Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (135 page)

Obviously a good deal of these attacks on Mary and Jesus could actually have been spoken by Jewish as well as pagan opponents; the story of Panthera is well known from Jewish sources.
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What is striking for our purposes here is that virtually every objection raised by Celsus’ Jew is answered by the narrative account of the Protevangelium, a correspondence too impressive to be written off as coincidental:

• Did Jesus invent the story of his virgin birth? The narrative shows that Mary really was a virgin. In fact, Joseph was given a test that revealed he
did not father Jesus, and Mary was given a virginity test to show that she conceived without ever having sex. They passed with flying colors, to the amazement of all who looked on. Moreover, the special nature of the birth was shown by the fact that time stood still when the savior appeared into the world, by the vision of glory at the cave that both Joseph and the midwife witnessed, and above all by the postpartum inspection of Mary by the doubting Salome. She was intact, even after giving birth.

• Was Jesus born in a remote Jewish village? On the contrary, he was born near Bethlehem, famous as the home of King David; moreover, his birth occurred there because Joseph and Mary had traveled on order of the Roman emperor Augustus (17.1). Furthermore, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem is specifically said to be a fulfillment of prophecy (21.2).

• Was Jesus’ mother a simple country woman? In fact, her father Joachim was extremely wealthy (1.1); he appears to have lived in Jerusalem, the capital city, in close proximity to the Temple of God (7.2); and he was customarily allowed to offer his gifts to God first, before all other Israelites, showing his extraordinarily high status. Moreover, Mary would be highly revered “among all generations” 6.2); and the “entire house of Israel loved her” (7.3). In fact, “all the generations of earth” would bless her (12.1).

• Did she earn her living by spinning? No, she did not need to earn a living. Early in life her needs were supplied by her fabulously wealthy father; then she was fed by an angel of God in the Temple (8.1); and then she was supported by a wealthy businessman, her espoused Joseph. When she did spin it was not to make money but in order to fulfill a sacred duty, as she was given the honor of spinning part of the curtain for the holy Temple of God (10.1–2).

• Did she live a life of poverty? Quite the contrary, her father was extremely rich and her husband, Joseph, was a well-to-do man of business.

• Was she a commoner (not of royal blood)? In fact, she came from a family that was inordinately wealthy and among the upper-tier aristocrats of the land. More than that, she enjoyed divine favor from the time of her birth through her upbringing in the Temple, where she was fed by an angel of God.

• Was she completely unknown, even to her neighbors? No, actually, “all Israel” knew her, even when she was still a child. As she grew, she became a favorite of the aristocratic priests who were at the center of the religion.

• Was her husband a lowly carpenter? On the contrary, he was a major building contractor (9.2).

• Was she expelled from her house and divorced by her husband when he discovered that she was pregnant? In fact, he was dissuaded by an angel of the Lord from abandoning her, and he “watched over her,” (14.2) taking her into his home.

• Was she (legally) convicted of committing adultery? No, she was tried on the charges of adultery and legally exonerated by a sacred test that showed she had never had sexual relations (chs. 15-16).

• Was the real father of the child a soldier named Panthera? On the contrary, she conceived by the Word of God, the living God, and the power of God (11.2–3).

• Was Jesus then an illegitimate child? In fact, he was the literal son of God, destined to be “a great king to Israel” (20.3) and who was himself worthy of worship.

• Did no one believe her story? On the contrary, everyone believed her, in no small measure because God revealed the truth in dreams and sacred tests to the satisfaction of all: Joseph, the Jewish priests, and the Jewish people.

It is true that there are other charges that Celsus levels against the infant Jesus—especially involving his “escape” to Egypt—that do not appear to be answered by the narrative of the Protevangelium. That may either be because of oversight, because the author simply chose not to respond to everything, because the ending of the narrative at some point became muddled or lost (when it shifts to the preservation of John from the wrath of Herod, rather than Jesus), or because it was not written directly to counter Celsus per se, but to counter the kinds of attacks that are now known from Celsus. In any event, it is quite clear from the point-by-point refutation that what we are dealing with here is a narrative that serves not only to entertain its readers with stories about Mary’s life and the coming into the world of the infant Jesus, and not only to provide an encomium on the mother of the Son of God. It also is an account that serves to stave off the attacks on both Mary and Jesus by opponents of the faith, both pagan and Jewish.

In view of the emphases of the Protevangelium, it can well be imagined that the author’s apologetic agenda, directed to outsiders, found its complement in certain polemical motives related to intramural conflicts. For example, in addition to defending the character of Jesus’ divine birth from attacks by opponents such as Celsus, the narrative could just as well function to debunk the views of adoptionists, such as the Ebionites from the Jewish side or the Theodotians from the gentile one, both of whom held that Jesus was naturally born of the union of Joseph and Mary and only acquired his divine sonship at his baptism.
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In the Protevangelium, on the contrary, Jesus was miraculously conceived and miraculously born the Son of God—God’s son from birth—born to one who was herself miraculously conceived, born, and raised to be a fit vessel for the Son of God.

