Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (26 page)

The evidence for this motive is not limited to Galen. In one of his humorous satires,
The Mistaken Critic
, Lucian charges:

There is nothing invidious in fending off destitution by every means.… However you will permit me to praise one thing, anyhow, that very pretty performance of yours when you yourself—and you know it—composed the “Tisias’ Handbook,” that work of an ill-omened crow, thus robbing that stupid old man of thirty gold pieces; for because of Tisias’ name he paid seven hundred and fifty drachmas for the book, gulled into it by you.
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After our period, Olympiodorus claims that since Juba, king of Libya, so loved Pythagorean writings, Ptolemy Philadelphius Aristotelian writings, and Pisistratus tyrant of Athens Homeric writings, they were willing to pay gold for them. As a result, many entrepreneurial types forged such works and sold them on demand.
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John Philoponus confirms the report about both Juba and Ptolemy.
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Furthermore, in one of the classic studies of forgery, A. Gudeman speculates that the hundreds of pseudonymous speeches and orations from antiquity are best accounted for by thinking that booksellers cobbled together as many school exercises on different orators as possible in order to have an exhaustive collection for sale, and so outdo their competition.
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More commonly, forgeries were produced for political and religious reasons (these are not always distinct, of course), to authorize or attack, under authority, political or religious figures and institutions. A number of instances are attested of forgers producing prophecies or oracular pronouncements for matters of state, such as when, at the beginning of the reign of Emperor Galba, a two-hundred-year-old set of verses was “discovered” in the temple of Jupiter Clunia indicating
that a ruler would come from Spain.
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The verses may have been presented as an oracular pronouncement of Jupiter himself. If so, this is forgery with aplomb: the alleged author is not claiming to be a famous human authority but the king of the gods. In any event, there was a long tradition of such oracular forgeries; Alexander the Great was one beneficiary, as in the course of his conquests he was presented with a forged oracle on a copper plate near the city of Xanthus in Lycia, which indicated that the time would come when the Persian Empire should be destroyed by the Greeks.
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So too the supporters of Julius Caesar could find cold comfort in an oracle “discovered” in Capua, in the grave of its founder Capys, which predicted the murder of a “son of Ilium” by his own relatives, after which things would go badly in Italy. Speyer suspects that Octavian and Antony themselves were responsible for the forged oracle, as it provided them with divine sanction to ostracize the murderers. Suetonius, who reports the event, swears to its truthfulness: “And let no one think this tale a myth or a lie, for it is vouched for by Cornelius Balbus, an intimate friend of Caesar.”
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Somewhat later, Suetonius reports, Augustus was the victim rather than the culprit of a forgery. But in this case he had the last word, as he punished a certain Patavinus for having “circulated a most scathing letter about him (Augustus) under the name of the young Agrippa.”
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The forging of political letters was a salient issue in the earlier struggles for power at the end of the Republic, as Asconius informs us in no uncertain terms in his commentary on Cicero’s
In toga candida
, faulting, once again, Antony, but this time Catilina as well (
In toga candida
, 94). Other forgeries involving political intrigues are reported by Josephus, including one I have already mentioned, a letter forged in the name of Herod’s son Alexander that spoke of his plan to murder his father.
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At other times forgeries were used to authorize the establishment of religious institutions, such as the oracle at Abonoteichus established by Alexander, Lucian’s infamous “False Prophet.” To demonstrate the divine approval of the new oracle, according to Lucian, Alexander and a cohort forged a set of bronze tablets and buried them in the temple of Apollo in Chalcedon. When dug up, these divine writings indicated that Asclepius and his father Apollo were soon to move to Pontus and take up residence at Abonoteichus. Here is one instance in which a forgery was spectacularly successful (
Alexander the False Prophet
, 10).

