Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (2 page)

Matching the abundant materials for the study of early Christian forgery is the remarkably sparse attention paid to it—as a broader phenomenon—in modern scholarship. Apart from studies of individual instances, which do indeed abound, and discussions of the relationship of pseudepigrapha to issues of canon, there is no full length study of the phenomenon in the English language, and only one reasonably comprehensive study in German.
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There is none in any other language of scholarship.

The study of individual cases is, of course, crucial for the understanding of the broader phenomenon and so need continuously to be carried out with rigor and focus. But somewhat ironically, these examinations are often conducted precisely apart from a knowledge or appreciation of the wider phenomenon of early Christian forgery. Surely an individual instantiation of the practice cannot be studied in isolation, apart from its wider historical and cultural context.

The studies of forgery and canon are also vital in many ways, especially in assisting in the evaluation of the practices of and attitudes toward forgery in the early Christian tradition. Inevitably such studies draw on materials taken from the wider Jewish and pagan environments, often, though not always, with broad coverage and clarity of insight. But a focus on issues of canon can skew the discussion in certain ways, and there are other important questions that need to be addressed.

What are needed are fuller studies of the historical phenomenon, not only in relation to a set of theological concerns and not only with eyes focused on the early Christian forgeries that were eventually deemed to be Scripture. The canonical forgeries participated both in the broader stream of literary practices of antiquity and, more narrowly, in the literary practices of the early Christian communities. These broader practices should not be seen merely as background to the object of ultimate (theological) concern (the question of canon), but should be explored as a matter of intellectual inquiry in their own right. That is the intent and goal of the present study.

The focus of my concern will be the Christian literary forgeries of roughly the first four centuries CE. Later texts will be discussed only when they are in
some way compelling, relevant, and especially noteworthy. In particular, for the purposes of this study, I am interested in forgeries that were engendered in the context of early Christian polemics. One could easily argue that these involve the majority of the relevant texts, but that statistical question is of no concern to me here. I am interested in polemics because they played such a major role in the history and development of the early Christian tradition and, as a consequence, in the production of early Christian forgeries. We know of numerous polemical contexts from the early Christian centuries, of course, and I am not restricting my vision to just one of them. Christians engaged in conflicts with non-Christian Jews and with antagonistic pagans; most of the polemical contexts, however, were intramural. There were internecine disputes over legitimate authority and authority figures. There were arguments over church structure and hierarchy, offices, ritual, and discipline. There were abundant and heated disagreements over specific theological teachings, from early eschatological disputes to later Christological and Trinitarian controversies. In all these contexts unknown authors produced forgeries, in large measure to help secure victory over their opponents through the authority provided by an assumed authorial name. Some of these forgers were remarkably successful in deceiving their reading audiences. Most of the forgeries produced have been lost or destroyed. But a striking number have survived, some through manuscript traditions down through the ages, others by chance discoveries made by professional archaeologists or rummaging fellahin.

We cannot understand these polemical forgeries if we fail to situate them in their context within the deceptive literary practices of the environment, the broader Greco-Roman world, including the part of that world that comprised Judaism. The study needs, then, to be carried out in relationship to that context, and so, in the following four chapters, it will begin by asking a set of questions about the wider phenomenon, seeking what can be known about the intent, function, motivations, and techniques of Greek and Roman forgeries. We will also examine the attitudes toward the practice, toward specific instantiations of it, and toward those who engaged in it: Were they seen to be lying? Were there culturally available justifications for their deceits? We will also evaluate the methods of detection that were employed by ancient critics intent on uncovering forgery.

The rest of the book deals with Christian forgeries of the first four centuries that appear to have been generated in polemical contexts. I discuss some fifty instances. In many cases I evaluate the scholarly debates that the texts have engendered—debates, in particular, over whether or not the text in question is authentic or forged. But there is much more to the matter of forgery than a mere Dass, as recent scholarship on forgery has so valuably stressed.
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That is to say,
knowing
that
a book is forged is crucial, but only as the beginning, not the end, of the investigation. Other—arguably even more important and interesting—questions involve such matters as the motivations and functions of the forgery. Why did an author choose to lie about his identity?
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What was he trying to accomplish? How did the book he produced achieve his desired ends?

With respect to the first set of questions, whether or not a book is forged, I have taken three approaches in my analysis. Some books continue to be keenly debated among scholars (e.g., 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, James); for these I provide a full discussion of the range of issues that suggest that the book is in fact forged. Other instances are less open to dispute (e.g., 2 Peter, the Pseudo-Ignatians), and in such cases I will simply state the most compelling reasons that have persuaded the majority of scholars. Yet other instances require no case to be made at all, as they are recognized as forgeries, for compelling reasons, by all hands (e.g., the Gospel of Peter; Jesus’ correspondence with Abgar; the Apostolic Constitutions). The ultimate goal of the study is not to determine if this, that, or the other writing is forged, but to examine the motivation and function of forgery, especially in polemical contexts.

In the course of my discussions I will be especially interested in a kind of subcategory of forgery that I am calling “counterforgery” (Gegenfälschung). This term occasionally appears in the scholarship in two senses, which are not usually differentiated cleanly. On one hand, in a most general sense, a counterforgery involves a forged writing that opposes a specific idea, doctrine, point of view, or practice. But that, by the nature of the case, is true of virtually all polemically driven forgeries. And so I also propose a more specific kind of counterforgery, that is, one designed to counter the ideas, doctrines, views, or perspectives found precisely in another forgery (whether or not the author of the counterforgery realized that the book being opposed was forged). The value of this subcategory of polemical forgery will become evident in the discussions of individual cases.

