Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (147 page)

For great is the value of deceit, provided it be not introduced with a mischievous intention … And often it is necessary to deceive, and to do the greatest benefits by means of this device, whereas he who has gone by a straight course has done great mischief to the person whom he has not deceived. (1.8)
⁴¹

At the outset of our study we saw that forgery, when it is explicitly discussed in antiquity, is roundly and emphatically condemned. Most readers did not consider this kind of lie to be acceptable, even if they did sanction other lies for other reasons. If someone’s life could be saved by a white lie, all to the good (for many Christians); if someone could be delivered from pain and suffering, from rape or torture, then surely (for many Christians), lying could be justified. But with the literary texts written under the cloud of deceit, we are not dealing with matters of life and death. The issues may have seemed enormous to the writers of these texts. But most readers, at least, condemned the practice. Moreover, unlike fiction, forgery does not include a contract between author and reader where veracity is suspended for the sake of the text. Ancient Christian readers expected authors to name themselves, if they named anyone at all, and not to lie about who they really were.

And so, it is not difficult at all to see what someone standing in Augustine’s camp would have thought of forgery. Augustine may well have been speaking for many (most?) other Christians, both of his own day and earlier, when he reflected on the need for Scripture, in particular, not to be implicated in lying and deceit:

It seems to me that no good at all can come of our believing that the sacred texts contain anything false or incorrect—that is, that these men through whom the Bible was given to us and who committed it to writing set down anything that was not true in those books. It is one question whether a good man might at some time tell a lie, but it is another question altogether whether a writer of Holy Scripture might have intended to lie or deceive. No, it is not another question—it is no question at all. If you can point out at least one instance of the intentional falsehood within this holy citadel of authority, then anything in the Bible which strikes us as too hard to practice, or too difficult to believe in, can simply be explained away as a deliberate untruth. (
Epist
. 28.3)
⁴²

Or, as he says elsewhere in another letter:

[I]f it is the case that we admit into Holy Scripture claims which are untrue but which serve some profounder purpose—for the sake of religion, let us say—then how do we defend the authority of the Bible? What statement in the Bible will be strong enough to stand up against the wicked stubbornness of heresy? Anyone arguing with you can claim that in the passage you are citing the writer really intended something else, he had a higher purpose in mind” (
Epist
. 40.3)
⁴³

This is clearly a hard line when it comes to truth and deceit, and I see no reason to doubt that a large number of Christians would have agreed with it (whether the majority or not—who can say?). Augustine may have seen himself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the author of Ephesians, who tells his readers that they are to “Fasten the belt of truth around your waist.” Truth was all-important for this canonical writer. Early on he refers to the gospel as “the word of truth” (1:13); he indicates that the “truth is in Jesus” (4:21); and he declares that the “fruit of the light is found in the truth” (5:9). Most important, as we have seen, he insists that his readers “put aside the lie and speak the truth” to their neighbors (4:25). And yet the author lied about his own identity, claiming to be the apostle Paul when in fact he was someone else, living years later. What would Augustine and those who were like-minded have thought about this author, and his book, had they known the truth of its authorship? They would have called the author a liar and his book a deceit, and they would not have admitted it into the canon of Scripture.

But what did the author himself think? He must have known that he lied. But if he was like a large number of other Christians, he must have also thought that there were times when it was appropriate to lie, that the intention of the lie was more important than the fact of the lie, that sometimes it was the right thing to do to reject truth and embrace falsehood. Most Christians—and undoubtedly this unknown author himself—knew full well that throughout Scripture lies could further and promote the will of God. If Abraham had not lied about his wife Sarah, calling her his sister, he may well have been killed and the nation of Israel would never have come into being (Genesis 12). If Jacob had not deceived Isaac to receive the birthright, Israel would never have become heir of the promises of God (Genesis 27). If the midwives of Egypt had not lied about the hardiness of the Hebrew women giving birth, the nation may well have been destroyed and Moses would certainly never have come into existence (Exodus 1). If Rahab had not lied about the whereabouts of the Israelite spies, Israel may have never been able to take the Promised Land; if they did, she and her family would not have been spared, and she would not have been in the messianic line; in fact the line may well have ended prematurely at that point (Joshua 2). If Michal and Jonathan
had not lied for David, he may well have been killed by Saul, before he produced the offspring that would lead to the coming of his greatest Son, the Messiah (1 Samuel 19–20). Jesus too was known to have used deceit, indicating that he was not going to the feast in Jerusalem while knowing full well that he was about to go (John 7). Even God could use deceit when he chose to do so, as declared in forthright terms by the prophet Jeremiah: “You deceived me and I was deceived” (20:7). And as shown, for example, in his declaration through Jonah that Nineveh was to be destroyed in forty days, when he knew full well that it was not to be.

Did forgers think that lying is sometimes not only right, but divinely sanctioned? That it is sometimes morally acceptable, even necessary, to lie and deceive others? That a greater good can sometimes result from a lie than from the truth? At an early stage of our study we considered the one instance of a Christian forger who discussed his motives for lying about his identity, Salvian of Marseille, who, among other things declared: “For this reason the present writer chose to conceal his identity in every respect for fear that his true name would perhaps detract from the influence of his book, which really contains much that is exceedingly valuable.”
⁴⁴
He had an important book to write, and no one would read it if it were attributed to a nobody like Salvian. And so he wrote it in the name of Timothy, in hopes that it would have a wide influence.

