Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (9 page)

Practices of forgery are complex and not easily classified. In “normal” forgeries, if we may use the term, an author falsely claims to be a well-known person. But that claim can be made in a variety of ways and with different levels of insistence. Just considering examples from our earliest Christian writings, in a number of cases the author states his assumed name and does nothing further in his writing to assure his reader that he really is who he claims to be. That appears to be the case, for example, in such books as 1 Peter and James.

In other instances, the author uses validation techniques to assure his readers that he is the actual writer. We will see such techniques more fully in
Chapter Five
. For now it is enough to note several of the most obvious kinds. In some instances, the author inserts corresponding verisimilitudes into his account to make the reader think he really must be who he says he is. An outstanding set of examples occurs in 2 Timothy, where the author reminds his (fictitious) reader of their past interactions (“you have observed my teaching, my way of life, … my patience … my persecutions, my sufferings …” 3:10–11), but also gives to him personalized instructions: “Hurry and come to me quickly … and when you come bring the cloak that I left behind in Troas with Carpus, and also the books and especially the parchments” (4:9, 13). Such verisimilitudes assure the reader that this really is Paul writing to his young companion Timothy.

In other instances the author intensifies the claims through asseverations intended to demonstrate beyond doubt that he is who he claims to be. This happens, for example, in 2 Peter, whose author insists with some vehemence that he was actually there to see the majesty of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration (2 Pet. 1:16–18). He was among the “eyewitnesses” to the event and among those who “heard the voice that came from heaven.” The argument that he makes depends on his telling the truth about the matter. So too the author of 1 Timothy, who swears an oath “I speak the truth, I am not lying,” when he claims to be Paul, “preacher, apostle of the truth, and teacher of Gentiles” (2:7).

Sometimes the asseverations take the form of written guarantees of the author’s identity, as happens, for example, in the famous conclusion of 2 Thessalonians: “This 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).

There are other kinds of forgery that might be considered special cases, somewhat more complicated than the simple instance of an author claiming at the outset to be someone else. Here I will mention three such instances:

a.
Embedded forgeries
. Some writings do not make the explicit claim to be authored by a well-known person, but instead embed first-person narratives—or other self-identifying devices—in the course of their discussions, without differentiating the first person from the author. In these instances the reader naturally assumes that the person speaking in the first person is actually the writer of the account. A good example occurs in the Ascension of Isaiah, whose author does not self-identify at the outset but instead sets out an anonymous historical framework, written to sound very much like the prose narrative sections of the book of Isaiah itself. Partway through the narrative, however, and at key points throughout, the revelation given through Isaiah begins to be delivered in the first person. The (real) author of the account does not indicate that he is now quoting someone else, making the reader assume that the author has now begun speaking about what he himself experienced. This provides an unimpeachable authority for the account: it is revealed by none other than Isaiah. This kind of embedding strategy shows how blurry the lines of distinction can be between forgery and other kinds of writing. In many ways an embedded forgery is comparable to the use of speeches invented by historians and placed on the lips of their protagonists; but in those cases it is clear that the author has moved from narrative description to an (alleged) speech, even though the speech is invented. In an embedded forgery the narrator simply slips into another guise and becomes the authenticating figure. In another sense this kind of forgery is not so very different from fabrications of sayings reported to be from an authoritative figure, but that are actually the inventions of the author or of the unknown tradents who have passed them along in the oral tradition—such as many of the sayings of the Gospel of Thomas or later (or earlier) Gospel materials. But there again the sayings are attributed to another person and are presented by a narrator who is distinct from the one who is speaking, unlike what happens in the embedded forgery. For the latter, the narrator becomes the speaker (or participant in the action of the narrative). The Ascension of Isaiah, then, is a kind of forgery. The speaker who describes his experiences to the scribe recording the account is allegedly none other than Isaiah of Jerusalem himself.
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b.
Redactional forgeries
. There are a number of instances in which a book was originally circulated as an anonymous work, and was known in that
form for some time, before a later editor or scribe altered the text to make it present an authorial claim. The book is not then a forgery from its inception, but it becomes a forgery in the course of its transmission, not in the sense that the (original) author made a false authorial claim but in the sense that a later redactor reworded the text in such a way as to have the author (unwittingly) make such a claim. This is the case, for example, with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. In the oldest parts of the textual tradition, this account of Jesus the mischievous wunderkind is simply narrated apart from any authorial claim. Only in later manuscripts is the name Thomas attached to it. Presumably this Thomas is to be taken as Jesus’ twin brother Judas (Didymus), a particularly qualified authority to recount the miraculous childhood of the Son of God. But as Gero has argued, the attribution is late, probably from the Middle Ages.
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The author himself made no authenticating claims.

c.
Non-pseudepigraphic forgeries
. There are other instances in which a book puts forth clear, but false, authorial claims without actually naming an author. This is true of one of the forgeries of the Hebrew Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes, which is allegedly authored by the “son of David,” who is ruling as the king in Jerusalem, a man both inestimably rich and wise. Obviously the author means his readers to take him to be Solomon; but he never calls himself by name. This then creates an ironic situation: the author claims to be a famous person without actually naming himself. And so the book is a forgery (Solomon did not actually write it), but it is not, technically speaking, pseudepigraphic since it is not inscribed with the false name. A similar situation obtains much later in Christian circles in a book such as the “Martyrdom of Marian and James,” whose author claims, falsely, to have been a personal companion of these two estimable martyrs, but never identifies himself by name.
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In
Chapter Four
we will see a number of scholars who, on general principle, are loath to label pseudepigraphic writings (especially canonical cases) forgeries, in part because they fail to see that false authorial claims involve deception. There are other scholars who posit special cases in which forgery is not really forgery. For these scholars, there are indeed instances of deception among the pseudonymous writings of antiquity, but other instances entailed special circumstances that make it inappropriate to label the pseudepigraphic writings in question forgeries.

