Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (98 page)

The correspondence comprises two letters. The first is a short missive from the king of Edessa, Abgar Uchama (“the Black”) to Jesus, acknowledging Jesus’ miracle-working powers: “I have heard about you and your healings, which you perform without medications or herbs. As the report indicates, you make the blind see again and the lame walk, you cleanse lepers, you cast out unclean spirits and demons, you heal the chronically sick, and you raise the dead.”
⁹⁴

Abgar has drawn the appropriate conclusions from the tales he has heard: “Having heard all these things about you, I have concluded one of two things: either you are God and do these things having descended from heaven, or you do them as the Son of God.” His principal concern, however, is for his own, unspecified illness. He would like Jesus to come to Edessa to heal him, and at the same time to escape the animosity of the Jews in his homeland: “For I have also heard
that the Jews are murmuring against you and wish to harm you.” Here then is another piece of anti-Jewish rhetoric that highlights the Jewish animosity toward Jesus (and, presumably, all things Christian).

In his brief reply, Jesus blesses Abgar for “believing without seeing” (an allusion to John 20:29) but informs the king that he cannot come because he needs to fulfill his mission, that is, by being crucified. After his ascension, however, he will send an apostle to heal the king and “provide life both to you and to those who are with you” (that is, to lead them to salvation).

There are various indications that this short correspondence originated independently of the legend of the conversion of Edessa. It can at least be affirmed that it circulated separately
⁹⁵
: copies of the letter in Greek can be found in two inscriptions at Euchaita in northern Anatolia, on a stone at Philippi in Macedonia, and on a stone at Kirk Magara near Edessa, all dating from the fifth century. Later it can be found in an inscription at Ephesus on a stone over the door of a house and on a papyrus that was possibly used as an amulet. In addition, according to Judah Segal, “texts of the Abgar-Jesus correspondence are frequent in Coptic, and in many forms—on stone, on parchment, on ostraca, and as amulets on papyrus.”
⁹⁶

In addition to the surviving remains themselves, we have the evidence from the pilgrim Egeria that citizens of Edessa in later times considered the correspondence significant for its magical powers, as containing a letter from the Son of God himself (
Peregrinatio Egeriae
19). It was brought forward in times of war, miraculously scattering the armies laying siege to the city. Eventually a copy of the correspondence was affixed to the city gates to ward off enemies. This miraculous character of the correspondence was based in no small measure on the last line of Jesus’ letter, which is not found in Eusebius’s account, but is present both in the surviving Greek fragments of the letter and in the account found in the
Doctrina Addai
, where Jesus assures Abgar that “Your city will be blessed, and the enemy will no longer prevail over it.” This line itself can still be found in inscriptions, ostraca, and amulets.
⁹⁷

It is possible that these various sources for the correspondence extracted it from the fuller legend. It is worth noting, however, that Egeria herself gives no evidence of knowing the fuller legend, but speaks only of the correspondence.
⁹⁸
Moreover, the letter indicates that Jesus himself will send an apostle to Abgar after his ascension, but the legend indicates that it is Thomas who does so, with no indication of or even allusion to dominical inspiration. It may well be, then, that the legend sprang up around the correspondence in a second stage of the
tradition. The tradition itself is internally uneven: the
Doctrina Addai
does not speak of a letter from Jesus, possibly under the influence of the notion that Jesus never wrote anything. Instead, according to the
Doctrina
, he sent an oral reply through a messenger.

Both Augustine and Jerome indicate that Jesus never produced any writings.
⁹⁹
Other traditions exist, however, indicating that he both was able to write and did write. The best known is the apocryphal Pericope Adulterae that later found its way into manuscripts of the Fourth Gospel, where Jesus is literally said to “write”
on the ground (not draw or doodle), a passage that Chris Keith has recently argued was originally designed precisely to show that Jesus was writing-literate.
¹⁰⁰
Two other writings allegedly by Jesus survive, the letter that Jesus writes from the cross, addressed to the Cherubim of heaven, in the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea (although in that case one might suppose the letter was dictated …) and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth from Nag Hammadi, which, however, is allegedly written by the heavenly, not the earthly Jesus. As a result, the correspondence with Abgar is the only piece of writing allegedly produced by Jesus himself that survives. And appropriately enough, it is in response to a letter forged by the same writer, in the name of the king of Edessa, who is concerned about Jesus’ fate at the hands of the recalcitrant Jews, who obviously do not recognize his supernatural character, despite the miraculous signs he performed.

As it turns out, a similar set of themes is played out in a second pair of letters preserved in the Abgar legend, at least in its later iteration in the
Doctrina Addai
. This is a correspondence between Abgar and the emperor Tiberius, allegedly written after Jesus’ death. The themes of the correspondence sound very much like what one finds throughout the Pilate cycle. Abgar informs the emperor that the Jews have wrongfully crucified their own messiah: “I write and make known to your powerful and great rulership, that the Jews under your authority who live in Palestine have gathered together and crucified the Messiah who was unworthy of death.”
¹⁰¹
They did this despite the fact that Jesus “performed signs and wonders and had showed to them mighty powers and signs.” In response, Abgar has wanted to take his armies into Palestine and wipe out the Jews, but he restrains himself out of respect for the emperor.

