Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (5 page)

What is yet more striking is that in two places this self-conscious pseudepigrapher explicitly condemns what he practices, insisting that his readers not read other forgeries. The first passage is in 6.16.1:

We have sent all these things to you so that you might be able to know what our opinion is. And do not receive the books that have been patched together in our name by the ungodly. For you are not to pay heed to the names of the apostles, but to the nature of the things and to their undistorted opinions.

The author goes on to mention books forged by the false teachers Simon and Cleobius
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and their followers, who have “compiled poisonous books in the name of Christ and of his disciples,” written in order to deceive others. He also speaks of “apocryphal books” written by the ancients, in the names of Moses, Enoch, Adam, Isaiah, David, and so on, that are “pernicious and alien to the truth,” and he indicates that other “ill-named” persons have done so as well, writing books that malign the creation, marriage, providence, having children, the Law, and the prophets.

It is true, as J. Mueller has recently observed, that the author is not precisely condemning his own practice; he objects to heretical and apocryphal forgeries specifically because they teach false notions.
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His own book, in his opinion, teaches the truth, something (for him) quite different. But it is also important to consider the issue in a wider perspective. His opponents—the ones who forged heretical books—would have seen the matter in just the opposite light and no doubt asserted that their views were apostolic whereas his were pernicious and poisonous. It is not up to the historian to adjudicate this theological dispute. Still, it is worth noting that the fact of the author even raising the issue of apostolic pseudepigrapha shows he is fully conscious of the circumstance of authors falsely writing in the name of apostles when he is doing so himself. And so the view of Steimer seems completely justified: “By adding a criterion for determining authenticity to his critique of forgery, the compiler of the Apostolic Constitutions avoids submitting his own work to the verdict that he himself has formulated. The criterion for authenticity provides him with a suitable means to polemicize as a forger against forgery.”
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The second instance is 8.47.60, which condemns in no uncertain terms “anyone who publicly displays the pseudepigraphic books of the impious
in the church.” Once more the author is principally concerned with forgeries that he judges to be heretical. And here again, the author opposes “pseudepigraphic books” of the heretics, without having any problem producing a pseudepigraphic book of his own. Among other things, as we will see, this kind of warning against forgeries proved to be a powerful tool in the hands of a forger, as it served, among other things, to throw the reader off the scent of his own deceit, as recognized, again, by Steimer.
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What we have here in the Apostolic Constitutions, then, is not only a liar who condemns lying and a deceiver who is himself deceived; we also have a forger who condemns forgeries. His own forgery, in any event, was spectacularly successful. Later orthodox church leaders took him seriously when he claimed to be the apostolic band. From three centuries further on, for example, the so-called Trullan Council of 692 accepted as fully authoritative the eighty-five Apostolic Canons, which appear in 8.47 of the book. The rest of the Apostolic Constitutions was treated by the council as suspect, not because it was forged but because later heretics obviously intercepted the text and interpolated false passages into it. And so, as Canon 2 of the council reads:

It has also seemed good to this holy Council, that the eighty-five canons, received and ratified by the holy and blessed Fathers before us, and also handed down to us in the name of the holy and glorious Apostles should from this time forth remain firm and unshaken for the cure of souls and the healing of disorders. And in these canons we are bidden to receive the Constitutions of the Holy Apostles [written] by Clement. But formerly through the agency of those who erred from the faith certain adulterous matter was introduced, clean contrary to piety, for the polluting of the Church, which obscures the elegance and beauty of the divine decrees in their present form. We therefore reject these Constitutions so as the better to make sure of the edification and security of the most Christian flock; by no means admitting the offspring of heretical error, and cleaving to the pure and perfect doctrine of the Apostles.
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As a further example of a forger who perpetrated a fraud, we might consider the work of a contemporary of the author of the Apostolic Constitutions, the doughty defender of the apostolic faith, Epiphanius of Salamis. Throughout his major work, the
Panarion
, an eighty-chapter refutation of all things heretical, Jewish and Christian, Epiphanius repeatedly demeans his opponents for using forged and apocryphal books. Nowhere is he more explicit in his condemnations than in his attack in book 26 on the Phibionites (known also as Gnostics and Borborites; he gives them numerous names). Among the false and forged books that this heretical sect used, Epiphanius explicitly condemns a book called Noriah, the Gospel of Perfection, the Gospel of Eve, the Lesser Questions of Mary, the Greater Questions of Mary, the Books of Seth, Apocalypses of Adam, the Birth of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip. Many of these books are now lost, although we do
have still today an Apocalypse of Adam, the Gospel of Philip, the Birth of Mary (= Protevangelium Jacobi), and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth. Whether the extant versions are the books Epiphanius had in mind is anyone’s guess.

Epiphanius is particularly well informed about the Phibionites and their literature, he tells us, because as a young man he was nearly seduced—literally—into their sect. According to his autobiographical, yet imaginative, account, as a young man he was approached by two attractive women who urged him to join with them in their sectarian worship, which, as we will see, was anything but sanctified (from Epiphanius’ perspective). He nearly succumbed but in the end managed to escape their clutches, and he reported to the authorities what they were doing. The authorities went on a search and dispelled the band.

