Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (95 page)

This early passage is an adumbration of the fuller exposition near the end of the book, 6.15–23. Christians are not to follow the Law that was given in order to punish Jews for their sins: “You who have been converted from the people [i.e., from among the Jews] who believe in God and in our Saviour Jesus Christ should not now be continuing to keep to your former conduct, keeping pointless obligations and purifications, and separations and baptismal lustrations and distinction between foods” (6.15.1).

The temptation to follow the secondary legislation is not limited to converts from Judaism, however, as the author earlier addresses “especially you who are of the gentiles” (5.14.22). And so the problem involves both ethnically Jewish Christians who continue to follow the prescriptions of Torah and gentile Christians who have been convinced, presumably by them, to do so as well. For this author, the true Law of God, which certainly is to be followed, is “simple … pure, and holy.” It is the Decalogue, as shown by a curious kind of gematria. Since it is specifically a “Deca”-logue, it can be represented by the letter iota (the numeral ten); and it is iota that begins the name
(6.15.2). And so the Decalogue is for the followers of Jesus, and only the Decalogue: “Thus the law is indissoluble, whereas the secondary legislation is transitory. For the law is the Decalogue” (6.15.3–4).

The secondary legislation was given by God out of anger, when the children of Israel committed idolatry in the incident of the Golden Calf: “Then was the Lord angry, and in the heat of his anger, yet in his merciful goodness, he bound them to the secondary legislation as to a heavy load and the hardness of a yoke” (6.16.6).
This deuterosis required them to make frequent burnt offerings, to observe strict food laws, purifications, “and much else that is astounding” (6.16.9). Followers of Jesus, however, have been “released from the worship of idols through baptism, as from the secondary legislation. For in the Gospel he renewed and fulfilled and confirmed the Law, and abolished and abrogated the secondary legislation” (6.17.1). That, in fact, is why Christ died: “to redeem us from the bonds of the secondary [legislation]” (5.5.3).

Anyone who continues to try to keep the secondary legislation, therefore, is “guilty of the worship of the calf” (6.18.9); what is more, “if you uphold the secondary legislation you are also asserting the curse against our Saviour. You are ensnared in the bonds and so are guilty of the woe as an enemy of the Lord God” (6.18.10).

It should be clear from the foregoing that the main target of the pseudepi-graphic polemic is a form of Jewish Christianity, defined, in this instance, as a Christianity that insists on the ongoing validity of Jewish ritual observances. The author appears to have other opponents in view as well, and indeed he may not have neatly differentiated among them. For one thing, Jews who are not followers of Jesus also come under attack, on grounds that can easily be imagined. They are no better than “pagans [who] go in the morning to worship and serve their idols when they rise from sleep” (2.60.2). They are, in fact, “vainly called Jews” (2.60.3), by resting on the Sabbath they show that they are “idle.” They do not have any faith. Most severely, “they do not confess the murder of Christ, which they brought about through transgressing the law, and so repent and be saved.” They are, then, without “excuse before the Lord God” (2.60.4). Indeed, they “made the Lord angry by not believing in him,” (5.16.1) and they hate the Christians (5.14.23).

The other target of attack is a group of “heretics” whose crimes of unbelief are spoken of in such general terms that it is impossible to know exactly who they were or what they believed. The names Simon and Cleobius (6.8) may be traditional, picked up, perhaps from 3 Corinthians, which I will discuss in a later chapter. The charges against these heretics may also have been derived from this Pauline forgery, as they are accused of refusing to use the laws and the prophets, of blaspheming God the Almighty, and of not believing in the resurrection (6.10.1)—all charges dealt with not only in 3 Corinthians but throughout the writings of proto-orthodox heresiologists attacking “Gnostics.” At the same time the opponents are said to forbid marriage and the eating of meat, charges commonly associated with overly rigorous encratites (also Gnostics?); yet others insist simply on not eating pork and on getting circumcised—charges involving, now, the secondary legislation (6.10.3–4). It may be that in this instance the author is simply attacking heresy in general, rather than having specific targets in mind. In any event, he claims that the rise of these opponents is what prompted the Jerusalem conference and the writing of this very didascalia (6.12.1), even though, as I have noted, the vast bulk of the instruction has nothing to do with such false teachings.

