Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (94 page)

At the same time, the saying is more than that. The Jews are portrayed negatively here, as those who cannot decide what to love and what to hate. The supposed followers of Jesus who cannot understand him are like that: without knowledge—the correct understanding of his teachings—they do not know
what to think; and if they do not know what to think, they will never inherit eternal life. Like the Jews.

In this saying the disciples exclaim that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Jewish prophets, only to earn his rebuke for listening to dead voices rather than the voice of the living: “His disciples said to him, ‘Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and they all spoke about you.’ He said to them, ‘You have abandoned the one who lives in your presence and have spoken of the dead.’”

There has been considerable speculation concerning who the twenty-four prophets of Israel were. They are probably best understood as the books of the entire Hebrew Bible, as in 2 Esdras 14:45, where Ezra is instructed to publish all the Scriptures he has inscribed: “The Most High spoke to me, saying, ‘Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first, and let the worthy and the unworthy read them.’” For many early Christians, Jesus came in fulfillment of Scripture, and Scripture provided testimony to who he is; Judaism is thus the forerunner of Christianity that prepared the way for Christ. For the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, on the other hand, the Hebrew Bible is dead and defunct, and the religion it supports is of no value. It is not the Old Testament that is to be studied, but the sayings of the living Jesus.
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Following the rejection of ancient Israel and its scriptures in saying 52, saying 53 makes a direct attack on the Jewish practice of circumcision, comparable to the attack on other aspects of Jewish cultic life in saying 14. When the disciples ask whether circumcision is beneficial, Jesus delivers a stark reply: “If it were beneficial, their father would beget them already circumcised from their mother. But true circumcision in the spirit has become entirely profitable.” It is important to note that Jesus does not simply express the superiority of spiritual over physical circumcision, as the saying could easily be misread. The final clause does indeed indicate that spiritual circumcision is beneficial, as found in texts of the Hebrew Bible (Jer. 4:4) and other early Christian writings, including those associated with Paul (Rom. 2:25–29, 3:1–2; Phil. 3:3). But in this case the superiority of spiritual circumcision is coupled with a complete rejection of physical circumcision, which is of no value at all. This is a vivid contrast with Paul’s own view (Rom. 3:1–2), that circumcision is valuable “much and in every way.” For this author, circumcision is of no value whatsoever; otherwise, boys would be born circumcised. Since they are not, circumcision does not come from God.

This denigration of circumcision is at the same time a denigration of what it means to be Jewish. Rather than representing the sign of the covenant made between God and his people, circumcision is to be rejected as of no religious value. To this extent the Jesus of Thomas embraces a view found in other anti-Jewish writings, such as Justin’s
Dialogue with Trypho
19.3: “As I already explained … it is because circumcision is not essential for all men, but only for you Jews, to mark you off for the suffering you now so deservedly endure.”
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The so-called church orders include such books as the Epistula Clementis (although as earlier noted, it is not usually included in the group), the Didache, the Apostolic Tradition, the Apostolic Church Order, the Didascalia Apostolorum, and the Apostolic Constitutions. There is some question over whether it is appropriate to consider these books, and others like them, as a coherent genre, but in any case they do tend to discuss a range of topics related to the administration of the church (not all topics are found in each book): church organization, ethical and to some extent doctrinal instruction; the appointment of church officers; the duties of each office; church discipline; and instructions for liturgical acts such as baptism, eucharist, and ordination. The Didascalia Apostolorum is notable within the group for its strong anti-Jewish slant. It was allegedly written by the twelve apostles after the death of Jesus, but like the Epistula Clementis and the Apostolic Constitutions (which takes it over virtually wholesale), it too is forged. For those who wanted an authoritative account of the church—its offices, organization, beliefs, ethics, and so on—no better option existed than a book of instructions from the apostolic band itself.

