Forged (5 page)

Very few forgers in the ancient world were actually caught red-handed.
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The reasons should seem fairly obvious. For one thing, ancient scholars who were invested in detecting forgeries did not have the sophisticated methods of analysis that we have today, with our computers, databases, intricate analyses of writing style, and so on. An ancient scholar frequently
could
tell that a literary text was not by the same author who wrote another text (e.g., that the book of Revelation was not written by the same author who wrote the Fourth Gospel). But it's much easier to say who did
not
write a book (Paul did not write Hebrews) than who
did
write it (Ephesians, if not by Paul, was written by whom?).

Even more important, forgers went out of their way not to get caught. Most of the time, they were successful. In one of the fascinating modern discussions of forgery, Anthony Grafton, of Princeton University, shows that over the centuries the art of forgery became increasingly refined as the art of detecting forgery improved its methods. The better scholars became at recognizing a forgery, the better forgers got at avoiding detection. This compelled the scholars to refine their methods, which in turn drove the forgers to improve their craft.
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Ancient forgers typically used several methods to escape detection. First and most obviously, anyone forging a document in the name of a well-known author did his level best to imitate the author's writing style and vocabulary. Everyone has a distinctive style of writing, and every style, in principle, can be imitated. Less skillful imitators simply recognized unusual words commonly used by an author and used those words a lot (sometimes much more than the author being imitated). Others tried to imitate the distinctive ways the author used grammar: sentence length, use of participial phrases, use of sentence fragments, and so on. For highly educated authors, this matter of imitating writing style was almost second nature; in the advanced education of “rhetorical” schooling that the upper-class elite received, a regular exercise involved writing an account or a speech in the style of a famous author or speaker. The most highly educated people in the empire were trained to do this as a matter of course.
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Most of those people, of course, were not involved in the business of forgery.

The fact that a forger tried to imitate an author's style can make it difficult to detect forgeries. But the reality is that some people were more skilled at it than others. Just as most people today couldn't forge a Rembrandt if their life depended on it, so too most people can't sound “just like” Aristotle, Plutarch, or Paul.

A second trick of forgers was to include verisimilitudes in their writings. The term “verisimilitude” refers to a statement, a comment, or an off-the-cuff remark that makes a writing look “very similar” to what you would expect the alleged author to have said. Forgers would make personal comments about the recipients of a letter, even if in fact they were not actually sending it to anyone. Why say you'll be praying for the letter's recipients during their time of persecution, if you're not actually sending it to people experiencing persecution? Because if you say that, it certainly
sounds
as though you're sending it to those experiencing persecution! Why ask for a personal favor from a person you're writing to, if you're not really writing to that person? (“Hey, James, be sure to say hello to your
mother for me; and don't forget to bring that book that I left at your house.”) Because there's no better way to make it look as if the letter is authentic. Why fabricate names of recipients, your past relationship with these recipients, remembered experiences you've shared, and so on? All of these add credibility to your writing, making it look as though you really are writing this person, at this time, in this situation, even if you're writing three hundred years later to no one in particular.

We've already seen one kind of verisimilitude in our earlier discussion. In both 2 Thessalonians from the first century and the
Apostolic Constitutions
three hundred years later, the pseudonymous author tells his readers not to read pseudonymous writings. Or to be more precise, the forger warns his readers not to read forgeries. Why? In part because it makes readers less likely to suspect that the book they have is itself a forgery. That is, it's a kind of verisimilitude.

One final technique used by some forgers involves a “discovery narrative.” If a book shows up this week claiming to have been written two hundred years ago, one might well wonder where it has been all this time. Forgers sometimes begin or end their writing by describing what has led to the book's disappearance and discovery. For example, an author might begin a book by explaining that he had a dream, and in this dream he was told to dig a deep hole on the south side of the oak tree in the field across the stream from his farm. When he dug the hole, he found an ancient wooden box. Inside the box was a deteriorating manuscript. He has now copied this manuscript out by hand, and this is it, a revelation given directly by Christ to the apostle James and hidden from the world until now.

The book then claims to have been written by James, as “copied” by the discoverer of the manuscript. The book is not widely known, because it has been hidden all these years. But now it has come to light, and here it is. Except it's not really here. What is here is a book not written by James, but by a forger claiming to be James, who has conveniently included an explanation for why no one has ever heard of this book before.

Ancient Views of Forgery

I
HAVE ALREADY INDICATED
that scholars are sometimes loath to use the term “forgery” for pseudepigraphal writings in which an author claims to be someone else. Later, I deal at greater length with what some scholars have claimed about this phenomenon in order to avoid thinking of such books as forgeries. This will come in Chapter 4, after we have had two chapters of data to help us assess these claims. As it turns out, many New Testament scholars who make pronouncements on forgery (“It wasn't meant to be deceitful.” “No one thought of it as lying.” “It wasn't looked down upon.”) simply haven't read what the ancient sources say about it. Throughout this book it will become quite clear from the ancient writings themselves that even though forgery was widely practiced, it was also widely condemned and treated as a form of lying. To get us started here, I want to give just a few examples, which could easily be multiplied, of how ancients thought and talked about the practice of forgery.

The first thing to note is that in virtually every instance in which an ancient author mentions forgery, he condemns it. There are a few exceptions, which I will discuss at greater length in Chapter 4. But these exceptions really are exceptional, for reasons we'll see. By far the dominant discourse in the ancient world opposed forgery and saw it as a deceitful and illicit practice. That doesn't mean that people didn't engage in the practice—adultery is usually seen as a deceitful and illicit practice today, but that doesn't stop a lot of people. Despite the condemnations of it, the practice of forgery thrived in antiquity.