The author shows a particular awareness of, and irritation toward, other Christian leaders who “come falsely under the name of apostles” (6.13.2), who are evidently having an influence on the churches. One hardly need note the thick irony, in this book that falsely claims to be written by the apostles, actually produced some two centuries after their demise. Who the author has in mind as apostolic impostors is anyone’s guess. If he knew of actual writings celebrating the importance of the Jewish Law for Christians—such as the forged Epistula Petri or the forged Grundschrift lying behind the Pseudo-Clementine
Recognitions
and
Homilies
—then we would be altogether justified in labeling his work a counterforgery in the strong sense. C. Fonrobert, on the other hand, has argued that the immediate occasion for the book was not Christian literary activity but non-Christian Jewish—specifically that the book and its instructions for Christians is a response to rabbis in the process of codifying what became the Mishnah:

The Didascalia spends so much time arguing about the “second legislation,” and the correct way of reading Scripture, because it recognizes that there are other ways of reading, potentially legitimate or persuasive ways of reading at that, that challenge the sense of Christian identity that the Didascalia itself wants to convey.
⁶³

At the end of the day it may be impossible to decide this issue. But it bears repeating that the explicit target of the author’s polemics in almost every instance is false teachers within the Christian community. Only rarely, as we have seen, does he attack non-Christian Jews; instead, his concern is with followers of Jesus who keep the Jewish Law. This may tilt the scale in favor of seeing the context as less a confrontation with local rabbinic activities and more a concern over Judaizing practices within the Christian communities themselves.
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And as we will see in a later chapter, there are other polemical issues touched upon by the author, again involving internal church dynamics.

Unlike the other books we have considered in this chapter, the Acts of Pilate was massively popular throughout the Middle Ages. More than five hundred manuscripts still survive in Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Armenian, and
Georgian. The manuscripts in the vernaculars of Europe are even harder to tally. They can be found in Castilian, Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, German, English, Danish, Dutch, Old Norse, Swedish, Gallic, Irish, Bulgarian, Polish, Old Slavonic, and Czech.
⁶⁵

We appear to have references to an Acts of Pilate before any such book existed. The first occurs in Justin’s First Apology, where he indicates, about the passion of Jesus, “That these things really happened, you can ascertain from the Acts of Pontius Pilate” (35.9).
⁶⁶
Later he states “That Christ did perform such deeds you can learn from the Acts of Pontius Pilate” (48.3). The second reference shows that these “Acts” are not thought of as some kind of official
acta
recording the events of Jesus’ trial, but a fuller account of some kind. Historians have always treated both references gingerly. Directly before the first of them, Justin also suggests that his reader can learn about the town of Bethlehem “by consulting the census taken by Quirinius, your first procurator in Judea.” Apart from the fact the Quirinius was never a procurator in Judea, there is the problem that the census itself, referred to in Luke 2, was almost certainly Luke’s invention (or that of Luke’s community or oral source), designed with the express purpose of locating Jesus’ actual birth in Bethlehem despite the fact that everyone knew that he came from Nazareth. Justin, in other words, is making things up. There was no census record to consult, and no Acts of Pilate. He may well have simply assumed that they must have existed.

Some decades later Tertullian refers, not to acta, but to correspondence allegedly sent from Pilate to the emperor Tiberius. Tertullian’s first reference does not actually mention Pilate, but indicates that “So Tiberius … hearing from Palestine in Syria information which had revealed the truth of Christ’s divinity, brought the matter before the Senate, with previous indication of his own approval” (
Apol
. 5.2). Here again we are dealing with an obvious fiction, both with respect to Tiberius’ attempt to obtain the senate’s approbation of Jesus’ divine status and to his receipt “from Palestine” of correspondence to that effect. The second reference clarifies that the alleged correspondence came from Pilate: “All these facts about Christ were reported to Tiberius, the reigning emperor, by Pilate who was by now a Christian himself, as far as his conscience was concerned” (
Apol
. 21.24). That Pilate eventually became a Christian was later narrativized in some of the writings of the Pilate cycle. The presence of the tradition in Tertullian’s reference to a correspondence does not inspire confidence in the report, which is fully implausible even on its own merits.

A further reference occurs in the “Passion of Tarachus, Probus, and Andronicus,” three martyrs during the Great Persecution of 304
CE.
Here it is not a Christian but a pagan governor, Maximus, who confronts the accused with the existence of an Acts of Pilate: “Nonsense! Don’t you know that he whom you invoke is an evil man who was hanged on a cross under the authority of a governor named Pilate, whose Acts are still preserved?”
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In this case there is reason to think that the governor—whether a fictional character speaking for the author/narrator or a real person—was referring to an actual, existing document. For we have solid evidence that there did indeed at one time exist a pagan version of the Acts of Pilate, propagated in the context of Christian persecution at the beginning of the fourth century.

The evidence comes from Eusebius, who both mentions the document and exposes it as a nonhistorical fabrication. In speaking of the activities of pagan priests under the persecuting zeal of the emperor Maximin Daia, he indicates that they forged an Acts of Pilate as part of their strategy in attacking the Christians: (
H.E
. 9.5) “They actually forged
Memoranda
of Pilate and our Savior
full of every kind of blasphemy against Christ.”
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He goes on to speak of the distribution of the book: