Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (14 page)

Later in his
Histories
Polybius similarly maligns the historian Timaeus for using rhetorical flourishes in the speeches he provides his characters, rather than indicating what was “really” said:

As the proverb tells us that a single drop from the largest vessel suffices to tell us the nature of the whole contents, so we should regard the subject now under discussion. When we find one or two false statements in a book and they prove to be deliberate ones, it is evident that not a word written by such an author is any longer certain and reliable. But to convince those also who are disposed to champion him I must speak of the principle on which he composes public speeches, harangues to soldiers, the discourses of ambassadors, and, in a word, all utterances of the kind, which, as it were, sum up events and hold the whole history together. Can anyone who reads these help noticing that Timaeus had untruthfully reported them in his work, and has done so of set purpose? For he has not set down the words spoken nor the sense of what was really said, but having made up his mind as to what ought to have been said, he recounts all these speeches and all else that follows upon events like a man in a school of rhetoric attempting to speak on a given subject, and shows off his oratorical power, but gives no report of which was actually spoken. The peculiar function of history is to discover, in the first place, the words actually spoken, whatever they were, and
next to ascertain the reason why what was done or spoken led to failure or success.… But a writer who passes over in silence the speeches made and the causes of events and in their place introduces false rhetorical exercises and discursive speeches, destroys the peculiar virtue of history. And of this Timaeus especially is guilty, and we all know that his work is full of blemishes of the kind.
⁶⁹

At the very least, then, we can say that there was not a consistent view of the legitimacy of the practice of fabricating materials for historical accounts in antiquity. Whereas some writers—Thucydides, and the two objects of Polybius’ scorn—accepted the practice, probably out of historiographic necessity, others strenuously objected. The vitriol of Polybius’ protest may well suggest that he was in the minority on the matter. In neither side of the debate, in any event, do we find authors likening the practice to forgery. When Jewish authors such as Josephus, or Christian authors such as the anonymous and pseudonymous writers of various Christian Gospels, placed invented speeches on the lips of their protagonists, they were doing what was widely done throughout antiquity. Some writers approved the practice and others demurred.

Speeches and documents are not the only kinds of fabrications in historical writing. Often writers—historians, essayists, polemicists, or most anyone else—fabricated narratives of all sorts about real and fictitious characters: events, episodes, activities, controversies, practices, and on and on. We have seen a small sliver of this kind of fabricating narrative already with Epiphanius, who appears to have invented the ritual practices of the Phibionites, possibly based on his slight knowledge of their theological views, precisely in order to malign them. In generating such fabricated accounts, Epiphanius stood in a solid line of tradition that goes back as far as our earliest heresiologists. The harsh but undocumented invectives of the letter of Jude in the New Testament come to be fleshed out in its later ideological successors, such as Irenaeus, whose
Adversus Haereses
is the first proto-orthodox heresiological treatise to survive, and which is famous for its accusations against the shocking sexual practices of, for example, the Valentinians, Carpocratians, and Marcosians that I have already mentioned. As I suggested earlier, if one considers the rigorous ethic endorsed by the Gnostic sources themselves, it seems unlikely that any of the charges represent accurate representations; they are more likely fabricated.

Not all early Christian fabrications were malicious, of course. Long before we have any written texts of any kind, stories about Jesus were not only altered in the course of oral transmission, but also generated then: stories about his birth, his activities, his teachings, his controversies, his last days, his death and resurrection. And the fabrications continued long after the New Testament period, as so abundantly and irrefutably attested in the noncanonical accounts of his birth, life, death, and resurrection. And of his afterlife, as in Tertullian’s claim that:

So Tiberius, in whose reign the name of Christian entered the world, hearing from Palestine in Syria information which had revealed the truth of Christ’s divinity, brought the matter before the Senate, with previous indication of his own approval. The Senators, on the ground that they had not verified the facts, rejected it. Caesar maintained his opinion and threatened dire measures against those who brought accusations against the Christians.
⁷⁰

This fabricated account was easily believed by later Christians; it is reiterated by Eusebius (
H.E
. 2.2.2). Further examples could be effortlessly multiplied many times over, for instance, from virtually every detail in the letters and narratives of the so-called Pilate cycle.
⁷¹

So too the preliterary accounts of the apostles eventually embedded in the canonical Acts have their analogues in the later apocryphal Acts, whether stories of Peter raising a smoked tuna from the dead and depriving the magician Simon of his powers of flight in midair, or of John resuscitating Drusiana and castigating pestiferous bed bugs, or of Paul preaching a message of sexual abstinence that leads to the conversion of his most famous female follower, Thecla.

This final example is commonly cited in works dealing with forgery, by scholars who confuse Tertullian’s comments in De baptismo 17 as referring to a presbyter of Asia Minor who allegedly forged the account in Paul’s name. Thus, for example, the recent comment from an otherwise fine article by M. Frenschkowski : “This passage [in Tertullian] is significant not least of all because it once and for all disproves the myth of the unproblematic acceptance of pseudepigraphy in a Christian environment.”
⁷²
In fact, Tertullian’s comments are not directly relevant to the question of whether or not forgery was widely seen as acceptable. The presbyter in question was charged not with forging an account but with fabricating it.

But if the writings which wrongly go under Paul’s name, claim Thecla’s example as a licence for women’s teaching and baptizing, let them know that, in Asia, the presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul’s fame from his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from his office (sciant in asia presbyterum qui eam scripturam construxit quasi titulo pauli de suo cumulans conuictum atque confessum id se amore pauli fecisse loco decessisse).
⁷³

The reconstruction of Tertullian’s text is debated,
⁷⁴
but the question of the presbyter’s crime need not be. The “writings that wrongly go under Paul’s name” were not accounts that Paul was alleged to have written. He was the subject of these writings, not the reputed author. At least as they have been handed down to us—assuming that what we have is what Tertullian is referring to
⁷⁵
—the Acts are anonymous. The presbyter was being faulted, then, for making up stories about Paul that were not historically accurate.

