Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (92 page)

For now, we might conclude by returning to the issue of forgery. Given the anti-Jewish element of the book, why did its author decide to call himself Peter? The question is easier to ask than answer; in no small measure we are handicapped by the size of the small fragment of the text that survives. Any assessment of its authorial claim would necessarily depend on what could be found in the rest of the now-lost materials. But even with what little we have, one can think of reasons for an unknown author of such a second-century account to claim to be Peter. On one hand, the mere claim lends credibility to this version of the story and thereby assures a wider readership. But even beyond this, is it an accident that this, the most anti-Jewish of our early Gospels, is placed on the pen of an apostle who was thought to insist most strongly on the Jewish character of the gospel, and to have been a missionary specifically to Jews?

Peter became a battleground over which the Jewishness of Christianity was fought. In the Pseudo-Clementine literature he is portrayed as a proponent of a form of Christianity that adhered to the Law of Moses (see, e.g., the
Epistula Petri
). In the Pseudo-Clementine
Homilies
, he avers that Jews who follow Moses are on a soteriological par with gentiles who follow Jesus. In these lengthy romances, Judaism is affirmed and Jews are praised, by Peter, the head disciple and foundation of the Christian church. But not in the Gospel of Peter. Here Jews are enemies of God who crucify their own messiah; their leaders hide the truth of Jesus’ resurrection and persecute Jesus’ disciples. At the end of the day, both sets of writings—the Pseudo-Clementines and the Gospel of Peter—use Peter, the Jewish follower of Jesus and well-known evangelist among the Jews, to set forth their visions of the message of Jesus in relationship to Judaism. In the Gospel the portrayal is hateful: Jews are responsible for executing Jesus and God will exact on them a penalty.

The Ascension of Isaiah is unusual in being a Christian apocalyptic text written about, and partially in the name of, a great prophet of the Old Testament. The book is clearly divided into two parts. The first five chapters describe the Martrydom of Isaiah under the wicked Israelite king Manasseh at the instigation of the false prophet Belchira, who is empowered by Beliar. These chapters include a description of Isaiah’s prophecy of the coming and reception of Christ on earth, and the apostasy that will follow his ascension. The latter is the one major event between the departure of the “Beloved,” the book’s favored epithet for Christ, and
the apocalyptic end. This opening section of the book ends with Isaiah’s death, as he is sawn in half with a “treesaw.”

Chapters 6 through 11 recount an earlier vision of Isaiah, in which he ascends through the seven heavens, observing the angelic hosts at each level, until he reaches the highest heaven, the realm of God himself, whence he observes the descent and reascent of the Beloved through the realms below, assuming a different angelic form on his descent so as not to be recognized en route, and providing, as required, the proper passwords to be allowed passage. There follows a description of the incarnation and crucifixion, and then the Beloved’s reascent in glory.

Scholarship on this apocalypse has long been obsessed with theories of sources.
²¹
As Richard Bauckham notes in his concise history of research, since W. Gesenius in 1821, most scholars have agreed that the Ascension of Isaiah is not the unified work of a single author.
²²
For much of the second half of the twentieth century the theory of R. H. Charles held sway, that the book comprises three earlier sources, a Jewish Martyrdom of Isaiah, edited by a Christian (much of
chs. 1
–
5
), a Testament of Hezekiah (3:13b–4:18), and the Vision of the book’s final six chapters. In 1973 A. Caquot tried to isolate the Jewish source behind the Martyrdom, but all such attempts—along with the idea of any such independent source at all—were destroyed by the work of Mauro Pesce, who showed that the Martyrdom is not a Christianized version of a Jewish source, but a Christian text through and through, based in part on Jewish haggadic traditions.
²³
Pesce’s view is now widely held. The Martyrdom is so obviously and thoroughly Christianized that it is difficult to remove Christian elements to obtain a Jewish core. It is filled with references to the Beloved, for example, and there are traces of an incipient trinitarianism, as in 1.7: “the Beloved of my Lord and the Spirit that speaks in me.”

