Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (114 page)

Moreover, just as in 1 John, Ignatius stresses the reality and importance of Jesus’ real death in which he shed real blood. The opponents in Smyrna and Tralles are explicitly said to believe that Christ, who was not real flesh, only “appeared to suffer” (
, Ign. Smyrn. 2.2; Ign. Trall. 10.1), whereas Ignatius emphasizes that Christ truly (
) suffered, died, and was raised, and that anyone who fails to believe in Jesus’ blood is subject to judgment (Ign. Smyrn. 6.1) because Christ’s real suffering is what effects salvation (Ign. Smyrn. 1.2, 2.1; cf. 1 John 1:7, 2:2, 5:6).

Thus the polemical emphases of 1 John seem to parallel those found soon thereafter in Ignatius’ opposition to the docetic Christians of Smyrna and Tralles. There is no reason to insist that the targets of attack are one and the same, but the two sets of opponents do appear to embrace highly comparable views. Both of them claim that the Christ is not the “man” Jesus, that in fact Christ was not really a flesh-and-blood human. For both the author of 1 John and Ignatius, if Christ was not really in the flesh, he could not really shed blood. And if Christ did not shed his blood, there is no expiation for sin.

It is this understanding of the opponents of 1 John that makes best sense of the prologue and its emphasis on the real, tangible appearance of Christ: “That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we have beheld and our hands handled.” The author wants to stress, at the very outset of his letter, the Christological theme that will play such a vital role in his harsh polemics. Christ was a physical being who could actually be heard, seen, and handled. He was no phantasm. But who, exactly, is the “we” who have heard, seen, and handled him?

To answer the question, we should first consider how the author uses first-person pronouns throughout the letter. On a number of occasions the first-person plural indicates the entire Christian community, of which the author is one: for example, “we should be called the children of God. … The world does not know us” (3:1–2); “we know that we have passed out of death unto life” (3:14); “they are of the world, we are of God” (4:5–6). In other places the author uses the first-person singular, in all but one instance to indicate that he is the one writing to the larger community: “My little children, I am writing this to you” (2:1); “Beloved I am writing you no new commandment” (2:7); “I am writing to you, little children” (2:12); and so on. In these instances the author differentiates himself (“I”) from his readers (“you”). This differentiation also occurs in several instances of the use of the first-person-plural pronoun. In some such instances the author differentiates between his readers and himself, even though they are all part of the larger Christian community: “you have heard that anti-Christ is coming … therefore we know that it is the last hour” (2:18). More important, in other instances the author differentiates between his readers and a group of persons that the author includes himself among;
this latter group is decidedly not the entire Christian community: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you” (1:5). “We” in this instance cannot be “all Christians” because “you” includes Christians as well. The “we” then is a subgroup among the Christian community.

It is this latter kind of differentiation that is the key to understanding the first-person pronoun of the prologue. It is true, as noted everywhere in the commentaries, that the grammar of 1:1–3 is both confused and confusing.
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What matters for my purposes here, however, is simply the first-person pronoun itself. In this case the author is not claiming simply to be a member of the entire Christian community who has “heard … seen … and handled” the incarnate word of life. He is a part of a smaller community that has had these tangible experiences involving Christ, and he is relating them to his readers. To begin with, that is evident from the graphic nature of the language—the community may have “seen …. and heard” Christ in a metaphorical sense; but they certainly did not “handle” him. As Brown has observed: “clearly the author is claiming participation in a physical contact with Jesus.”
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Moreover, and yet more compelling, the author makes a clear differentiation here between himself and his readers, between “we” and “you”: whereas “we have heard … have seen … have looked upon … and handled with our hands”(v. 1), it is to “you” that the author has proclaimed these things (v. 2). Thus only some believers have been in real, physical contact with Christ, and can attest to his physical existence as one who could be observed, heard, and handled. And the author includes himself among this select group. In other words, the author is claiming to have been among the inner group of Jesus’ followers who can bear witness to his real, physical nature.
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Except that he cannot be. He is an author living and writing long after the fact.
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In asserting that he was an eyewitness to the life of Jesus, he is advancing a false authorial claim. This then is a forgery, a book whose author claims to be someone other than who he is.