A closely related motivation, especially in Jewish and Christian circles, involves forgeries that functioned apologetically. Among Jewish instances, none is better known than the Letter of Aristeas, defending the divine origin of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.
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Also worth noting are the surviving Sibylline oracles.
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The twelve books, numbered, somewhat confusingly, 1–9 and 11–14, have been heavily Christianized; but only book 6 (and possibly the fragmentary book 7) is completely Christian. All the others are Jewish in whole or part. We will be returning to a fuller discussion of the Sibyllines in a later chapter; here it is enough to note their apologetic function. The original Jewish oracles present an ancient, divinely inspired, pagan prophetess who discusses, sometimes cryptically, the institutions, practices, and views of Judaism. What better authority to shore up a religious tradition under periodic attack by its (non-Jewish) cultured despisers? When Christians took over the texts, they served a doubly apologetic purpose: a pagan prophetess favorable to Judaism and antagonistic to Rome predicts the incarnation of the Son of God. Now it is the Christian faith that is attested as divine by an inspired and unimpeachable source, pagan in origin and Jewish by inclination.
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Whether Jewish apologists made extensive use of the Sibyllina is difficult to say; but there is no ambiguity about the delight that Christians took in them, as they are explicitly mentioned as early as Justin and cited as early as Athenagoras.
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They caused no little controversy by the end of the second century, as the pagan opponent of all things Christian, Celsus, accused Christians of inventing the prophecies themselves. Origen, in his inimitable style, challenged his long-dead opponent to prove it: “[Celsus asserts] that we have interpolated many blasphemous things in her verses, though he does not give any instance of our interpolation. He would have proved this point had he showed that the older copies were purer and had not the verses which he supposes to have been interpolated.”
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Some Jewish apologetic forgeries served clear political purposes, including the letter mentioned by Josephus between Arius, King of Sparta (died 265
BCE
), to the Jewish high priest Onias III, a letter that showed the Jews to be blood relatives of the Spartans—obviously of some apologetic moment for Jews in the
Hellenistic world.
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The letter is cited as well in 1 Macc. 12.7–9. In other instances the apologia functioned more to justify Jewish religious practices (if, again, we can differentiate on any level between politics and religion). This is the case with the lesser-known Letter of Mordechai (adopted father of Esther) to Alexander the Great, a Jewish apologia for the worship of the one God instead of idols and for maintaining high ethical standards, including the refusal to assert power and to engage in sexual immorality. The letter, originally in Greek, occurs at the beginning of some manuscripts of the Alexander Romance, but dates from early imperial times.
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Christians too employed epistolary forgeries for apologetic ends. This continues to be the most plausible explanation for the correspondence of Paul and Seneca.
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Christians of the late fourth century were perplexed by the fact that the great apostle of the early church, whose powerful and persuasive writings formed the basis not only of the New Testament but also of the church’s entire theology, was completely unknown to other great thinkers of the day. The forged attempt to show that Paul was revered by none other than Seneca is widely seen today as rather feeble. Little of substance is said in the letters, and Seneca reproves the apostle for his rather pedestrian writing style. In Christian antiquity, on the other hand, the letters were a real boon, and were accepted as authentic—and as irrefragable evidence of the apostle’s greatness—almost immediately. They are paraded to apologetic effect already by Jerome (
Vir. ill
. 12) and Augustine (
Epist
. 153, 14).

One could well argue for a similar apologetic function lying behind the forged correspondence of Jesus and Abgar, cited by Eusebius and forming, then, the basis for the
Doctrina Addai
.
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As we will see later, the letters serve an anti-Judaic purpose; but in no small measure they also elevate Jesus’ importance. Far from being an obscure preacher from rural nowhere, he is recognized by one of the great kings of the region and his help is solicited in a time of need.
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Royal acclamation comes to Jesus in yet other, nonepistolary, forgeries, including above all the Acts of Pilate and the other works of the Pilate cycle.
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Here, rather than being guilty of crimes against the state, Jesus is portrayed as innocent, royal, and even divine—confessed to be divine, in fact, by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, by
King Herod, and by the Roman Emperor Tiberius himself. I will have more to say about the Pilate cycle in a later chapter.
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Polemics can be seen as the flip side of apologetics, attack rather than defense. Not surprisingly, assaults on others—for political, philosophical, or personal reasons—are among the most widely attested motivations for the production of forgeries in antiquity.

