Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (25 page)

We are in the fortunate position of having vestiges of an ancient discourse on motivation. It is true that only rarely (and never in our period) do ancient forgers themselves explain why they did what they did.
²
And rarely (again, never in our period) is there systematic reflection on the matter by critics; only later writers attempted taxonomies of motivation. These are still worth examining. But from our period itself (prior to the fifth century
CE
) we do have numerous discussions of individual instances and clear ascriptions of motive by those who claim to have uncovered the deceitful practices of others. These discussions do not give unqualified indications of what individual forgers were actually thinking when they
produced their work: a critic ascribing motivation to another is a different kind of “evidence” from forgers explaining their own motivations.
³
At the same time, the ancient discussions do give us a clear sense of what motivations were conceivable, sensible, and plausible in the ancient context. Before creating a kind of taxonomy of our own, we might consider the one instance, from a slightly later period, in which a forger attempted to justify his actions once they were detected.

The author was a Christian presbyter of Marseille named Salvian, who around 440
CE
published the book
Timothei ad Ecclesiam Libri IV
.
⁴
The name “Timothy,” of course, had clear apostolic connections from Pauline times. In his letter to the church, “Timothy” inveighed against a community that had grown rich and soft, while advocating radical almsgiving to the church (in the divestment of property). In his concern for total commitment to the gospel and an ascetic style of life, Salvian was not far removed from the concerns of another author, from about the same time, a pseudonymous “Titus” (the other of Paul’s Pastoral companions) who wrote a scathing attack on Christians who indulged in the joys of the flesh, condemning anyone, married or not, who engaged in sexual activities. The author of the forged letter of Titus was never discovered. But the author of the forged letter of Timothy was, by none other than his own bishop, Salonius of Geneva.

Long before the incident, Salonius and Salvian had been members of the monastic community at Lerins, where, for a time, Salvian was Salonius’ teacher. But eventually the student surpassed the instructor in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and when the letter of “Timothy” came to his attention, he immediately, for reasons never given, suspected that in fact it had been written by his former teacher and colleague. He evidently confronted Salvian on the matter, and Salvian wrote a letter in self-defense.

In this, his ninth letter, Salvian does not directly admit to having written
Timothei ad Ecclesiam
. But there is really no doubt about the matter, as he explains why the pseudonymous author (of whom he speaks in the third person) did what he did. That is to say, he explains his motivations.

On one hand, Salvian insists, the name of an author should not matter to a reader: “In the case of every book we ought to be more concerned about the intrinsic value of its contents than about the name of its author.”
⁵
So too, “Since the
name [of the author] is immaterial, there is no use in asking about the author’s name so long as the reader profits from the book itself.” These pleas ring hollow, however, in light of the rest of Salvian’s self-defense: If he really thought that an author’s name did not matter, why would he write pseudonymously? Why not write in his own name? Or even better, if names do not matter, why not write the book anonymously? The question is exacerbated by the fact that Salvian otherwise wrote extensively in his own name. His
De gubernatione dei
still survives, and other works were known in Christian antiquity.
⁶

Still, Salvian’s answer is straightforward. He recognizes his own insignificance and knows that readers do in fact think it matters who produced a writing. He therefore “wisely selected a pseudonym for his book for the obvious reason that he did not wish the obscurity of his own person to detract from the influence of his otherwise valuable book.” If the authority of a book is rooted in the prestige of an author, then obviously a pseudonym is necessary: “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.”

Given this confession of motivation, what Salvian claims next may seem a bit surprising, if not downright duplicitous. Why did he choose the name Timothy in particular? Readers naturally took the name to refer to Paul’s Pastoral companion, hence Salonius’ distraught reaction. But in clear tension with his earlier assertion that an unknown person would not be accepted as an authoritative source, Salvian claims that he chose the name purely for its symbolic associations. Just as the evangelist Luke wrote to “Theophilus” because he wrote “for the love of God,” so too the author of this treatise wrote as “Timothy,” that is, “for the honor of God.” In other words, he chose the pseudonym as a pen name.

Even though many critics today continue simply to take Salvian’s word for it,
⁷
the explanation does not satisfy. If Salvian meant what he said, that the reason for choosing a pseudonymous name was to authorize the account—since a treatise written by an obscure or unknown person has no authority—then how can he also say that the specific pseudonymous name was not that of an authority figure (Paul’s companion Timothy) but of an unknown, obscure, and anonymous person intent on honoring God?