The Didascalia was originally written in Greek, but is now preserved completely in Syriac, with extensive portions in Latin. Traditionally it is dated to the early third century, although the most recent study of Alistair Stewart-Sykes places its final composition in the early fourth century.
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It was first published in 1856 by Lagarde from a single Syriac manuscript. One of the great scholars and translators of the work, R. H. Connolly, considered it to be a unified text,
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a view that held sway for most of the twentieth century, up to the more recent
investigations of Paul Bradshaw and now, most notably, Stewart-Sykes.
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Whatever one makes of the integrity of the text, the author(s) were clearly dependent on earlier traditions that have been incorporated into the work. In its final form, the book presents the “teaching” of the twelve disciples. Unlike some of the other church orders, there is no detailed instruction on liturgical practices; and, as we will see, large portions of the book are neither (directly) polemical nor written in the first person. Among the topics it addresses are sin and its consequences, penance, bishops and how they should judge and forgive, the need to support bishops and honor all the clergy, the settlement of disputes, the role of widows and deaconesses, the Christian relation to the Jewish Law (this is where the book becomes polemical, and where the author most frequently reverts to first-person discourse), and the related theme of heresy.

The most recent, detailed, and somewhat convoluted source-redaction analysis of the work comes in the new translation and introduction of Stewart-Sykes. In addition to two major sources underlying the bulk of the instruction, Stewart-Sykes claims that there were two later redactors. He labels one the “deuterotic,” because he opposed the “secondary legislation,” that is, the Jewish Law given by Moses as a punishment to the Jews for their idolatry, after he delivered the true Law of God, the Decalogue. The other redactor is called the “apostolic” because it was he who inserted the first-person authorial claims in the names of the apostles. If this view is right, then the final product that circulated in the manuscript tradition is what I have called a “redactional forgery.” The older sources and their combination into the bulk of the text were written anonymously; but by redacting the piece in the names of the apostles, sometimes narrated in the first person, the apostolic redactor has made not only his occasional additions but also the redacted whole a forgery.

The jury is still out on Stewart-Sykes’s complicated redactional analysis of the work. But it is clear that some redaction, at least, has taken place, in many instances awkwardly, as there are serious editorial seams in the work that become evident upon a close reading.
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In particular Stewart-Sykes makes a good point about the apostolic redactor: the topics addressed in the first person tend, as a whole, not to be those of the rest of the book, and in these passages the tone turns polemical, just when authorization for certain views becomes especially important. As we will see more fully, the apostolic first-person narrator inserts himself only rarely in the early chapters of the book (e.g., Matthew in 2.39.1)
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; by the end
of the book, however, the device becomes common. And it is not difficult to identify the first-person narrator’s overarching concerns. It is in the context of heresies and schisms that the first person becomes prominent, especially in discussions of the secondary legislation. The fundamental aim of this part of the text is “to dissuade Christians from keeping the Jewish Law.”
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One may well wonder why the redactor did not edit his work more exhaustively by setting up a pseudepigraphic frame at the outset. G. Schöllgen—writing well before Stewart-Sykes’s complex source-redaction analysis but anticipating it in at least one key point—gives a compelling explanation:

A possible, indeed perhaps the most plausible, explanation for the limited presence of the frame in the first third appears to me to be the assumption that the Didascalia was originally not conceptualized as an apostolic writing and sought to proceed only by means of extensive argumentation from Scripture against problems in communal practice.
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The issue of authority—a matter of concern for all the church orders—is clear at the outset of the book, even without the first-person narrator. The Didascalia is written “from the command of the Savior” (1). The later pseudepigraphic references, then, when they do start to appear, make that “command” all the more plausible. This teaching comes from Christ through the apostles. Still, the most peculiar feature of the authorial claims of the Didascalia is precisely their uneven spread.
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The unidentified narrator at the beginning of the book continues until 2.14.9, where suddenly the author speaks in the first-person plural in reference to Judas Iscariot praying with “us” but doing “us” no harm.
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Obviously one is to take the first person to be the other eleven disciples, but nothing more is said about the matter at this point.

