Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (142 page)

More than that, the Annas of the incipit is not meant to be a reference to the high priest. The letter is allegedly by Annaei Senecae, created by someone already familiar with the Paul-Seneca correspondence. The letter is written to show that the great stoic philosopher had a highly enlightened view of religion and that he anticipated the attacks on pagan idolatry to be popularized by Christian apologists a century after his day.

If then the letters of Paul and Seneca can be explained adequately by none of the options cited above, we might return to the suggestion made earlier, which in fact is the most common view of the matter. The letters function—by the very fact that they exist—as a kind of Christian apologia. The background to their construction can plausibly be reconstructed as follows. It was widely “known” in the fourth century that there had been no connections between Paul and the great minds of his day (“knowledge” based on the available sources on Paul, such as the book of Acts and the various legends incorporated in the Acts of Paul). Moreover, his style of writing, and even the extent of his learning, were open to suspicion.
¹¹²
Naturally questions arose: Was the great apostle to the gentiles really so great? Why was he not more significant historically? Why was he not connected with other major thinkers of the time? Why are his writings not more weighty intellectually and polished stylistically? A forger produced the correspondence with Seneca to answer these questions, and very little substance was required to achieve that end. Paul was known and adored by the greatest philosopher of his day, who considered his ideas divinely inspired, all the more so since his inferior writing style showed that he did not learn his message through rigorous academic training. It must have come, then, straight from God. Even the Roman emperor was amazed at Paul’s learning.

And so, as Stefan Krauter has recently observed, the letters of Paul and Seneca may seem insipid and disappointing to modern readers who hope to find some substance in them—for example, of the relationship of Stoic and Christian thought—or at least some good imperial gossip. But the letters should not be criticized on these grounds. The various anachronisms and fissures of the correspondence are there simply because the author had little vested interest in doing anything other than showing that Paul and Seneca exchanged letters in which Paul was praised.
¹¹³
A similar view is taken by the most exhaustive recent analysis of Fürst:

The text is crafted from conventions and phrases that are commonplace in late ancient epistolography. With these simple means, garnished with several
splendid ideas, the author generates the one impression that was apparently his aim, namely that Seneca and Paul were supposedly friends…. The letters desire nothing further but to show by means of the chosen genre that Seneca and Paul had contact with one another.
¹¹⁴

The driving force behind the association of Paul with Seneca in particular is that even though Seneca was not an important figure in pagan literary circles at the time,
¹¹⁵
he was indeed important to a range of Latin theologians, starting with Tertullian, who approvingly speaks of “Seneca saepe noster” (
De anima
20.1), and moving through Lactantius up to Jerome, who numbered Seneca among the saints. His philosophy may have played little role in the development of Christian thought, but his person was considered important. So too with these letters: it is their existence as encomia on Paul, more than their contents, that matter.

The long-range effect was significant, for both Paul and Seneca. Paul hereafter was seen as closely connected with the greatest mind of his day, who praised him for his divinely inspired thought, and Seneca’s status among Christians was elevated by his association with Paul. The letters came to be included as standard fare among the manuscripts of the writings of Seneca down to the invention of printing.

1.
For recent works on the early Christian apologists, see Bernard Pouderon,
Les apologistes grecs du II
^e.
siècle
(Paris: de Cerf, 2005); and Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman, and Simon Price, eds.,
Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Still worth reading as backdrop to the apologetic movement is the classic of Pierre de Labriolle,
La réaction païenne: étude sur la polémique antichrétienne du I
^er
au VI
^e
siècle
(Paris: L’artisan du Livre, 1934). For a recent, interesting attempt to limit the genre of the “apology” strictly, as a form introduced by Justin and perfected but brought to an end by Tertullian, see Sara Parvis, “Justin Martyr and the Apologetic Tradition,” in Sara Parvis and Paul Foster, eds.,
Justin Martyr and His Worlds
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), pp. 115–27. For my purposes here, “apologetic forgeries” refers not to forgeries necessarily in the literary form, or genre, of “apologia,” but to forgeries that function apologetically.

2.
Here I leave to the side the question of whether Christian apologiae were meant to convince outsiders, or to provide insiders with ammunition for their debates with others. I subscribe to the latter view, but the issue does not affect the questions I will be addressing throughout the chapter.

3.
For earlier discussion of Acts, see pp. 263–82.

4.
For an exception, see Acts 19.

5.
See discussion on pp. 239–59.

6.
See the discussion on pp. 350–58.

7.
The bewildering array of long and explanatory titles found in the manuscripts include such niceties as “Narrative and History Concerning How the Very Holy Mother of God was Born for Our Salvation” (Tischendorf ms C); or “Narrative of the Holy Apostle James, the Archbishop of Jerusalem and Brother of God, Concerning the Birth of the All Holy Mother of God and Eternal Virgin Mary” (ms A). Our earliest manuscript, Bodmer V of the third or fourth century, simply calls it “The Birth of Mary, the Revelation of James.”

8.
See Edouard Cothenet, “Le Protévangile de Jacques: origen, genre et signification d’un premier midrash chrétien sur la Nativité de Marie,”
ANRW
2.25.6 (1988): 4252–69.

9.
The book survives in some 150 Greek manuscripts and a range of eastern versions: Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavonic.

10.
De perpetua virginitate beatae Mariae adversus Helvidium
.

11.
Letter 6 to Exuperius of Toulous 7.30.

12.
See the extensive collations of manuscripts in two unpublished Duke University dissertations: B. Daniels, “The Greek Manuscript Tradition of the Protevangelium Jacobi” (1956); and George Zervos, “Prolegomena to a Critical Edition of the Genesis Marias (Protevangelium Jacobi): The Greek Manuscripts” (1986).

