Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (6 page)

One obvious place to start is with Epiphanius’ sources of information. Because he had some contact with the group as a young man—was nearly seduced into it—it is sometimes claimed that he had special access to their liturgical practices. But this is scarcely plausible. Epiphanius indicates that he spurned the advances of the two attractive Phibionite women
before
being drawn into their orb. This must mean that he was never present for any of the ritual activities. And it defies belief that missionaries would inform outsiders about the scandalous and reprehensible activities of the group before they were admitted into the inner circle. Potential converts were not likely to be won over by accounts of ritualistic consumption of fetuses.

Epiphanius stands in a long line of Christian heresiologists who claimed that their opponents, especially Gnostics, subscribed to impenetrable and ridiculous mythological understandings of the world while engaging in outrageous and scurrilous behavior, all as part of their religion.
²⁹
As far back as Irenaeus, two centuries earlier, we learn of Valentinians who allegedly taught that those who possess the divine seed should give their spirit to spiritual things and their flesh to fleshly things, so that indiscriminate copulation was not only permissible but
a
desideratum
for the pneumatichoi (
Adv. Haer
. I. 6.3–4); the Carpocratians are said to have practiced indiscriminate sex, and indeed their theology compelled them to violate every conceivable moral law and ethical norm so as to avoid being reincarnated ad infinitum (I.25.4); the heretic Marcus reportedly excited attractive women by inspiring them to speak in tongues, after which they became putty in his lascivious hands (I.13.3). Maligning the Other for sexual offenses was de rigueur among orthodox heresiologists.

And this is not the ammunition simply of Christian heresy hunters: throughout antiquity it was standard polemical fare to charge one’s opponents with the most nefarious of crimes against nature and humanity, in particular indiscriminate sex, infanticide, and cannibalism. The Christians were charged with such activities by pagans such as Fronto, tutor to Marcus Aurelius, and by Jews such as the one introduced, or rather imagined, by Celsus. Jews had to fend off charges by pagan antagonists; pagans describe comparable activities in play among other pagans.
³⁰

That the polemic is standard should always give one pause in the face of any particular instantiation of it. But with groups of Gnostics we are on particularly thorny ground. The proto-orthodox heresiologists uniformly assumed that since various Gnostic groups demeaned the material world and bodily existence within it, they had no difficulty in demeaning the body. Moreover, since for Gnostics the body was irrelevant for ultimate salvation, reasoned the heresiologists, then the body could be used and abused at will. And so, for their opponents, the Gnostics engaged in all sorts of reprehensible bodily activities, precisely to demonstrate their antimaterialist theology.

This heresiological commonplace has been effectively refuted in modern times. The one thing the Nag Hammadi library has shown about Gnostic ethics is that the heresiologists from Irenaeus (and no doubt before) to Epiphanius (and certainly after) got the matter precisely wrong. Many Gnostic groups did devalue the body. But that did not lead them to flagrant acts of immorality. On the contrary, since the body was the enemy and was to be escaped, the body was to be treated harshly. One was not to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh precisely because the goal was to escape the trappings of the flesh. The Nag Hammadi treatises embody a decidedly ascetic ideal, just the opposite of what one would expect from reading the polemics of the proto-orthodox and orthodox heresiologists.
³¹

Which takes us back to Epiphanius and his Greater Questions of Mary. Epiphanius, as we have seen, does claim to have read the Phibionites’ literature, and this claim is sometimes taken to substantiate his account, even though he himself
both provides the account and makes the claim. Here as always Epiphanius must be taken with a pound of salt. The books of the Phibionites could not have been widely circulated outside the group—at least any books that documented their scandalous activities. So possibly Epiphanius read some of their theological or mythological treatises, and drew (or conjured up) his own conclusions. But did he read the Greater Questions of Mary and quote it accurately in his
Panarion
?

