Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (8 page)

Rather than considering the two terms as categorically distinct, however, I prefer to see one as a subset of the other. For the purposes of this study, I will be using the term
pseudonymous
in a broad sense to refer to any writing that appears under
a name other than that of the author. Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of pseudonymity. Some books, past and present, are written under a fictitious pen name. In modern times one naturally thinks of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) or George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans). The question of the “innocence” of the fiction is often open, even with the use of pen names. Evans chose a male name, in part, to facilitate the publication of her work. It was not a purely innocent act, but a closely reasoned one intended to effect a desired result. Even so, it was not “deceptive” in the way it would have been if she had written a novel claiming to be Jane Austen. In the ancient world there are examples of fictitious pseudonymity as well, as I will discuss later in this chapter: Xenophon wrote the
Anabasis
under the name of Themistogenes (a not altogether innocent choice, as we will see) and Iamblichus, in a different era, wrote his
Mysteries
as Abamon.

The other form of pseudonymity occurs when a book appears under the name of a well-known person who did not, in fact, write it. It is for this kind of pseudonymous writing that I will be using the more specific term
pseudepigraphy
. And so, all pseudepigrapha are pseudonymous, but not all pseudonymous writings are pseudepigraphic, as I am using the terms. Writings that appear under a false (known) name are again of two types. First, there are books that were originally published anonymously (or under a homonym) that were later ascribed by other writers, editors, scribes, or readers to well-known persons who did not actually write them. This kind of false ascription is not to be laid at the feet of the author, who produced the work without attaching any name to it (or simply his own name, which he happened to share with a well-known person). It is not an instance, then, of authorial deceit but of later misattribution.

The other kind of pseudepigraphon does involve an authorial claim. This is when an author indicates that he is a known (usually famous, at least locally) person, realizing full well that he is in fact someone else. As we will see in further detail, there are grounds for thinking that this kind of false authorial claim was typically meant to deceive the reader. Authors who wanted to commit such acts of deception had a variety of reasons. And they used a range of literary techniques to make the deception effective. All these matters we will consider at length in this chapter and the ones that follow. For now it is enough to establish the meaning of the term I will be using. This kind of pseudepigraphy is what I am calling “forgery,” when an author claims to be someone else who is well known, at least to some readers. Forgeries involve false authorial claims.

The intention to deceive
³
is part and parcel of what it meant to produce a forgery; the claim to be a well-known person is not simply an innocent fiction.
This distinction was critical to the greatest historian of ancient forgery, Wolfgang Speyer: “It is the intent to deceive that, beyond any particular literary purpose, makes a pseudepigraphon a forgery”
⁴
For Speyer, an authorial claim was deceptive and false when it functioned in some nonliterary way, that is, as something other than a fiction, in order to accomplish some desired end. This purposeful intention to deceive the reader is what made a falsely named writing a forgery. And if it was a forgery, it was a form of literary lying: “Only where intent to deceive—that is to say, dolus malus—exists, does [a work] attain to the status of forgery. Forgery thus belongs in the same category as the lie.”
⁵

As I have already indicated, the term
forgery
is no more derogatory than the ancient terms used to describe the same phenomenon. In the texts that I will be dealing with, the most common terms include the following (and their cognates, in various accidental formations; all have their translational equivalents in Latin):

a.
the common term for “lie.” We have already seen the use of the term and some of its derivations—for example,
As Armin Baum has argued in the most recent and useful analysis, in some contexts the term can, to be sure, mean an unintentional “falsehood.” But Baum shows that this is not the normal meaning unless it is accompanied by some qualifying phrase, such as
⁶
Even beyond this, and more important still, the idea of an unintended falsehood (when one says something that is false, without knowing it or meaning to) is of no relevance to the term as it
occurs in the contexts we are concerned with here. The authors who wrote 1 Timothy, 3 Corinthians, and the Letter to the Laodiceans, claiming to be Paul, knew full well that they were not really Paul. Ancient people would call these literary productions
writings that are inscribed with a lie. They were not inadvertent falsehoods.

b.
This term refers to a child born out of wedlock, and carries with it all the negative connotations of our term
bastard
. A literary work is “illegitimate” if it does not actually belong to the person named as its author, just as a child is illegitimate if its real father is not known. For some authors, such as the much later Neoplatonist Olympiodorus, the term applies to books regardless of authorial intent: homonymous writings are, for him,
v
óθ
α
.
⁷
My concern in this study is not with falsely ascribed (or purely homonymous) writings, but with writings with clear authorial claims. Ancients often referred to such a writing as a bastard (Latin: nothus or spurius).
⁸

c.
This term, “counterfeit,” is entirely negative in connotation as well, referring often to the adulteration of coinage, and denoting that which is false, deceitful, and fraudulent. Often it is used in contrast with

Speyer lists twenty-six Greek terms, with Latin equivalents, sometimes used to describe the act of committing forgery, almost all of them with negative connotations, including
and
to his list could be added
and
“to make up,” “invent,” “fabricate.” Simply on the terminological level, this was not a respectable practice. When one considers what ancient authors actually said about the practice—a matter to which we will soon turn—there appears to be no reason to shy away from calling it what it is.
Forgery
is not an unnecessarily negative term, contrary to the claims of some New Testament scholars.
⁹
Books that made false authorial claims were thought of as lies, bastards, and counterfeits.