Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (40 page)

Also connected with Paul and his churches were problems of church hierarchy, structure, organization, and authority. Forgeries dealing with such issues abounded, from the Pastoral epistles of the New Testament through the “church order” literature (e.g., the Didascalia, Apostolic Church Order, Apostolic Canons, Apostolic Constitutions), but also in such writings as the Paraphrase of Shem from Nag Hammadi and the Ascension of Isaiah (Chapter Twelve).

Among the internecine theological conflicts that eventually emerged in the period, none proved so productive of forgery as those involving the nature, status, and relevance of “the flesh,” especially because views of the flesh became intricately connected with so many other crucial and debated issues, such as the unity of the Godhead, the nature of creation, the person of Christ, the efficacy of his death, the reality of his physical resurrection, and the future fate of the believer. And so numerous forgeries written under apostolic authority emerged, arguing either against the flesh (the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Gospel of Thomas, the Paraphrase of Shem) or in favor of it (3 Corinthians, the Epistula Apostolorum, the Nag Hammadi tractate Melchizedek,
the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul, and even, by misdirection, I will argue, the extant letter of Laodiceans; all in Chapter Thirteen).

Other theological debates engendered yet other forgeries from disputes with the Manichaeans (Abgar Correspondence) to the Arian controversies (the Pseudo-Ignatians; Chapter Fourteen). And, as mentioned, a significant range of forgeries appeared as apologetic defenses of the faith, in quite diverse but manifest ways, including the Martyrdom of Polycarp (which I will argue is a non-pseudepigraphic forgery), the Protevangelium Jacobi, the Acts of Pilate, the correspondence of Paul and Seneca, and the Sibylline oracles (Chapter Fifteen). In the final chapter I return to the question of self-justification, asking how the forgers of early Christian documents may have explained to themselves the morality of their literary endeavors.

As should be clear from this overview, my concern in the study is less with establishing where forgery has occurred than in determining the function of the forgery, in particular as this relates to Christian polemics. But the function of a forgery, naturally, depends on the prior question, and so, where there are significant debates that need to be addressed, I take them on. Here I should reiterate my three-pronged approach. Works whose authorship continues to be a hotly debated topic—for example 2 Thessalonians or 1 Peter—I discuss at length, making a range of arguments in support of my view that they are in fact forged. Other works, about which there is less disagreement—for example 2 Peter—I devote much less argument to, appealing instead to widely accepted lines of reasoning. In yet other instances there is no scholarly disagreement of any moment—the Gospel of Peter or the Letters of Paul and Seneca, for example. In such instances I focus almost exclusively on the question of function.

It is my view that in every instance of forgery that I discuss, the intention of the forger was to deceive his readers into thinking he was someone other than who he was; his motivation was not only to receive a simple hearing of his views (although certainly that) but also to authorize his views through the authority provided by the status of his falsely assumed authorial name. His goal was to advance his own polemical agenda.

E
schatology was supremely important at the outset of the Christian movement. Jesus’ apocalyptic proclamation of the coming kingdom, which was to appear before “this generation passes away” (Mark 13:30), found its mirror in the preaching of his earliest followers, who expected Jesus himself soon to return from heaven as the Son of Man. The message was continued in the missionary preaching of Paul and his followers, as evidenced in our earliest Christian writings, such as 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians. Alternative eschatologies also appeared in the early stages of the Christian movement, as Paul’s own writings attest. Some members of the Thessalonian congregation came to fear that those who had died already had lost out on their eschatological reward. Others in not-so-distant Corinth came to think that they had begun to reap the benefits of that reward in this life. Paul wrote in order to correct and comfort the despondent Thessalonians and to disabuse the enthusiastic Corinthians: there is a future reward, it will appear with the coming of Jesus, and it will involve a radical transformation not only of the world and its existing order, but also of the human body, as there will be resurrection of both the living and the dead into an immortal existence.

In view of the alternative perspectives more widely available, it comes as no surprise that some of the earliest Christian forgeries deal with just this issue of eschatology, produced by unknown authors claiming the authority of the apostle himself. At the end of the day it is impossible to provide relative datings of these pseudepigraphic efforts of Pauline Christians;
¹
it is completely plausible to think,
however, that they emerged not long after the death of Paul himself, or even, conceivably, while he was still alive. There is no way to know.
²
In any event it may well be that just as 1 Thessalonians is the earliest surviving orthonymous Christian writing of any kind, its “sequel,” 2 Thessalonians, is the earliest surviving Christian forgery.

Problems connected to the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians were first recognized by J. C. Chr. Schmidt in 1801.
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Schmidt pointed out that 1 Thessalonians is a letter allegedly by Paul that maintains that the end is imminent, whereas 2 Thessalonians warns against a letter allegedly by Paul that maintained that the end is imminent (2:2). How could one explain this situation? If 1 Thessalonians were written first, would Paul not remember what he had written by the time he wrote 2 Thessalonians? If, conversely, 2 Thessalonians were written first, would Paul not remember that he warned his readers against precisely the views that he now embraced in the second letter? “In any case, it remains puzzling why he described in one letter the appearance of Christ as near, and in the other warned not to expect it as being near.”
⁴

Schmidt considers the obvious possibilities that Paul at some point changed his mind and rejected his earlier views, but he finds these possibilities wanting. In addition, he evaluates every part of 1 Thessalonians as being completely Pauline, including the words of the imminent coming of Christ. Is 2 Thessalonians then to be considered a forgery? No, for Schmidt, this letter too appears completely Pauline, with the exception of the offending passage, the warning of 2:1–2 and the fantasies about the Antichrist that follow. As he points out: “The accuser is frequently himself at fault and complains only in order to remove suspicion from his person.”
⁵
In this case, though, it is not the whole letter that is forged; it is only the twelve verses in question. Once 2:1–12 are removed from the letter, 2:13 can be seen to follow the end of
chapter 1
without obvious break. What we have, then, is not a forgery but a falsely interpolated pericope.

