" methods to authenticate or impugn traditional authorship. One example is stylometric analysis. And this has been extended to forensics:
C. S. Lewis editor and trustee Walter Hooper published an allegedly unpublished story by Lewis: The Dark Tower. Kathryn Lindskoog and A. Q. Morton applied stylometric analysis to The Dark Tower, concluding that it was a forgery, and Hooper was the suspected forger:
With the 1994 release of the movie Shadowlands, Lindskoog reissued her book as Light in the Shadowlands, adding two new chapters. In this edition, she reported on a new study by the Rev. A. Q. Morton, which employed cusum (cumulative sum) statistical analysis of the first 23 sentences of chapter one of The Dark Tower, the first 24 sentences of chapter four, and the first 25 sentences of chapter seven, comparing them with similar passages from Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength. This type of style analysis has been used to prove that Shakespeare did not write his plays, that Paul did not write some epistles attributed to him, and that Jesus did not speak some sayings attributed to him. It assumes that a person’s use of language remains constant over one’s lifetime and in all situations. Morton concluded that Lewis could not have written chapters one and four, but that he did write chapter seven. Therefore, The Dark Tower was "a composite work." Harry Lee Poe, "Shedding Light on The Dark Tower: A C.S. Lewis mystery is solved." Christianity Today 51 (Feb 2, 2007), 1-3.
However, that struck a barrier reef when Alastair Fowler, professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, published an article detailing his experience as a doctoral student of Lewis:
Not that he always wrote without difficulty; sometimes he had to set a project aside for a long period. He showed me several unfinished or abandoned pieces (his notion of supervision included exchanging work in progress); these included “After Ten Years,” The Dark Tower, and Till We Have Faces. Another fragment, a time‑travel story, had been aborted after only a few pages. Getting to the “other” world was a particular problem, he said; he had given up several stories at that stage. His unfamiliarity with scientific discourse may have played a part in this. The vehicles of transition in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, although suggestive in other ways, are hardly plausible as scientific apparatus. In the Narnia stories Lewis turned to magical means of entry: teleportation rings from E. Nesbit and Tolkien, or else a terribly strange wardrobe. Alastair Fowler, "C. S. Lewis: Supervisor." Yale Review, 91/4 (October 2003), 64–80.
As he went on to say in the CT article:
“Lewis certainly talked about TDT [The Dark Tower],” Fowler wrote to me. “He said he had been unable to carry it further. He didn’t say when he had written the fragment. I got the impression that tdt had been meant as a sequel, but I have no idea at what stage in the development of the published trilogy.” Harry Lee Poe, "Shedding Light on The Dark Tower: A C.S. Lewis mystery is solved." Christianity Today 51 (Feb 2, 2007), 1-3.
Apparently, Lewis was experimenting with plots and characters for The Space Trilogy. He dropped The Dark Tower because it was a blind alley.
If it hadn't been for the incidental anecdotes of his doctoral student, the authenticity of The Dark Tower might still be suspect. It's a fluke that we have that corroboration. And that's a cautionary tale for confident allegations that the NT contains forgeries–even forgeries "proven" by "scientific" analysis.
I'm curious how a method like that can be called scientific? How was it tested?
ReplyDeleteIt has a scientific facade because it employs scientific analysis, but the scientific rigor is illusory.
DeleteThe Dark Tower is very Lewisian. It reads exactly like a Lewisian failure! I'm actually serious about this. Even its faults are Lewisian--the sexual aspects, for example, which he tries to be delicate about but feels he can't quite be delicate about, the dark hints of sado-masochism, the rather trite misogyny. One can tell that it was the kind of thing Lewis knew wasn't working, but it's definitely *by* Lewis.
ReplyDeleteJames White riffed on this humorously a while back - said he believes in a "truncated Ehrmanian Canon" because Ehrman's popular works use a different style and vocabulary from his scholarly work, and thus are clearly the product of "Pseudo-Ehrmanius."
ReplyDeleteI became a Christian thirteen years ago, and when I read stuff I wrote back then, especially personal correspondence, it doesn’t sound like me at all. The language and structure is so different from how I write now that if I didn’t remember writing them I’d think they were the work of an idiot!
ReplyDelete