Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (19 page)

And on and on. This list does not count all the books that scholars today widely accept as pseudepigraphic. Just in terms of the earliest Christian tradition, it is striking, as is often noted, that between Paul and Ignatius there is not a single Christian author who writes in his own name, with the possible exception of the “John” of the Apocalypse (which is homonymous).
²⁰
Every other Gospel, epistle, treatise, or sermon is either forged or anonymous and then falsely attributed. No surprise, then, that K. M. Fischer can label the second half of the first century “the era of New Testament pseudepigraphy.”
²¹

From these sundry references it is also clear that ancients employed criticism during this early period. Jeremy Duff, in his otherwise helpful study “A Reconsideration of Pseudepigraphy in Early Christianity,” is incorrect to claim that there are only six explicit discussions of pseudepigraphy in the first two Christian centuries. He names, as the six, 2 Thess. 2:1–3 (a letter “as if by us”); Dionysius of Corinth, who complains about false teachers interpolating his own writings; Serapion on the Gospel of Peter; Tertullian on the Acts of Paul; Tertullian on the Gospels of Mark and Luke (as actually Gospels of Peter and Paul); and the Muratorian Fragment with its comments on heretical forgeries.
²²
Some of these, however, do not concern issues of authorship. Dionysius of Corinth is referring to the falsification of (his own) writings, not to forgery. And Tertullian, as we have seen, condemns the author of the Acts of Paul and Thecla not for forging the account but for fabricating it. Moreover, when Tertullian indicates that Mark and Luke are reasonably considered to represent the views of Peter and Paul (
Adv. Marc
. 4.5.3–4), he is not suggesting that Mark claimed to
be
Peter or that Luke claimed to
be
Paul. These authors (for Tertullian) wrote in their own names, not in the names of their authorizing figures.

On the other hand, there are other authors of the period who did indeed discuss pseudepigraphy, especially in Duff’s wider usage of the term. Hegesippus, for example, maligned heretical forgeries in circulation, as Eusebius tells us: “And in discussing apocryphal books, as they are called, he states that some of them were fabricated by heretics in his own time”
H.E
. 4, 22, 9). So too Gaius of Rome objected to those who “compose new scriptures” and contended that Paul’s letters number thirteen, not accepting Hebrews as Pauline. As Eusebius indicates: “for then as now there were some at Rome who did not think that it was the Apostle’s” (
H.E
. 6.20.3). Moreover, Gaius appears to have assigned the authorship of the book of Revelation to Cerinthus, who only falsely claimed to be John (Eusebius
H.E
. 3.28). So too, somewhat later, Dionysius of Alexandria indicates that his “predecessors” had charged that the book of Revelation was forged by Cerinthus in the name of John in order to get a hearing for his views (Eusebius,
H.E
. 7.25).

In addition, Irenaeus mentions numerous apocryphal and inauthentic writings by the heretics: “they adduce an untold multitude of apocryphal and spurious writings, which they have composed
to bewilder foolish men and such as do not understand the letters of the Truth” (
Adv. Haer
. 1.20.1).
²³
Clement of Alexandria, as previously noted, mentions some who reject 1 and 2 Timothy because the former speaks of Gnosis falsely so-called (
Strom
. 2.11). Finally, as we have also seen, Origen was
even more forthright than Dionysius of Corinth in complaining about the falsification of his own work.
²⁴

As a net result, there is certainly no lack of materials from antiquity related to forgery—pagan, Jewish, and Christian. All the odder, as I indicated at the outset, that there are so few studies devoted to the topic. There are to be sure explorations of individual cases in droves,
²⁵
as well as extensive studies of the relationship between pseudepigraphy and canon.
²⁶
And there are articles written on this or that aspect of the broader problem,
²⁷
many of them compiled into valuable collections.
²⁸
But where are the monographs?
²⁹

We have already seen substantial grounds for labeling literary works that make false authorial claims forgeries, for example in the clear instances of intended deceit considered in Chapter Two and in the ancient Greek and Latin terms used to describe the phenomenon, such as
, and
. Scholars who object to the idea that deceit was involved in the practice typically claim that literary, or intellectual, property is a modern notion without an ancient analogue, so that authors who made false authorial claims were simply engaged in a widely accepted exercise that no one thought the worse of. And so, for example, in his commentary on the pseudepigraphic letter to the Ephesians, Andrew Lincoln declares:

There is no reason to think of the device of pseudonymity in negative terms and to associate it necessarily with such notions as forgery and deception.… The idea of “Intellectual property,” basic to modern discussion of legitimate claims to authorship, plagiarism, and copyright laws, played little or no role in ancient literary production.
³⁰

On these grounds, Lincoln indicates that literary pseudepigraphy (what I’m calling forgery) “was a widespread and accepted literary practice in both Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures.”
³¹
Lincoln is not alone in expressing such opinions.
³²

The careful studies of Speyer, Brox, Grafton, Duff, and Baum, among others, however, have effectively destroyed this position. Ancients certainly did have a sense of intellectual property, and, as we have seen, critics thought and spoke badly of anyone who transgressed acceptable bounds by falsely claiming in writing to be a well-known person.
³³
On the contrary, what is a modern invention is
the idea that ancient readers widely found false authorial claims acceptable.
³⁴
This was recognized already by one of the pioneers of the modern study of forgery, Frederik Torm, some eighty years ago:

The situation within Judaism and Christianity resembled that of the Greco-Roman world.
Either
one believed in the authenticity of a pseudonymous document and could then prize it highly,
or
one assumed its inauthenticity, in which case the writing in question became suspect already due to its pseudonymity. The notion that in this era pseudonymity was ever treated as a literary form in the religious realm and was indeed recognized as such is a modern invention.…
³⁵