Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (21 page)

And “Paul” was not the only Christian who was both aware of and incensed by forgeries in his own name. We have already seen an analogous situation with Origen from a century and a half later.
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A century still farther on we have the account of Athanasius, irate over a letter forged in his name by a theological opponent:

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.… But here again I am astonished at those who have spoken falsehood in your ears, that they were not afraid, seeing that lying belongs to the Devil, and that liars are alien from Him who says, “I am the Truth.” For I never wrote to you, nor will my accuser be able to find any such letter.
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Forged letters became a real and widespread problem in the highly charged polemical environment of the Christian community at the end of the fourth Christian century and into the fifth. And so we have the complaint of Jerome:

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.

That he was not the author of the letter should have been obvious from the style; in any event, Jerome considers himself fortunate, tongue in cheek, for not being “self-accused” by the forger of truly criminal activity.

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.… 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. Indeed I ought to be grateful to him for having imputed to me no more than one act of error or false dealing out of the whole forest of possible crimes. (
Adv. Ruf
. 2.24)
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In another place Jerome himself is falsely accused by Rufinus of forging a letter in the name of Pope Anastasius, a letter that, as it turns out, was genuine (
Adv. Ruf
. 3, 20). Elsewhere Rufinus feels that he has been unjustly accused of forging a letter in Jerome’s name to a group of African bishops (Jerome,
Adv. Ruf
. 3, 25). Again, Jerome writes Augustine to ask if the letter he has received is actually by him (
Epist
. 102.1). As we have already seen, Augustine too exposed a forgery of a letter allegedly by Victorinus summoning him to a council meeting.
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It should not be objected that the forging of letters is generically different from the forging of literary works. Generic differences do matter. But many of the early Christian forgeries we will be examining—including those found in the New Testament—are precisely letters.

There was no legislation in Greece and Rome to protect literary property rights, just as there was no legislation for all sorts of scandalous and socially unacceptable activities. Still, to that extent, forgery in antiquity is different from today, when forgers can be punished by law. At the same time, there is no doubt, as we have seen, that by the early Christian centuries there had long been a sense of intellectual property among ancient authors. Another indication is that ancient falsifiers of texts, fabricators of accounts, and forgers of literary works were regularly condemned, chastised, and sometimes even physically punished for their troubles.

In our first surviving account of Echtheitskritik, Herodotus tells us that Onomacritus was not only caught in the act of falsifying oracles but was severely punished for it by being banished from Athens.
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This was not merely the peculiar whim of the local despot. Onomacritus and others like him who altered the oracular texts were open to widespread aspersion, as attested still many centuries later by Plutarch: “I forbear to mention how much blame men like Onomacritus, Prodicus, and Cinaethon have brought upon themselves from the oracles by foisting upon them a tragic diction and a grandiloquence of which they have had no need, nor have I any kindly feeling toward their changes” (
Oracles at Delphi
407B).
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In a similar vein, the Stoic Athenodorus was relieved of his duties in the great library of Pergamum because he altered the texts of Zeno.
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In Christian circles, as we have seen, Tertullian tells us of the presbyter of Asia Minor who resigned (by force?) his ecclesiastical office on being implicated in the fabrication of the Acts of Paul and Thecla (
De baptismo
, 17). In other instances, falsifiers and fabricators were simply maligned for their literary handiwork, as when Dionysius of Corinth leveled bitter complaints against those who heretically altered his writings,
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or when Celsus castigated Christians for inventing Sibylline oracles that placed predictions of the coming of Christ on the lips of the ancient pagan prophetess.
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Much the same kinds of reaction are attested for those caught making false authorial claims. We have seen already the castigations of Martial on the pagan side and Origen on the Christian, leveled against brash authors who forged writings in their names.
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Sometimes forgers were called to account, as when the fifth-century ecclesiastic Salvian was caught by his own bishop forging a writing in the name of Paul’s companion Timothy. As we will see, Salvian wrote a self-serving justification in his own defense. For now it is enough to note that his bishop, Salonius, was not at all amused when he discovered that his former colleague and current underling had tried to promote his own views in the name of an authority who had been dead for four hundred years. That Salonius was upset and incensed is clear; how he reacted to Salvian’s self-defense we will never know. We learn of the incident only from Salvian himself.
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In other instances we learn of real punishments for forgery. The philosopher Diotimus was caught having forged fifty obscene letters in the name of Epicurus. According to Athenaeus (
Banqueters
13.611B), who names as his source Demetrius of Magnesia (the “Homonyms”), an Epicurean philosopher named Zeno tracked Diotimus down and murdered him. Forging could be serious
business. This much we can learn from a Jewish source, Josephus, who indicates that a royal servant in the court of King Herod forged a letter in the name of Alexander that discussed his plan to murder his father Herod. The forger, a certain “Diophantus, a secretary of the king, an audacious fellow, who had the clever knack of imitating any handwriting
and who, after numerous forgeries, was eventually put to death for a crime of that nature.”
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There are not many testimonials from antiquity about persons caught in the act of falsifying, fabricating, and forging documents. But every instance that we do have points in the same direction. These were not acceptable practices. On the contrary, they were condemned, maligned, castigated, and attacked. In the realm of polemical discourse and political realia, in particular, they were matters of real moment—sometimes, though rarely, of course, matters of life and death.

