Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (138 page)

To me have these noble witnesses of God left the task of proclaiming their glory, I refer to Marian and James, among the dearest of our brethren. Both of these as you are aware, were bound to me not only by our common sharing in the mystery of our faith, but also by the fact that we lived together in a family spirit…. It was their wish that their battle … should be communicated to their fellow Christians through me…. And it was not without reason that in their close intimacy they laid upon me the task which I am about to fulfill. For who can question the common life we shared in times of peace when the same period of persecution discovered us living in unbroken affection? (1.2–4)

We were on our way together to Numidia…. But an entire band of violent and unscrupulous centurions swooped on the country-house which sheltered us as though it was a notorious centre of the faith.… And while the ripe hour of the divine choice made more stringent demands on them, it also bound me to them with a tiny share in my brothers’ glory; for I too was dragged from Muguae to Cirta…. For in exhorting me with special intensity they betrayed by their effusive joy the fact that they too were Christians. They were then questioned and were led off to prison…. (2.1; 4.3, 6, 9–10)

It is difficult indeed to understand how the author himself was not arrested and sent to prison, if he really was such a close companion and eyewitness of all these
things. Musurillo can simply assume that “the author had presumably been freed as not falling under the Valerian edicts” (p. xxxiv) although the account says nothing of the matter. Moreover, Musurillo admits that “some scholars have had serious doubts about the authenticity” of the account (p. xxxiii). A serious option worth entertaining is that here again we have a martyrology written in the first person not because the author was really there to see these things happen, but in order to stimulate interest in his account and assure the reader of its accuracy.

Often thought to have been based on work produced by a disciple of Cyprian,
⁶¹
the Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius is another account of the execution of Christian clergy under the persecution of Valerian. It is allegedly written by one of the Christians who was arrested, as a kind of memoir that cannot help but call to mind the Passion of Perpetua, as here too a number of visions of those who are jail-bound are presented, reliably, by a first-person narrator:

Love and a sense of obligation have urged us to write this account, that we might leave to all future brethren a loyal witness to the grandeur of God and a historical record of our labours and our sufferings for the Lord (1.1)…. All of us were arrested (2.1)…. We got the news of our sentence from the soldiers: the governor had threatened us the day before with fire…. (3.1)
⁶²

At
chapter 12
the narrative shifts to a different “first person,” reminiscent, again, of the Passio Perpetua: “This was the joint letter written to us from prison.… Flavian privately enjoined on me the task of adding to their account whatever might be missing. Hence I have added the rest as was necessary.” This new author continues on, then, with a third-person narrative (with occasional references to himself as an observer) to the end. The first-person narrators are here again interspersed with third-person narrations, both to add immediacy to the account and to verify the accuracy of its reports. Not everyone has been fooled, however; in their 1890 edition of
The Passion of Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas
, J. Rendell Harris and S. K. Gifford called it “a deliberate forgery.”
⁶³

The legendary account of Ignatius’ death by wild beasts in the arena in Rome comes to us in several forms, the most important of which, historically, is the so-called Antiochene version, which provides us, as well, with the authentic letter
of Ignatius to the Romans, otherwise lacking from the epistles’ textual tradition. Since Lightfoot’s withering criticism, the Acts themselves have rarely been taken seriously as historical.
⁶⁴
The surviving account is normally thought to derive from the fifth century, although Bisbee argues, somewhat implausibly, that it is ultimately based on a near contemporaneous second-century commentarius. In any event, the work that we have is late.
⁶⁵

The widely recognized problems with the account, as recounted by Lightfoot and Bisbee, include the following
⁶⁶
:

• The trial before the emperor Trajan in Antioch is dated to 106–07
CE,
the ninth year of his reign; but Trajan did not come to Antioch until some seven years later.

• The route taken by Ignatius in the Acts does not coincide with that presupposed in the authentic letters.

• Whereas there is no persecution of the churches of Asia Minor in evidence in the authentic Ignatian letters, it is presupposed here.

• Ignatius’ own letter to Polycarp intimates that the two first met while Ignatius was en route to his martyrdom; in the Acts they have been companions from long before, as they both sat at the feet of the disciple John.

• There is no reference to the Acts in either Eusebius or Jerome; and no manuscript attests the Acts until the sixth century.

Even though the trial of Ignatius is here narrated in the third person, the author moves to a first-person account, strikingly, as in the Acts of the Apostles, during a sea voyage leading to martyrdom: “Therefore continuing to enjoy fair winds, we were reluctantly hurried on in one day and a night” (
ch. 5
).
⁶⁷
The account describes Ignatius’ martyrdom by the wild beasts (
ch. 6
), and we are told that “only the harder portions of his holy remains were left, which were conveyed to Antioch and wrapped in linen, as an inestimable treasure left to the holy church by the grace which was in the martyr” (
ch. 6
). The account itself is then ensured through a first-person declaration:

Having ourselves been eye-witnesses of these things, and having spent the whole night in tears within the house … it happened, when we fell deeply asleep, that some of us saw the blessed Ignatius suddenly standing among us and embracing us, while others saw him again praying for us, and still others saw him dripping with sweat, as if he had just come from his great labor, and standing by the Lord. When, therefore, we had with great joy witnessed
these things and had compared our several visions together, we sang praise to God…. (
ch. 7
)

Here, then, as with the much-earlier Martyrdom of Polycarp, the first-person narrative serves to validate the claim to have observed a divine miracle.

