Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (137 page)

And what he is writing is a kind of historical legend. The legendary character of the account is seen in numerous details, including the remarkable “coincidences” that make Polycarp’s trial and death so much like that of Jesus: Polycarp does not turn himself in but waits to be betrayed (1.2); he knows about his coming execution in advance and predicts it to his followers (5.2); he prays intensely before his arrest (7.1–3); he asks that God’s will be done (7.1); the official in charge of
his arrest is named Herod (6.2); Polycarp rides into town on a donkey (8.1); and so on. These are literary touches, not historical recollections. So too other parts of the story, including the remarkable account of Germanicus in
chapter 3
, who evidently has a wild beast standing meekly by, waiting for his suicidal impulse. To leave this life, he drags the beast-in-waiting onto himself, forcing it to kill him. It is hard indeed to know how we are supposed to imagine this actually worked.

And then there is Quintus, the voluntary martyr turned coward. As Moss has argued, the Quintus episode creates enormous problems for the traditional dating of the text, seen simply from a traditio-historical perspective. If the account dates, say, from 155–167 (as we have seen, scholars differ), then we have the unparalleled situation that this text is the earliest to recognize the category of “martyr” at all; at the same time it is also the first to refer to voluntary martyrs; and yet further, it is the first to condemn the practice of voluntary martyrdom. As Moss notes: “it is remarkable to suppose that the first text to construct an ideology of martyrdom accurately anticipates later ‘enthusiasm’ for an as-yet-undefined practice.”
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Problematic for entirely other reasons is the account of what happens in the aftermath of Polycarp’s death. The Jews, moved by the devil, are intent not to allow the Christians to collect Polycarp’s body “even though many were desiring to do so and to have a share in his holy flesh” (ch. 17). And so, the centurion ordered the body to be burned. That did not hinder the Christians’ enthusiasm for Polycarp’s material remains, however: “And so, afterwards, we removed his bones, which were more valuable than expensive gems and more precious than gold, and put them in a suitable place.” It is there that the author anticipates celebrating, with his fellow believers, the “birthday of his martyrdom.”

One might be able to imagine some kind of “cult of the martyr” already at the time of Polycarp’s death, as Saxer and others have argued.
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But where do we observe anything like this adoration of the martyr’s relics? Outside of this text, we do not find such a thing, as Moss has noted, until the third-century Acts of Thomas (dated ca. 230
CE).
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Polycarp’s body is not simply treated here with respect and given a decent burial. His bones are considered more precious than gems and gold and are stored where worship takes place. Yet “the practice of collecting and venerating the bodies of the martyrs is unparalleled in second-century Christian literature.”
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The author, in fact, has to defend the practice by claiming that the adoration of the remains of the martyr would never replace the worship of Christ (17.2). This defense shows that the practice was far enough advanced
as to be open to attack. In other words, it came at a time when adoration of relics was a known and criticized phenomenon.

Equally telling is one other portion of the text meant to ensure its authenticity, but which, when examined critically, has precisely the opposite effect. The colophon, as cited already above, provides a kind of history of transmission of the text, in which Irenaeus had a copy of the book among his papers, which was then copied by Gaius, whose work was copied by Socrates; then, many years later, when the copy of Socrates was old and falling to ruin, it was revitalized by Pionius, who received a revelation from the martyred Polycarp himself, presumably telling him where to find the manuscript. The general implausibilities of the case—involving visions of a long-dead Polycarp and the miraculous recovery of his story—speak against anything like historicity. The narrative functions, in fact, like the eyewitness reports generally in this account, to make believable that which, on the surface, defies belief. If this closing account were historical, it would be passing strange that Irenaeus himself, the ultimate authority cited, never mentions either the letter of Polycarp or the martyrdom. It cannot be objected that the colophon was added only later after the original text had long been in circulation; we have no manuscripts that lack it, but only an extended form in the Moscow manuscript that heightens its original emphases. The idea of a story of discovery is by now familiar to us. It functions here as it does in other places, such as the Apocalypse of Paul, to explain why the account has now surfaced in the middle to late third century (after the days of Pionius) when it was previously unknown to interested Christian readers.

From all these historical problems, it should be clear that the Martyrdom of Polycarp does not go back to an eyewitness account written within a year of the event, say 157 or 166
CE.
It was written at least some fifty years later. It was not really produced by Evaristus, carried and authenticated by Marcion, on behalf of the Christians of Smyrna who, along with the two named figures, actually saw these things take place. It is a legendary account written simply as if by eyewitnesses. And so it is a forgery. The events it narrates had been in oral circulation down to the time of the author, which is no doubt why there are remnants of historical reminiscences that do indeed make sense in a second-century setting.
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The story was not made up whole cloth. But it was also not a firsthand account. Its attempts to validate its miraculous claims are simply part of the forgery; by claiming to have been there, the author can establish the truth claims of his message.