In other instances the narrative fabrications of the early Christians served polemical purposes, although at times more subtly. As already pointed out, for example, stories of Jesus as a miracle-working wunderkind from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas functioned to discount an adoptionistic Christology that claimed that Jesus received his divine sonship—and so his divine power—only at his baptism. The story of Jesus emerging from his tomb as tall as a mountain from the Gospel of Peter functioned to show that his resurrection was decidedly bodily, in the face of claims that his afterlife was purely in the spirit, while his body experienced corruption. Stories of Peter besting Simon Magus in a series of miracle-working contests from the Acts of Peter illustrated the superiority of the proto-orthodox lineage of the Roman episcopacy over against various groups of Gnostic contenders. Stories of Pilate, Tiberius, and other Roman officials recognizing the clear divinity of Jesus from the Pilate Cycle functioned to counter the polemical charges of the cultured despisers of the new faith among the pagans, such as Celsus and Porphyry.

Christian fabrications served other purposes as well. Some satisfied early Christian curiosity about unknown aspects of the lives of Jesus and his followers (where was Jesus, exactly, during the time between his death and resurrection? Thus the Gospel of Nicodemus); others provided edificatory tales (God was on the side of the apostles in the face of horrible Roman opposition, as in the Apocryphal Acts); yet others were no doubt entertaining (Jesus’ miraculous deeds as the mischievous five-year-old son of God in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas); some more directly supported one theological or ideological view or another (Paul’s preaching of continence for eternal life, in the Acts of Thecla); and others performed apologetic service (the stories of the Protevangelium as answers to the charges against Mary, Joseph, and Jesus on the pen of Celsus).

Given their wide functionality, were such invented narratives generally seen as acceptable by the early Christians? On one hand, most Christians who heard such stories almost certainly did not consider them as anything but historical, and so were in no position to pass judgment on their character as fabrications. What would they have said if they were shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that such
stories were made up? At the end of the day, it is impossible to say. But it does seem likely that Christians who approved of the stories and the lessons they conveyed would not have been particularly disturbed, taking, possibly, a Thucydidian attitude toward them. Christians with alternative perspectives, on the other hand, or non-Christians of all stripes would doubtless have considered such fabrications worthy of attack, more along the lines of a Polybius.

Even more closely related to the phenomenon of forgery is the practice of falsifying a text. When an author forges a writing, claiming to be someone other than who she is, she asserts that her words are those of another. So too a copyist who alters a text by adding a few words, or by interpolating entire passages, or by rewriting the text in other ways, is making the implicit claim that his own words—the ones he has interpolated or generated himself—are the words of the author of the (rest of the) text.

Textual alteration was widely discussed in antiquity, and just as widely condemned. Our earliest reference appears to be in Herodotus, who mentions a collector of oracles named Onomacritus, friend and counselor of the tyrant Pisistratus, who earlier in his life had been discovered to have inserted an oracle of his own into the verses of Musaeus, to the effect that the islands off Lemnos would disappear under water. Lasus of Hermione, a poet and musician who was Pindar’s teacher, evidently suspected Onomacritus of making the interpolation and reported it to Hipparchus, who promptly banished Onomacritus from Athens.
⁷⁶

Onomacritus had a wide reputation for interpolating oracles into the alleged writings of Musaeus. Pausanias, for example, gives another instance: “I have read a poem in which Mousaios was able to fly, by the gift of the North-east wind; I think Onomakritos wrote it; nothing of Mousaios exists for certain except the
Hymn to Demeter
.”
⁷⁷
And Plutarch as well: “I forbear to mention how much blame men like Onomacritus, Prodicus, and Cinaethon have brought upon themselves from the oracles by foisting upon them a tragic diction and a grandiloquence of which they have had no need, nor have I any kindly feeling toward their changes.”
⁷⁸
Even the Christian Clement recounts the by then traditional view: “Onomacritus of Athens,
the reputed author of the poems attributed to Orpheus, is to be found in the reign of the Pisistratides
circa
the fiftieth Olympiad” (
Stromateis 1.21
).
⁷⁹

Strabo reports on an earlier Athenian textual alteration, this time in Homer’s Iliad. In this case the falsification, made either by Pisistratus or Solon, had clear political implications, as it supported the Athenians’ claim to the island of Salamis:

At the present time the island is held by the Athenians, although in early times there was strife between them and the Megarians for its possession. Some say that it was Peisistratus, others Solon, who inserted in the
Catalogue of Ships
immediately after the verse, “and Aias brought twelve ships from Salamis,” [Iliad 2, 557] the verse, “and, bringing them, halted them where the battalions of the Athenians were stationed,” and then used the poet as a witness that the island had belonged to the Athenians from the beginning. But the critics do not accept this interpretation, because many of the verses bear witness to the contrary.
⁸⁰

Sometimes writings were falsified for philosophical rather than political reasons. Diogenes Laertius, for example, reports that the librarian of Pergamum, the Stoic Athenodorus, was condemned at trial for falsifying Stoic writings by deleting problematic passages from Zeno, founder of the sect:

Isidorus likewise affirms that the passages disapproved by the [Stoic] school were expunged from his [Zeno’s] works by Athenodorus the Stoic, who was in charge of the Pergameme library; and that afterwards, when Athenodorus was detected and compromised
they were replaced. So much concerning the passages in his writings which are regarded as spurious
(
Lives
, 7.34)