We have already seen instances of political attacks in Cicero’s complaints as amplified by Asconius (
In toga candida
, 94); in the court of Augustus, as recorded by Suetonius (
Life of Augustus
, 51, 55); and in the household of Herod described by Josephus (
War
1, 26, 3).

Philosophical attacks facilitated by forgery were at least as common, or even more so, judging at least from our surviving sources. One of the better-known instances is related by Pausanias in his story of Anaximenes, a rhetorician who, like all good rhetoricians, was skilled in imitating the style of others. Out of a personal vendetta against his fellow rhetorician Theopompus, Anaximenes wrote and widely circulated a treatise in his opponent’s name, following closely his style; the treatise abused the citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. As Pausanias tells us, “Though Anaximenes was the author of the treatise, hatred of Theopompus grew throughout the length of Greece” (
Description of Greece
, 6.18.5).
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A comparable account is found in Diogenes Laertius, who indicates that Diotimus, a philosophical opponent of Epicurus, circulated fifty obscene letters in his name (
Lives
10.3). This did nothing, as one might imagine, for Epicurus’ reputation as a hedonist. Evidence that the story is not simply apocryphal is provided by Athenaeus, who indicates, as we have seen, that one of Epicurus’ incensed followers, Zeno, tracked Diotimus down and murdered him for his spiteful act (
Banqueters
13.611 B).

Other writings of Epicurus that were commonly accepted as authentic in antiquity spoke harshly of representatives of other philosophical schools. As Diogenes indicates:

Epicurus used to call this Nausiphanes jelly-fish, an illiterate, a fraud, and a trollop; Plato’s school he called “the toads of Dionysius,” their master himself
the “golden” Plato, and Aristotle a profligate.… Protagoras a pack carrier, the scribe of Democritus, and village school master; Heraclitus a muddler.… The Cynics foes of Greece; the Dialecticians despoilers; and Pyrrho an ignorant boor.
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Cicero says something similar.
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W. Crönert, however, convincingly argues that these alleged writings of Epicurus in fact all derive from a single letter written by a single author, forged, again, in order to cast aspersions on Epicurus’ reputation.
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The letter is not one of those produced by Diotimus, since those, unlike this one, were obscene. In any event, slandering Epicurus through forgery appears to have been de rigueur.

Politicians and philosophers were not the only ones subject to forged assault, as we saw at the outset of the study in the case of the “Parthenopaeus” forged in the name of Sophocles by Dionysius the Renegade, in part to make his former teacher Heraclides look foolish. On several occasions Martial complains about poems forged in his name to sully his reputation.

My page has not wounded even those it justly hates, and fame won from another’s blush is not dear to me! What does this avail me when certain folk would pass off as mine darts wet with the blood of Lycambes, and under my name a man vomits his viperous venom who owns he cannot bear the light of day? (
Epigrams
7.12)
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The scurrilities of home-born slaves, low railing, and the foul insults of a hawker’s tongue … [these] a certain skulking poet scatters abroad and would have them appear as mine. Do you believe this Priscus? That a parrot speaks with the voice of a quail.… Why should I toil to be known so evilly when stillness can cost me nothing? (
Epigrams
10.3)
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With other public figures, the attacks were more direct, as comes out in the trial of Apuleius:

And then there was that fabricated letter that was neither written by my hand nor plausibly forged. They intended it to show that I worked upon the woman by means of blandishments. But why use blandishments if I had put my trust in magic? Anyway, how did this letter come into their hands, for, naturally, it would have been sent to Pudentilla by way of a trusted person, as happens in such cases. And moreover, why would I write in such defective words, such barbarous
language? … Yes, this is how things are, it is plain for everyone: the man who was not able to read a letter by Pudentilla in perfect Greek had less trouble in reading this one and put it across better, since it was his own. (
Apol
. 87)
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