One of the more famous stories of forgery involves the second-century Roman physician Galen, whom I mentioned earlier. In one of his surviving writings, Galen gives an autobiographical account in which he tells of detecting a forgery. As he relates it, he was one day walking down a street in Rome and was passing by a bookseller's shop. In the window were two men arguing about a book that was allegedly written by Galen! One man was heatedly arguing that Galen had in fact written the book; the other was insisting that the writing style was
all wrong, that Galen could not have written it. This episode warmed the cockles of Galen's heart, since in fact he had
not
written the book. So he went home and wrote a book, which we still have today. Sometimes the book is called
How to Recognize Books Written by Galen.

Did Galen think it was an acceptable practice for someone else to write in his name? Obviously not. Nor did anyone else who discovered forgeries in his own name. I earlier mentioned the poet Martial, who was incensed that other poets tried to pass off their own work (which he considered vastly inferior) as his. Among Christians we have outraged complaints about forgeries in the writings of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine. Forgery was so widely condemned in antiquity that even forgers condemned forgery—as we have seen in the case of 2 Thessalonians and the
Apostolic Constitutions.

Some scholars have argued, strenuously, but without much evidence, that it was a common and accepted practice in schools of philosophy to write a philosophical treatise and sign your master's name to it (Plato, Pythagoras, etc.), rather than your own, and that no one looked askance at this practice. As we will see in Chapter 4, there is little evidence indeed that this happened. Ask a modern-day scholar who claims that in antiquity this was a widespread practice to cite an ancient source for it. In almost every instance, you will find a tongue-tied scholar.
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That forgery was widely condemned in antiquity can be seen by some of the terms that were used to describe the practice, most of which were at least as negative as the modern term “forgery.” In Greek the two most common words to describe literary texts whose authors falsely claim to be a well-known figure are
pseudos,
which means “a falsehood” or “a lie,” and
nothos,
which means “an illegitimate child,” with connotations similar to our modern word “bastard.”
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With respect to the first word, some scholars have stressed that
pseudos
does not have to have the negative connotation of a bald-faced lie, since it is sometimes used simply to indicate information that is incorrect, a falsehood. And that is certainly true, in some contexts. But it means that only in contexts in which those speaking the falsehood do
not realize that what they are saying is an error. When a person speaks something that is false, knowing that it is false,
pseudos
always means what “lie” means in English: an intentional falsehood with the intent of deceiving hearers or readers into thinking that it is right. There can be no question which connotation applies to ancient forgeries. The person who wrote the
Gospel of Peter,
claiming to be Jesus's disciple Simon Peter, some sixty years after Peter's death—did he realize that he was not in fact Simon Peter? Unless he was a lunatic, then of course he did. He intentionally claimed to be someone he was not. In Greek that would be called a
pseudos;
in English we would call it a lie.

The other term,
nothos,
might seem a bit puzzling. It is often translated “spurious,” which may be accurate enough, but does not carry the same connotations as the Greek word, which refers typically to a bastard child. The logic of the term in the context of forgeries is clear. If a child born out of wedlock is raised by his mother and her husband (who is not the child's father), then the child does not “belong,” by blood, to his alleged father; they are not related. Moreover, in antiquity, the child had no legal rights. So too with a literary text. If it goes under the name of an author who did not in fact produce it, then it is not actually related or legally connected to that person, but derives from someone else. So it is called a
nothos,
an illegitimate child, a text that does not belong to the author claimed for it.

Both of these terms are negative, not neutral, and they show what ancients thought about the practice of forgery. An author who produces a writing in the name of someone else has produced a “false writing,” “a lie,” “an illegitimate child,” or a “bastard.” Similar words are used by Latin writers for the act of forgery, for example, words that mean “to lie,” “to falsify,” “to fabricate,” “to adulterate,” “to counterfeit.”

Contrary to what some scholars have claimed (again, see Chapter 4) forgers in the ancient world typically wanted to deceive their readers by claiming to be persons of authority and standing. This has been long recognized by the real experts in ancient forgery.
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And a moment's reflection shows why this must be the case. Consider the motivations for forgery mentioned earlier. Forgers who wanted to see
if they could get away with it, to see if they could pull the wool over someone's eyes, would scarcely have tried to make their ploy transparent and obvious; they would have truly wanted to deceive people. If they wanted to make money by producing an “original” copy of, say, a dialogue of Plato, they wouldn't get very far if everyone knew who they really were. If they wanted to justify a political institution or religious practice by citing the views of an authority or wanted to have their own views accepted as authoritative even if they themselves were completely unknown, it would make no sense to claim to be someone else knowing full well that no one would believe you.

That forgery was not a transparent fiction is evidenced as well by the negative things people say about it in the ancient sources—the practice, as I have argued, is condemned in virtually every instance it is discussed. Moreover, the reactions to forgers when they are caught show quite clearly that they meant to deceive, that they were often successful, and that people were not at all pleased when they discovered the truth. Galen and Martial were incensed to find someone else claiming their name for writings they did not produce. And sometimes the reaction was even more hostile.

The first time we hear of a forger being discovered occurs all the way back in the fifth century
BCE
, in the writings of the famous Greek historian Herodotus.
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In a puzzling and enigmatic passage, Herodotus speaks of Onomacritus of Athens, who had invented an oracle (i.e., a prophecy from a divine being) and ascribed it to the ancient bard Musaeus, a mythical figure thought to be able to predict the future. This oracle indicated that a certain group of islands would sink into the sea. It is hard to understand why Onomacritus forged the oracle or why people were upset by it. But they were. The ruler of Athens, Hipparchus, banished Onomacritus from the city; he fled Greece and ended up in Persia. On yet other occasions Onomacritus was thought to have forged other oracles and was roundly chastised for it by other ancient authors, such as Plutarch.
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