Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (105 page)

Most important for MacDonald is his claim that a theory of literary dependence is able to explain the similarities between the two texts, but not the differences in the details. For example, in the Acts of Paul Hermogenes is associated with Demas; but in the Pastorals he is associated with Phygelus. If one is dependent on the other—as arguably shown by the similarities—it is hard to account, in MacDonald’s view, for such differences.

The major problem with this position is that it requires far too narrow an understanding of how literary dependence can work and overlooks an entire range of possibilities involving secondary orality. It is not necessary to suppose that an author who is responding to a text will have the writing on his knee, comparing every line as he proceeds to write his narrative (or epistle). He may just as well—especially in an ancient context—have heard the earlier text read aloud, possibly multiple times, and decided then to respond to its themes. Many of the names and places may well be recalled, but it is altogether possible that the specifics get lost. I myself have read the Pastoral epistles literally hundreds of times in both Greek and English, and I could not tell you, without looking it up, with whom Hermogenes is associated in the text, or even if Phygelus is mentioned in it. One should not respond by insisting that matters were different in past oral cultures; if studies of oral cultures have taught us anything, it is that stories were not remembered or repeated precisely the same way in every iteration.

There is a broad consensus that the Acts of Paul as we have it are the product of the late second century. If these are the works referred to by Tertullian in
De baptismo
17—which continues to be a strong consensus—and if he is correct that they were first put together near the end of the second century, then on virtually any reckoning they came into existence some time after the Pastorals. If, as appears evident, there is some kind of relation between the two corpora, the most sensible solution is to think that the author of the Acts is responding in narrative form to the image of Paul, and of his views, found in the earlier texts. He worked to rewrite Paul in significant ways. Paul’s message is now one of rigorous ascetic celibacy (whereas in the Pastorals he condemned asceticism and urged women to have babies); women are now empowered and allowed to teach and preach; and the unity of the home is not to be protected.

At the same time, it should be stressed that even if the Pastorals were not written as responses to the Acts of Paul, the traditions and views embodied in these later accounts were not invented out of whole cloth sometime late in the second century. Ascetic impulses can be found early in the Christian movement, as evidenced not only in the Pastorals. Paul himself urged celibacy in view of the “impending crisis” and insisted that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” Women were afforded active roles in the churches, as seen, most strikingly and emphatically, by Paul himself, as attested in Gal. 3:28; Rom.
16:1, 7; and 1 Corinthians 11. Other Paulinists objected to such views, urging the value of the extended family and the Haustafeln that kept everyone in their place, arguing for the “freedom” of the whole person in Christ, propounding the virtues of marriage and sexual activities. The apocalyptic urgency that created an unworldly and, seen from a Roman point of view, antisocial attitude among Christians eventually lost out to (what cannot help but appear to observers today to be) a bourgeois ethic.

In that environment the Pastoral epistles were written, in part to oppose views advocated by other Paulinists, opponents who could well appeal to Paul himself for their views. These views did not die out with the writing of opposing forgeries in Paul’s name. They lived on in some circles that passed along the oral traditions they inherited about the apostle, which stressed the importance of the ascetic, celibate life and celebrated the important roles that women could play in the church. Eventually these traditions came to be written down in such works as the Acts of Thecla. The Pastoral epistles may not be counterforgeries in the strong sense of being produced in order to oppose the view found in another identifiable forgery, or even an existing legendary fabrication; but they are counterforgeries in the weaker sense of opposing views associated otherwise with Paul by using the best set of ammunition available to the unknown author: the name of the apostle himself. The real, but unknown, author lied about his own identity in order to bring the apostolic voice to bear on a set of issues that were very much a matter of intense debate in his own day.

We have already seen that several of the “church orders” produced in our period were forged. This would include the Epistula Clementis, the Didascalia, and the Apostolic Constitutions, the last of which could also be considered a case of plagiarism, depending on how far one stretches the meaning of the term.
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The earliest examples of the genre were not always forged: witness the anonymous Didache, which avers to propound the teaching of the twelve apostles, but whose author does not claim to be the apostolic band or even one of its members. So too the Apostolic Tradition, later attributed, wrongly, to Hippolytus of Rome.
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Other church orders fall outside of our time period.
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There have been long debates over the character of these documents and their instructions for church organization and administration. Do they represent descriptive and reasonably full accounts of the protocols that governed the life of the Christian community? Or do they deal only with issues and problems that
have arisen within an author’s purview, and do not therefore provide a full representation of the organizational and administrative issues that a community had to address, the bulk of which would have been nonproblematic and therefore in no need of discussion? That is to say, are these church orders reasonably exhaustive and descriptive accounts? Or are they selective, polemical, and prescriptive?

The decision between these two options obviously matters. If the church orders are principally descriptive, then in them we gain an extensive insight into the lives of the pre-Constantinian churches, at least in the regions from which they derive, and by subtraction we can see what these churches were not doing as well. If they are principally polemical and prescriptive, they are not protocols for the most important activities of the community, but
Tendenzschriften
that deal only with what the author perceives as the problems and (possibly deplorable) state of affairs in his community. This too would be helpful historically, as it would show us what internal organizational issues were being debated in the Christians communities of the first three hundred years.