In many instances readers may suspect that the forgeries I consider functioned in ways other than polemical. To anticipate that objection, I should here stress that it is important to recognize the multifunctionality of forgeries, which corresponds to the multifunctionality of all literary texts. Few writings are produced for a solitary reason. If one were to ask why Paul wrote the letter now known as 1 Thessalonians, a number of perfectly valid, but differing, responses could be given. He wrote it in order to resume relations with a community that he had founded and considered particularly dear; he wrote it to bring his apostolic presence into their midst while he was himself physically absent; he wrote it to remind his readers of the redemptive message they had earlier received; he wrote it to
clarify the misunderstandings of some of the community concerning the nature of the eschatological gospel he had proclaimed; he wrote it to urge his readers to lead a life of high morality; and he probably wrote it for a handful of other reasons. It would be wrong to insist that he wrote the letter for just one reason, and it would be wrong to deny any one of these being the reason (or one of the reasons) he wrote it.

So too with forgeries in Paul’s name, or the names of any of the famous figures from early Christianity. Rarely, if ever, do they fulfill just one purpose or serve just one function. They may serve several, possibly unrelated to one another. To take one obvious example, the Protevangelium Jacobi. The author calls himself James, and he almost certainly is claiming to be “that” James—the brother of Jesus, who, according to the account itself, would have been the son of Joseph from a previous marriage, that is, Jesus’ older step brother. This, of course, would put him in a particularly strong position to tell the prehistory of Jesus’ appearance in the world, which forms the subject for the bulk of the narrative. But why did the author write the account? In fact, the (forged) work may well have functioned on numerous levels. It may have been written to provide readers an entertaining account of the prehistory of Jesus’ birth and of its immediate aftermath. It may have been produced to celebrate the greatness of the mother of God. More than that, it may have been created in order to answer pagan opponents of Christianity such as Celsus (and the fabricated claims of his “Jew”), by showing that the charges they leveled against Mary (a peasant girl who had to spin for a living), Joseph (a poor common laborer), and the child Jesus (born into poverty) were precisely wrong. But there is more. Against adoptionist Christians the account shows that Jesus was in fact the Son of God from his birth; and against Marcionites it shows that Jesus actually came into the world as a child—that he did not simply descend from heaven, fully grown, in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar. The text, in other words, functions on a number of fronts in the proto-orthodox attempt to establish itself and its views in the face of opponents, Jewish, pagan, and heterodox Christian. Was it written to deal with just one set of problems? Possibly so. But it is virtually impossible to say, without having the author available to interview, since features of the account successfully counter the claims of this, that, or the other opponent of the proto-orthodox.

Finally, in view of my ultimate concerns in this study, I should emphasize what I will
not
be addressing here:

• I will not be discussing literary texts that have been taken by some scholars to be forgeries but that I consider to be authentic. Thus, for example, I will certainly be dealing with the fourth-century Pseudo-Ignatian letters, but I will not be discussing the seven letters of the Middle Recension, even though there is a history—some of it quite recent—of taking these letters also as forgeries. I do not find the recent arguments of Hübner and
Lechner to be any more persuasive than the older arguments by Weijenborg, Joly, and Rius Camps on the matter
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; I think the seven letters are authentic, and so I will not be discussing them as polemical forgeries.

• I will not be examining pseudepigrapha that are not Christian in origin but came to be transmitted, cherished, and sometimes also altered by Christians as part of their literature (e.g., the Testaments of Twelve Patriarchs and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve).
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• I will not by and large be considering polemical forgeries from after the fourth century (e.g., Pseudo-Titus; the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea).

• I will not be considering forgeries that are not polemical in some obvious way (e.g., the Prayer of the Apostle Paul or a number of other nonpolemical pseudepigrapha of the Nag Hammadi Library).

• Conversely, I will not be considering polemical works that are not forgeries (the Nag Hammadi Testimony of Truth, for example, makes no authorial claim).

• I will not be considering books that are no longer extant, in full or in part.

• I will not, for the most part, be considering falsely attributed books (since their authors made no false authorial claims: so, for example, the New Testament Gospels; the Epistle of Barnabas; Pseudo-Justin; Pseudo-Tertullian; etc.).

• I will not, with a few key exceptions in passing (such as the Sibylline Oracles and the Pseudo-Ignatians), be considering the closely related matter of false interpolations (e.g., in the writings of the New Testament).

• I will not be considering ancient instances of plagiarism, unless they have something to do with forgeries (e.g., possibly, 2 Peter).

I should stress that the preceding topics are all important and deserve full examination. But in this study, I will be restricting myself to books whose authors appear to make false authorial claims, for polemical purposes, within the Christian tradition of the first four Christian centuries.

Finally, I want to take special care to circumvent a possible misreading of my study, which would think or claim that I am trying to advance some kind of positivist agenda in promoting one kind of Christian thought and its literature over another. When I call a text forged I am making a literary-historical claim about its author; I do not mean to imply any kind of value judgment concerning its content or its merit as a literary text (religious, theological, ethical, personal, or any other kind of merit). In particular, I am not claiming that it is somehow inferior in these ways to a work that is orthonymous. I am not, that is, contrasting later forged texts with texts that are somehow pristine, “original,” and therefore better or more worthy of our attention.

Another way to express this caveat is this: my ultimate concerns do not lie (at least in this study) with theological or ontological questions of ultimate truth, but in historical questions about how Christianity developed as a religion. From a historical perspective—just to take an example—writings that were actually written by Paul were themselves products of their time, based on things Paul heard, experienced, and thought, just as were the writings produced by others in his name. As a historian I do not value the authentically Pauline writings any more or less than later “Pauline” writings that were forged.