One commonly cited flaw in Speyer’s rightly celebrated survey of pagan and Christian “Fälschungen” is his special category of “echte religiöse Pseudepigraphie” (“genuine religious pseudepigraphy”). Speyer notes that the category of forgery presupposes the concept of literary property: an author in some sense “owns” his work. Speyer traces this concept back to certain modes of Greek rational thought. When this kind of rationality is not in evidence in an ancient author, who instead writes under the inspiration of a divine being, Speyer maintains, the claim to authorship no longer consists of a deceit. In this case, it is the deity who is allegedly writing the book and the human inscriber is simply a tool in the hand of the divine. This kind of writing cannot be understood “scientifically,” since it presupposes a different kind of thought and experience from that of the modern scholar:

The final form of literary activity listed here, for which a deity is considered to be the originator of the written memorial, can be designated mythical or “religious pseudepigraphy.” It is “genuine,” as long as the belief in a divine revealer is vividly experienced as such … “genuine” religious pseudepigraphy could appear only in places not yet penetrated by rationalism, that is to say, primarily in regions at the margins of the Greco-Roman world.
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As examples Speyer has in mind certain kinds of oracular writing, or from Jewish circles, apocalypses truly based on revelatory experience. He thinks there are virtually no instances in the Christian literature.

This category is not unique to Speyer. In many ways it is similar to the view of J. Sint that “echte religiöser Ergriffenheit” (emotion) could lead to pseudepigraphic activity:

It has become apparent, that a great number of writings can be explained only on the basis of religious motivations or motivations related to the psychology of religion. From the peculiarity of mythical thinking and genuine religious emotion the author obtains such persuasive power for his undertaking that we can no longer speak of conscious deception, that indeed ethical truth questions do not pose any problems for him and that he therefore could not fear being unmasked.”
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For Speyer, there are also instances in which the religious pseudepigraphy is “false” rather than “genuine.” This is when a later author, cognizant of Greek rationalistic modes of thought and conversant with ideas of authorship, pretended to be under the inspiration of a divine being, and somewhat cynically then produced an imitation of a genuinely religious pseudepigraphon.

This further differentiation, however, reveals a principal problem with the category. It represents an attempt to render a historical judgment (what kind of pseudepigraphon is this work?) on the basis of a nonhistorical criterion (what is the state of mind of the author? Does he genuinely feel inspired by the divine?).
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Inner psychological states are never accessible to the historian, and so surely they are not the best basis for forming historical conclusions. Hence the critique of E. J. Bickerman in his extended review of Speyer’s work: “The hypothesis concerning ‘genuine’ religious pseudepigraphy is thus not only spurious, it is useless.”
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Other objections are raised by H. Balz, who points out that the instances we have of Speyer’s genuine religious pseudepigrapha are based on oral traditions that were later written down by an author. They are not, in other words, the product of immediate religious experience of divinely inspired prophets but are literary productions generated for the needs of communities.
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More recently, and from another angle, P. Beatrice objects that Hesiod received his “information” about the genealogy of the gods from the Muses, yet signed the
Theogony
in his own name, just as the prophets of Israel who were conscious of being under the inspiration of God, and who spoke in his name, nonetheless produced orthonymous works.
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When they did so, they were certainly not driven by the spirit of Greek rationalism. The other problem is that one might imagine how an author in a divinely inspired ecstatic trance might write in the name of the God who is using him as his vessel; but why would he be driven, then, to claim to be another
human? Why produce the writing in the name of someone else, rather than in the name of God?

In any event, since Speyer finds little evidence of any kind of genuine religious pseudepigraphy among Christian authors, his claims on this score are of little direct relevance for the current investigation.

By way of contrast, a much cited article by Kurt Aland declares that inspiration by the Spirit of God was precisely a Christian phenomenon and that it can explain the pseudepigraphic practices of the early church. The early Christian authors understood that the Holy Spirit was speaking through them when they wrote, much as he had spoken through them and their co-religionists when they orally delivered the Word of God to their hearers. When writing what the Spirit revealed, it would have been deceitful and false to claim their own names, as if the words were their own. As Aland puts it, “not only was the tool by which the message was given irrelevant, but … it would have amounted to a falsification even to name this tool, because … it was not the author of the writing who really spoke, but only the authentic witness, the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the apostles.”
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As a result:

When pseudonymous writings of the New Testament claimed the authorship of the most prominent apostles only, this was not a skillful trick of the so-called fakers, in order to guarantee the highest possible reputation and the widest possible circulation for their work, but the logical conclusion of the presupposition that the Spirit himself was the author.
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According to Aland, it was only later in the life of the Christian community, once the age of prophecy had ceased, that works falsely written in the names of the apostles could be thought of as actual forgeries. This started happening in the midsecond century. By then “the possibility for the genesis of ‘authentically pseudonymous’ writings had passed.”
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Like Speyer, then, Aland maintains that there were authentic and inauthentic pseudepigrapha. Only the latter are to be deemed forgeries.