Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (3 page)

1
. I will be defining the term
forgery
, and related terms, soon, and justify the way I will be using them. See pp. 29–32. For now it is enough to state my general conception. A “forgery” is a literary work with a false authorial claim, that is, a writing whose author falsely claims to be a(nother) well-known person.

2
. I am excluding for now the writings of Ignatius from this tally; were he to be considered—on the grounds that he probably wrote prior to the appearance of 2 Peter—then seven additional works and one additional author would be added to the totals.

3
. See further, R. M. Grant, “The Appeal to the Early Fathers,”
JTS
11 (1960): 13–24.

4
. Wolfgang Speyer’s rightly famous
vade mecum, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum: Ein Versuch ihrer Deutung
(München: Beck, 1971). It is now, obviously, over forty years old, but nothing has come along to replace or even to supplement it.

5
. See especially the recent collection of essays edited by Jörg Frey, Jens Herzer, Martina Janssen, and Clare K. Rothschild,
Pseudepigraphie und Verfasserfiktion in frühchristlichen Briefen
. WUNT 246 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).

6
. That forgers were consciously lying about their identity in an effort to deceive their readers will be the burden of much of the following four chapters; in particular see pp. 128–32.

7
. Thomas Lechner,
Ignatius adversus Valentinianos? Chronologische und theologiegeschichtliche Studien zu den Briefen des Ignatius von Antiochen
, VCSup 47 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); R. M. Hübner, “Thesen zur Echtheit und Datierung der sieben Briefe des Ignatius Antiochien,”
ZAC
1 (1997): 44–72; Reinoud Weijenborg,
Les lettres d’Ignace d’Antioche
(Leiden: Brill, 1969); Robert Joly,
Le Dossier d’Ignace d’Antioche
, Université libre de Bruxelles, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres 69 (Brussels: Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, 1979); Josep Rius-Camps,
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
(Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1979). For responses, see Caroline Hammond Bammel, “Ignatian Problems,”
JTS
n.s. 33 (1982): 66–97; Mark J. Edwards, “Ignatius and the Second Century: An Answer to R Hübner,”
ZAC
2 (1998): 214–26; and Andreas Lindemann, “Antwort auf die ‘Thesen zur Echtheit und Datierung der sieben Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochien’,”
ZAC
1 (1997): 185–95.

8
. See, for example, M. de Jonge,
Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament as Part of Christian Literature: The Case of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve
(Leiden: Brill, 2003). The only exceptions to my rule—e.g., the Sibylline Oracles—involve corpora that include originally Christian productions as well.

I
begin with a series of anecdotes that establish some of the themes pursued throughout the course of my study. These historical narratives involve forgers who condemned forgery and deceivers who were deceived.

Heraclides Ponticus was one of the great literati of the classical age.
¹
As a young man from aristocratic roots, he left his native Pontus to study philosophy in Athens under Plato, Speusippus, and eventually, while he was still in the Academy, Aristotle. During one of Plato’s absences, Heraclides was temporarily put in charge of the school; after the death of Speusippus he was nearly appointed permanent head. His writings spanned a remarkable range, from ethics to dialectics to geometry to physics to astronomy to music to history to literary criticism. Diogenes Laertius lists more than sixty books in all. Ten more are known from other sources. Few texts remain, almost entirely in fragments.

Diogenes is our principal source of information outside the primary texts.
²
As is his occasional wont, he betrays much greater interest in regaling readers with amusing anecdotes than in describing Heraclides’ contributions to the intellectual
world of his day.
³
And so we are told that Heraclides’ penchant for fine clothing and good food, which produced a noticeably corpulent figure, earning for him the epithet Heraclides Pompicus.

Of particular interest to Diogenes are instances in which Heraclides was involved in conscious deception. At one point, Heraclides had fallen desperately, even, he thought, mortally ill. Concerned for his postmortem reputation, he entrusted a family servant with the ploy. Feigning his death, he arranged for his pet snake to be placed, instead of his (not yet deceased) corpse, under the cover of the funeral bier; at the internment, those attending his funeral would take the appearance of the sacred snake as a sign that Heraclides had been bodily assumed into the realm of the gods. The plot failed, as it turns out; the snake prematurely slithered out from cover during the funeral procession, and it was immediately recognized that the entire proceeding had been a ruse. Heraclides was discovered, and, in the event, he was destined to live on, with more deceits in store.

This near-death experience is paired, by Diogenes, with an episode that did end Heraclides’ life. When the region of Heraclea was suffering a famine, its citizens sent to the priestess at the oracle of Pythia to learn what they were to do in order to regain divine favor. Heraclides bribed the envoys and the oracular priestess herself to publish a fake prophecy: the Heracleans’ plight would be resolved when they installed Heraclides as royalty with a golden crown, and vowed to bestow upon him honors worthy of a hero at his death. The citizens took the fabricated oracle to heart, but the falsity of the envoys and priestess was soon uncovered: when Heraclides was crowned as directed in the theater he was struck by a fit of apoplexy and died, thwarted in his desire for posthumous honors. The envoys were stoned to death, and the priestess was later dispatched by a poisonous snake at her shrine.

Even at the height of his career, the Diogenic Heraclides was involved in scandal. His literary treatise dealing with Homer and Hesiod was shown to be a bald plagiarism. And he committed forgery, according to the musician Aristoxenus, who claimed that Heraclides composed tragic plays in the name of Thespis. Richard Bentley was the first to argue that the few surviving fragments of Thespis are in fact Heraclidean inventions.
⁴

What Heraclides is best known for, however, is an instance of deceit in which he was the victim rather than the culprit. This involves arguably the most famous instance of mischievous forgery in the history of the practice, Heraclides’ deception at the hands of his former student Dionysius (Diogenes Laertius,
Lives
, 5.92–93).