As one moves through the book, first-person references begin to appear, more or less out of the blue, without any self-identification and without pushing any obvious ideological or theological agenda (2.6.16, 2.7.1, 2.8.1, 2.52.3, 3.9.2, 4.9.2). At other times it is clear that the apostles are the “we,”—as in the recollection
of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet in 3.13.4–5. The first occurrence of a first-person singular narrative is 2.39.1, “I Matthew.” In this instance the reference is occasioned by the mention of “tax collectors” in the previous paragraph; but it is probably significant that this is also the first context in which “false brothers” are discussed.

It is not until the final third of the book that the first-person narration becomes prominent. When looked at as a whole, the alternations between first and third persons are awkward. For example, even though, in the final product, this is the apostles talking, they sometimes talk about themselves in the third person, as in 2.20.1, “for to the bishop it was said through the apostles.”
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Or in 2.26.7, “the presbyters are also to be reckoned to you as a type of the apostles.” It seems especially odd for Matthew to speak in the first person in 2.39.1 (“I, Matthew”) but then to have the Gospel of Matthew referred to impersonally, “Now in the Gospel of Matthew it is written thus” (5.14.11).

On the other hand, it is perhaps not surprising that once the text moves to discuss doctrinal matters, the basis for correct teaching is not made merely by natural arguments and appeals to Scripture, but by the personal authority of the apostles who were with Jesus, spoke with him, ate with him, and were witnesses to him (5.7.25–26). Doctrine in particular needs special apostolic authorization. So too when the author tries to settle a major controversy over the celebration of Passover, he speaks in the first person in the voice of the apostles who personally participated in the Last Supper (5.14.1–5, 5.17.1). And again, when the matter of heresies and schisms appears, the first-person narrator can appeal to having heard the Lord himself (6.5.1–4). In particular, he stresses that God has departed from “the people” (i.e., the Jews) and moved into “the church” (i.e., the Christian community), and this has happened “by means of ourselves the apostles” (6.5.4). Satan too has come to the church, for example in the person of “Simon the sorcerer,” whose encounters with the true representatives of God are narrated in the first person by the apostles, and in particular “I, Peter” (6.9). Most especially, “because the entire church was in danger of falling into heresy, we twelve apostles gathered together as one in Jerusalem to determine what should be done” (6.12.1). They decided that they would write up this “didascalia,” so that the entire book, in this final redaction, is understood to be the document that emerged from the Jerusalem conference, convened to attack false teaching (6.13.1).

This claim to apostolic authorization for its teaching had its effect. Epiphanius, for example, held the document to be apostolic (
Panarion
, 70, 10ff.).

Stewart-Sykes has a clear vision of the function of the deuterotic redactor: “The fundamental aim of the redactor is to deal with the challenges posed by Jewish
Christians.”
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Unlike the earlier works we have studied in this chapter, the opponents here, in other words, are not Jews from outside the church but Christians who insist on still following aspects of the Jewish Law. For the most part, the attack on Judaism is, therefore, indirect; but as we will see, there is also direct polemic against Judaism itself as a false religion. That is why, ultimately, followers of Jesus are not to practice it.

Most of the Didascalia is not polemical in nature. When the polemic does begin to appear, however, it is in relation to the Jewish Law. In an important passage early on (1.4.7–10), the author indicates that the true Law is the “Decalogue and the judgments.” What he calls the “deuterosis”—the “secondary legislation”—is the Law given after the incident of the Golden Calf, when Moses returned up the mountain and received all of the Law other than the ten commandments. Christians are to avoid this secondary legislation: “Keep away from all its instructions and commands, so that you do not lead yourself astray and bind yourself and weigh yourself down with ancient bonds which cannot be undone” (1.4.7). Christ came, for this author, in order to fulfill the Law (i.e., the true Law, the Decalogue) and to weaken the bonds of the secondary legislation, making them null and void for his followers.