It is important to note that this way of reading the prologue is “normal.” Historically, the author—because of this passage—was taken to be an eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus. The first explicit quotation of the Johannine epistles comes from Irenaeus, who cites 2 John on two occasions and 1 John once, evidently thinking they are the same writing, and attributing them to John, the Lord’s disciple (
Adv. Haer
. 1.16.3; 3.16.5, 8).
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About the same time, the Muratorian Canon indicates that John wrote the Gospel and his epistles in which he indicates that he saw, heard, and touched Christ (quoting 1 John 1:1). Tertullian cites 1 John more than forty times and refers to it as the work of John. So firmly entrenched was the idea that John had written the anonymous three epistles that later writers who doubted they were by John the son of Zebedee were constrained to identify the author as a
different
John. As Judith Lieu observes, “there was never any alternative tradition of authorship.”
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The view had lasting power, down to the present, as seen in some of the less critical commentaries, such as that of Plummer, who speaks of the author as “the last survivor of those who had heard and seen the Lord.”
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When more critical commentators—Brown, Lieu, Schnackenburg, and others—reject the idea that the author is claiming to be an eyewitness to the fleshly reality of Jesus in his public ministry,
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it is almost always because they are convinced that in fact he was not an eyewitness. The fault of the interpretation derives from a failure to understand the world of ancient forgery. What we have in 1 John is an author who very much wanted his readers to think he was an eyewitness, even though he was not. In this he was following established patterns of forged writing from antiquity, seen already, for example, in the author of 2 Peter who was
bound and determined to have his readers know that he really was present at the transfiguration of Jesus, or the author of 2 Timothy, who loaded his letter with verisimilitudes to make himself appear to be Paul, or, in fact, the authors of virtually all the pseudonymous documents we have considered. This author is simply applying the craft of the forger.

The reason behind the false authorial claim of 1 John was keenly recognized by Strecker. Since the author is opposing “the false teachers who … represent a docetic Christology … it is important to assert the ‘empirical’ reality of the Christ event.” And so he begins the letter “with a testimony that the Christ lived on earth as visible, audible, and tangible.” It is true, Strecker concedes, that the author does not use a pseudonym. But “he is still writing this document under fictitious circumstances. He pretends to be an eye- and ear-witness, even though that does not correspond to historical reality.” And his motive is clear: “such a fiction is appropriate to underscore the claims of this document and hence the author’s intention to put the docetic teaching of the opponents in its place.”
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It cannot be objected that the author would be known to his readers, on the basis of the evidence of 2 and 3 John, sent by the same author to a community of people who knew his identity. There is nothing to suggest that the letter of 1 John was sent to the same community,
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or, more precisely, the self-same house church, as the other two letters. Indeed, there is good evidence that it circulated as a separate composition. Otherwise it is hard to explain why 2 and 3 John did not have a wider acceptance as authoritative texts early on. Origen, for example, knows of these two smaller letters but never quotes them, questions whether they are canonical, and observes that they are not everywhere accepted as coming even from the same author.
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Brown concludes that the three letters were not transmitted as a corpus and that whereas 2 and 3 John were assumed to have been written by the somewhat shadowy “presbyter” John, 1 John was understood to have been written
by the apostle himself. They may have originally circulated, then, in different communities.

In many respects, then, 1 John is a forgery comparable to the book of Acts. Both writings are, strictly speaking, anonymous. But both authors make false authorial claims through the use of first-person discourse, used in order to establish themselves as eyewitnesses to that which they testify. Both books, in other words, are what I have already termed “non-pseudepigraphic forgeries.” In the case of Acts the author claims to be an eyewitness to the life and teachings of Paul; in the case of 1 John the author claims to be an eyewitness to the incarnation of Christ. The latter claim is made for purely polemical reasons.
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It is directed against onetime members of the community who have created a schism and gone off to form their own community (assuming that it is they, and not the author’s own group, who have left), due in large part to a variant understanding of Christology. The author buttresses the beliefs of his own (sub)community, that Christ was a real flesh-and-blood human, by writing an anonymous tractate, choosing anonymity not because his readers know full well who he is but precisely so that he can claim to be someone other than who he is. By assuming the guise of an eyewitness to the life of Jesus, he can provide the necessary authorization for the Christological views that he feels compelled to advance. Against those who claimed that Jesus did not “come in the flesh,” this author attests that he himself heard, saw, and handled Jesus, the “Word of Life” who “was made manifest” (1:1–2). As was the case with so many others, the author’s false claims about himself were readily believed, and the book was eventually accepted as a part of sacred Scripture, written by Jesus’ own disciple, John the son of Zebedee.

Within the short compass of the two letters known, together, as 3 Corinthians we find an entire range of vital issues related to early Christian debates over the status of the flesh: Is the flesh important in the divine scheme? Did Jesus have real flesh? Was he raised in the flesh? Will believers too be raised in the flesh? This final question is related to the issue addressed in 2 Timothy; here, however, the question is not simply about the fact of the future resurrection but also about its character.

The scholarly discussion of 3 Corinthians began with J. Ussher’s mention of a lacunose Armenian manuscript in 1644.
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The correspondence was not published
however, for another seventy years, making its first appearance in a work by F. Masson.
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The first critical editions were of the Armenian.
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The book came into English through a translation by William Whiston,
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later superseded by a rendition of none other than Lord Byron.
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It came into German through a translation of W. F. Rink.
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In most of the surviving Armenian manuscripts, the correspondence occurs as part of the New Testament between 2 Corinthians and Galatians.