All these martyrologies appear to have served multiple functions among their Christian readership. On one level they were entertaining, if in a rather grisly way. They also provided models of behavior for those who themselves might be threatened with persecution, torture, and death. And, importantly for our purposes, they were apologiae for the truthfulness of the Christian message in the face of opposition to it. Justin suggested that his observation of Christian martyrs played a role in his conversion (2
Apol
. 12), and Tertullian famously argued against his belligerent pagan opponents that “We become more numerous every time we are hewn down by you: the blood of Christians is seed” (
Apol
. 50). The texts describing martyrdoms functioned in a similar way at the literary level, apologetically. They revealed the truth of the Christian gospel in the face of violent opposition to it, with the valiant deaths of the martyrs testifying to the power of God in the midst of a world that brought all its power to bear against him and his servants.

Markedly different, but also fulfilling an apologetic function, the Sybilline oracles consist of twelve books of Jewish and Christian origin that present the “predictions” of the ancient pagan Sibyl. An anonymous Byzantine scholar of the sixth century
CE
compiled the surviving collection, which spans a seven-hundred-year period. He claims that he brought these writings together because he wanted to provide in one place oracles otherwise widely dispersed, which together, he avers,

expound very clearly about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the divine Trinity, source of life; about the incarnate career of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, the birth, I mean, from an unchanging virgin, and the healings performed by him; similarly his life-giving passion and resurrection from the dead on the third day and the judgment which will take place. (Prologue)
⁶⁸

In fact, the majority of the oracles are not about the Trinity or Christ at all, but are of non-Christian Jewish origin. Two of them are indeed Christian (one, certainly), and several others represent Christian redactions of Jewish originals (through heavy interpolation).

Because of a fluke of transmission, the twelve books are numbered 1–8 and 11–14. The background to the collection involves the famous but no longer
surviving pagan Sibylline oracles of Roman and, predominantly, Greek extraction. The full story of these “original” oracles is found elsewhere and need not deter us at great length; the story from Republican through early Imperial times, though, can be summarized briefly.
⁶⁹

From an early age there were known to be prophecies of the great Sibyl, an ancient Greek prophetess of astounding longevity attuned to communications of the gods, which she delivered in hexameter verse, often with the use of acrostics. As these prophecies proliferated over time, and came to be associated with numerous locations, stories arose of Sibyls living in different places. Varro made the canonical claim that there were ten Sibyls altogether.

In Roman times the best-known collection of the oracles came to be stored in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the capitol in Rome; these were consulted by the quindecimviri, on direction of the Senate, when divine instruction was sought in times of plague, famine, and prodigy. Evidently the collected books indicated the necessary ritual for dealing with dire situations. There is record of the books having been consulted some fifty times between 496 and 100
BCE.
In 83
BCE,
while Sulla was fighting his way up through Italy, the temple was destroyed, and with it the deposit of Sibylline books. That oracles had been widely in circulation before the event is shown by what happened in the wake of their disappearance from the capitol. In 76
BCE
the consul Caius Curio proposed a commission to go to Erythrea in search of replacement oracles. The results were disappointing: only about a thousand verses were gathered from private sources (about a third of what had been lost). Further expeditions yielded other oracles in other localities. The quindecimviri were given the task of editing what had been collected. We do not know the criteria they used, but they evidently detected and expunged certain verses as interpolations.

In 28
BCE
Augustus transferred the books to his new marble temple of Apollo on the Palatine. In 12
BCE,
when he became pontifex maximus, Augustus ordered the retrieval of all circulating prophetic books in Greek and Latin. Those that were anonymous or of unsuitable authorship were burned, some two thousand of them. Others were added to the official collection. Evidently these actions were undertaken to ensure that no unauthorized oracles would be in circulation; individuals were no longer allowed to possess any.

In 19
CE
Tiberius had to deal with a popular rumor of a sibylline prophecy that Rome would perish “when thrice three hundred years have passed over” (a prophecy taken to refer to contemporary times). Tiberius intervened, declared the verses spurious, inspected all books of oracles in circulation, and burned the ones he disapproved of.

Eventually all the books were lost or destroyed. What we have now are Jewish and Christian versions, in which forgers, claiming to be the great Sibyl herself,
place Jewish and Christian ideas, views, and predictions on the lips of the ancient prophetess.
⁷⁰
Many of the Jewish creations are associated with Alexandria and evidence several obvious polemical and apologetic functions: to condemn idolatry; to propagate the Jewish faith, especially monotheism and ethics; and to stress the coming of eschatological judgment, particularly as this relates to the ultimate doom and downfall of Rome. As noted, the surviving Christian Sibyllina correlate to the Pseudo-Ignatian writings in that they constitute both original compositions and extensive redactions. In my discussion here I will deal with the interpolations first and then consider the original, forged, creations. In each instance we are probably dealing with different authors, who had, however, similar purposes. Among other things, they shared the common goal of apologia: the great and trustworthy pagan prophetess, the Sibyl, attests to the truth of the Christian message, and, especially, the truth of the Christian Savior.

As samples of how Christian authors placed their views both in the context of Jewish oracles and, as a consequence, on the lips of the ancient Sibyl, we can consider the striking examples from books 1, 2, and 8. Books 1 and 2 were originally a unity, composed together, by a Jewish author, but redacted at some time in the midsecond century, according to the dating of Collins.
⁷¹
Together these two books recount (or rather “predict”) the appearance of ten generations of humans on earth, leading up to the time of the end. For some unknown reason—possibly in the course of the Christian redaction—generations eight and nine have dropped out of the work. The tenor of the book is established at the outset:

Beginning from the first generation of articulate men Down to the last, I will prophesy all in turn, Such things as were before, as are, and as will come upon The world through the impiety of men. (1.1–4)

There follows a discussion of the creation and “fall,” and then the history of the human race in ten generations. A major Christian interpolation occurs in II. 324–400, in the midst of a discussion of the seventh generation of humans (the Titans). The interpolation is about Christ, his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and its effect on the Jews: