Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (120 page)

And from this circumstance, with a most foolish presumption, certain vain persons have devised an
Apocalypse of Paul
, which the sound Church does not accept, full of some fables or other, asserting that this it is about which he had said that he had been caught up to the third heaven and there had heard “unspeakable words, which it is not granted to man to utter.” In any event, their audacity would be intolerable if they had said that he had heard [words] which it is not
yet
granted to man to utter; but since he said “which it is not granted to man to utter,” who are those people who dare to utter these [words] impudently and unsuccessfully?
¹³⁴

Nor did Sozomen:

So the work entitled The Apocalypse of the Apostle Paul, though unrecognized by the ancients, is still esteemed by most of the monks. Some persons affirm that the book was found during this reign, by Divine revelation, in a marble
box, buried beneath the soil in the house of Paul at Tarsus in Cilicia. I have been informed that this report is false by Cilix, a presbyter of the church in Tarsus, a man of very advanced age, as is indicated by his gray hairs, who says that no such occurrence is known among them, and wonders if the heretics did not invent the story.
¹³⁵

Arguably the most famous feature of the book is the opening discovery narrative that Sozomen refers to, and which I have already discussed.
¹³⁶
The account itself begins with a lamentation on the sinfulness of humans by the sun, moon, stars, and sea (
chs. 3
–10). Paul is then taken up to the third heaven where he is shown the fate of souls from on high, in particular that of one righteous and one unrighteous man (
chs. 11
–
16
). There follows a tour of the realms of the blessed and the damned, based in part on the visions of the Apocalypse of Peter. Throughout the account it is assumed that the rewards of the blessed are given temporarily until the soul returns to the body for the final judgment day: “And they roused the soul saying: Soul take knowledge of your body which you have left, for in the day of resurrection you must return to that same body to receive what is promised to all the righteous” (
ch. 14
). One can assume that the torments described in such graphic detail are, likewise, preliminary to those yet to come at the resurrection.
¹³⁷

The torments of the damned have a good deal in common with those earlier assigned to Peter’s vision: here too there is a stress on the physicality of both ecstasy and torment, the former, in this case, being described in graphic terms reminiscent of the famous superlatives of Papias.
¹³⁸
But there are also key differences from the author’s model.
¹³⁹
Whereas the patriarchs, prophets, and righteous of the Old Testament are praised, there appears a strain of anti-Jewish sentiment in the statement of chapter 48: “See, Moses, what those of your people have done
to the Son of God.” Of far greater significance is the heightened attention given to Christians. On one hand, the wilderness ascetics are praised early in the account, whereas those who do not fulfill their ascetic practices are roundly condemned (
chs. 9
–
10
; again, e.g., ch. 23). Among the blessed are the married souls who nonetheless remain chaste (ch. 22). On the other hand, those who fast but who are proud and who praise themselves cannot enter the city of Christ (ch. 24). Moreover, church people who are not totally committed to a Christian lifestyle are punished in boiling fire; these include those who spent some of their days in prayer, but others in sin, and who were involved in idle disputes; and those who took the eucharist but then committed fornication (ch. 31).

Yet more striking is the punishment suffered specifically by Christian leaders. There are gory eternal torments lying in wait for a presbyter who is punished severely for not fasting and for offering communion while in a state of fornication (ch. 34); for a bishop who was not just and did not pity widows and orphans (ch. 35); for a deacon who used the oblations for himself and committed fornication (ch. 36); for a reader who did not keep the precepts of God (ch. 36); for those who disparaged the Word of God and did not obey it (ch. 37); for those who stopped fasting too soon (ch. 39); and for would-be monks who did not live the life of a monk (ch. 40).

But above all there are the heretics, who falsely hold to a docetic Christology and deny the importance of the flesh. It is here that the real polemic can be found. The worst punishment of all—“seven times greater than these” (ch. 40)—is the “well” filled with an unbearable stench, and peopled by “those who have not confessed that Christ came in the flesh and that the Virgin Mary bore him, and who say that the bread of the eucharist and the cup of blessing are not the body and blood of Christ” (ch. 41). Others are tormented by cold and gnashing of teeth and cubit-long worms with two heads: “They are those who say that Christ has not risen from the dead and that this flesh does not rise” (ch. 42).

Here then we have the implicit polemic of the earlier Apocalypse of Peter taken to an extreme and made explicit. Not only does the physicality of the afterlife emphasize the importance of the flesh in the face of those who deny it; the most horrendous torments are reserved precisely for such heretical naysayers. For this orthodox author there can be no crime more heinous or deserving of eternal and excruciating torment than the sin of denying that Christ himself came in the flesh and that the resurrection would be in the flesh. Eternity would indeed be a fleshly existence, as those who refused to acknowledge it would discover to their eternal horror.

1.
Quotations taken from James Brashler and Roger Bullard, “Apocalypse of Peter,” in
NHL
.

2.
On the difference between a docetic and a separationist Christology, see Ehrman,
Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
, pp. 140–45, 212–19.

3.
Cf. Havelaar,
Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
, p. 190: “the idea of a division between the real Savior who cannot suffer and the material Jesus who is crucified is a common theme in the Nag Hammadi corpus.”

4.
Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, “The Suffering Jesus and the Invulnerable Christ in the Gnostic
Apocalypse of Peter
,” in Jan Bremmer, ed.,
The Apocalypse of Peter
(Leuven: Peeters, 2003), pp. 187–99; Havelaar,
The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
, p. 179.

