Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (144 page)

Arguably the most striking finding of my study is the most basic. In the early centuries of the church Christians produced a large number of literary forgeries. We have considered some fifty examples from the first four Christian centuries. Many of these are highly significant historically and culturally. Among the earliest surviving writings of the Christians—those that make up the New Testament—nearly half (13/27) are forged.
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I have restricted my study, with only a couple of minor exceptions, to the forgeries that have survived in manuscript tradition and that are tied closely to the polemical agendas of the early Christians in their various internecine and extramural struggles. We know, of course, of other forgeries that do not survive but that were, at one time, known and discussed.
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Moreover, toward the
end of our period forgeries continued apace, especially with the sea-change that came with the conversion of Constantine and the proliferation of writings of all sorts among Christian intellectuals. Sometimes these later forgeries involved shenanigans connected with important figures in the theological and ecclesiastical life of the church of the fourth century. Such is the case with a no-longer surviving letter forged for unfriendly purposes in the name of Athanasius, as he himself tells us in a letter he wrote to Constantius in opposition to Arian opponents:

I am sure you will be astonished at the presumption of my enemies. Montanus, the officer of the Palace, came and brought me a letter, which purported to be an answer to one from me, requesting that I might go into Italy, for the purpose of obtaining a supply of the deficiencies which I thought existed in the condition of our Churches. Now I desire to thank your Piety, which condescended to assent to my request, on the supposition that I had written to you, and has made provision for me to undertake the journey, and to accomplish it without trouble. But here again I am astonished at those who have spoken falsehood in your ears. … For I never wrote to you, nor will my accuser be able to find any such letter. (
Apol. ad const
. 19)
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Years later, Jerome describes a malicious letter, no longer extant, written to castigate his intentions in performing his translation work:

My brother Eusebius writes to me that, when he was at a meeting of African bishops which had been called for certain ecclesiastical affairs, he found there a letter purporting to be written by me, in which I professed penitence and confessed that it was through the influence of the press in my youth that I had been led to turn the Scriptures into Latin from the Hebrew; in all of which there is not a word of truth. When I heard this, I was stupefied.… Letters were soon brought me from many brethren in Rome asking about this very matter, whether the facts were as was stated: and they pointed in a way to make me weep to the person by whom the letter had been circulated among the people. He who dared to do this, what will he not dare to do? It is well that ill will has not a strength equal to its intentions. Innocence would be dead long ago if wickedness were always allied to power, and calumny could prevail in all that it seeks to accomplish. It was impossible for him, accomplished as he was, to copy any style and manner of writing, whatever their value may be; amidst all his tricks and his fraudulent assumption of another man’s personality, it was evident who he was. It is this same man, then, who wrote this fictitious letter of retractation in my name, making out that my translation of the Hebrew books was bad, who, we now hear, accuses me of having translated the Holy Scriptures with a view to disparage the Septuagint.… I
wonder that in this letter he did not make me out as guilty of homicide, or adultery or sacrilege or parricide or any of the vile things which the silent working of the mind can revolve within itself.
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(
Adv. Rufin. 2, 24
)

Examples could be multiplied.
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In addition to restricting myself to works that survive, I have focused on just one kind of early Christian forgery, those written in the context of early Christian polemics—whether internal struggles among various Christian groups trying to establish, in the face of opposing views, what Christians should believe or how they should live, attacks on Jews and Judaism, or apologia in the face of pagan assault. I have not considered non-polemical forgeries, and so have left out of our examination, for example, a number of Nag Hammadi treatises such as the Apocryphon of John, The Gospel of Philip, or the two Apocalypses of James. These do indeed use a pseudonym to advance a particular understanding of the religion (and to that extent are obviously arguing against alternative perspectives), but they are not especially polemical in their content or rhetoric.

As it turns out, however, the majority of our early Christian forgeries do in fact appear to have been generated out of a polemical context. The reason has to do with much larger issues in the development of the Christian religion, which I will mention here in only very brief compass. As is widely recognized, Christianity—by which I mean all the various groups of devotees who paid allegiance to Christ in one way or another, and considered themselves to be his followers—was distinctive in the Roman world in a number of ways. As opposed to followers of other religions, most Christian groups were exclusivistic in their views, maintaining that they had the “true” understanding of the faith (whether they were Sethian, Valentinian, Thomasine, Marcionite, Ebionite, Proto-orthodox, or something else), and that knowing the truth was in fact the key to practicing true religion. Christians (“true” Christians of whatever variety) were right, and everyone else was in error. Conversion was required, and conversion meant abandoning one’s old religion, whether that was some form of Judaism, one of the many hundreds (thousands) of “pagan” cults, an “aberrant” Christian sect, etc. A person had to believe the “right” things to be on the right side of God, from the very beginning of the Christian movement.

