Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (124 page)

The remaining six forgeries circulated with heavily interpolated versions of the seven authentic Ignatian letters. For reasons we will see, it is almost universally thought that the interpolator and the forger were one and the same; taken
together, it is these interpolated and forged letters that are usually referred to as the Long Recension.

The forgeries involve letters of Ignatius to the churches of Tarsus, Antioch, and Philippi; a personal letter to Hero, his successor to the bishopric of Antioch; a letter from Mary of Cassobola to Ignatius; and his reply. These six letters, along with the interpolated versions of the seven authentic letters, were known to be “Ignatius” until the mid-seventeenth century, when critical examinations of Ussher and others, and important manuscript discoveries, changed the picture. Problems were initially detected through comparisons of the texts of the letters with quotations of Ignatius in the writings of Eusebius and Theodoret. The differences were so stark that it was difficult, as Ussher indicated, to imagine “that one was reading the same Ignatius who was read in antiquity” (eundem legere se Ignatium qui veterum aetate legebatur).
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In addition, it was noted that the Long Recension (the only one known at the time) contained serious anachronisms and revealing blunders, such as its references to Basilides and Theodotus among the false teachers Ignatius opposed (Trall. 11), when in fact they lived long after his day, and when he named Ebion a heresiarch (Philad. 6), as Tertullian and those after him had done. Moreover, it was noted that Eusebius knew of only seven letters—casting immediate doubts on the other six (
H.E
. 3.36).

Ussher was particularly taken by the fact that several late medieval writers,
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including the thirteenth-century Robert Grossteste of Lincoln, cited the letters of Ignatius in a textual form that was different and shorter than that otherwise known. Ussher reasoned that an alternative textual tradition must have once existed, at least in England. He embarked on a mission to find remnants of this other tradition, and was rewarded in uncovering two Latin manuscripts that contained the seven Eusebian letters in a shorter form, which coincided with the medieval citations of the text, lacking the passages so obviously tied to the theological and ecclesiastical concerns of the fourth century (although these manuscripts included the additional, forged letters as well). On the basis of his discovery, in 1644 Ussher published a new Latin edition of the Ignatian corpus: just the Eusebian letters in the noninterpolated form (although Ussher considered the letter to Polycarp spurious).
²⁹

Two years later, Ussher’s views were confirmed by Isaac Voss’s publication of a Greek manuscript from Florence that preserved six of the Eusebian letters in their shortened form—all but the letter to the Romans, which had a separate history of transmission.
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Finally, in 1689 the French scholar T. Ruinart published the Greek text of Romans as uncovered in a tenth-century manuscript from Paris, making then the original form of the authentic corpus completely available.
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Debates over the full extent of the authentic Ignatian corpus continued to rage after the seventeenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century the flames of controversy were stoked by William Cureton, who claimed to have discovered manuscript evidence of an “original” corpus containing only condensed versions of the letters to Polycarp, Ephesians, and Romans.
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But with the massively documented studies of Theodore Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot, the seven-letter corpus in the uninterpolated form posited and then discovered by Ussher and his successors was put on solid ground.
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The twentieth century saw renewed questions, as authors such as R. Weijenborg, R. Joly, and J. Rius Camps, and most recently R. M. Hübner and T. Lechner, argued that some, or all, of the letters of the Middle Recension (= the uninterpolated seven letters known to Eusebius) were forged.
³⁴
The majority of scholars remains unconvinced, however, and I take the common view here: the seven “Eusebian” letters go back to Ignatius (Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, Smyrneans, and Polycarp). These were interpolated and six additional letters were forged (Tarsians, Antiochians, Hero, Philippians, Mary Cassobola, and from Mary Cassobola), creating the Long Recension.
³⁵