5.
Havelaar,
Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
, p. 186.

6.
John D. Turner, “The Book of Thomas and the Platonic Jesus,” in Louis Painchaud and Paul-Hubert Poirier, eds.,
L’évangile selon Thomas et les textes de Nag Hammadi
(Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval / Louvain: Peeters, 2007), p. 601.

7.
Turner suggests that the book may represent a secondary combination of two originally distinct treatises: (1) an older dialogue that had been created by dissecting an earlier epitome of Plato’s teaching on the soul and making it into a series of expositions on this teaching by Jesus in response to questions; and (2) a collection of dominical sayings reminiscent of Q, with woes and blessings. When the two works were combined, the whole was then attributed to Thomas. See Turner, “The Book of Thomas.”

8.
Quotations are taken from John D. Turner, “The Book of Thomas the Contender,” in
NHL
.

9.
It is not important to my purposes here to determine where the book fits more broadly within the Thomasine tradition of early Christianity. Turner argues that the book occupies a “median position” between the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas, in terms of date, dominance of the figure of Thomas, and development of genre (it lies between a list of sayings and a full narrative). Moreover, in this sequence the notion of sexual renunciation becomes increasingly dominant from one book to the next. Paul-Hubert Poirer, however, does not think the three books can be linked together (“The Writings Ascribed to Thomas and the Thomas Tradition,” in
The Nag Hammadi Library after Fifty Years
, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 295–307). Schenke goes even farther to argue that the Book of Thomas stands outside the Thomasine tradition (H.-M. Schenke,
Das Thomas Buch [Nag Hammadi-Codexes II, 7]
, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1989, 65).

10.
Turner, “Book of Thomas and the Platonic Jesus,” pp. 606–7. Turner’s article enumerates numerous parallels with the
Phaedo
,
Phaedrus
,
Republic
, and
Timaeus
.

11.
Translations taken from Ehrman and Pleše,
Apocryphal Gospels
, pp. 303–35.

12.
Contra DeConick,
The Original Gospel of Thomas
, p. 135.

13.
Johannes Leipoldt,
Das Evangelium nach Thomas
TU 101 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1967), p. 62.

14.
The Gospel of Thomas
, p. 96.

15.
The Gospel of Thomas
, p. 104.

16.
See pp. 234–35.

17.
Original Gospel of Thomas
, p. 192.

18.
Gospel of Thomas
, p. 140.

19.
Translation of Wesley Isenberg,
NHL
.

20.
Moreover, Valantasis assumes that the “body” refers to the body of believers. But in fact the saying denigrates the body, rather than affirming it. DeConick proposes the same textual emendation for saying 80 as for saying 56.

21.
Gospel of Thomas
, p. 110.

22.
DeConick,
Original Gospel of Thomas
, p. 254; italics hers.

23.
See also R. Uro,
Thomas: Seeking the Historical Context of the Gospel of Thomas
(London: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 58–62, who discusses the Platonic context for the problem of souls being united with bodies.

24.
There are, of course, a large number of theories about the relationship of the letter to the Fourth Gospel, with nearly every possible view represented by reasonable scholars, including a range of views of the relationship of the two prologues. On all this, one can simply consult the commentaries. Since the epistle does not deal with problems involving the Jewish synagogue, but is instead concerned with a secessionist movement that almost certainly occurred later in the community’s history, the simplest and now probably most widespread solution to the relationship of the books is that they derive from two authors living at different times and addressing situations out of a very similar tradition rooted in the same community. With respect to the similar prologues, the author of 1 John appears to try to imitate that of his more famous predecessor, and is not altogether successful in the attempt.

25.
See
The Community of the Beloved Disciple
(New York: Paulist, 1979) and his valuable commentary
The Epistles of John
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982).

26.
This is not the view of Brown himself, who thinks the secessionists simply undervalue the salvific importance of Jesus’ humanity. This view, however, cannot explain all the polemical emphases of the letter, including the prologue. See my assessment in
Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
, pp. 153–57, esp. n. 66.

27.
See ibid., p. 200, n. 63.

28.
See ibid., pp. 153–55, and its discussion of 1 John 5:6.

29.
I have borrowed much of the following two paragraphs from my discussion in ibid., pp. 155–56.

30.
Among the sundry options, the one proposed by Strecker has considerable merit, that the neuter relative used four times in 1—despite the fact that it is neuter (which, of course, is the problem)—in conjunction with the
clause of 1b, “refers to nothing other than the Christ event to which the author testifies” (Georg Strecker,
The Johannine Letters
. Hermeneia. Trans. Linda Maloney [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996; German original 1989], p. 10). But even more persuasive is Raymond Brown, that the pronoun refers to “that entity that became human” (so that the pre-existent Logos in some sense is depersonalized).
Epistles of John
, pp. 151–54.

31.
P. 163. Brown goes on to claim that the author is not
really
indicating that he had real contact with Jesus, since he was writing much later and could not have been an eyewitness to Jesus’ ministry. R. Schnackenburg too refuses to believe that the author could really be claiming to be an eyewitness, since he was not one (
The Johannine Epistles
, New York: Crossroads, 1992, ET of 7th German edition of 1984, original 1953, p. 55). Both of these exegetical opinions overlook the pseudepigraphic character of the author’s claims. This oversight creates a contradiction in the interpretation. On one hand, Schneemelcher indicates that in the prologue the author is “expressing a prophetic self-consciousness in which he appropriates to himself the experience of a witness who actually saw and heard,” but he then indicates that “1 John does not otherwise betray a ‘prophetic self-consciousness’” (p. 55).