If being right mattered, then accepting the right teachings mattered. But how was one to know the right teachings when there were so many alternative views available, not just within the Christian movement, but competing with it from the outside? Authorities were needed. Authorities who could speak the truth from God. And so there developed the notion of apostolic succession. God sent Christ, who chose his apostles, who spoke the truth and passed it along to their hand-selected successors. But what happens when Christianity spread, and there
were very few people left who actually knew the successors of the apostles? In one strain of thought, apostolic succession was carried down to and through the bishops of the main churches, who could be trusted to convey the apostolic teachings learned from Jesus who was sent from God. Another way to get back to the apostles was by reading the writings they had produced. Apostolic writings then became the order of the day. Even apostles of Jesus who, in real life, could not have written a paragraph in Greek had their souls depended upon it—Simon Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and John the Son of Zebedee, for example—had writings attributed to them. Many of these writings were produced by later authors who could not possibly have had any real connection with the apostles. They wrote forgeries, but they did so no doubt—at least in their own views—for good causes. The apostolic truth needed apostolic authority, and that required the use of an apostolic name. This was deceit in service of the truth.

Later still, other (non-apostolic) Christian leaders came to be cherished as authority figures: Clement of Rome, for example, or Ignatius of Antioch, and eventually Jerome, Augustine, and Chrysostom. And so sundry authors claimed those names as well for their own writings, lying about their identities to get their views heard. It happened a lot.

That, then, is one set of theses that I have tried to establish in the preceding chapters. Forgery occurred to a notable extent and it involved both well-known names and historically important writings, including a large number that became Scripture. As subsidiary theses I have tried to show that explanations for the phenomenon that at times seem ubiquitous, especially among Neutestamentlers, lack compelling evidence and are almost certainly wrong. This includes the claim that it was common practice in philosophical schools for students to write treatises in the names of their teachers, with impunity, as an act of humility, and the assertion that letters written in the names of such stalwarts as Peter and Paul can best be explained as having been produced by secretaries or coauthors, rather than the apostles themselves.

One other overarching conclusion is the corollary: forgery was indeed understood in antiquity to be a form of lying and deceit. This is seen not only in the negative terms used to describe writings produced by an author falsely claiming to be someone else, such as
(bastards) and
(writings inscribed with a lie). It is also seen in the extensive discourse surrounding the activity, which castigated it as a form of lying. The true nature of these false writings was clearly recognized, as we have seen, by the greatest scholar of ancient forgery, Wolfgang Speyer, in words that bear repeating: “Every forgery feigns a state of affairs that does not correspond to actual events. In this vein, forgery belongs in the realm of lie and deceit.” … “Only where the intent to deceive—that is to say: dolus malus—exists, does [a work] attain to the status of forgery. Forgery thus belongs in the same category as the lie, indeed as the intentional lie.”
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I should stress again that forgery is not—and was not–simply an ancient form of transparent “fiction.” The authors of forgery in almost every known instance meant to deceive their readers and the vast majority of times they appear to have succeeded. And so, “fiction” is not at all the right designation for this kind of practice.
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Both in antiquity and today “fiction,”
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involves a kind of contract between the author and the reader, in which the requirement of factual reporting is, by mutual assent, suspended. To revert to the helpful explanation of Michael Wood:

Fiction is pure invention, any sort of fabrication. It is invention which knows it is invention; or which knows
and says
it is invention; or which, whatever it knows and says,
is known
to be invention. It is permissible or noble lying, licensed under quite specific cultural circumstances, and displays (sometimes) the linguistic or textual marks of its license. It is not lying at all, but exempt from all notions of truth and falsehood, licensed in quite a different way. …
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That is not what we are dealing with when considering forgeries. The reports of and discussions about the practice in antiquity consistently show that in fact there was no agreement between author and reader for the assumption of a false name. Instead, forgery was seen as a form of lying meant to deceive. As such it was closely related to other literary practices that we have mentioned only in
passing throughout this study
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: plagiarism,
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falsification,
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fabrication,
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and false attribution.
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It is important at this stage to stress that even though I have insisted throughout the study that forgery is a form of literary deception, only in passing, at the outset, have I addressed the question of whether or not this kind of lying was ever considered morally acceptable. That, of course, is a different issue altogether.

Any normative evaluation of literary deceit should be the work of ethicists or, possibly, theologians—not historians. But the historian does have the obligation to consider how such activities would have been perceived in their own day. As it turns out, the (ancient) moral evaluation of lying is complicated, as might be expected when dealing with Christian authors who urge their readers to tell the truth, after lying about their own identity.
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To make sense of this situation we need to consider the attitudes to lying and deception in the early church.