Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (12 page)

As is well known, the problems posed by homonymity were recognized by critics in the early Christian tradition as well. The best-known instance involved the third-century Dionysius of Alexandria, who argued that the book of Revelation was not written by the disciple John the son of Zebedee, but by some other John:

That he was called John, and that this work is John’s, I shall therefore not deny, for I agree that it is from the pen of a holy and inspired writer. But I am not prepared to admit that he was the apostle, the son of Zebedee and brother of James, who wrote the gospel entitled According to John and the general epistles. On the character of each, on the linguistic style, and on the general tone, as it is called, of Revelation, I base my opinion that the author was not the same. (Quoted in Eusebius,
H.E
. 7.25)
⁴⁸

Among other books in question were 2 and 3 John, which Jerome suggested may have been written by John the Presbyter rather than John the son of Zebedee (
Vir. ill
. 9); and the Shepherd, attributed to Hermas, but to which Hermas? Origen (
Romans Commentary
10.31) and possibly Eusebius (
H.E
. 3.3) maintained that it was the Hermas mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:14, putting the composition
of the book back into apostolic times by a companion of the apostles, whereas the Muratorian Fragment insists that Hermas was the brother of the second-century bishop of Rome, Pius, and that it had been written “recently, in our own times.” This was the view, of course, that eventually won out. Analogously, but somewhat later, the Adamantius who wrote De recta in deum fide was sometimes understood, wrongly, to be Origen; Rufinus reworked the dialogue by altering the places that showed it was written after Origen’s day in order to use it to vindicate Origen’s orthodoxy.
⁴⁹

There are far fewer anonymous writings from antiquity, and from Christian antiquity, than of other kinds of writing (orthonymous, falsely ascribed, forged). The reason is quite simple: anonymous works were almost always ascribed, usually incorrectly. This is due to what Wilamowitz famously described as a
horror vacui
. Speyer goes further in speculating that when libraries were collecting works, authors were assigned to them, with the most famous representatives of each genre then being ascribed works actually written by (anonymous) others: divine hymns were attributed to Homer, fables to Aesop, medical treatises to Hippocrates, and so on.
⁵⁰

Ancient critics sometimes discussed anonymity and its reasons, as when Clement of Alexandria claimed that the apostle Paul wrote the letter to the Hebrews anonymously because he realized that he was not much appreciated by the Jewish people to whom it was addressed: “In writing to Hebrews already prejudiced against him and suspicious of him, he was far too sensible to put them off at the start by naming himself” (Eusebius
H.E
. 6.14).

It is a genuine question as to why so many of the earliest Christian writings were produced anonymously (before being attributed). Michael Wolter argues that all these anonymata are principally concerned with differentiating their views, and the Christians who held them, from Jews and their religion. The use of anonymity, in his view, allowed the authors to claim implicitly that Jesus Christ himself was the authority behind their positions. Unfortunately, Wolter does not look at all the evidence, even within the New Testament, his area of principal concern. He leaves 2 and 3 John out of consideration, for some reason, and these are certainly not chiefly concerned with the relationship of the Christian gospel to Judaism. Moreover, for other anonymous books of the New Testament, Judaism is only one of a number of concerns at best (it is a matter of concern for Mark, but is it the
principal
reason the Gospel was written?), and for others it is not a concern at all (1 John). It might be
added that if one is seeking a historical explanation for the phenomenon, it will not do to restrict oneself to canonical writings: one also needs to deal with such works as the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, 2 Clement, and so on.

There may in fact have been a variety of reasons for Christian authors to remain anonymous. Wolter may be right that the choice was sometimes based on a desire to stress the authority of Christ himself, although that is not obvious from reading the texts. Possibly in some cases (2 and 3 John; the Didache) an author did not identify himself simply because he was already well known to the closely knit community to which he wrote. Or possibly, in the case of the Gospels, there was a generic consideration: like the histories of the people of God in the Jewish Scriptures (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings), the stories of God’s work among his people, Israel, are told anonymously. The Gospels, in this view, portray Jesus as a continuation of God’s historical activities.

In any event, all of New Testament anonymata and almost all other anonymous writings of the early Christian centuries came to be attributed eventually (see below). An exception such as the Letter to Diognetus can be explained on the ground that it was so little known. This early apology, for example, is never quoted in any ancient source. Books that circulated for a long time anonymously almost always were attributed. This is true, for example, of the anonymous source that Eusebius quotes to malign the Roman adoptionists in his
Ecclesiastical History
5.28. Theodoret later named the book the Little Labyrinth and attributed it, wrongly, to Origen. Modern scholars have proved no more successful, sometimes, since Lightfoot, wrongly assigning it to Hippolytus.
⁵¹
With an anonymous book like the Didache, it may be that the attribution of the teaching to the disciples was mistakenly taken to be a claim about authorship.