Scholars determined to follow Salvian’s lead in getting him off Salonius’ hook have pursued various angles. Norbert Brox thinks it significant that Salvian claims in the letter to be humble (“we are urged to avoid every pretense of earthly vainglory.… The writer … is humble in his own sight, self-effacing, thinking only of his own utter insignificance”); for Brox, the choice of the pseudonym was
consistent with ascetic practices of self-abnegation that Salvian, in part, endorsed in the treatise of “Timothy.”
⁸
Brox notes that on two other occasions in his writings Salvian quotes himself, both times anonymously. He chose, in other words, to keep himself, and so his name, out of the limelight.

There is some merit to this view, but it does not really solve the problem.
⁹
Quoting oneself in the third person is not the same thing as writing in the name of someone else: if keeping out of the public eye was the key, then, as I have pointed out, Salvian could have written
Ad Ecclesiam
anonymously. Moreover, the other examples of the literary self-abnegation that Brox cites—starting with Paul’s discussion of his ecstatic removal to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians—involve instances in which an author actually uses his own name (i.e., 2 Corinthians is orthonymous). Brox does not, that is, adduce anything analogous to Salvian’s letter. What is completely analogous is the slew of forged writings from the early Christian tradition, numerous texts put in circulation by authors claiming to be apostles and companions of apostles, including letters allegedly written both to and by Timothy and Titus, canonical and noncanonical. Moreover, it should be reemphasized that Salvian did write other books using his own name.

Even less convincing is the more recent claim of David Lambert that Salvian’s ninth letter was actually written as a preface to
Ad Ecclesiam
.
¹⁰
It is true that in the scant manuscript tradition it is located there; but one can easily imagine why a scribe might arrange Salvian’s writings in that order, so as to explain the true nature of the authorship of the tractate. It can hardly make sense for Salvian to have put it there initially: the letter is a response to objections raised subsequent to the publication of the tractate, a self-defense for having circulated it under the name of someone else.

We do not know how Salonius reacted to Salvian’s defensive ninth letter. But it is relatively clear how he reacted to the tractate
Ad Ecclesiam
itself. He considered it a forgery, he objected to the literary practice, and he called the author to account for it. Moreover, it is difficult to take Salvian at his word that he never meant anyone to think that he really was Timothy, the companion of Paul. Otherwise his explanation that no one would heed an unknown or obscure author makes no sense: Who is more unknown or obscure than a person who does not exist, or one whose name is not even given? But his explanation for why he could not write the book orthonymously is of considerable value: it shows that one of the motivations for producing pseudepigraphic works was to get a hearing for one’s views, by claiming to be someone who deserved to be heard. That will be a fundamental point for the rest of our study.

Before stressing its importance for the polemical forgeries of early Christianity, we would do well to consider the range of motivations for forgery attested in our ancient sources.

It will be useful at the outset to differentiate between the concepts of motivation and intention. An intention indicates what a person plans to accomplish; a motivation indicates why she or he wants to accomplish it. A novelist may intend to write a best-selling book (that is what he would like to accomplish, his intention); but he may be motivated by a range of factors, including, for example, the desire to make a vast fortune and to become a household name. Later I will be furthering my argument that forgers in antiquity intended to deceive their reader into thinking they were someone other than who they really were.
¹¹
But what drove them to do so? That is the question of motivation. I should stress that just as texts could perform a range of functions—rarely does an author write for just one reason—so too a forgery could be motivated by a number of reasons. The categories presented here, in other words, are not meant to be mutually exclusive.

It is sometimes, wrongly, claimed that the only reason for producing a forgery is to turn a profit. The New Testament scholar J. C. Fenton, for example, in an attempt to exculpate the authors of canonical pseudepigrapha from charges of deceit, argues that “A forger is one who writes in the name of another for his own profit: they [NT authors] did not do so. Forgery involves deceit for gain: pseudonymity did not.”
¹²
Not only is this playing fast and loose with terminology (by fiat, a forger is out for personal profit), it overlooks an entire host of reasons that forgers had for doing what they did.

Still, it is true that on occasion—though not within the early Christian tradition—forgers were driven by a profit motive. The best-known evidence comes from Galen, who indicates that the construction of, and competition between, the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum spawned an active forgery market, driven by the need of the respective librarians to boast holdings in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, along with Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and others.
¹³
As he puts the matter in one place: “For before the kings in both Alexandria and Pergamum eagerly endeavored to purchase ancient works, no one as yet produced pseudonymous writings
” Once money could be made for such texts, however, all that changed: many pseudepigrapha were then written
¹⁴

Galen is wrong about the first part, since there were ample numbers of forgeries before the construction of the Hellenistic libraries. But the idea that plays and
treatises in the names of the masters started to appear with alarming frequency once someone was willing to pay for them is completely plausible. Galen elsewhere gives a specific, related instance: one enterprising fellow took Hippocrates’
Nature of Man
and Polybius’
Regimen of Health
, both small-size volumes, and combined them in order to fetch a better price at one of the libraries.
¹⁵