Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (140 page)

This entire discussion is intended to establish the Sibyl as a completely trustworthy source. And what is it that she allegedly said? According to chapter 38, she predicted “in a clear and patent manner, the advent of our Savior Jesus Christ.
She also taught that the gods of the idols have no real existence; and she uttered prophecies about the advent of Christ and the things he would do.”
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Here, then, the author is reliant on early Christian forms of the Oracula Sibyllina, thought to be utterances of a pagan priestess who prophesied the truth when in a state of ecstasy, inspired by the one true God.

An even more extensive use of the oracles of the Sibyl is found in the writings of Lactantius, especially the
Diviniae Institutiones
. Lactantius uses the Sibyl more than any other ecclesiastical writer, and in fact quotes Sibylline material 50 percent more often than he quotes the Old Testament. Unlike Pseudo-Justin, he does not provide long quotations, but only sentences here and there. Still, he cites hundreds of lines altogether. Lactantius shows that he is acquainted in particular with what became books 3–8. He quotes the text in order to discuss monotheism, everlasting life, the “fall,” the coming of the Son of God, his life and miracles, passion, resurrection and second coming, the last judgment, and the general resurrection. In particular, for Lactantius, the Sibyl is a prophetess who foretold Christianity: “Since these events are true and certain of fulfillment, being in agreement with prophecies uttered by the seers, and since Trismegistus and Hystaspes and the Sibyls have foretold the same destinies, it is indisputable that all hope of life and salvation rests on the religion of God alone” (
Epitome Institutionum
, epilogue).
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The apologetic function of the material could hardly be more patent.

A similar function can be found in the citation of the Sibyl in the forged Apostolic Constitutions: “But if the Gentiles laugh at us, and disbelieve our Scriptures, let at least their own prophetess Sibylla oblige them to believe, who says thus to them in express words:

But when all things shall be reduced to dust and ashes
And the immortal God who kindled the fire shall have quenched it
God shall form those bones and that ashes into a man again,
And shall place mortal men again as they were before.
And then shall be the judgment, wherein God will do justice,
And judge the world again. But as many mortals as have sinned through impiety
Shall again be covered under the earth;
But so many as have been pious shall live again in the world
When God puts His Spirit into them, and gives those at once that are godly both life and favour
Then shall all see themselves. (5.1.7)
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In a similar way Augustine declared in
The City of God
that the acrostic of book 8 was a genuine prophecy of Christ:

It was at this same time, according to some accounts, that the Erythraean Sibyl made her predictions. Varro, we note, informs us that there were a number of Sibyls, not only one. This Sibyl of Erythraea certainly recorded some utterances which are obviously concerned with Christ…. This I discerned in conversations with that eminent man Flaccianus, who was, amongst other things, proconsul, a man of most ready eloquence and profound learning. We were talking about Christ, and he produced a Greek manuscript, saying that it was the poems of the Erythraean Sibyl. He showed me that in the manuscript the order of initial letters in one passage was so arranged as to form these words: IESOUS CHREISTOS THEOU UIOS SOTER, the translation of which is “Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour. (City of God, 18.23)
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He then quotes the acrostic poem.

Altogether, according to the statistics compiled by B. Thompson in a short but extremely useful article on the subject,
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twenty-two Patristic sources preserve some eight hundred lines of the oracles. Clement of Alexandria, for example, quotes them eleven times, amounting to forty-six lines; Theophilus quotes a large portion of book 3, etc.

That Christians were particularly interested in the Sibyl and in the forged prophecies that supported the claims and theological views of their faith is especially evident in the charges occasionally leveled against them by pagans, that they had interpolated their own words into her writings. The first time we find the charge is in the
of Celsus. After telling the well-known story of the Stoic Epictetus, who removed himself so far from his own suffering that he calmly explained to his master that he should not have broken his leg, Celsus asks why Jesus, if he were so great, did not react similarly:

What comparable saying did your God utter while he was being punished? If you had put forward the Sibyl, whom some of you use, as a child of God you would have had more to be said in your favour. However, you have had the presumption to interpolate many blasphemous things in her verses, and assert that a man who lived a most infamous life and died a most miserable death was a god. (7.53)
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Origen’s reply may have satisfied his Christian readers, but knowing what we do today about the composition of the Sibyllina Oracula, it seems, in fact, a bit wanting:

Then for some unknown reason he wanted us to call the Sibyl a child of God rather than Jesus, asserting that we have interpolated many blasphemous things in her verses, though he does not give an instance of our interpolations. He would have proved this point had he showed that the older copies were purer and had not the verses which he supposes to have been interpolated. (7.56)

Although the charge of forgery is not found in (surviving) pagan attacks against Christians, it is referred in several other Christian sources that counter these attacks. A half century after Origen, Lactantius could claim, “Some, refuted by these testimonies, are accustomed to have recourse to the assertion that these poems were not by the Sibyls, but made up and composed by our own writers” (
Institutions
, 4.15.26).
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Even more striking is the extensive discussion by none other than the Christian Constantine, in his “Oration to the Assembly of the Saints,” preserved for us by Eusebius (assuming for the moment that the speech actually goes back to Constantine, an issue that does not much matter for my point).
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The passage, though lengthy, deserves to be quoted in full, as it shows both the apologetic value of the Sibyl for the Christian cause and the pagan charge that the “predictions” in fact represented Christian forgeries:

My desire, however, is to derive even from foreign sources a testimony to the Divine nature of Christ. For on such testimony it is evident that even those who blaspheme his name must acknowledge that he is God, and the Son of God if indeed they will accredit the words of those whose sentiments coincided with their own. The Erythraean Sibyl, then, who herself assures us that she lived in the sixth generation after the flood, was a priestess of Apollo, who wore the sacred fillet in imitation of the God she served, who guarded also the tripod encompassed with the serpent’s folds, and returned prophetic answers to those who approached her shrine; having been devoted by the folly of her parents to this service, a service productive of nothing good or noble, but only of indecent fury, such as we find recorded in the case of Daphne. On one occasion, however, having rushed into the sanctuary of her
vain superstition, she became really filled with inspiration from above, and declared in prophetic verses the future purposes of God; plainly indicating the advent of Jesus by the initial letters of these verses, forming an acrostic in these words: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour, Cross. The verses themselves are as follows. (chs. 18–19)
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Constantine then provides a full quotation of the acrostic poem, and continues by refuting the charge of forgery:

Many, however, who admit that the Erythraean Sibyl was really a prophetess, yet refuse to credit this prediction, and imagine that someone professing our faith, and not unacquainted with the poetic art, was the composer of these verses. They hold, in short, that they are a forgery, and alleged to be the prophecies of the Sibyl on the ground of their containing useful moral sentiments, tending to restrain licentiousness, and to lead man to a life of sobriety and decorum. Truth, however, in this case is evident, since the diligence of our countrymen has made a careful computation of the times; so that there is no room to suspect that this poem was composed after the advent and condemnation of Christ, or that the general report is false, that the verses were a prediction of the Sibyl in an early age. For it is allowed that Cicero was acquainted with this poem, which he translated into the Latin tongue, and incorporated with his own works.

Constantine, needless to say, was wrong about this.

It is possible to see the Christian Sibylline Oracles—both those that survive (as interpolations of forgeries) and those quoted in patristic writers—not only as forgeries created for apologetic purposes, but specifically as counterforgeries. Among the weapons pagans used to oppose Christians were (forged) oracular pronouncements of their own, delivered with all the power of divine authority in the names, of course, of the pagan gods. And so, for example, Eusebius recounts an incident during the persecution of Maximin Daia, when a sheriff of Antioch named Theoctecnus forged an oracle to justify persecution of the Christians; he “displayed his magic arts by spurious oracular utterances…. This man aroused the demon against the Christians: the god, he said, had commanded ‘the emperor’s enemies,’ to be cleared right out of the city and its neighborhood” (
H.E
. 9.2–3).

Years later Augustine could claim that pagan opponents of Christianity “thought up some sort of Greek verses, supposedly the effusions of a divine oracle, given to someone consulting it,” which indicated that Jesus’ disciple Peter
“used sorcery to ensure that the name of Christ should be worshipped for 365 years, and that on the completion of that number of years it should come to an immediate end.” Augustine readily exposes the false claim of the oracle: the allotted amount of time had passed already, and the church was thriving more than ever (
City of God
18.53). Later, in the same source, Augustine discusses Porphyry’s
which mentioned an oracle of Apollo against the Christians. Augustine proffers the expected objection: “Is anyone so dense as to fail to realize that these oracles were either the inventions of a cunning man, a bitter enemy of the Christians, or the responses of demons devised with a like intent?” (19.23; see also 20.24 and 22.25).

If pagans were using forged oracles to oppose the Christians, is it any surprise that Christians responded in kind, by forging oracles of their own to defend themselves and their faith?
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They could not forge oracles as having come from the gods of Greece and Rome, known to be either nonexistent or demonic. But an outlet existed in the person of the Sibyl, an actual human who went into a trance and under the power of inspiration delivered the truth of God. There is, in fact, a possible suggestion within the surviving Oracula Sibyllina themselves that Christians may have been inventing these texts as counterforgeries, in this case not against pagans but against Jews, who were known to have a good number of Sibylline oracles, as most of the surviving books derive ultimately from Jewish circles. The passage in question comes from Book 7:

But they will endure extreme toil who, for gain
Will prophesy base things, augmenting an evil time;
Who putting on the shaggy hides of sheep
Will falsely claim to be Hebrews, which is not their race.
But speaking with words, making profit by woes,
They will not change their life and will not persuade the righteous
And those who propitiate God through the heart, most faithfully. (7.132–138)

Normally, the false “Hebrews” here are taken to be non-Jewish Christians of some kind. But might they, even more radically, be taken to be actual Jews, who, for Christians, were not in fact “true Jews,” because by rejecting Christ they had rejected their own God? As this book itself says, in further attacking Jews: “Ah, Coele-Syria,… wretched one, you did not recognize your God, whom once Jordan washed in its streams” (7.64–67). And so, it should be at least considered possible that the forger of this part of book 7 produced his Christian interpolation precisely as a counter to the Jewish Sibylline prophecies that he saw here before him, which needed to be “corrected” in line with true religion.