As we will see, for later scholars it was precisely the peculiarly Pauline character of 2 Thessalonians—specifically its close resemblance to 1 Thessalonians itself—that, somewhat ironically, made it suspect. But Schmidt at least opened the debate with a plausible scenario, for directly at the point where 2 Thessalonians begins to diverge from its predecessor in theme it begins to contradict it in substance. It was many decades, however, before wider attention was drawn to the tensions between the two books, and between 2 Thessalonians and the other Pauline letters in general. In 1862 Hilgenfeld made the argument still favored by many scholars today, that 2 Thessalonians was forged precisely in order to replace its predecessor as Paul’s (only) letter to the Thessalonians.
⁶
Thirty years later it had become yet more widely suspected that 2 Thessalonians could not be Pauline, as summed up in the arguments of Holtzmann: unlike the authentic Pauline letters, there was no anti-Jewish polemic in the book, in places it uses non-Pauline language, it contains a number of expansions of parallels from the first letter, and it contains no citations of the Hebrew Bible.
⁷

These lines of argumentation can be easily picked apart and so were not widely convincing across the critical spectrum. A solid basis for seeing 2 Thessalonians as non-Pauline was not laid until Wrede’s penetrating analysis of its relationship to 1 Thessalonians, about which I will have more to say presently. Trilling was the first to write a major commentary based on the assumption of non-Pauline authorship; important contributions by Marxsen, Krenz, and Bailey have furthered the discussion. There continue to be holdouts for Pauline authorship, most notably, among critical scholars, Robert Jewett and Abraham Malherbe. Malherbe can claim, in his Anchor Bible Commentary, that the “majority” of biblical scholars continues to hold to authenticity.
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This may be true, but if so, it is simply because a sizeable plurality of biblical scholars (counting broadly) hold theological views that make the presence of literary forgeries in the canon of scripture untenable on principle. Among scholars with no such scruples, the balance swings in the other direction, and for compelling reasons.

One reason the case for the inauthenticity of 2 Thessalonians has occasionally seemed wanting, even to some very fine scholars, is that critics have often resorted to a shotgun approach, citing every possible argument, good or bad, in support of their position. It is all too easy to dismiss bad arguments, leaving an appearance of evidence in balance, pro and con. And so, for example, the letter is often said to lack Paul’s customary “warmth” (are all of Paul’s writings necessarily warm? Even
to the same congregation? Think of the different fragments of correspondence with the Corinthians—including 2 Cor. 10–13); the focus is on Christ as Kurios rather than on his cross (does Paul have to focus on the cross, in everything he says?); the letter does not employ the diatribe style (as if Paul was obliged to do so); the letter is lacking in justification language (do we need to read every Pauline letter with Lutheran blinders?). A scholar such as Malherbe can easily dismiss such claims, making the other arguments seem weak by association.

A better tack is to drive hard the compelling arguments. The two most striking involve (1) the impressive parallels to 1 Thessalonians, first pushed strenuously by Wrede, which, when examined closely, seem virtually inexplicable on grounds other than that a second author (not Paul) has used Paul’s letter as a model for his own; and (2) the substantive differences
from
1 Thessalonians in precisely the passage (recognized already by Schmidt) where the parallels evaporate. It is the combination of these two arguments that proves especially suasive. Where the author of 2 Thessalonians has borrowed words and phrases from 1 Thessalonians, of course he sounds like Paul (it is easy to take over the words of another writing, after all). And where he projects his own views onto the apostle, he in fact stands at odds with him. Add to these arguments some comments on differences in aspects of style in the author’s free composition, and there are solid reasons for thinking that 2 Thessalonians was written by someone intent on authorizing a non-Pauline view in the name of the apostle himself.

Over a century ago Wrede showed that the parallels between 1 and 2 Thessalonians are massive and operate on various levels; his arguments have been confirmed and strengthened by Krenz and others.
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As will be seen, these parallels do not indicate that Paul wrote both letters; on the contrary, a later author is imitating Paul.
¹⁰

The easiest places to imitate the style and wording of a letter are its beginning and ending, and here the two Thessalonian letters are virtually identical. What is more, their concurrences make them stand alone among the Pauline writings: these are not the ways Paul begins and ends any of his other letters. With respect to the beginnings, we have the following:

They are virtually the same. The three named authors are identical in each place, and they are not further identified apart from their names. It is especially striking that in only these two letters of the entire Pauline corpus is Paul not described with an epithet such as “apostle” (as in most of his letters) or “slave” (Philippians) or “prisoner for Christ” (Philemon). Moreover, both letters refer to the church as comprising the people of a place—“of the Thessalonians”—as opposed to naming the city in which they dwell (“the church of God which is in Corinth”); this too is unlike any other Pauline letter.