Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (131 page)

Moreover—the point I stressed earlier—even though the author’s Job Commentary comes out strongly for a neo-Arian position that appears close to those taken by an Aetius or Eunomius, this does not mean that this set of writings will as well. We know nothing about the life story of Julian of Antioch, whether he remained consistent in his Trinitarian views with the shifting of the doctrinal tides over the years, or whether he wrote these two works in close proximity to one another. It is hard to believe that a theologian such as Julian, who insisted on the absolute supremacy of God the Father, and the subordination of the Son, would be willing to say that the two were
. At the same time, that is the claim of Pseudo-Ignatius himself, even though he too stresses the superiority of the only unbegotten God and the subordination of his only begotten Son.

In any event, the counter arguments of Lightfoot that the author could as well be seen as a Nicene Christian fail to convince.
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However one might decide to label the author positively, a number of his comments indeed appear to be coded statements of polemic, directed against a specific target. This target does not need to be identified with any person that we otherwise have knowledge of, any more than the author Julian need be someone mentioned in our other surviving records. What is reasonably clear is that a number of the author’s nuanced statements show that he is combating a hyper-monotheistic, virulently anti-Arian, strict miahypostatic view such as that embraced by, and often accorded
to, Marcellus of Ancyra (whether Marcellus himself was the actual target or not). This view was commonly labeled Sabellian by its enemies, because of its insistence that there was only one hypostasis, God the Father, and that only the Word (not the Son) was preexistent with the Father.

According to Marcellus, the Word emerged from the Father for the purpose of creation and later, then, became flesh at the incarnation. It was when it took on flesh that the Word became the Son; indeed none of the traditional Christological titles, apart from Word, apply to the Preincarnate. At the end of all things, when the time is fulfilled, the Word will return into the Father, at which point the kingdom of the Christ will come to an end.
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The opponent of these views—Julian of Antioch, forger of the Pseudo-Ignatian letters—was some kind of “Arian,”
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who is most clearly seen in what he attacks, either explicitly or with subtlety. It is hard to know why he does not take the hard neo-Arian views expressed in the Job Commentary. Is it because he is pretending to be Ignatius? Because his views are slightly different at this point of his life and authorship? Because he is more intent on opposing an aberrant view than setting forth the niceties of his own? In any event, his “Eusebian”-type opposition to a Marcellian miahypostatic view is relatively pronounced throughout this forged response in the name of Ignatius.
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And so, for example, Antiochenes 1 attacks those who “deny Christ under pretense of maintaining the unity of God”—the latter being one of the ultimate concerns of miahypostatic views. Philippians 4 insists that not only is there one God the Father, there is also one Son, God the Word. Repeatedly, throughout Julian, the forger’s, writings, Christ is portrayed as a separate being from God. Christ, moreover, is the “Son” (not just the Word) “before the ages” (Antioch. 14); Christ (not just the Word) is begotten by the Father before the ages (Magn. 11); Christ is the Son of God before time (Polyc. 3). Magnesians 6 strongly asserts an anti-Marcellian position: Jesus Christ was begotten before the ages and was not only God the Word but the only begotten Son, and he “remains the same forever” and “of his kingdom there will be no end”—the most strident and frequent position taken by opponents against Marcellus.

An even more direct assault on Marcellus is found in the edited version of Magnesians 8, as long ago recognized by Lightfoot. The authentic letter spoke of “Jesus Christ His Son, who is his word proceeding from silence.”
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The interpolator significantly altered the passage with important theological result, so that now it reads,

through Jesus Christ his Son, who is his Word, not a literal utterance but having a real existence; for he is not a speaking of an articulate utterance [meaning that he is not just words that can be aurally sensed] but is a being begotten of divine power [that is, he has a real existence as an ousia, but is begotten as such by God].
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Lightfoot argues that this statement opposed the Marcellian view that Christ did not have a separate ousia from the Father but was an energy emitted by the Father for the purposes of creation and redemption, who then was absorbed back into the Father when these tasks were completed.
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Moreover, it stresses, contrary to Marcellus, that the Preincarnate was not Word in name only, a Word that was inside the Father until spoken and not the Son (until the incarnation).
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For this author not only is the divine Christ a distinctive being, begotten before the ages, he is subordinate to God, contrary to the views of Marcellus and others more or less in the Athanasian camp or to the left of it. Hence the stress we have seen already: Christ does the will of the Father, he does nothing apart from the Father (Magn. 7); he is subject to the Father, dependent on the Father, obedient to the Father (Eph. 5; Philad. 4; Smyrn. 7, 9). This is a subordinationist Christology. It makes sense, then, that the author portrays his opponent(s) in contrary, Sabellian terms. Thus, as we have seen Satan (the author of the heresy held by the opponent) is attacked in Philippians 7 for maintaining that Christ himself is God over all. So too Marcellus and his followers were often accused of being Sabellian, since they were so miahypostatic that they (seemed to have) denied the Son a separate existence. It bears noting that in his
De ecclesiastica theologia
Eusebius accused Marcellus of being Sabellian on forty occasions; moreover, a number of later anti-miahypostatic tractates—including Pseudo-Athanasius’
Fourth Oration against the Arians
and Basil of Caesarea’s
Contra Sabellianos et Arium et Anomoeos
—attacked Marcellus and his followers under the thinly disguised figure of
Sabellius.
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Finally, it should be noted that Eusebius explicitly maligned Marcellus for his view that Christ had a specifically human soul (
De eccl. theol
. 1.20.43, 45); the author of the Pseudo-Ignatians is emphatic that the incarnate Christ had a human body and the divine Logos in the place of a human soul, a view that has been wrongly read as Apollinarian, but is in any event clearly anti-Marcellian.
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It would not be prudent to claim to have ascertained the precise theological position of the author of the Pseudo-Ignatian corpus, when so many stalwarts in the field have failed. What is relatively clear is that the author Julian has here used the proto-orthodox martyr-bishop Ignatius to oppose an Über-Nicene view such as found in Marcellus and those like him, who stressed the complete unity of God at the expense (it was thought) of the separate existence of the Son. This miahypo-static position is roundly attacked in the polemics of the corpus through its emphasis on the preexistence of the Son (not just the Word), his separate existence from God, and especially his subordination to God. All of this could simply be called Origenist, but that does not get us very far, as so many theological views of the fourth century could trace their lineage—had they wanted to do so—to the great Alexandrian.

Even though Julian himself appears to have been neo-Arian in his Commentary on Job, the views in the Ignatian forgeries (and interpolations) are more muted, and ambiguities remain. When the author stresses that there is only one God, not two or three (Philip. 2), that may simply be a defense against the charge of ditheism or tritheism, but it could also be an attack on those who, like Origen, had no qualms about calling Christ a “second God”—a view acceptable as well to a range of Arians. The “Eusebian” dyohypostatic view stressed that although there were two hypostases, they were not equal; Eusebius, in fact, makes the emphatic declaration that
(
De eccl. theol
. 2.7.3). That seems difficult to reconcile with the claim of Pseudo-Ignatius that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are, precisely,
(Philip. 2). Are the three
but not
Moreover, when the author claims that the opponents “alienate Christ from the Father” (Trall. 6) is that an attack on neo-Arians? And does the claim that Christ is “unchangeable in nature” (Philip. 5) stand counter to a neo-Arian view, as Perler maintains?
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