In the course of his near seduction, Epiphanius tells us, he managed to procure and read a number of the Phibionites’ sacred books. One that particularly struck him was the Greater Questions of Mary, from which he quotes a passage in order to highlight its extraordinary, not to say completely scandalous, character. The passage concerns an encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and replicates in Gospel form the interests and activities of the Phibionites who had allegedly forged it:

For in the book called The Greater Questions of Mary (they have also forged one called the Lesser), they indicate that he [Jesus] gave a revelation to her [Mary]. Taking her to the mountain he prayed and then extracted a woman from his side and began having sexual intercourse with her; then he gathered his semen in his hand, explaining that “This is what we must do in order to live.” When Mary became disturbed and fell to the ground, he again raised her and said to her, “Why do you doubt, you of little faith?”
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Epiphanius need only cite this passage to show how outrageous it was as a forgery and how implausible it was as an account from the life of Jesus. But one might wonder how plausible it is even as a Phibionite account of Jesus. Is it possible that the account was forged not by the Phibionites but by Epiphanius himself? There are in fact reasons for thinking that Epiphanius invented both the book and the episode.

The place to begin is with Epiphanius’ detailed explanation of the scurrilous ritual activities of the Phibionites, which he narrates with scarcely shrouded voyeuristic pleasure. For their periodic Eucharistic celebrations, Epiphanius tells us, the Phibionite devotees came together to enjoy a sumptuous meal. When they arrived at the place of meeting, they greeted one another with a secret handshake, tickling the palm underneath, presumably to assure one another that they were legitimately part of the group, but perhaps also to set the stage for the intimacies
to follow. After gorging themselves, the men and women matched up, each with someone other than their own spouse, in order to have indiscriminate sex together. But when the man reached climax, Epiphanius indicates, he would withdraw from the woman. They would then collect his semen in their hands and eat it, saying “This is the body of Christ.” If the woman was in her period, they would also collect some of her menstrual blood and consume it, saying “This is the blood of Christ.”

If, despite the ordained coitus interruptus, a woman by chance became pregnant, the group would perform a ceremonial abortion; they then cut up the fetus and ate it communally as a special Eucharistic meal.

Epiphanius also tells us that the Phibionite men who had advanced to roles of leadership no longer required women for their periodic celebrations. They are said to have engaged in sacred homosexual activities. Moreover, some members of the group practiced holy masturbation, consuming the body of Christ in the privacy of their own homes. This practice was justified by an appeal to Scripture: “Working with your own hands, that you may have something to give also to those in need.”

According to Epiphanius, the Phibionites’ ritual activities were closely tied to the theological views of the group. They are said to have believed that this world is separated from the divine realm by 365 heavens, each of them controlled by an archon who must be placated in order to allow the soul to rise through his realm. Since the soul first descended through all 365 heavens and then must reascend, it must pass by all the archons, twice. The journey occurred proleptically here on earth through a kind of empathy, as the man, during the course of the nocturnal sex liturgy, called out the secret name of one of the ruling archons, effecting a kind of identification with him that allowed safe passage through his realm. Since each archon must be passed by twice, as Epiphanius is quick to point out, each of the Phibionite men could expect to seduce female devotees on at least 730 festal occasions.

There was another link between the Phibionites’ ritual activities and their theological system. Like other Gnostic groups, the Phibionites believed that human bodies were places of imprisonment for seeds of the divine, and the goal of the religion was to set the seed free. Since the seed comes to be implanted in the body through the sex act—literally in the exchange of bodily fluids—then the fluids were to be collected and consumed as an image of ultimate reunification. When, however, the seed was left inside the woman and a new body was formed, this allowed for the generation of another place of imprisonment. The fetus then was to be aborted in order to thwart the divinities keen on maintaining the system of entrapment. And so, whereas procreation defeated the true goal of existence and led to further entrapment and bondage, the ritualistic ingestion of semen, menses, and the occasional fetus provided liberation.

The Great Questions of Mary helped provide a textual basis—from the life of Jesus—for the ritual practices of the group. But did such a text actually exist?

The prior question is whether Epiphanius’ description of the activities of the group is at all plausible. Historians have long treated Epiphanius in general with
a healthy dose of skepticism.
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No patristic source is filled with more invective and distortion; Epiphanius frequently makes connections between historical events that we otherwise know are unrelated, and he expressly claims to write horrific accounts precisely in order to repulse his readers from the heresies he describes (Pan. Proem. I. 2). His description of the Phibionites and their sex rituals, nonetheless, has been taken as historically grounded by a dismaying number of competent scholars. For Stephen Gero, the fact that other heresiological sources down into the Middle Ages mention the group (which he calls the Borborites) and level charges of immorality against them indicates that they did indeed exist and that they were indeed immoral.
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But surely the perdurance of traditional slander is not the best gauge of historical veracity. So too Stephen Benko argues that the close ties between the ritual activities of the group and their theological views show that the account of Epiphanius is entirely plausible.
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But this overlooks that it is Epiphanius himself who establishes the linkage, which may just as well show that he has invented a set of scandalous rituals imagined as appropriate to the nefarious theology of the group. How would we know?