Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (139 page)

Then indeed the son of the great God will come,
Incarnate, likened to mortal men on earth,
Bearing four vowels, and the consonants in him are two.
I will state explicitly the entire number for you.
For eight units, and equal number of tens in addition to these,
And eight hundreds will reveal the name
To men who are sated with faithlessness. But you, consider in your heart
Christ, the son of the most high, immortal God. (II. 324–31)

The clever gematria is of the name
whose letters add up, remarkably, to 888. Not only, however, does the interpolation provide a pagan prediction of the coming of Christ. Closely tied to it is a vitriolic attack on the Jewish people, pronounced here by a pagan oracle in support of a Christian agenda. And so the oracle says that “Israel, with abominable lips and poisonous spittings will give this man blows” (II. 365–66); it also speaks of a “new sprout” that will emerge among the nations, who will “follow the law of the Great one” (by implied contrast with the old stump, II.383–84). The rhetoric becomes especially strong in II. 387–400: the “Hebrews” will “reap a bad harvest”—meaning that they will reap their awful reward for killing Christ. Specifically “a Roman king will ravage much gold and silver”; there will “be a great fall for those men when they launch on unjust haughtiness”; “the Hebrews will be driven from their land, wandering, being slaughtered, they will mix much darnel in their wheat… receiving the wrath of the great God in their bosom, since they committed an evil deed.”

The interpolation is thus both apologetic, predicting reliably the coming of Christ, and polemical, against the Jews. This is a combination we have seen before and will see yet again. The Christian redaction of book 2 moves along similar lines, describing the final judgment from a Christian perspective, with Christ as judge, and providing graphic descriptions of the torments of the damned, all accompanied with more anti-Jewish invective.

Book 8 of the Oracles is particularly intriguing. There has been considerable scholarly dispute over how to divide the oracle, with Johannes Geffcken proposing a complex solution that derives three passages from a pagan source, intermingled with Christian redactions,
⁷²
and Collins suggesting a simpler division of the book roughly in half, in which lines 1–216 are Jewish (except for II. 131–38, and a Christian interpolation involving eschatology in II.194–216) and 217–500 are Christian.
⁷³
This Christian section begins in II. 217–50 with one of the best-known and intriguing features of the surviving Sibyllina, an acrostic poem, the first letters of each line spelling out the words
Throughout the poem there is a strong emphasis on the flesh: Christ will “judge all flesh” (II. 218–19); the flesh of the dead will arise (I. 227); “fire will torment the lawless forever” (I. 228). The conclusion then is
striking: “This is our God, now proclaimed in acrostics, the king, the immortal savior, who suffered for us” (II. 249–50).

The rest of the Christian interpolation involves a poetic celebration of Christ, a condemnation of idolatry, the need for ethical rigor in the face of the coming judgment, a paean to God, and a recounting of the incarnation event. Here too there appear to be some (implicit, at least) anti-Jewish materials: “They will stab his sides with a reed on account of their law” (I. 296). Even though one might take the referent to be the Romans, the following statement makes it appear to be to the Jews: “every law will be dissolved … on account of a disobedient people” (II. 300–01). This interpretation is confirmed later, in II. 305–8, when the Temple curtain is rent, “for no longer with secret law and temple must one serve the phantoms of the world.” Later still the author appeals to “daughter Sion,” and speaks of the “yoke of slavery, hard to bear, which lies on our neck … the godless ordinances and constraining bonds” (II. 324–28). And so, once more, we find a mixture of apologetics and polemics, the latter possibly against those who minimize the importance of the flesh, and certainly against the Jews.

Book VI of the Sibyllina is completely and incontrovertibly a Christian creation. The poem is quoted by Lactantius thirteen times in
De ira dei
, and so must date some time before 300
CE.
A more precise date is not possible. The book presents a short twenty-eight-line hymn to Christ. There is no evidence of a pagan or Jewish substratum, and nothing, in fact, that connects it to the Sibyl, apart from its appearance in the collection. The high Christology of the piece is evident at the outset:

I speak from my heart of the great famous son of the Immortal, To whom the Most High, his begetter, gave a throne to possess before he was born. …

Here, as in the interpolations, there is a good deal of anti-Jewish polemic. Christ is said to come to “a disobedient people” (I.11); the people of the “land of Sodom” have “evil afflictions … in store” (I. 2l),
⁷⁴
for the people of this land “did not perceive your God when he came before mortal eyes” (II. 22-23). The author goes on to say that these people were the ones who crowned Christ with thorns and gave him gall to drink (II. 23–25). As a result, the Jewish people will suffer: “That will cause great afflictions for you” (I. 25). The poem ends with a paean to the cross, the “blessed” wood that will ascend from earth and “see heaven as home when your fiery eye, O God, flashes like lightning” (II. 26–28).