There is evidence that some such book did at one time exist: it is at least mentioned elsewhere, although there is no evidence that any other author of a surviving work actually had seen it.
³²
But nowhere else, outside of Epiphanius, are we given any indication of its contents. The episode that Epiphanius cites of Jesus engaging in illicit sex, coitus interruptus, and consumption of his own semen coincides perfectly well with Epiphanius’ description of the activities of the Phibionites themselves. Moreover, Epiphanius almost certainly fabricated the accounts of these activities: he had never seen them, no one from within the group would have told him about them, they could not have been described in their other literature, and they stand at odds with what we do know of the ethical impulses of all other Gnostic groups from antiquity. On these grounds I would propose that Epiphanius made up the account of the Greater Questions of Mary. The Phibionites may have had a long-lived reputation for scurrilous activities—thus Gero—but if they were like every other Gnostic group for which we have firsthand knowledge—and why would they not be?—then their antimaterialist theology did not lead to socially scandalous and illegal promiscuity, but to ascetic dismissal of the passions of the flesh. The conclusion seems inevitable: Epiphanius got the matter precisely wrong and then fabricated his accounts, and at least one document, in order to make his point.
³³

Epiphanius would not be the first Christian author to condemn forgeries and then produce a forgery (or at least a fabrication) himself; nor would he be the last. Indeed, one of our earliest Christian writings of record may represent an analogous, if less outrageous, situation. As is well known, Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians warns its readers against an earlier letter “as if by us” to the effect that “the Day of the Lord is almost here” (2:2). In other words, the author is concerned about a forgery that has the potential of leading his readers astray about the true nature of eschatology. The irony—one to which we should be slowly growing accustomed by now—is that 2 Thessalonians is itself widely thought not
to be by Paul, even though it claims to be written by Paul and goes out of its way to convince its readers that it really is by Paul (thus 3:17).
³⁴
Among other things, the passage in 2:2 makes it relatively certain that forgeries in the name of Paul were being produced already in the New Testament period. If 2 Thessalonians is authentic, then Paul knows of a troubling forgery in his name already during his lifetime; if 2 Thessalonians is not authentic, then it is itself a forgery in Paul’s name, in all probability not long after his death. Either way, there are Pauline forgeries in circulation. I will provide a fuller discussion of the matter later, but for now it is enough to state the widely held view that 2 Thessalonians is not Pauline. What this means, then, is that this is the first recorded instance in which a Christian forger—someone other than Paul claiming to be Paul—is warning his readers against a Christian forgery.

Here then is a ploy used at the beginning of the Christian era. And it was used for centuries to come, even after the invention of printing. In his lively and compelling book
Forgers and Critics
, Anthony Grafton points to no less a figure than Erasmus as another instance. Erasmus made a living off of exposing the forgeries, fabrications, and falsifications of his intellectual and religious tradition. Following in the path of the great Lorenzo Valla, for example, he showed compelling reasons for thinking that the famous correspondence between Paul and Seneca was forged: the letters are banal, Christ is hardly mentioned in them, Paul himself is portrayed as cowardly and timorous, and it is stupid to imagine that Seneca offered Paul a book “On the Abundance of Words” (De copia verborum) in order to help him write better Latin (“If Paul did not know Latin he could have written in Greek. Seneca did know Greek”).
³⁵

But what goes around comes around. In 1530 Erasmus published an edition of the works of the third-century Cyprian, including a new treatise that Erasmus claimed to have found “in an ancient library,”
De duplici martyrio
(“On the Two Forms of Martyrdom”). In this treatise the traditional martyrs are praised; but Cyprian also praises those who are martyrs in a different sense, who live a life of sacrifice (especially sexual) in the here and now. In Grafton’s words, the treatise “takes a position highly sympathetic to Erasmus, who had always disliked the kind of Christianity that equated suffering with virtue, and had always preferred the human Christ hoping to avoid death in Gethsemane to the divine Christ ransoming man by dying at Calvary.”
³⁶
Grafton notes that the book is found in no manuscript that survives, it explicates passages of Scripture in ways paralleled in Erasmus’s own commentaries, and the Latin writing style is very similar to Erasmus’s own in such works as
The Praise of Folly
. Grafton’s convincing conclusion:

