Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (15 page)

The falsification of texts of Homer, of course, generated early classical scholarship, especially as associated with the library in Alexandria.
⁸¹

Falsification of texts was also a matter hotly contested within Christian circles of the first four centuries. Heretics were roundly and widely condemned for altering the texts of Scripture in light of their own doctrines.
⁸²
Among the earliest and
most vitriolic accusers was Tertullian, who famously assaulted Marcion on these grounds:

I say that mine is true: Marcion makes that claim for his. I say that Marcion’s is falsified: Marcion says the same of mine. Who shall decide between us? Only such a reckoning of dates, as will assume that authority belongs to that which is found to be older, and will prejudge as corrupt that which is convicted of having come later. For in so far as the false is a corruption of the true, to that extent must the truth have preceded that which is false. An object must have been in existence before anything is done to it, as what it is in itself must be prior to any opposition to it. … Certainly that is why he has expunged all the things that oppose his view, that are in accord with the Creator, on the plea that they have been woven in by his partisans; but has retained those that accord with his opinion.
⁸³

As is clear, Marcion leveled the same charges against his own theological opponents, deemed as well to preserve false teachings.

False teachers were known to alter the texts not only of Scripture but also of any work that might prove harmful to their cause. And so the complaint of Dionysius of Corinth with respect to his own writings:

When my fellow-Christians invited me to write letters to them I did so. These the devil’s apostles have filled with tares, taking away some things and adding others. For them the woe is reserved. Small wonder then if some have dared to tamper even with the word of the Lord Himself, when they have conspired to mutilate my own humble efforts. (quoted in Eusebius
H.E
. 4, 23, 12)

Or the charges of Rufinus against heretical falsifiers who corrupted the writings of church authorities who opposed them:

The heretics have followed this example of their father and this skill of their teacher. Whenever they have found treatises by renowned writers of old that have discussed things that pertain to the glory of God in detail and faithfully, so that every believer could make progress and receive instruction by reading them, they have not spared their writings, but have poured in the poisonous filth of their own doctrines, whether by interpolating what they had said, or by inserting things that they had not said. By this means, of course, the assertion of the man’s own heresy was more easily advanced under the names of all the most learned and renowned among the ecclesiastical writers in view
of the fact that some brilliant men among the Catholics appeared to have thought likewise.
⁸⁴

The normal way of falsifying a text was simply by altering it in the process of re-copying it. A particularly egregious example is cited by Origen with respect to the transcript of one of his debates:

For a certain author of a heresy, when a discussion was held between us in the presence of many persons and was recorded, took the document from those who had written it down. He added what he wanted to it, removed what he wanted, and changed what seemed good to him. Then he carried it around as if it were from me, pouring scorn conspicuously on the things that he himself had composed. The brethren who are in Palestine were indignant over this. They sent a man to me at Athens who was to receive from me the authentic copy. Prior to this I had not even re-read or revised the work, but it was lying there in such a neglected state that it could hardly be found. But I sent it, and I say with God as my witness that, when I met the man who had falsified the work, [and asked him] why he had done this, he answered, as if he were giving me satisfaction: “Because I wanted to adorn and purify that discussion.”
⁸⁵

Clearly, falsifiers of the text, like others who engaged in one kind of literary deception or another, felt both justified in what they did and offended by those who took umbrage. On other occasions falsifiers could be remarkably crafty, as in the case discussed by Rufinus about a manuscript containing the writings of Athanasius. It is a complicated story. Bishop Damasus was seeking to reconcile the Apollinarians to the rest of the church and had a theological treatise drawn up that could be agreed on by all sides. In this treatise, the term “Homo Dominicus” was applied to Christ, but the Apollinarists objected on the ground that it was a novelty, not part of the sanctioned terminology of their theological forebears. The author of the document attempted to defend himself by appealing to an earlier writing of Athanasius, which also used the term. But a representative of the Apollinarists found a way to undercut the precedent that this writing presented:

When he had received the manuscript, he devised an unprecedented method of falsification. He erased the very passage in which the words were found, and then wrote in again the same words that he had erased. He returned the manuscript, and it was accepted as is.

