Read Online Forged by Bart D. Ehrman - Free Book Online

mean, “Is this something that really happened?” If the answer is yes, then we somehow feel assured and comforted that the events took place, and so, as a story, it is “truer” than one that is just made up. But even then we never think that absolutely everything found in the movie—all of the characters, the dialogue, the individual scenes, and so on—is absolutely and completely the way it “really” happened. We allow for a kind of poetic license of distortion, even when acknowledging that the story is somehow “true.”
    One could easily make the case that a movie can be true in a deeper sense even if it is about something that never happened. This has been my view for many years, and it used to drive my kids crazy when they were young. We’d be watching a movie, and they’d say, “Dad, is this a true story?” And I’d almost always say yes. But then they’d remember that I tend to have a different view of things, andthey’d ask the follow-up question, “No, Dad, I mean did this really happen?” I’d say no, and they’d continue to be puzzled.
    As some of my readers may be. How can a story be “true” if it didn’t happen? In point of fact, there are all sorts of true stories that didn’t happen, as everyone will admit, I think, if they think about it a bit. When I try to illustrate this with my students, I usually rehearse for them the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.
    True Stories That Didn’t Happen
    E VERY GRADE-SCHOOL KID IN the country knows the cherry tree story. As a young boy, George Washington, for unknown reasons, took a hatchet to his father’s cherry tree. When his father came home, he saw the tree and asked, “Who chopped down my cherry tree?” Young George answered, “I cannot tell a lie. I did it.” The way the story is normally told, we don’t find out what happened afterwards—was young George taken out to the woodshed? The story ends with George’s one-liner. 1
    We know that this story never happened, because the person who invented the tale later admitted to having done so. He was a Christian minister named Mason Locke Weems, usually known as Parson Weems. As a later biographer of Washington, Parson Weems confessed that he made up the story, even though he once had claimed that he received it from a credible eyewitness (a nice paradox: he “told a lie” in this story about not lying).
    Here, then, is a story that we know is nonhistorical. But we still tell it to our children. Why? Not because we are trying to teach them about the facts of colonial history, but because we think the story conveys a “truth” that we want our children to learn. The truth claims of the story actually work on several levels. On one level the story is a good piece of political propaganda for the United States. Who was George Washington? He was the father of our nation. What kind of person was he? He was an honest man, a man who would never tella lie. Really? How honest was he? Well, one day when he was a kid…The conclusion is clear. This country is founded on honesty. This country is honest. This country cannot tell a lie. Or so the story goes.
    But the story of George Washington and the cherry tree functions on another level as well, and this is probably why most parents are glad their kids learn it. This is a story about personal morality and responsibility. I told the story to my kids because I wanted them to be like young George. Even if they did something wrong, I wanted them to come clean and tell the truth about it. It is better to be truthful and face the consequences than to live a life of dishonesty. It is better not to tell a lie.
    My point is that fiction, even historical fiction, can in some sense convey “truth” even if it is something that “didn’t happen.” Truth is more than simply correct information.
    That does not