In his reply, Tiberius indicates that he was already informed about the malevolent actions of the Jews in a letter from Pilate, and that he is now prepared to take legal actions against the culprits: “I am ready whenever I have quiet to make a legal charge against the Jews who have acted unlawfully.” Pilate himself has been punished by being “dismissed in disgrace” for his part in the affair, “because he deserted the law and did the will of the Jews, and for their appeasement crucified the Messiah who … should have been honored instead.… It is right that he
should have been worshiped by them, particularly since they saw with their own eyes everything which he did.”

This forged correspondence presupposes the existence of an exchange between Pilate and Tiberius, as referred to earlier in this chapter. Eusebius himself knows about such an earlier exchange, but shows no knowledge of these letters between Abgar and the emperor. It appears that their forger produced his account sometime in the late fourth, or even the early fifth, century and, like the sundry authors of the writings found in the Pilate cycle, was intent not only on imagining the unimaginable—a Tiberius agonized over the death of the Jewish messiah—but also on imagining it in the harsh anti-Jewish terms of his own day.

1.
Among the standard works, see especially Marcel Simon,
Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations Between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire 135–425 AD
(New York: Oxford, 1946, French original 1948); Rosemary Ruether,
Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism
(New York: Sea-bury, 1974); and John Gager,
The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity
(New York: Oxford University, 1983). Among the more valuable of the spate of recent literature, see Daniel Boyarin,
Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004); Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed,
The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).

2.
It is tempting to include the book of Hebrews as an instance of a forged polemic against Jews. But even though it does indeed appear to be a forgery, at the end of the day it is difficult to establish its function as primarily, or even covertly, polemical. It is the postscript of 13:22–25 that seems to carry the implicit claim that the author was Paul (even though he certainly was not Paul). Especially striking is v. 23: “You should know that our brother Timothy has been released; I will see you with him if he comes quickly.” That the passage was originally part of the letter, see Harry Attridge,
The Epistle to the Hebrews
Heremenia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989), p. 13 and ad loc. Claire Rothschild in particular has made a lively and impassioned case that the book is meant to be taken as a Pauline letter, by an author living well after Paul’s day: “The author of Hebrews composed the postscript in imitation of Paul in order to pass off the text as one of his prison letters.… The author did so, not as an afterthought, but as a way of carrying out the book’s original intention. That is, the postscript is a deliberate forgery by an otherwise unknown early Christian author, claiming Paul’s authorship for a work he composed to be published as part of an existing
corpus Paulinum
” (
Hebrews as Pseudepigraphon: The History and Significance of the Pauline Attribution of Hebrews
, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009, p. 4). Rothschild’s argument is that the entire letter—not just the postscript—contains numerous allusions to Paul’s own writings, and that it cites an inordinate number of passages of Scripture also cited by Paul. In her judgment the Pauline materials throughout the book do not come to the author from some kind of “common stock” of early Christian traditions. They are intentional allusions to Pauline teachings, given to verify to the readers that the author is Paul.

I am inclined to agree that the letter—especially because of its ending—is written by someone who wants his readers to think he is Paul. At the same time, I do not see the letter as polemical (Rothschild does not contend that it is either). It is true that one of the major concerns of Hebrews is that its readers not (re?)turn to Judaism. And so most of the book is designed to show that Jesus is superior to anything Judaism has to offer (he is greater than the angels, than Moses, than Joshua, than the high priests, than the sacrifices, and so on). As a result, one might see in this a polemic against Judaism. But in fact the author does not attack Jews or the Judaism of his day; the form of Judaism he discusses is biblical Judaism. Even when he indicates that God “finds fault with them” (8:8), the author is referring to Israelites in the days of Jeremiah, not to Jews in his own time. The Judaism discussed in the book, therefore, is not a contemporary religion subject to polemical attack. And yet more important, it is not an evil to be abrogated. The Jewish religion of biblical times was a good religion, given by God, that has now been transcended.

3.
A. Hilgenfeld, “Das Petrus-Evangelium über Leiden und Auferstehung Jesu,”
ZWT
36 (1893): 447; A. Harnack,
Bruchstücke des Evangeliums und der Apocalypse des Petrus
(Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1893), 37–38.

4.
“Justin und das Markusevangelium,”
ZNW
84 (1993): 93–110.

5.
The Gospel of Peter: Introduction, Critical Edition, and Commentary
(Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 97–99.

6.
Foster argues that since the infinitive used before the
and the infinitive used after the
both have as the subject Jesus, then the
must not be changing the person being discussed. There’s a certain force to the argument, but it ultimately fails because it overlooks both the closest antecedent for the pronoun and the established usage of Justin in his other references to the Memoirs, not to mention the problems involving the use of an objective genitive with “Memoirs.”
Gospel of Peter
, pp. 97–99.