The debate about this very expression is stirred up once again; the manuscript is brought forward as evidence; the expression in question is found in it,
but in a position where there had been an erasure in the manuscript. The man who brought forward the manuscript is discredited, since the erasure seemed to be proof of corruption and falsification.
⁸⁶

No one was more famously connected with the alteration of inherited theological writings than Rufinus, who explicitly tells his readers that while translating the works of Origen he came upon passages that, in his opinion, could not have actually been written by him. His obvious solution to the problem was to return the texts to their pristine state by eliminating the offensive passages. As he states the matter in the Preface to his translation of
De principiis:

Wherever, therefore, I have found in his books anything contrary to the reverent statements made by him about the Trinity in other places, I have either omitted it as a corrupt and interpolated passage, or reproduced it in a form that agrees with the doctrine which I have often found him affirming elsewhere.
⁸⁷

Or as he says in his
Apology to Anastasius:

I used my own discretion in cutting out not a few passages; but only those as to which I had come to suspect that the thing had not been so stated by Origen himself; and the statement appeared to me in these cases to have been inserted by others, because in other places I had found the author state the matter in a catholic sense.
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And so we have the grounds for one of the vitriolic exchanges with Jerome, who responds to such editorial activity with characteristic zeal:

I wish to know who gave you permission to cut out a number of passages from the work you were translating? You were asked to turn a Greek book into Latin, not to correct it; to draw out another man’s words, not to write a book of your own. You confess, by the fact of pruning away so much, that you did not do what you were asked. You say that you have cut out many things from the Greek, but you say nothing of what you have put in. Were the parts cut out good or bad? Bad, I suppose. Was what you kept good or bad? Good, I presume; for you could not translate the bad.… It is a strange thing if you are to act like an unjust censor, who is himself guilty of the crime, and are allowed at your will to expel some from the Senate and keep others in it.
⁸⁹

The widespread disapprobation of altering texts does not appear to have done much to stop copyists from engaging in such activities. One might nonetheless wonder what steps were taken to ensure the integrity of a text once put in circulation. The reality is that not much could be done. Occasionally there was legislation designed to protect against textual falsifications. The best known is the instance recounted in Pseudo-Plutarch’s
Lycurgus
, the Athenian orator who urged passage of the law that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were to be kept in a public archive, and that public officials were to use these official copies to check all performances in order to guarantee that there were no departures from the text. Any actor who did not stick closely to the “official” script was allegedly barred from further appearances on the stage.

This instance was the exception to the ancient rule. Without laws governing literary property, texts could be protected only by the relatively ineffective ploys of moral suasion and literary curses. Of curses, the best known is the conclusion to the Apocalypse of John:

I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to them the plagues that are described in this book; and if anyone removes any of the words of the book of this prophecy, God will remove his share from the tree of life and from the holy city that is described in this book. (Rev. 22:19)
⁹⁰

Description of an analogous curse can be found in Jewish circles in the Letter of Aristeas. Once the translators of the Septuagint had miraculously produced their text, the leaders of the Jewish community are reported to have decided that its wording was never to be changed: “There was general approval of what they said, and they commanded that a curse should be laid, as was their custom, on anyone who should alter the version by any addition or change to any part of the written text, or any deletion either.”
⁹¹

Note the words: “as was their custom.” Such curses were typical, not unusual. They recur in Christian writings of our period, for example in Irenaeus’ now lost
Ogdoad
, as quoted by Eusebius:

If, dear reader, you should transcribe this little book, I adjure you by the Lord Jesus Christ and by His glorious advent, when He comes to judge the living and the dead, to compare your transcript and correct it carefully by this copy, from which you have made your transcript. This adjuration likewise you must transcribe and include in your copy. (
H.E
. 5.20)

