Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (113 page)

And so Valantasis is probably wrong when he claims that the saying’s “problematizing of the world does not denigrate it, but makes it a place of wonder.”
¹⁵
The world is, to be sure, a place where wonder takes place. But this material existence is itself impoverished and the saying maligns it. That is why, in saying 27, Thomas indicates that one must “fast from the world”; and it is why, as we will see, saying 56 insists that in fact this world is a dead “corpse.”

We have already considered the meaning of this verse and some of the scholarship devoted to it in Chapter Eight.
¹⁶
In part the verse rejects the expectation of the disciples that there is to be a future apocalyptic salvific moment. But in championing an alternative perspective the saying undermines a basic assumption of futuristic eschatology: this material word and the physical bodies that people inhabit are to be transformed in a cataclysmic act of God. For the Gospel of Thomas, salvation does not come
in
the body through an act of future redemption; it comes
from
the body as people learn that this fleshly existence is to be superseded, and so escaped, in order to experience the joys of salvation. It is “when you strip naked without being ashamed and take your clothes, place them under your feet like little children, and stamp on them” that salvation occurs. Here clothes are emblematic of the physical, material body inhabited by the spirit. It is only by discarding it and trampling on the physical shell of one’s existence that the spirit can be set free, and so “will see the Son of the Living One, and … not be afraid.”

The terse saying 56 arguably summarizes better than any other the Gospel of Thomas’s understanding of the material world: “The one who has come to know
the world has found a corpse; and the one who has found the corpse, the world is not worthy of that person.” The world, when truly known, is recognized as a dead entity; those who come to this recognition are superior to the world because they are the ones who have life, as suggested, for example, in saying one.

It is only because DeConick insists on a thoroughly encratitic interpretation of the Gospel that she decides the verse must be textually corrupt, proffering as an emendation “Whoever has come to know the world has mastered the body. The world does not deserve the person who has mastered the body.”
¹⁷
This, though, is a textual emendation driven by an interpretive principle. If the text is not forced into a procrustean bed of encratic thought, the logion makes perfectly good sense as transmitted. The material world is dead, not alive; those who know this will live and thus are superior to that which is dead. And so as Plisch can summarize, “Whoever comprehends what this world, the material world …, in its essence really entails, recognizes that it is dead,” and so “this world recognized as a corpse is worthless for the one who has this comprehension.”
¹⁸

The saying thus has a good deal in common with the Gospel of Philip 73.19–23: “This world is a corpse-eater. All the things eaten in it themselves die also. Truth is a life-eater. Therefore no one nourished by [truth] will die.”
¹⁹
It is also very close to the virtual doublet in Gospel of Thomas 80, which prefers the term
to
for “body”/“corpse.” The term
occurs only three times in the Gospel (sayings 29, 80, 87) and carries negative connotations each time. For that reason Plisch suggests translating it as “dead body” (i.e., corpse). Valantasis argues that in fact saying 80 and 56 represent two different Coptic renditions of the same Greek saying; but that would mean that the saying was literally repeated twice in the Gospel, which seems somewhat unlikely.
²⁰

Saying 110 is comparable. In this case a person is said to “find” the world, which surely means, in the context of this Gospel, “finds the true meaning of the world.” That person will “become wealthy” and then should “renounce the world.” This does not mean that the person who acquires true knowledge of this world will thereby amass worldly wealth, although this apparently is not obvious to Plisch, who suggests that literal riches are in view here.
²¹
On the contrary, a person who discovers what the world really is—a corpse, as we have seen—has acquired great spiritual wealth far in excess to anything the world has to offer. That is why the person is to renounce the world: it cannot provide anything of value, especially in
comparison with the great wealth that inheres in the true knowledge that brings life. Knowing the world must lead one to reject it.

Saying 87 provides a forceful statement that any dependence on the physical body leads to a wretched existence—whether it is another body that depends on the body or the soul that does. DeConick proposes an interesting alternative understanding of the verse, arguing that EISHE here does not mean “depend on” but “hang,” in the sense of “hang by crucifixion,” as the word is used of Jesus’ crucifixion in the Coptic version of Matt. 20:19, Mark 15:14, Gal. 5:24, Heb. 6:6, Acts 2:23, and Luke 23:39. If so, then possibly the verse should be translated as “Miserable is the body crucified by a body. Miserable is the soul crucified by these together.” As such, the saying means something like “the body suffers because of its own nature, while the soul suffers because it is united with the body.” And so, “the point of the logia [87 and 112], in fact, is that
embodiment is a dire situation with suffering resulting for both body and soul
.”
²²
Parallels, as DeConick points out, can be found in Clement of Alexandria, who speaks of bodily pleasure and pain as “nailing” the soul to the body (
Strom
. 2.2; cf. the
Book of Thomas the Contender
) and talks of the soul that is constantly undergoing torture through its bodily sensations (
Strom
. 5.14).
²³

A doublet of saying 87 appears in the terser construction of saying 112: “Woe to the flesh that depends on the soul. Woe to the soul that depends on the flesh.” The problem here is specifically the “flesh,” denigrated as bringing woe, both to itself and to the soul. A comparable woe is pronounced in the
Book of Thomas the Contender
discussed earlier, “Woe to you who hope in the flesh and in the prison that will perish” (143.10–11). For both authors, flesh and soul cannot be dependent on each other, and neither can be redeemed by the other. The flesh will perish but the soul can live on. Thus a person needs to strive to become, as the Gospel of Thomas puts it, “a solitary one,” renouncing the flesh and living as a soul, not dependent in any way on the material trappings of the body (see sayings 16, 49, 75).