E. Norelli has argued at length that
chapters 1
–
5
are a coherent and unified work by a single author, with a central theme involving the conflict between true and false prophecy. In addition, he maintains that the Vision of
chapters 6
–
11
is an earlier composition that had circulated independently, which was later joined to the Martyrdom by the author of the latter, who composed 11.41–43 to bind the two parts together. The two major portions of the work, then, reflect different phases of the history of the community of prophets from which they emerged.
²⁴

Bauckham wants to take the matter a step further still. In his judgment the entire Ascension is the single composition of a solitary first-century Christian author who used the book of Daniel as his generic model, with its opening narrative only loosely connected with the visions in the second half of the book. This view, however, may propose an implausibly early date for the final product of the Ascension. There is nothing in Christian literature of the first century analogous to the descent and reascent of the Beloved through the seven heavens, using passwords as necessary to pass through the realms controlled by others.

Jonathan Knight places the final text after the apostolic age, given comments made in 3.21–31, but before “full-blown Gnosticism,” since the Vision evinces parallels with Gnostic thought yet lacks Gnostic cosmology such as is known from the writings of the Nag Hammadi library that date from the midsecond century. Here too, however, one should be wary of placing too much emphasis on a unilinear ideological development among texts, as if Gnostic writings written after 150
CE
necessarily evidence developed cosmogonic myths. As we will see, the early to middle second century provides a plausible date for the Ascension. Certainly no detailed account of a divine being’s ascent and descent through the layers of the heavens—replete with passwords—can be found earlier.

As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the Ascension of Isaiah is a textbook example of “embedded pseudepigraphy.” The book as a whole does not claim to be written by Isaiah, but periodically through the course of its narrative “Isaiah” inserts himself to describe his own history and vision. And so the narrative begins in the third person and continues that way up to 3.30 (“for each will say what seems pleasing in his own eyes”
²⁵
) and then suddenly, without explanation, moves into the first person in 3.31 (“And they will set aside the prophecies of the prophets which were before me and also pay no attention to these my visions …”). The narrative continues in the first person (see 4.1, 13, 20) before returning to the third person in 5.1. So too in the Vision,
chapter 6
describes Isaiah entering into a trance in the third person, but Isaiah himself begins to narrate his vision in the first person starting in 7.2 (“In that moment when I was prophesying according to things heard by you, I saw a sublime angel …”). So too at the end, there is an abrupt shift from first to third person, at 11.35–36 (“‘This have I seen.’ And Isaiah told it to all who stood before him …”). Thus the author of the book often removes himself from consideration and feigns the identity of Isaiah himself. It should not be argued that this is simply the generic device of apocalypses and so should not be taken seriously as an authorial claim. As I showed in an earlier chapter, pseudepigraphy is indeed a regular feature of both Jewish and Christian apocalypses, but the authorial claims were meant to be believed and trusted.
Whoever wrote the book of Daniel in the second century
BCE
meant his readers to take seriously his claim to be the wise man and prophet of four hundred years earlier; otherwise his “predictions” would have carried no probative force. These books were not written under innocent pseudonyms, but were forged.
²⁶

We should also guard against thinking that the goal of forgers of apocalypses was the same in every case. Each apocalypse pursues its own agenda and the authorial question needs always to be pursued in that light. In some apocalypses the function of the authorial claim makes particular sense, when, for example, the seer foretells what will happen in the future even though he is, in fact, relating what had already happened in the past, thereby verifying his “vision” for his reader. But that is not the case with the Ascension of Isaiah, which is not concerned to relate the course of human history through a variety of maleficent kingdoms aligned against God (contrast Daniel). And so how might we explain the authorial function here?

