Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (45 page)

Eva-Maria Becker has recently played with the idea that this lost letter was an actual Pauline letter in circulation.
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This is a possibility, but the reality is that whoever forged 2 Thessalonians, wanting to label this other letter (whether it existed or not) a forgery, would have had no way of knowing, at the end of the day, whether it was authentic or not, assuming it existed. And so for the interpretation of 2 Thessalonians the question is moot. What appears certain is that the letter of 2:2 is not 1 Thessalonians but a letter allegedly by Paul that the author wants to denigrate both in terms of authorship and, relatedly, authority. It conveys the false teaching of the eschaton. But since 2 Thessalonians affirms 1 Thessalonians, and yet proffers an alternative understanding of eschatology, one must conclude that its author wanted its readers to read the teaching of 1 Thessalonians in light of its own eschatological assertions. Or, to use the language that has recently come to be in vogue, 2 Thessalonians appears to be providing “reading instructions” for 1 Thessalonians.
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H. Roose, who sees the relation of the two letters in this light, has made a specific argument for how the “instructions” work, by describing the divergent understandings of the parousia in the two letters, arguing that when they are taken together as a unit the “Day of the Lord” and the “parousia” become coterminous, so that there is now a firm thematic unity between the events of 1 Thess. 4:13–18 on the one hand and 5:1–11 on the other. This view may be taking the matter a step too far, as surely Paul himself saw a firm thematic unity between these two passages that, off his pen, did not experience a chapter break between them. But it is true that when the letters are read together, the “imminent” and “sudden” eschatology of 1 Thessalonians is muted and altered.

It should not be objected that no one would place two such letters in a canon and assume they were complementary when they so clearly stand at odds with one another. Church leaders did place them in the same canon and Christian readers have always read them as complementary, as attested so elegantly by the advocates of the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians still today. But in fact their views were not seen as harmonious by the author of the second letter. He objected to an eschatology that insisted that Jesus was coming suddenly and unexpectedly, and in the imminent future, right away. 1 Thessalonians could certainly be read as conveying just such a message, but the author could scarcely denigrate that letter, as it was widely known to have come from the apostle himself. Another letter was (allegedly? actually?) available, however, that made the point even more strenuously and disturbingly, and this other letter too claimed to be written by Paul. Or so the forger averred. It was to counter this false letter that he produced a false letter of his own. He countered a forgery by producing a forgery. This is the first known instance of a Christian counterforgery, in the strong sense.
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In order to make his handiwork more effective, the author employed several of the known tools of the forger’s trade. He replicated the distinctive vocabulary and adopted key instances of the phrasing of an authentic letter, structuring his along similar lines, and addressing most of the same major issues. He provided clear instances of verisimilitude, including a borrowed instance of “remembrance” of the time he had allegedly spent among the congregation, in words taken from the earlier letter (2 Thess. 3:8; 1 Thess. 2:9). He warned his readers against a forgery circulating in his name (2:2), a ploy to be repeated by later Christian forgers. And at the end he did perhaps “protest too much”: “The greeting is in my own hand,
the hand of Paul, which is the sign in all my letters. This is how I write” (3:17). The first six words—
are precisely parallel to 1 Cor.
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, and are matched still more famously by Gal. 6:11. But in neither of these instances is Paul’s final signing off—after his amanuensis had penned his dictation—said to be a mark of authenticity. It may have been that; but in both other instances it may as well have been a way of personalizing the letter for his readers. If this was the way Paul always finished his letters, it is more than a little strange that he does not end all his letters this way, and stranger still that he never refers to the practice as a prophylaxis against forgery.
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At the same time, it is an odd claim to make in a (Christian) culture where letters circulated more commonly in copies rather than autographs. Did Paul himself expect only his handwritten copy to be read among his churches? If not, then it is hard to understand how he could have imagined 3:17 would be a bona fide demonstration of authenticity. On the other hand, it makes sense for a forger to make the claim. It did, after all, prove effective in throwing readers off the scent of the author’s deceit, even though none of these readers saw a single iota of Paul’s actual handwriting. Moreover, it was a ploy used by other forgers of antiquity.
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The letter to the Colossians is sometimes taken to be the earliest surviving Pauline pseudepigraphon, and thus the earliest Christian forgery of any kind.
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But there is obviously no way to say for certain: we do not know who wrote the letter, to whom, or where. As a result, it is virtually impossible to establish its relative chronology in relation, say, to 2 Thessalonians. It is also difficult—again, well nigh impossible—to identify with any level of certainty the adversaries who are being opposed, although I will argue below that they are probably to be taken as real, not imaginary. What is most clear is that the author of the book is using Paul’s authority to attack them. Moreover, in doing so, the author has been more or less compelled, given the nature of the false teaching, to embrace eschatological views that stand at odds with Paul’s. As we will see, eschatology is not a peripheral issue in the letter. It constitutes one of its central features.

