Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (130 page)

What can be said with greater certainty, in any event, is that he goes out of his way to emphasize that even though the divine Christ may be worthy of equal honor to God (whatever that is taken to mean) he is decidedly subordinate to him as the Son of the Father. Christ’s subordinate status is evident throughout the forged and interpolated letters. As examples, Christ is said to do all things “according to the will of the Father” (Eph. 3); he established all things “according to the will of the Father” (Eph. 18); Christ becomes “subject to” God
Tars. 5); just as the church “depends on” Christ, Christ “depends on” God the Father
Eph. 5); so too all in the church are to be obedient to the bishop as the bishop is to Christ and Christ is to the Father (Philad. 4). In Smyrneans 7 we are explicitly told that Jesus Christ “rejoiced in the superiority of the Father”
in Smyrneans 9 Christ is subject to the Father just as those in the church are subject to their leaders and those lower in the church hierarchy are to those higher

Along with his concern to clarify—as best he could, we might assume—the relationship between Christ and God the Father, the forger was determined to understand the humanity of Christ, who, as we have seen, is described as an
. The most striking feature of the author’s view is that even though the Incarnate had a human body, he did not have a human soul. In its place was the Logos: “God the Word did dwell in a human body, being within it as the Word, even as the soul also is in the body, because it was God that inhabited it, and not a human soul” (Philad. 6).
⁵⁹
Probably it was because of that that Christ, as a human, “could not be tempted” by the Devil in the wilderness (the author asks the Devil:
Philip. 11); and why he “lived a life of holiness without sin” (Smyrn. 1). After his life ended, it was the Word, which had previously indwelled him, that “raised up again His own temple on the third day” (Smyrn. 2).

As repeatedly noted, it has proved remarkably difficult over the years for scholars to nail down the object of the author’s polemic. On one hand, it is clear that he is opposed to all sorts of heterodoxy stemming from the second century—docetism, psilanthropism, Marcionism, Gnosticism, Sabellianism, and Ebionitism. It would be also fair to say, in general terms, that based on the parallels to the Job commentary, the author is almost certainly an “Arian” of some kind. But that term itself has fallen on hard times, for good reasons. Rowan Williams notes that it became more or less a term of disapprobation applied indiscriminately to anyone
who did not subscribe to Nicene orthodoxy: “The anti-Nicene coalition did not see themselves as constituting a single ‘Arian’ body: it is the aim of works like Athanasius’
De synodis
to persuade them that this is effectively what they are, all tarred with the same brush.”
⁶⁰
Even such a die-hard dyohypostatic as Eusebius of Caesarea could in effect deny that he was Arian.
⁶¹
It is striking that in his theological writings
Contra marcellum
and
De ecclesiastica theologia
, Eusebius never uses either the term
Arian
or the name
Arius
; so too other harsh opponents of miahypostatics such as Eusebius of Emesa and Cyril of Jerusalem.
⁶²