Or in the lesser known but equally threatening comment near the conclusion of the Coptic
History of Joseph the Carpenter
: “Whoever takes away from these words or adds to them, and so considers me a liar, I will soon take vengeance on him” (30.7).
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It should be clear on a number of grounds that the alteration of texts was widely condemned in antiquity by authors who were pagan, Jewish, and Christian. Writers did not want copyists or editors to alter their words. They chastised and cursed anyone who did so. When falsifiers were detected in the act, they were censured, abused, and sometimes punished. An author’s words were to be kept intact, because they were the author’s own.

If authors objected to having words wrongly placed on their pens by falsifiers, it does not take much to imagine how they would react to words wrongly placed on their pens by forgers. In these instances a deceptive writer does not merely interpolate or alter the words of a text, implicitly claiming them to be the words of the author; he instead invents a text out of whole cloth, claiming that it presents the words of the author falsely named. In both cases the question is whether the written text derives from the person who is being claimed as its author.

1
. See, for example, the authors mentioned in note 32 on p. 78 and on pp. 128–32.

2
. “Die Begriffe Pseudepigraphie und Pseudonymität sind nicht einfach synonym zu gebrauchen. Bei der Pseudonymität wird ein fiktiver Autor gewählt, bei der Pseudepigraphie wird das Werk einem realen Autor zugeschrieben.” In “Von Paulus zu ‘Paulus,’” in Jörg Frey et al., eds.,
Pseudepigraphie und Verfasserfiktion
, p. 376.

3
. I am quite aware of the problems posed by the notion of “intention.” When Wimsatt and Beardslee first presented their claims about the “intentional fallacy,” it was to explain and justify some of the hermeneutical principles of the “new criticism” (see W. K. Wimsatt,
The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
, Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1954). Their concerns were principally literary, not historiographic. Philosophers as well have devoted considerable attention to the problem, and the issues obviously do have clear historiographic implications. In the second edition of my book
The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
, I set forth in greater detail my views of the matter, specifically, of how historians who recognize the theoretical problems with reconstructing past intentions can nonetheless use the category of “intention” as a functional category (
Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament
, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University, 2011, pp. 32–33 and 337–41). Here I am going a step further to claim that reasonable assumptions about (past) intention can be made. A good example of how historians can proceed is provided by Jason BeDuhn, “The Historical Assessment of Speech Acts: Clarifications of Austin and Skinner for the Study of Religions” in
MTSR
12 (2000): 477–505. At the end of the day, persons both past and present have always had intentions, whether these are (completely) accessible or not. For BeDuhn, reconstructing intentions is a matter of establishing reasonable probabilities. The same can be said, of course, of all historical work: history as an act of “establishing the past” is itself nothing but plausible reconstruction.

4
. “… macht die Täuschungsabsicht, die jenseits eines literarischen Zweckes liegt, ein Pseudepigraphon zur Fälschung.”
Literarische Fälschung
, p. 94.

5
. “Nur wo Täuschungsabsicht, also dolus malus, vorliegt, wird der Tatbestand der Fälschung erfüllt. Insofern gehört die Fälschung zur Lüge.” Ibid., p. 13.

6
. Armin Daniel Baum,
Pseudepigraphie und literarische Fälschung im frühen Christentum
, WUNT 138 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), pp. 11–12. Someone familiar not with Baum’s work but only with his title might wonder how his book differs from mine. Baum’s overarching concerns involve the question of canon. Given the fact—which he establishes forcefully—that ancient persons, including Christians, considered forgery to be lying, is it possible that Scripture could contain any forgeries? This simply is not my concern. One of Baum’s subsidiary concerns is to establish that a book that was not authored by the person named is not a forgery if its contents can be traced back directly to that person. That is a matter on which we disagree, for reasons that will be evident in the course of my study. See especially pp. 87–90.