As we will see more fully in the next chapter, ancient Greek and Roman critics were deeply concerned over the attributions of writings. As far back as the fifth century
BCE
, Herodotus expressed his doubts concerning the attribution of the Cyprian poems and the Cyclic poem “The Heroes’ Sons” to Homer, based on their material discrepancies with the Homeric epics themselves (2.117; 4.32). Centuries later, a fellow Halicarnassan, Dionysius, indicated that works attributed to Cadmus of Miletus, Aristaeus of Proconnesus, and other historians like them were not “universally accepted as genuine” (
On Thucydides
. 23). Quite often attributions were simply rejected off the cuff, showing that criticism was commonplace. Thus, for example, in talking about lewd songs to be publicly performed, Athenaeus quotes a passage from the work called the “Beggars,” and admits that the common attribution of the work is probably wrong:
“Whoever wrote
Beggars
, generally attributed to Chionides, mentions a certain Gnesippus, playful writer of the lascivious muse …” (
Banqueters
14:638d).
⁵²

As suggested earlier, attributions were sometimes simply made as a best guess or by simple mistake. This is probably the case for the attribution of the
Liber antiquitatum biblicarum
to Philo and the
Adversus omnes haereses
to Tertullian. The anonymous treatises
Cohortatio ad Graecos, De monarchia
, and
Oratio ad Graecos
sounded to some readers, as early as Eusebius (for at least the first two; he does not mention the
Oratio
) very much like Justin, and so they were attributed to him and were passed down in the manuscript tradition as his—wrongly, as is now known.
⁵³
The same is true of later works that recorded the dialogues of Jerome and Augustine; they are sometimes attributed to these writers themselves, apparently on the ground that they were the principal speakers, even though they patently were not the authors.
⁵⁴
Hundreds of sermons came to be attributed to Chrysostom, most of them wrongly.

In other instances attributions were not at all innocent. Whoever first thought of assigning the five books of the Torah to Moses did not do so out of purely antiquarian interests. On the Christian side, much the same can be said of the four books of the Gospels. Contrary to the extravagant claims of Martin Hengel, there is no reason to doubt that these books circulated for decades anonymously, before being attributed.
⁵⁵
It is no accident that when these four books in particular—the ones in widest usage in the proto-orthodox communities—were assigned, it was to two of the disciples and two companions of the apostles. The attributions to Mark and Luke should cause no surprise. As early as Irenaeus and Tertullian we can see how the proto-orthodox logic worked: Mark gave Peter’s version of the story (cf. Papias) and Luke gave Paul’s. As Tertullian puts it: “that which Mark produced is stated to be Peter’s, whose interpreter Mark was. Luke’s narrative also they usually attribute to Paul. It is permissible for the works which disciples published to be regarded as belonging to their masters” (
Adv. Marc
. 4.5.3–4).
⁵⁶
This
is not to be misinterpreted—as it often is—to mean that Tertullian thought disciples could publish writings in the names of their teachers; Mark and Luke, in his opinion, published their works in their own names. But their views represent the views of their teachers. Thus the two greatest apostles of the church stand behind the Gospel traditions of these books.

And so the fourfold Gospel was based on the testimony of two personal disciples of Jesus and of his two principal apostles. Why were attributions made at all, after the books had originally circulated anonymously? The issues were complex, but can be boiled down to matters of differentiation (which Gospel is this?) and authority (is it based on a credible source?).

Other attributions as well may have been made for ulterior purposes. The anonymous letter that was early on assigned to Barnabas represents a view of Judaism and the Jewish Law that stands very much at odds with heterodox perspectives floated about by the likes of Marcion and various groups of Gnostics in the midsecond century. The book may be vitriolic in its opposition to Jews and Judaism, but it is not harsh toward the Old Testament. Quite the contrary, the Old Testament is presented as a distinctively Christian book, misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misappropriated by the Jews. It is, in fact, for the anonymous author, Christian Scripture. This became the proto-orthodox position in opposition to heterodox alternatives, which claimed that the Old Testament was not inspired by the one true, or ultimate, God. When Christians such as Clement of Alexandria falsely claimed that the anonymous letter was in fact written by Barnabas, they ascribed to it a significant authority. But not just any authority. Since Barnabas was otherwise so closely associated with Paul, the chief apostle of Marcion and much revered in some Gnostic circles, Paul himself was, by the indirection provided by the ascription, placed on the side of the proto-orthodox in the struggle to define the Christian understanding of the Old Testament.

It is sometimes stated that plagiarism was either nonexistent or nonproblematic in Greek and Roman antiquity. As a prominent publication of the Jesus Seminar tells us: “The concept of plagiarism was unknown in the ancient world.”
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In point of fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Plagiarism was known, discussed, and condemned in ancient sources. As one of the best studies of the phenomenon, by Bernard Legras, summarizes: “In spite of the reticence of our sources and assuming that our texts are indeed admissible, we have been able to establish that plagiarism and forgery of literary works were considered offenses and punished.”
⁵⁸
Legras does go
on to qualify his statement: plagiarism and forgery were under legal sanction only in cases that appear to have affected the concerns of the state. There is no evidence of any proprietary laws, at any time or place, involving the concern to keep writings in general intact and safe from borrowing, or “stealing” as the ancients called it.

The phenomenon is in any event not unknown to our sources, as we have already seen in the case of Heraclides Ponticus, who, according to Diogenes Laertius, not only published extensively works of his own but also occasionally published works of others as if he had written them: “Chameleon complains that Heraclides’s treatise on the works of Homer and Hesiod was plagiarized
from his own.”
⁵⁹
This was plagiarism by a man who, strikingly, wrote two separate treatises
Or consider his Athenian predecessor Aeschines, who stole dialogues of Socrates after the great man’s death and was calumniated for it on more than one occasion, especially by Menedemus of Eretria, who claimed that “most of the dialogues which Aeschines passed off as his own were really dialogues of Socrates obtained by him from [Socrates’s wife] Xanthippe. Moreover Aeschines made use (fraudulently:
) of the
Little Cyrus
, the
Lesser Heracles
, and the
Alcibiades
of Antisthenes as well as dialogues by other authors” (Diogenes Laertius,
Lives
, 2.60).