It is widely and almost certainly correctly thought that the same person who interpolated the authentic Ignatian letters forged the remaining six. As Zahn and Lightfoot exhaustively demonstrated, the interpolations and the forgeries share many of the same verbal and stylistic features, ecclesiastical views, practical concerns, polemical targets, theological positions, and uses of Scripture; sometimes they even replicate the same passages and similar paraphrases. With respect to theological investments, for example, Lightfoot has argued that the “same doctrines are maintained, the same heresies assailed, and the same theological terms employed.”
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Amelungk has provided charts of the remarkable parallels between the forgeries and the interpolations, claiming that four-fifths of the material of the former is paralleled in the latter. Of the letter to Hero he claims that it is “actually plagiarized from the [letter] to Polycarp.”
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The only serious challenge to the unity of authorship has come from Jack Hannah, who claimed that Lightfoot was right that the forger of the additional letters produced his work in the fourth century, but argued that the textual affinities of
the Scripture citations in the interpolations indicate that they were made by a different person two centuries earlier, about 140
CE
in Ephesus, “probably within twenty-five years of the originals.”
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The interpolations were then used by the forger for his subsequent creations. This is an interesting view, but it was demolished in the one article devoted to its refutation, by Milton Brown, who effectively reasserted the traditional view.
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This traditional view maintains that the author was writing in the second part of the fourth century. Numerous features of the forged materials (including here, for the sake of convenience, the interpolations under the rubric of “forged”) show that they were written long after Ignatius’ day, not least the extensive citation of the writings that eventually became the Scriptures of the New Testament, not cited as canonical authorities by Ignatius himself. We will be considering this use of Scripture anon. There are also several telling anachronisms in the text, including not just the post-Ignatian heresiarchs of Tralles 11, already mentioned, but also a striking list of later church offices in Antiochians 12: “the sub-deacons, the readers, the singers, the doorkeepers, the laborers, the exorcist, the confessors … the keepers of the holy gates.”
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As Lightfoot notes, the first mention of the office of laborers is in the rescript of Constantius of 357
CE
; the offices of doorkeepers and singers are first mentioned in in the canons of the Council of Laodicea of 363
CE
. Moreover, “the fact that the writer can put such language into the mouth of S. Ignatius without any consciousness of a flagrant anachronism would seem to show that these offices were not very new when he wrote.”
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Somewhat less obvious, but equally compelling and of particular interest to our concerns here, the forger, as we will see, uses a good deal of coded theological language that, despite its frequent subtlety, betrays a concern for the Christological debates of the mid to late fourth century.

What is yet more striking, we appear to have two other works from the hand of this same author, in one of which he names himself. As we have already seen, the forger of the Pseudo-Ignatians appears also to have forged the Apostolic Constitutions, another work with polemical intent, not written in the name of a one-time companion of the apostles, but of the apostles themselves, and allegedly delivered by Ignatius’s near contemporary Clement of Rome.
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It is now also widely recognized, based on the investigative work of D. Hagedorn, that the forger also produced a Commentary on Job, and that his name was Julian.
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In the manuscript tradition, this commentary is attributed to Origen, but that cannot be right, as Hagedorn shows. Not only does the theology differ from
Origen’s in significant ways, but the book also mentions Lucian of Antioch as a person of the past; Lucian, however, died some fifty years after Origen. The catenae sometimes ascribe the work to an unspecified Julian, which has often been taken to be Julian of Halicarnassus. But R. Draguet long ago showed that this cannot be right either: the commentary represents an arianizing theology of the second half of the fourth century.
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One manuscript of the catenae attributes it instead to Julian, a deacon of Antioch; and in fact Julian is named in the prologue of the commentary itself. This then is probably the author; he cannot, however, be identified with anyone else who bears the name from the period. All that we can learn about him comes from the works—one orthonymous and two forged—that he left behind.

The benefit of identifying the author of the Pseudo-Ignatians as Julian is that it helps solidify our knowledge of his views and perspectives, which are less guarded in the Job Commentary than elsewhere. The reasons are transparent: in his other two works he is claiming to be other people and so he was compelled to present his views under the guise of others. As a result, his theological views are often more opaque, most obviously in the Pseudo-Ignatians themselves, where a number of scholars, basing their judgments only on what was available to them, the texts themselves, have argued incessantly concerning the doctrinal investments of the forger, most maintaining that the author was one kind of Arian or another (e.g., Zahn, Harnack, Amelungk, Perler) or, instead, Apollinarian (Funk, Diekamp). A number of scholars have proposed specific authors—Eusebius of Emesa, Evagrius Ponticus, Euzoius—or persons closely connected with them.
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Surveying the discussions up to his time, Hagedorn concludes that there is simply no
opinio communis
.
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In the commentary, on the other hand, the author was not hampered by the demands of his pseudepigraphic art from presenting in more straightforward fashion his own theological perspective. And here it is quite clear that he is an “Arian” of what was once called a “strong” sort, someone who would have been comfortable in many ways with the positions of, say, an Aetius or Eunomius.
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Hagedorn makes a compelling case that Julian authored all three works, on the basis of striking commonalities among them in theological views, dogmatic terminologies, topoi, and style. He provides a list of thirty-five points of contact between the Job Commentary and the Apostolic Constitutions. Both works often
deal with precisely the same topics, using precisely the same somewhat unusual expressions.
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It is virtually impossible to imagine, as he notes, that two authors could independently attest such verbatim agreements in so many instances. Either two authors used the same source, or one author heavily edited or used the work of the other, or they are the same person. A careful analysis leads to the final result: Julian is the compiler of the Apostolic Constitutions.
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Verbal parallels between the Job Commentary and Pseudo-Ignatius are also significant. Hagedorn cites numerous instances, most of them impressive. As just three examples:

1.

2.

3.