It should not be surprising to find that forgeries celebrating the flesh—both of Christ and of the believers—far exceed those that denigrate it. The side that wins preserves the texts. It is only through the lucky happenstance of the Nag
Hammadi discoveries that we have been graced with the few forgeries discussed above. The winners, on the other hand, preserved one forgery favoring the flesh as part of the canon of the New Testament, two others that were considered canonical by some of the proto-orthodox at certain times and places, and several others that were widely popular in various parts of the proto-orthodox community.

Like the book of Acts, the letter of First John is not normally treated as a forgery. And like Acts, the book is not pseudepigraphic. Its author does not falsely claim to be a (specific) famous person. But he does make a false authorial claim of another sort to validate and legitimize his account. By my definition that makes the book a forgery.

To make sense of the authorial claim, we should first consider the polemical situation that the author addresses.
²⁴
Judging from the author’s derogatory comments, it is clear that a group of one-time insiders have split off from the author’s (larger?) community, in part because of a harsh difference over Christology. The “secessionists,” as Raymond Brown has dubbed them,
²⁵
appear to have embraced a docetic Christology, in many ways comparable to what was known perhaps a decade or so later to Ignatius of Antioch, and later still found among the followers of Marcion and some groups of Gnostics.
²⁶

The key passage is 2:18–19, which describes a group of “antichrists” who “went out from us.” Clearly, these “opponents of Christ” were once members of the community, who have now left. The author wants to insist that even though these persons were once part of the larger group, “they were not of us, for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us.” The author calls them “antichrists”—the first recorded use of the term—because in his opinion they have
adopted views that oppose Christ, a remarkable claim for a group of persons evidently committed to Christ. One hint concerning their aberrant view comes then in 2:22. These persons deny that “the Christ is Jesus.” It is not widely enough recognized among commentators that this denial involves an identification formula that answers the question “who is the Christ”?
²⁷
For this author, but not his opponents, it is the man Jesus. But what does that mean?

It cannot mean that the opponents are Jews who do not confess the messiah-ship of Jesus, since the subgroup started out as part of the Christian community. They must, then, be believers in Jesus who have developed Christological views that the author considers tantamount to a denial of the community’s confession that the Christ is actually the man Jesus (cf. John 20:30–31). What those views might have been becomes clearer in a subsequent reference to the “antichrist” in 4:1–3. The true Christological confession for this author is that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” In contrast, “every spirit that does not confess Jesus” (i.e., “that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh”) is not from God. This is “the spirit of the antichrist.”

What matters for this author is that believers acknowledge that Christ really came “in the flesh.” Anyone who denies that view is an antichrist. The secessionists do not subscribe to a separationist view, such as that occasionally associated with Cerinthus, but a pure docetic view, in which Christ was assumed to be a phantasm, not actual flesh and blood.
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That can explain why the author stresses the physical nature of the Christ even in the prologue, as we will see in a moment, and why he emphasizes, throughout his short letter, that it is precisely Jesus’ “blood” that brings expiation for sin (1:7, 2:2, 4:10, 5:6). The real blood of Jesus is needed for real expiation; there was nothing phantasmal about it.

In many respects the secessionists appear to embrace a Christology that comes to prominence some time later among the docetists attacked by Ignatius in his letters to Smyrna and Tralles.
²⁹
These opponents reject the idea that Jesus Christ “truly” came “in the flesh” and was killed and raised
instead, they teach that he only “seemed”
to be what he was and to do what he did (thus Ign. Smyrn. 1.1–2, 2.1, 3.1–3, 4.2, 5.2, 7.1; Ign. Tral. 9.1–2). For them Jesus was a spirit without a real body of flesh, who assumed the form of a human for a short while. It is significant that Ignatius stresses, on the contrary, that Jesus’ body could be perceived and handled (
; Ign. Smyrn. 3.2), much as the prologue of 1 John emphasizes that the Word of Life could be heard and handled (
). An especially striking parallel occurs in Ignatius’ condemnation of his opponents for “not confessing that he bore flesh” (Ign. Smyrn. 5.2,
), which is closely parallel to 1 John 4:2 “every spirit that confesses
Jesus Christ having come in the flesh” (
).