De duplici martyrio
is not Erasmus’ discovery but his composition; it marks an effort to find the support of the early Church for his theology at the cost—which he elsewhere insisted must never be paid—of falsifying the records of that Church. The greatest patristic scholar of the sixteenth century forged a major patristic work.
³⁷

From New Testament times to the early years of printing: forgers who condemn forgery. There are numerous examples between these two points. As Speyer has argued: “Frequently, however, the eras of incisive critique were also rich in forgeries. Hilduin of St. Denis, rather like Anastosius Sinaites, is critic and forger in one.”
³⁸
He later names as well the ninth-century archbishop of Rheims, Hincmar.
³⁹

Guilty parties leveling a charge are not found solely in the Christian tradition, of course, as we saw at the outset in the case of Heraclides Ponticus and Dionysius the Renegade. As a final example we might consider the charge leveled at the emperor Hadrian in the forged Historia Augusta, on the pen of (Pseudo-) Spartianus. Hadrian is faulted for instructing his freedmen to attach their own names to his autobiography, to provide it with something less than self-referential credentials: “So desirous of a wide-spread reputation was Hadrian that he even wrote his own biography; this he gave to his educated freedmen, with instructions to publish it under their own names. For indeed, Pflegon’s writings, it is said, are Hadrian’s in reality” (
Hadrian
1.6).
⁴⁰

Yet again we have the exposure of a forged document (Pseudo-Hadrian) by a forger (Pseudo-Spartianus). The Historia Augusta is full of such irony, never found more elegantly than in the pseudonymously penned statement of
Aurelian
1–2: “There is no writer, at least in the realm of history, who has not made some false statement.” And this by an author who is writing, to use Ronald Syme’s term, under a “bogus name.”
⁴¹

These anecdotal accounts set the stage and express the themes for our detailed examination of the use of forgery in the context of early Christian polemics. Each
incident has involved the use of forgery in a polemical context, where the forgery, based on an authority claimed under the guise of an assumed name, provided ammunition for the assault on the views of another.
⁴²
In each case, the forgery was meant to deceive its readers; that is to say, the authorial claims were meant to be believed. No one approved of someone else’s forgery; the practice of forgery was condemned, in fact, even in works that were themselves forged. This is just one of the ironies that emerge from the ancient forged literature. One of its corollaries is that forgeries were sometimes used to counter the views of other forgeries. This is a phenomenon that I will be calling “counterforgery” in its narrow sense. We will see numerous instances of the phenomenon throughout the Christian tradition of the first four centuries.

Before looking specifically at the Christian materials, it will be important to have a more thorough grounding in the practice of forgery in the broader environment, defined here as the Greek and Roman worlds of antiquity and late antiquity. This will be the subject of Chapters Four and Five. First, however, I need to explain the terminology that I will be using throughout the study and justify my usage. That will be the subject of the next chapter.

1
. For texts and fragments, see the standard edition of F. Wehrli,
Die Schule des Aristoteles
, Hefte VII,
Heracleides Pontikos
2nd ed. (Basel: Schwabe 1969); and now Eckart Schütrumpf,
Heraclides of Pontus: Text and Translations
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009). For a full study, see H. B. Gottschalk,
Heraclides of Pontus
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Contra Wehrli, who based his judgment on the comments of Diogenes Laertius, Heraclides is now seen as a member of the Platonic Academy, not a member of the school of Aristotle. So Gottschalk (pp. 2–6) and Schütrumpf (p. vii).

2
. Texts and translation in R. D. Hicks,
Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers
, 2 vols. LCL (Cambridge: Harvard, 1972).

3
. All anecdotes are taken from Diogenes Laertius,
Lives
, 5.6.

4
. Richard Bentley, “Dissertation upon Phalaris,” in
The Works of Richard Bentley
, ed. Alexander Dyce, vol. 1 (London: F. MacPherson, 1836; reprinted New York: Hildesheim, 1971), pp. 289–96.