Dionysius Spintharos (“the Spark”) earned the epithet Metathemenos, the Renegade, in his old age, after a severe illness effectively disabused him of his
lifelong Stoic view that pain, which is morally neutral, cannot therefore be considered evil.
⁵
According to Diogenes, earlier in life Dionysius played a trick on his former teacher, by forging a play called the
Parthenopaeus
in the name of Sophocles. In one of his works of literary criticism, Heraclides drew on the play, citing it as authentically Sophoclean. But Dionysius then informed him that in fact the play was a forgery, perpetrated by none other than himself. Heraclides refused to believe it, and so Dionysius brought forth evidence: at the opening of the play, the first letters in a group of lines formed an acrostic, “Pankalus,” the name of Dionysius’ own lover.

Heraclides insisted that the matter was a coincidence, until Dionysius brought forth two additional and yet more convincing proofs. The first was a subsequent acrostic that said, “An old monkey is not captured by a trap; yes, it is captured, but it is captured after some time.” The final acrostic was irrefutable:
(Heraclides does not know letters, and is not ashamed).
⁶

Diogenes’ passage has generated some scholarly discussion. In his edition of the fragments of the philosophers of the Aristotelian school, F. Wehrli gives reasons to think it was not the
Parthenopaeus
that was fabricated, but Diogenes’ anecdote itself.
⁷
The story may be humorous and clever, but for the acrostics to have worked, Wehrli argues, Dionysius would have had to be relatively certain that Heraclides in particular would be deceived and make a public display of his ignorance.

Wehrli makes a strong point but perhaps is not completely suasive. Two of the three acrostics have no explicit connection to Heraclides; the other could just as easily have been placed in the text to satisfy Dionysius’ rather scandalous sense of humor. If so, Heraclides just happened to step into a trap particularly suited for his corpulent frame.
⁸

In any event, this is not the only instance of roguish forgery from the ancient world, designed to bamboozle an intellectual opponent. Galen indicates that Lucian decided to ridicule a much beloved, but unnamed, philosopher whom he considered a braggart and did so by penning an obscure and senseless philosophical treatise in the name of Heraclides. He had it presented to his enemy for an interpretation. When he complied, Lucian turned the tables, mocking him for being unable to see through the swindle.
⁹

More to my purpose here, however, is the pure irony of Diogenes’ own Heraclides. In a game of intellectual boomerang, the one who is guilty of swindles,
lies, plagiarism, and forgery—in a word, deceit—is himself a victim of deceit. The deceiver is deceived.

This ironic phenomenon has its rough parallels in the later Christian tradition. To begin with, we might look at a work universally recognized as pseudepigraphic, the late-fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, a “church order” allegedly written by none other than the apostles of Jesus (hence its name) but in reality produced by someone simply claiming to be the apostolic band, living three hundred years after they had been laid to rest in their respective tombs.

We will be considering other aspects of this text in a later chapter.
¹⁰
For now it is enough to note that the book represents an edited composite of three earlier documents still extant independently, the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum, which makes up books 1–6 of the composite text; the Didache, which is found in book 7; and the Apostolic Tradition, wrongly attributed to Hippolytus, in book 8. Since this author has taken over earlier writings without acknowledgment, he could well be considered a plagiarist by ancient, as well as modern, standards. Consider, for example, the words of Vitruvius:

While, then, these men deserve our gratitude, on the other hand we must censure those who plunder their works and appropriate them to themselves; writers who do not depend upon their own ideas, but in their envy boast of other men’s goods whom they have robbed with violence, should not only receive censure but punishment for their impious way of life.
¹¹

In absolving our unknown compiler of the charge, it might be observed that plagiarism involves an author passing off someone else’s work as his own, whereas in the case of the Apostolic Constitutions the author does not claim that
any
of the work is his own. He claims instead that it is the writing of the apostles. Ancient critics would certainly have considered the work a forgery, but it is not clear if they would have considered it a plagiarism.

As to the charge of forgery, it is worth observing that unlike the earliest of the borrowed documents, the Didache, the Apostolic Constitutions does not claim merely to stand in the apostolic tradition or to present a correct understanding of the teachings of the apostles. It claims to be written by the apostles. To this end, although the three earlier “church orders” are taken over more or less wholesale, some
important editing has taken place. The Apostolic Constitutions begins by naming its authors as “the apostles and elders.”
¹²
As in the Didascalia, lying behind
chapters 1
–
6
, the apostles appear only rarely until toward the end; in 6.8, for example, the author reverts to a first-person plural “we went forth among the gentiles” and then to a first-person discourse in the name of Peter (6.9). The fourteen authors name themselves in 6.14 (the eleven disciples, Matthias the replacement of Judas, James the brother of Jesus, and the apostle Paul); in 6.12 they speak of themselves as the “twelve”—the original eleven and Matthias; elsewhere, on two occasions, Clement is added to the list. Moreover, the authorial fiction is inserted into the source documents at the very beginning of both book 7 (“We also, having followed our teacher Christ … are obliged to say that there are two ways”) and book 8 (“Jesus Christ, our God and Savior, delivered to us the great mystery of piety.… These gifts were first given to us the apostles when we were about to proclaim the gospel”).