One might imagine as well that the views of the Protevangelium may have been prompted by views expressed by Christian thinkers on the opposite end of the theological spectrum from the adoptionists, that is, docetists such as Marcion,
who denied that Jesus appeared as a human being into the world as an infant at all, but that he descended in the appearance of a grown man during the reign of Tiberius (Tertullian
Adv. Marc
. 4.7). Proto-orthodox writers accused Marcion of altering the Gospel of Luke to promote this view.
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The forger of the Protevangelium takes the opposite side and approaches the matter from the opposite tack. Rather than truncating Luke (as Marcion is alleged to have done), this author expands it, precisely back into the period where Marcion refused to go, accepting as authoritative very “Jewish” traditions about Jesus’ prehistory that Marcion, who opposed all things Jewish, would have found repugnant.
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It should not seem odd that a writing such as the Protevangelium could fulfill these various apologetic and polemical functions at one and the same time. Already Tertullian recognized that Marcion’s understanding of Christ coming into the world coincided with the non-Christian Jewish view, that he was not the Christ predicted by Scripture:

So, then, since heretical madness was claiming that that Christ had come who had never been previously mentioned, it followed that it had to contend that that Christ was not yet come who had from all time been foretold: and so it was compelled to form an alliance with Jewish error, and from it to build up an argument for itself. (
Adv. Marc
. 3.6)

Or as he says more pithily (he restates the argument repeatedly):

It is now possible for the heretic to learn, and the Jew as well, what he ought to know already, the reason for the Jew’s errors: for from the Jew the heretic has accepted guidance in this discussion, the blind borrowing from the blind, and has fallen into the same ditch. (3.7)

At the same time, an anti-docetic function of the text may appear less plausible since the physical nature of the boy Jesus is not emphasized at all, except to the extent that Mary was obviously physically pregnant before giving birth; hence the horror of Joseph and the Jewish priests.
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But when Jesus comes into the world he scarcely seems to be a real child who has experienced a real birth: he does not
appear to have come through the birth canal (hence the postpartum “proof”) and he is able already to walk (as he toddles over to his mother) and to perform miracles (curing Salome’s burning hand). If this was a forger who wanted to stress the reality of the fleshly appearance of Jesus, who appeared in the world as a real human being, born like other humans, he did a rather bad job of it.

It is more likely, then, that if polemics are involved at all, they are directed against an adoptionistic view of Christ. What seems relatively certain is that whether or not internecine conflicts affected the account, the apologetic need was foremost. This is a forgery that defends Jesus and his mother against the charges leveled against them by antagonistic opponents of the faith, allegedly written by someone uniquely qualified to know the truth of the matter.

In a very different apologetic vein are the martyrologies that begin to appear in the Christian literary tradition beginning in the early third century. I give that date in full cognizance of its problems. Normally the first instantiation of the genre is taken to be the Martrydom of Polycarp, usually dated to within a year of Polycarp’s execution, which is variously located—based on a number of complex factors—to the middle of the second century or a bit later (156
CE?
177
CE?
).
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But the date of the narrative correlates to the time of Polycarp’s death only if we take at face value the author’s claim to have been eyewitness at the event. That, however, is precisely the point that must be decided. Whether it is a contemporary account, or one written much later, the Martyrdom of Polycarp has clear apologetic features. In this it is like the other martyrologies that sprang up in its wake, which strive to show both that the Christians were innocent of any wrongdoing that might have warranted their harsh treatment and that in the midst of their suffering they received such divine succor as to reveal the ultimate truth of the religion for which they were willing to die.

The description of the arrest, trial, and martyrdom of Polycarp comes to us in the form of a letter allegedly written by a member of Polycarp’s home church of Smyrna who had, along with the others, observed the execution. It is addressed to the church of Philomelium: “The church of God that temporarily resides in Smyrna to the church of God that temporarily resides in Philomelium, and to all congregations of temporary residents everywhere, who belong to the holy and universal church (Pref.).”
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The account was not, of course, actually written by the entire church, but by someone belonging to it. We learn at the end of the letter that this was a person named Evaristus (20.2: “the one who is writing the letter”; this would make him either the actual author or the scribe taking dictation). Marcion (unrelated to the
heretic of the same name; 20.1) was the one who allegedly carried the letter and authenticated its contents
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The letter has not come down to us in a straight line of transmission, however. According to the concluding colophon, it was copied several times within solidly proto-orthodox avenues of production, but came to be lost until a preternatural vision revealed its existence to Pionius, himself a later martyr, whose own death is described (in a different text) in ways highly reminiscent of Polycarp’s, as we will see. Pionius’ copy of the letter, then, brought the account out of hibernation and made it more widely available:

Gaius transcribed these things from the papers of Irenaeus, a disciple of Polycarp; he also lived in the same city as Irenaeus. And I, Socrates, have written these things in Corinth from the copies made by Gaius. May Grace be with everyone. And I, Pionius, then sought these things and produced a copy from the one mentioned above, in accordance with a revelation of the blessed Polycarp, who showed it to me, as I will explain in what follows. And I gathered these papers together when they were nearly worn out by age…. (22.2–3)

It is clear even from a superficial reading of the “Martyrdom” that it was never meant to be a disinterested account of the death of Polycarp, but had from the outset literary pretensions and apologetic motives. The author engages in polemics against other groups, including the Jews who are especially eager to participate in the killing of the Christian witness, and, from a completely other sphere, the voluntary martyrs (Montanists?) who, contrary to the Gospel (and contrary to Polycarp), needlessly offer themselves up as sacrifices to the cause. Yet more germane for our purposes, the account goes out of its way to show that Polycarp’s death was “in conformity with the Gospel”; on page after page the events mirror episodes known from the canonical accounts of Jesus’ passion. In addition, the author stresses not only that true martyrs were doing the will of God, but that as a reward God gave them strength to endure their inhumane torments with a fortitude that could only be ascribed to divine intervention (e.g., 2.2–4). One result was the amazement of the crowds who looked on, who realized that the Christians were not normal humans (2.2–4, 3.2, 16.1). In other words, this work is driven by an apologetic impulse to defend the divine character of this persecuted religion.