Bruno Steimer, in his study
Vertex Traditionis
, a 1991 dissertation at Regensburg, takes the first position. The book deals with twelve church orders, starting with the Didache and moving up through the fifth-century Clementine Octateuch. Steimer is chiefly concerned with establishing the generic features of these works, but he deals extensively with issues related to pseudepigraphy throughout, especially in a closing section exclusively devoted to the question. In this final section he argues that although pseudonymity is not a generic requirement, it is one of the ways that the author of a church order could most successfully perform his task, in that the apostolic pseudonym naturally provided legitimation for the positions he asserts. That is to say, the apostles are typically presented as “formal authorities” to back up the views that are advanced and work to show that these orders were normative for the church from the outset, all the way back to the apostles of Jesus themselves.
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The pseudepigraphic claims, therefore, function to gain the works acceptance and universal validity.

Steimer summarizes the important matters dealt with in this literature, most of them involving the church as an institution: the qualification and selection of leaders, their duties, church discipline, ethical and doctrinal instruction, observance of rituals such as baptism and eucharist, and so on. In Steimer’s view, these books represent the church’s actual practice, and to that extent they are descriptive accounts. For that reason, it is possible to recreate extensively the activities of the early churches, since the most important church concerns are addressed “mit Umfassendheit.”
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A trenchant review of Steimer’s work by Georg Schöllgen provides compelling counterarguments to this view.
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Schöllgen focuses on the Didache, the Apostolic
Tradition, and the Didascalia, arguing that for these three, “nowhere is it clear that they intend to order life in their communities comprehensively. There is no ‘pretended universalization of order’ to speak of.”
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For Schöllgen, the church orders do not represent a codification of the typical praxis of the community; rather, they deal with problems that had arisen—such as those, quite obviously, involving itinerant prophets and apostles in the Didache. This is shown especially by the fact that the authors have had to cement their views in writing, accompanied with paranesis, under the authority of the apostles. The authors are trying to argue a case in light of abuses in the community, involving such matters as the roles of women, alternative forms of governance, and care of the poor. They do not simply indicate something about the status quo. Among other things, church orders represent an attempt to make the monepiscopate more central to the life of the community.
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In particular, the forged character of these books shows that they were not written simply to state the current state of affairs: “Pseudepigraphy is thus a clear argument against the ‘reflection theory’: Why should a church order, which does not intend anything but ‘to put into writing’ the community’s practice, do so not in the name of its actual authors or its community, but instead takes the risk of being unmasked as an act of deception?” The use of pseudepigraphy served then to justify practices where there were controversies about them: “The borrowed authority of the apostles was intended to make the text binding in a way that the author could not have achieved by publishing it under his own name.”
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It is especially significant for Schöllgen that these documents are scripturally based. The authority of the apostles, as found in Scripture, was important for establishing the veracity of the claims made in them. And so the apostolic character of the church orders is in a sense an extension of the authority of Scripture, so that these too function as Scripture in dealing with community problems that had arisen.
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What is more, when a book like the Didascalia likens
the office of the bishop to the office of the apostle, with similar functions ascribed to both
the bishop is presented as having the same role in his congregations that the apostles have for the entire church. They are the mouth of God and the witness to the divine will, through the proper interpretation of Scripture.

In short, when considering the church orders, we are dealing with inherently polemical literature, even when the polemics are below the surface. Sometimes, of course, the polemics are front and center, as we have already observed with the Didascalia. At other times, however, they are far more subtle, as we can see by looking at other aspects of these works.

We have already considered the Didascalia at some length with respect to the anti-Jewish character of its teaching on the “secondary legislation,” which was put into the document, according to the theory of Stewart-Sykes, by the deuterotic redactor, who worked before an editor inserted the apostolic claims that make the text pseudepigraphic.
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There is no need at this stage to review all of the relevant background information on the document itself and its (possible) redactional states. Rather we can turn to consider several of its other polemical interests, also advanced in the names of the apostles after the death of Jesus.

Some readers have suspected that the heightened emphasis on the role of the bishop in the life of the community is not simply descriptive of situations that widely obtained at the time of the author’s writing, but represent a plea to grant the bishop greater authority. It is striking that eight of the twenty-seven chapters of the book deal with the office, responsibilities, and behavior of the bishop. Charlotte Methuen contends that “the Didascalia must be seen as part of an ongoing struggle to establish a more hierarchical Church centered on the bishop, which led to the discrediting of other forms of authority and the groups which supported them.”
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In particular she has in mind church groups that stressed the possibility of women exercising authoritative roles in the work of teaching and baptizing, a matter to which we will turn momentarily. But it is also possible that the stress on the bishop was driven by broader concerns of localizing the power of the local congregation in the hands of one authority figure who was able thereby to marginalize and overturn schismatic and heretical factions advocating alternative forms of polity or the age-old bugbear, “false teaching.”