In 1838, Ernst Mayerhoff was the first to question the Pauline authorship of Colossians. In his view, the language and style of the letter were not sufficiently Pauline, certain terms were used in non-Pauline ways, the author attacked a heresy not found until after Paul’s day, and the book derived much of its teaching from Ephesians.
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Many of these issues have remained important parts of the conversation still today. In 1857, Heinrich Ewald was the first to argue that the differences from the Pauline letters were because the letter was penned by a Pauline associate, Timothy, a view that continues to have representatives among those who see the letter as basically Pauline but distinctive in greater or lesser ways.
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Despite its popularity, this latter view is completely implausible. Not only is Paul named first as the author of the letter in 1:1, on two other occasions, the author—presumably not Timothy!—speaks of himself as “I, Paul” (1:23, 4:18), once indicating that he has written the greeting in his own hand. Moreover, as we will see, the problems presented by the letter involve not just the style—a serious matter in this instance—but also the very substance of its teaching. As Lindemann has pointed out, even if, to stretch the imagination, one of Paul’s colleagues wrote the letter (claiming to be the apostle: “I, Paul”), Paul himself would surely have signed off on the contents. Yet it is precisely the contents that dissociate the letter from Paul. And so, quite apart from the issues of secretaries and coauthors—to be addressed in the next chapter—attributing the letter to a close co-worker appears to be a counsel of despair.
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The closely related view that Colossians, and others of the Deutero-Pauline letters, were the product of a “Pauline School” can also probably be put to rest. The idea of a Pauline school was first put forth by Hans Conzelmann in his important essay “Paulus und die Weisheit,” and has been much bandied about over the past half-century since.
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Even though no consensus ever emerged on the nature of such a school or the time of its inception, the benefits of the hypothesis for questions
of pseudepigraphic authorship have always been obvious: without maligning authors for committing forgery, scholars could argue that close associates of Paul, who discussed and studied his teachings, produced writings in his name with impunity, much as the disciples of great teachers did in the cognate philosophical schools of their environment.

That this reconstruction is contextually untenable should be clear from our earlier discussions. There in fact is no evidence that students produced pseudonymous writings in the names of their teachers with impunity in the philosophical schools of the first century (or before or after).
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This could scarcely, then, have been the context for the production of Pauline pseudepigrapha. Moreover, the references to Pauline authorship in these letters is not casual—a matter of an inscription, for example. The Deutero-Pauline letters insist with some emphasis that Paul himself was the author (thus the “I, Paul” references of Colossians, and the signature “with my own hand”). Whoever wrote these books wanted their readers to think they really were Paul.

Even beyond the contextual problem, one needs to ask seriously whether it makes sense to speak of a Pauline school. For one thing, we would not be talking about “a” Pauline school, but of many Pauline schools. Paul’s communities, even in his own day, were wide-ranging in outlook and perspective, with followers of Paul claiming widely disparate views on a surprisingly broad range of topics. Eventually Paul’s authority would be claimed for divergent understandings of such fundamental matters as the unity of the Godhead, the nature of Christ, the character of the created order, the means of salvation, the status of the flesh, the reality of the resurrection, the role of women in the church, and numerous other theological, liturgical, and practical issues. What could it possibly mean to speak of “a” Pauline school? Even in one of his earliest letters, 1 Corinthians, the one group of followers who claimed Paul as their leader (“I am of Paul”) are presented as supporting views that Paul himself opposed. And this is not to speak of all the other Corinthians who looked up to him and yet advanced positions he found abhorrent.

One could argue that there were lots of Pauline schools, in lots of places, that took lots of positions, some of them in continuity with Paul and others of them not. But that in itself leads to the more fundamental question: Did Paul establish schools? We know that he started congregations. But schools? Did Paul establish places of learning, study, research, lecturing, and writing like the schools of antiquity? Where is the evidence of any such thing? Where does Paul ever mention, or even allude to, any such institution? It is fair enough to argue that the Deutero-Pauline letters evidence the oral transmission of Paul’s teachings and discussions. But this kind of ongoing reflection does not require a “school.” All it requires is a church. And that, of course, is what Paul does speak about, abundantly: churches, not schools. It is in the church context that proclamation, edification, and education took place.

Paul was no professional rhetorician, and nothing suggests that students were taking notes at his lectures. Moreover, Paul believed the end was near and
that the Gentile mission needed to be pursued. Why form a school? One might imagine—many have—that “the” Pauline school emerged with the delay of the end, as the Pauline churches became more firmly entrenched in the world. But here again we are faced with the pluriform nature of Pauline Christianities and the disappointing fact that nothing in the first century of Christianity’s existence has any appearance of a philosophical school.

As a result, as helpful as the notion of a Pauline school may have once seemed to explain a product like the letter to the Colossians (or any of the other Deutero-Pauline epistles), the concept in the end is neither necessary nor even useful. To paraphrase Tertullian, “What has Athens to do with Colossae?”

This is not to deny that the letter to the Colossians bears strong resemblances to other literary products of the Pauline communities, especially Ephesians, and also to the writings of Paul himself. These similarities do not derive from comparable scholastic contexts, however. Instead, they suggest that here again we are dealing with an author who wanted his work to sound like Paul’s.

The closest ties of the letter are to the orthonymous Philemon. The data are well known. Paul is said to be a prisoner in both letters (Col. 4:3; Phlm. 1, 9–14); in both Timothy is named as the cosender (Col. 1:1; Phlm. 1) and Onesimus is referred to as being sent to the recipient(s) (Col. 4:9; Phlm. 12). Five of the six persons who send greetings to the Colossians also send greetings to Philemon (Aristarchus, Mark, Epaphras, Luke, and Demas; Col. 4:10–14; Phlm. 23, 24); and special appeal is made in each letter to Archippus, one of three individuals addressed in Philemon (Col. 4:17; Phlm. 2). The conclusion reached by Victor Paul Furnish seems inescapable: these books were either written by the same author (notice: the similarities are not of the sort we found in 2 Thessalonians in relation to its model), or Colossians is written by someone wanting to imitate Paul with the letter of Philemon to hand.
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