We have seen that ancient attitudes toward the violation of intellectual property claims are relatively clear just from the vocabulary used to describe it. The terms used for plagiarism (“thievery,” “robbery”) and forgery (“lies,” “adulterations,” “bastards”), for example, were obviously harsh. Moreover, we have observed a keen interest in and serious intellectual energy devoted to establishing writings as authentic or spurious. Those who were found guilty of literary malfeasance were objects of derogation, if not worse.

In the rarified realm of literary criticism, deprecating comments were often simply off the cuff, as when Seneca the Elder, speaking of the works of the great rhetoricians, says, “In general there are no extant drafts from the pens of the greatest declaimers, or what is worse, there are forged ones (quod peius est, falsi).”
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Still, critics wanted to know who said what, and they cast aspersions on the anonymous authors who claimed to be someone else. Thus, for example, Porphyry, in his
Life of Plotinus
, speaks of a book allegedly written by Zostrianus: “I myself have shown on many counts that the Zoroastrian volume is spurious and modern, concocted by the sectaries in order to pretend that the doctrines they had embraced were those of the ancient sage.”
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For Seneca, Porphyry, and other ancient critics, one of the key reasons for wanting to know whether or not a writing was genuine
was a widely
shared cultural assumption that a symbiotic relationship existed between the author of a writing and its authority. That is to say, critics were not concerned about either the author or the contents of a writing in isolation from one another, but in tandem. The person of the author provided the authority for the account; at the same time, the contents of the account established the identity of the author. This symbiotic relationship was fully appreciated by early Christian critics and is a key to understanding their attitudes toward forged writings.

To some extent, the early Christian intellectuals, like their non-Christian counterparts, were interested on general grounds in knowing who the authors of various texts really were. And so, for example, Clement of Alexandria, one of the earliest of the trained Christian critics, both borrowed and mirrored the critical stances of his pagan contemporaries:

It is said that the oracles attributed to Musaeus were composed by Onomacritus, Orpheus’
Mixing-Bowl
by Zopyrus of Heraclea, the
Descent to Hades
by Prodicus of Samos. Ion of Chios in his
Triads
records that Pythagoras attributed some of his work to Orpheus. Epigenes in his work
On Poetry Attributed to Orpheus
says that the
Descent to Hades
and the
Sacred Doctrine
are works of the Pythagorean Cercops and the
Robe
and the
Works of Nature
, writings of Brontinus.
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So too Tertullian, from the passage already mentioned: perplexed by the existence of the book of Enoch, Tertullian develops a lengthy argument to show that even if all the copies of the book had been destroyed by the flood in Noah’s day, Noah himself, as Enoch’s descendant, would have remembered his teachings handed down through the family line and so would have been able to reconstruct them, either of his own natural abilities or through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In either case, the book of Enoch extant today really is the book written by the antediluvian Enoch (
De cultu Fem
. 1.3.1).

Or there is Augustine dealing with the books of the Hippocratic corpus:

But even in worldly writings there were well-known authors under whose names many works were produced later, and they were repudiated either because they did not agree with the writings that were certainly theirs or because, at the time when those authors wrote, these writings did not merit to be recognized and to be handed on and commended to posterity by them or their friends. Not to mention others, were not certain books that were produced under the name Hippocrates, the highly renowned physician, rejected as authoritative by physicians? Nor did a certain similarity of topics and language offer them any help. For, compared to the books that it was clear were really Hippocrates’ books, they were judged inferior, and they were not
known at the same time at which the rest of his writings were recognized as truly his.
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This widespread desire to find the actual, not just the reputed, author of a text puts a question mark beside the recent claim of Armin Baum that ancient critics did not consider a work forged so long as the contents could be thought to go back to the alleged author, whether or not he actually produced the book. In Baum’s view, it did not matter so much whether the alleged author actually wrote the words; what mattered is whether the contents of the work could be traced back to the views of the alleged author. If so, ancient critics did not consider the book to be forged.
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