13.
Adolf von Harnack,
Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius
(Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1958 [original 1897]), 2: 598–603.

14.
Emile de Strycker,
La Forme la plus ancienne du Protévangile de Jacques
(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961).

15.
Ronald Hock,
The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas
(Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1995). pp. 14–20.

16.
Translations taken from Ehrman and Pleše,
Apocryphal Gospels
, pp. 31–71.

17.
Thus, in his commentary on the book, H. Smid states the obvious conclusion: “The author of PJ poses as James, the step(brother) of Jesus. The object of this identification is to make his story that of an eyewitness, able to complete the account in all ‘necessary’ points, on the basis of Matt 1 and 2 and Luke 1 and 2.” Harm R. Smid,
Protevangelium Jacobi: A Commentary
(Assen: van Gorcum, 1965), p. 168.

18.
See, for example, Albert Frey, “Protévangile de Jacques,” in
Écrits apocryphes chrétiens
, vol. 1, ed. François Bovon and Pierre Geoltrain (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 73–80; P. A. Van Stempvoort, “The Protevangelium Jacobi, the Sources of its Theme and Style and their Bearing on its Date,” in SE, pp. 413–15; Cothenet, “Le Protévangelium,” p. 4257; and Smid,
Protevangelium
, pp. 15–17: “It is probable that P.J. is a direct reply to the accusation of Celsus, at any rate to a similar indictment” (p. 16).

19.
A Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 20.

20.
Translations taken from Chadwick,
Contra Celsum
.

21.
See the discussion in ibid. (p. 31, n. 3), in reference for example to Tosephta Hullin, 11.22–23. For a fuller listing of passages, see Raymond Brown,
The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke
(New York: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 534–37.

22.
This is an option suggested, for example, by Cothenet (cf. Justin
Dialogue
48), “Le Protévangile,” p. 4257.

23.
It is not altogether clear that Tertullian and the later heresiologists who deal with the matter are right to think that Marcion truncated Luke by eliminating the offensive opening two chapters. It is equally plausible that the text of Luke inherited by Marcion in the early second century lacked the chapters, and that they were added only later. But it was widely
thought
among the proto-orthodox that Marcion took his penknife to these chapters, and this is all that matters for the present argument.

24.
For a supporter of this view, see John L. Allen, “The Protevangelium of James as an Historia: The Insufficiency of the Infancy Gospel Category.” SBLSP 30 (1991): 508–17.

25.
Although one could still imagine a specifically anti-Marcionite polemic, as the account makes plain that Jesus came into the world as a child born (in some sense) of Mary, not as an adult descended straight from heaven.

26.
See Bart D. Ehrman,
The Apostolic Fathers
, vol. 1, p. 362.

27.
Translation from ibid.

28.
On the use of
to designate the letter carrier, see above, pp. 248–49.

29.
R. A. Lipsius, “Der Märtyrertod Polykarps,”
ZWT
17 (1874): 188–214.

30.
Theodor Keim,
Aus dem Urchristenthum: geschichtliche Untersuchungen
(Zurich: Orell Fsli, 1878), pp. 126–32.

31.
Ibid., p. 132.

32.
Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen, “Bearbeitungen und Interpolationen des Polykarpmartyriums,”
SHAW. PH
(1957): 5–48.

33.
E.g., H. I. Marrou in
TLZ
84 (1959): 361–63.

34.
“On the Dating of Polycarp: Rethinking the Place of the
Martyrdom of Polycarp
in the History of Christianity,”
Early Christianity
1 (2010): 543.

35.
B. Dehandschutter, “The Martyrium Polycarpi: A Century of Research,”
ANRW
2.27. 1 (Berlin: New York: de Gruyter, 1993), p. 494.

36.
See, e.g., ibid. Victor Saxer, “L’authenticité du ‘Martyre de Polycarpe’: Bilan de 25 ans de critique,”
Mélanges de l’école française de Rome. Antiquité
94 (1982): 979–1001; Gerd Buschmann,
Martyrium Polycarpi
—
eine formkritische Studie. Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach der Entstehung der Gattung Märtyrerakte
, BZNW 70 (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 15–70.

37.
“Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch,”
ANRW
2.27.1 (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1993), pp. 353–54.

38.
Indagine sul martirio di San Policarpo: Critica storica e fortuna agiografica di un caso giudiziario in Asia Minore
(Nuovi Studi Storici, 6; Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1990).

39.
See, for example, Dennis Trout in
Spec
68 (1993): 251–53; T.D. Barnes,
JTS
43 (1992): 237–38; and esp. Jan den Boeft and Jan Bremmer, “Notiunculae Martyrologicae V”
VC
49 (1995): 146–64. Den Boeft and Bremmer in particular stress that the late date does not account for details in the text that make better sense with a second-century dating. They do not consider the possibility that such indicators of an early date could just as easily have been passed down orally in the accounts of Polycarp’s death, before the account was written many years later.

40.
The first person recurs later in the account as well, in the adoration of the martyr’s relics, which I will address later.

41.
Pre-Decian Acts of Martyrs and Commentarii
, HDR, 22 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), p. 121.

42.
Bisbee,
Pre-Decian Acts
.

43.
Moss, “Dating,” pp. 549–50.

44.
T. D. Barnes, “A Note on Polycarp,”
JTS
n.s. 18 (1967): 436.

45.
“Dating,” p. 562.

46.
“L’autenticité du Martyre de Polycarpe.”

47.
Moss, “Dating,” p. 567.

48.
Ibid., p. 566. Moss also argues that the text provides an “apologia for the absence of relics.” Strictly speaking, however, this is not true, since the bones in fact are the relics, even if the other parts of the body no longer survived.