John Collins considers book VII also to be a Christian composition, but in this case there is at least a modicum of doubt.
⁷⁵
There are certainly Christian elements in the oracle, but there are scant grounds for deciding whether these came in by way of interpolation or were part of the original wording. In any event, Collins is certainly right that the book consists of a loose collocation of oracles, some of them judgments against the nations, bracketed, significantly, with descriptions of the past destruction by flood and the future destruction by fire. The Christian elements are for the most part found in II. 64–90. Here Christ is referred to as “your God” and is the one who was not recognized by the inhabitants of Coele-Syria (II. 64–66). A high Christology is evident here in the reference to “the sovereign Word, with the Father and Holy Spirit”; moreover, the incarnation is explicit: Christ “put on flesh but quickly flew to his Father’s home” (II. 69–70).

One key passage is found in the ritualistic prescriptions of II. 76–84. Sacrifice to God is to be made, but not by burning incense or slaughtering animals (II. 77–78). Instead the worshiper is to take a wild dove and set it off while gazing to heaven. Then she is to pour a libation of water on pure fire, while crying out the following prayer: “As the father begot you, the Word, so I have dispatched a bird, a word which is swift reporter of words, sprinkling with holy waters your baptism, through which you were revealed out of fire” (II.82–84). Whereas Geffcken and Kurfess consider this to be a Gnostic ritual, and see other traces of Gnostic thought in the use of such terms as “the first ogdoad” (I. 140), John Gager has made an impassioned plea for restraint, arguing that ambiguous ritualistic formulations and isolated Gnostic-like terms a Gnostic text doth not make; far better simply to see the book as in some sense “syncretistic.”
⁷⁶
Much of the rest of the book deals with judgments on the nations and individuals, especially at the end when fire will devour the earth and all those who live on it, a fire that will torment them not briefly but for the years of ages forever (II. 127–28).

It is fair to ask whether it is right to see the Christian Sibylline materials as forgeries, in any ordinary sense of the term. On one level they may not seem “forged” in that they represent claims to inspired divine prophecy. On the other hand, the Sibyl was indeed considered to be a human author (although a highly unusual one), who was often thought of as being a historical person from hoary antiquity, and these sundry Christian writers—both the interpolators and literary creators ex nihilo—were claiming to be her. At the least we can say that these books are redactional forgeries, in the sense laid out earlier in the study.
⁷⁷
Even if book 6 was not originally attributed to the Sibyl (the matter is difficult to judge), in its
surviving context it conveys her words. So too with the redacted books: in their present state they represent Christian reflections that are now given not by unknown poets and theologians, but by the great prophetess of Greek antiquity. The authors and redactors do not claim to be conveying the words of a divine being (Apollo, for example), but the words of a seer.

There is another form of Sibylline materials that survives from Christian antiquity, outside of the collection of Oracula Sibyllina that have come down to us. This involves references to and quotations of the Sibyl in Christian writers of the early centuries. Some of the quotations do not correspond with what can now be found in the surviving fourteen books, and so they require a different treatment. In many of these Patristic references the apologetic function of the Christian Sibyl is particularly evident.

Apart from the reference to the Sibyl in the Shepherd of Hermas (a case of false identification, when Hermas thinks the elderly lady representing the church is the ancient prophetess; Vision 2.4), the first clear references occur in Justin: “Indeed Sibyl and Hystaspes foretold that all corruptible things are to be destroyed by fire” (
Apol
. 1. 20). This is an apt summary of what is found in the surviving books; but it is so general as to make closer identification impossible. More telling are the quotations in Pseudo-Justin
Cohortio
(a misattributed, not forged, work). This anonymous apologist refers to the Sibyl on numerous occasions, especially in
chapters 16
and 37–38. In
chapter 16
we are told that the “ancient and very old Sibyl” was called by Plato and others a “prophetess”; she is said to have taught through her oracular verses that there is “only one God.” The author then provides three quotations of the Sibyl, one indicating that there is “only one unbegotten God” (cf. O. S. 3.11–12), another that the people who worship idols have “strayed from the Immortal’s ways” since the idols are the “workmanship of our own hands, and images and figures of dead men” (cf. O.S. 3.721–73); and the other that people should worship the one great God and abjure all shrines, altars, idols, and sacrifices (cf. O.S. 4.24–30). It is striking that all three of the quotations are drawn from, or at least are very similar to, the Jewish, not the Christian, Sibyllina.

The discussion intensifies in chapters 37–38. Chapter 37 discusses the Sibyl but provides no oracular pronouncements. The Sibyl is said to have been of Babylonian extraction, the daughter of Berosus, author of the “Chaldean History.” She is said to have gone to the hot springs at Cumae; the author himself has actually seen, he says, the basilica where she bathed and prophesied. She was proclaimed a prophetess by Plato in the Phaedrus, and is one of those he refers to in the Meno who are clearly shown to be inspired by God when they speak in plain and manifest terms the truth about which they are personally unaware. Her prophecies were recorded by ignorant amanuenses, which is why the meter sometimes does not work. She herself, coming out of a trance, did not know what she had said.