It may well be that other forgers—of both canonical and non-canonical texts—felt similarly. They may have believed that they had a high moral obligation to convey the truth as it had been revealed to them. They may have reasoned that they needed to have their words read as widely as possible. They may have realized that the best way to assure a broad and much-deserved influence was by hiding their identity behind that of a greater authority. They may have thought that they had a truth to convey, and they may have been willing to lie in order to convey it.

1
. For my tally I am including Acts, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, and Jude.

2
. See, e.g., pp. 19–20, if one chooses to trust Epiphanius.

3
. Translation of M. Atkinson and A. Robinson,
NPNF
, second series, vol. 4.

4
. Translation of W. H. Fremantle in
NPNF
, second series, vol. 3.

5
. E.g., Basil,
Epist
. 224, 1; Augustine
Epist
. 59.1–2.

6
. “Jede Fälschung täuscht einen Sachverhalt vor, der den tatsächlichen Gegebenheiten nicht entspricht. Damit gehört die Fälschung in das Gebiet der Lüge und des Betrugs.… Nur wo Täuschungabsicht, also dolus malus, vorliegt, wird der Tatbestand der Fälschung erfüllt. Insofern gehört die Fälschung zur Lüge, und zwar zur vorsätzlichen Lüge”;
Literarische Fälschung
, pp. 3, 13.

7
. If such a thing as “fiction” can be imagined for antiquity. On this, see the next note. In antiquity, of course, there were epic poems, Greek novels (as satirized in Lucian’s “True Story”), epistolary novels, etc., and these
were
read differently from “histories.”

8
. For an argument that ancient writers and readers did not have anything that corresponded to our category of “fiction,” see Christopher Gill, “Plato on Falsehood–Not Fiction,” in Gill and Wiseman, eds.,
Lies and Fiction
, pp. 38–87. Gill maintains that in modern ways of construing literature, we think of fiction as narrative that is imaginary, “made up” by the author. This is not a category for Plato. When he speaks of the myths being
he does not mean that they are made up; he means they teach lessons that are not true. That is Plato’s principle category: Does something teach what one needs to learn in order to live rightly? And so he does not contradict himself when he condemns the
of the poets but then tells his own myths (Er, the Cave, and so on). And when he urges the Noble Lie (which is true). Or when he invents dialogues. None of these things is the absolute embodiment of truth, since that can be reached and conveyed only through dialectical reasoning. But they are pathways to the truth, false in medium and in not being able to convey “truth” in its full and pristine state, but not false because they are made up, invented, imagined. I am in full agreement with this view of Plato. At the same time, it should not be overlooked that ancient persons did recognize that a history of Thucydides was not the same sort of writing as a novel by Achilles Tatius. Nowhere is that clearer than in Lucian’s parody of history in his fictional work, “A True Story.”

9
. “Prologue,” Gill and Wiseman,
Lies and Fiction
, p. xvi. Emphasis his.

10
. See more fully pp. 43–67.

11
. We have seen, for example, the problems with considering the Apostolic Constitutions and 2 Peter as plagiarized, even though they certainly take over other writings wholesale for the production of their own (though not under the author’s own name).

12
. The New Testament writings were widely falsified by scribes over the centuries, but they do not stand alone. We have seen the interpolations in the Pseudo-Ignatians and the Sibyllina (considering only these in our study, since they are closely related to forgeries in their respective corpora); other instances abound, as, for example, in the writings of Dionysius of Alexandria and Origen.

13
. Many fabricated stories are not to be chalked up to malicious intent. But there are numerous episodes from the lives of Jesus that do not pass even ancient standards of veracity, whether stories about Jesus involving a census under Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria or involving his mischievous deeds as a five-year-old wunderkind. Stories about the apostles proliferated as well, as we have seen, whether made up as entertainment or for other more ideological reasons, such as Peter and the smoked tuna, Paul and the baptized lion, and John and the obedient bedbugs, just to stick with an animal theme.

14
. I have not dealt at any length with false attribution here, even though it affects a number of the writings of the New Testament (the Gospels, 2 and 3 John), not to mention later writers (Pseudo-Justin, Pseudo-Tertullian, Pseudo-Chrysostom, and on and on). In many instances the attributions may have been made in full cognizance that there were no real grounds for making the ascriptions (the Gospel of Matthew); in other instances they were probably simply made by mistake (Pseudo-Justin).

15
. See further pp. 546–47.

16
. “Wie bereits bemerkt wurde, macht die Täuschungsabsicht, die jenseits eines literarischen Zwekkes liegt, ein Pseudepigraphon zur Fälschung. Fälschung und Lüge aber stimmen darin überein, daß sie einen wirklichen Sachverhalt verhüllen und den Schein der Wahrheit für einen nicht zutreffenden Tatbestand vortäuschen. Dazu benutzen sie das Mittel der Verstellung. Die literarische Fälschung ist somit ein Sonderfall der Lüge, näherhin des Betruges. Diese Verwandtschaft zwischen literarischer Fälschung und Lüge scheint jedoch weder im Altertum noch in der Neuzeit näher beachtet worden zu sein.… Es ist aber zu fragen, ob im Altertum jede Lüge als unsittlich verurteilt wurde, oder ob hier unterschieden wurde und Täuschung in gewissen Fällen als erlaubt galt”;
Literarische Fälschung
, p. 94