Knight provides one explanation worth considering.
²⁷
In his judgment, the book is principally about the defeat of Beliar by Christ, and is written to provide hope for Christians who are undergoing persecution in the early second century. For this author the end is near and the persecuting powers will soon be overthrown. In other words, this apocalypse and its authorial claim function in a way similar to the canonical apocalypses of Daniel and Revelation. Knight’s view, however, may rely too much on his understanding of how apocalypses work in general; there is less to commend it from the specifics provided by this text in particular. Persecution may be part of the picture, in that the deaths of both Jesus and Isaiah figure prominently. But it is certainly not the entire picture. The bigger picture involves the revelation of heavenly secrets that make sense of earthly realities, and not just the realities of suffering. Also at stake are the reality of the incarnation, the hidden identity of Jesus, his rejection on earth, and the apostasy that arose in the wake of his departure. At its heart, this apocalypse is deeply concerned with theology.

The theological views of the text have long puzzled interpreters. Its view of Christ is often described as “naïvely docetic,” in that Christ is said to have come to earth in the “likeness” of a human, after transforming his appearance at will through the heavenly realms (3.13). He was born after Mary was pregnant for just two months (11.13); and he nursed not because he needed nourishment but simply to avoid being recognized for who he really was (11.17). Darrell Hannah has shown, however, that the account is not thoroughly docetic. Christ really suffers torment, is crucified, and dies, before being raised from the dead.
²⁸

So too the account is clearly Trinitarian but not especially nuanced: “And there they all named the primal Father and his Beloved, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, all with one voice” (8.18). Moreover, both the Beloved and the Holy Spirit are worshiped (9.40). At the same time they flank the throne of God, presumably as subordinates, and only the Holy Spirit, not the Beloved, is described as an angel (9.40). Instead, the Beloved assumes the appearance of an angel only as it suits his purposes during his descent. In Hannah’s convincing explication, the account is not theologically rigorous, written to promote a refined theological perspective. Nor is it naïvely docetic. It is simply theologically naïve.
²⁹

One aspect of the theology of the book that merits particular attention is its relationship to Johannine theology known from the writings of the New Testament, with which it shares many features—both with the Gospel of John, where Isaiah is said to have seen the glories of heaven (John 12:41), and with the book of Revelation, where another seer is granted a vision of the divine realm. At the same time the author of the Ascension stands at clear odds with some of the views of the Fourth Gospel. John maintains that no one has ascended to heaven except the one who has previously descended, that is Christ, the Son of Man (John 3:13). Not so for the Ascension, where the prophet of old ascended to the highest realm. Moreover, according to John, Isaiah had a vision of the pre-incarnate Christ in the realm of glory (12:41), since indeed, no human has ever seen God the Father, except Christ himself (John 6:46; see also 1:18, 5:37; 1 John 4:12, 20). The Ascension stresses, on the other hand, that Isaiah saw not just Christ on his throne, but God the Father himself (9.39).
³⁰
It is possible, as Robert Hall has argued, that there is some competition among the communities behind these two literary productions, although it may be going too far to suggest that we can know the inner workings of these groups.
³¹

The commonalities and differences between the Johannine community and the author of the Ascension of Isaiah may suggest that they were in direct contact with one another at points of their history. Their different perspectives do not require completely separate historical developments. It should always be remembered that the secessionists shared a history with but rejected the theology of the community behind the Johannine epistles. Something similar can be said of the book of Revelation, with its many ties to the fourth Gospel but its radically
divergent eschatology. The traditions behind Ascension of Isaiah as well may have been forged in connection with the views behind the Gospel of John, but developed in different directions.

On one point, however, the two books appear in close proximity: their views of Jews and Judaism. For both, Judaism is the God-given, true religion; but the Jews are maligned as the enemies of God. I do not need to make that case for the Fourth Gospel in this context, with its affirmation of Jewish Scripture and, say, festivals, and its simultaneous assault on “the Jews,” children of the Devil (
ch. 8
). But it is important to consider how these views play out in the Ascension of Isaiah. Here, even though polemic is not the driving force of either the Martyrdom or the Vision, there is ample opposition to Jews throughout, with the implicit claim that Jews have forsaken their own religion. That appears to be the reason the great Hebrew prophet Isaiah is chosen as the subject and, indeed, pseudepi-graphic presence, in the book; he testifies to the truth, and his views are rejected (much like John 1:11; “He came to his own, and his own did not receive him”).