It should be reemphasized that the author is interested in other forms of polemic as well. He is most emphatically opposed to voluntary martyrdom that the orthodox later came to associate—rightly or wrongly is beside the point, for our purposes—with the Montanist movement (
ch. 4
). Moreover, it is the Jews who are said to be the most eager (and accustomed) to gather the firewood to burn the Christians (13.1); and they are key in the refusal to provide access to the corpse
once the deed is done (17.2). They are the enemy, more than the governor who is driven by the mobs to condemn Polycarp. Here again, then, the apologetic impulses of the text accompany its opposition to the Jews. Its major contention, however, is that God was on the side of Polycarp as he was on the side of the other martyrs who preceded him in dying a death “in conformity with the Gospel.” At the end of the day, this is apologia in martyrological guise, produced as an eyewitness testimony by a forger who wanted his readers to know that they could rest assured in the factual accuracy of his legendary report.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp is not the only martyrology to come down to us from the early church that is written as a first-person narrative in order to authenticate the accuracy of its tales. There are, of course, a large number of martyr texts. Those with the greatest (though often slight) claims to “reliability” have been collected in the handy edition by Mursurillo.
⁵⁰
More than anyone else, Gary Bisbee has tried to show how one can establish what is historical in them.
⁵¹
There are no grounds, however, for seeing any of them as thoroughly accurate representatives of what actually happened. Most of the accounts are simply third-person narratives; some of them, though, do contain first-person passages that function to “guarantee” the accuracy of the report. With the exception of the well-known first example that we will consider, the first-person narrators are not named, however, and so in these instances we are dealing with non-pseudepigraphic forgeries.
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Augustine was the first to express doubts about the authorship of the “diary” kept by Perpetua prior to her martyrdom in 203
CE
. When speaking of Perpetua’s
brother Dinocrates, Augustine says in passing “… nor does the saint herself, or whoever it was who wrote the account…”
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Whereas many scholars continue to think the diary an authentic production of Perpetua herself,
⁵⁴
others have harbored considerable doubt. A particularly interesting case has been made by Thomas Heffernan, who focuses on how the verb tenses and sequences work in the piece.
⁵⁵
Although Heffernan acknowledges that the genres of “diary” and “autobiography” were not set in stone in antiquity, they do evidence a difference in reference to time. Autobiography “provides attempts to a coherent interpretation of the past from a future perspective.”
⁵⁶
A diary, on the other hand, gives accounts of the past as fragments of experience as perceived from the present. Diaries, then, do not provide unified coherence between past events; they tend to be episodic and to lack any kind of teleology. An autobiography, in contrast, reconstitutes the self as an agent in an attempt to impose meaning on events.

For Heffernan, the Passio Perpetua is a kind of “hybrid of these two types.” But what is most striking is that the verb tenses fit an autobiographical mode, in which the past connections are used to provide temporal coherence. Terms such as “after a few days,” or “many days,” or “a few hours later” indicate the passage of time and so provide a kind of narrative sequence. The reason this matters: “Such periodicity is not typical of a narrative written diurnally, in snatches when the hideous oppression of the prison abated; rather it suggests a composition written sometime after the events have transpired.”
⁵⁷

If Heffernan is right, then what we have in the Diary of Perpetua is not a diary, but a later author—claiming to be Perpetua—writing in autobiographical mode, pretending to write a diary. In other words, the “diary” would be a forgery, a conclusion reached by other scholars on yet other grounds.
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Like the other martyrological texts, it functions apologetically in showing that, contrary to appearances, God is at work in the lives and sufferings of the martyrs, empowering them in the
face of horrible opposition and torment, and using them as a witness to the truth of the gospel.

Probably written sometime around 300
CE
the Martyrdom of Pionius “is the only substantial martyrdom that we possess which pretends to date from the period of the Decian persecution.”
⁵⁹
The opening of the account is a bit odd, in that it indicates that the bulk of the writing—which is narrated almost entirely in the third person—is a book by Pionius about himself (even though for the most part it does not employ the first person):

More fitting is it that we should remember the martyr Pionius seeing that this apostolic man, being one of us, kept many from straying while he dwelt in the world, and when he was finally called to the Lord and bore witness, he left us this writing for our instruction that we might have it even to this day as a memorial of his teaching. (1.2)
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The account does not move into the first person until near the end, and then it is clearly not Pionius speaking, as the author claims to have witnessed the miracles that transpired at the martyr’s death. The entire account, however, bears the marks of literary license, if not wholesale invention, since, as widely recognized, it is modeled on the Martyrdom of Polycarp. As we have seen, Pionius, not coincidentally, is named in the earlier martyrdom as the one who received a revelation from the long-dead Polycarp concerning the whereabouts of the lost account of his martyrdom. The account of Pionius’ own martyrdom, perhaps not remarkably, is dated to the anniversary of Polycarp’s (a century later); it too occurs on a Great Sabbath. Here, as in the earlier account, the Christian martyr is wounded, but acts as if he is not. Here too the execution occurs, remarkably, in a stadium. A figure named Marcion appears in both texts—here in connection with a follower of the heretic who is martyred along with the orthodox man of God. The Jewish antipathy is as strong here as in the earlier account. The author speaks of Jews as the “enemies” (4.8), and asks rhetorically “Who forced the Jews to sacrifice to Beelphegor? Or partake of the sacrifices offered to the dead? Or to fornicate with the daughters of foreigners ? Or to sacrifice their sons and daughters to idols? To murmur against God? To slander Moses?” (4.11) With biting contrast the author indicates that “
we
did not slay our prophets nor did we betray Christ and crucify him” (13.2).

It is not until the end of the account that the author introduces a first-person narrative:

For after the fire had been extinguished, those of us who were present saw his body like that of an athlete in full array at the height of his powers. His ears were not distorted; his hair lay in order on the surface of his head; and his beard was full as though with the first blossom of hair. His face shone once again—wondrous grace!—so that the Christians were all the more confirmed in the faith, and those who had lost the faith returned dismayed and with fearful consciences. (22.2–4)

Here too, then, we have an author who wants to be both an eyewitness and a faithful testifier to the miraculous events surrounding the martyrdom of one beloved of God. But the account, as widely recognized, is an invention; the author was merely claiming to have seen it take place. Here again we have an instance of non-pseudepigraphic forgery.

There is no better way to show the unusual authorial problems of the early-fourth-century Martyrdom of Marian and James than to provide a lengthy citation of its narrative, in which the author is the closest companion of the martyrs who accompanies them at the time of their arrest: