Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (33 page)

The basic problem with this assumption of a transparent pseudepigraphy in ancient Christianity is that neither in the texts themselves are there any kinds of signals to the implied reader that allow us to discern a consciousness of this supposed genre, nor do we encounter pointers in other sources to such an attitude on the part of recipients.
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That deception was involved in the production of forgeries is the firm and emphatic conclusion of all the major studies of forgery, for example, those of Speyer, Brox, Grafton, and Baum. And for good reasons, as we will see. More representative of this less-apologetic perspective is the clear-headed recent statement of Harry Gamble: “It is undeniable, however, that irrespective of context, genre, or motive, pseudonymous writings are in their very nature deceptive, misleading the reader about the identity of the author.”
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Recall the words of the greatest modern scholar of forgery, Wolfgang Speyer: “Each forgery feigns a state of affairs that
does not correspond to actual events. In this vein, forgery belongs to the realm of lie and deceit.”
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Why then have scholars, especially New Testament commentators who have not looked at the broader phenomenon (and who, as a rule, do not cite any evidence), said otherwise? It is hard to escape the characteristically trenchant conclusion drawn by Anthony Grafton: “The only reason to assume that most earlier forgers were more innocent is our own desire to explain away a disquieting feature of the past.”
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Reasons for acknowledging that the overriding intention of forgers was to deceive their readers should be quite obvious from everything that has been said over the past two chapters. How else can we make sense of the motivations that drove forgers to produce their works in the first place, the techniques they used to avoid detection, and the reactions they incurred when detected? How else can we explain the pains that orthonymous authors took to assure their readers that their writings were authentic and the widespread exercise of criticism by scholars wanting to detect and declare which works were orthonymous and which spurious?

With respect to motives: if forgers could make money for the production of “authentic” writings of Euripides or Plato, who would pay if the works were known to be forged? If a forgery was used to authorize an oracle or some other religious institution, who would be persuaded if the authority did not write the authorization? If a forgery was produced as an apologia—for example of the Jewish or Christian religion on the pen of an ancient pagan prophetess—who would be convinced if it was known to be the work of a later author simply claiming to be someone he was not? If a forgery was produced in the name of a famous person in order to defame his character, as in the case of the fifty obscene letters forged by Diotimus in the name of Epicurus, how could they obtain their desired result if no one thought they were orthonymous? And on and on. None of the motivations for producing forgeries makes sense if they were transparent fictions. And so L. Donelson can categorically state: “No one ever seems to have accepted a document as religiously and philosophically prescriptive which was known to be forged. I do not know of a single example.”
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Moreover, if deceit were not involved, it is well nigh impossible to explain the techniques forgers used in order to pass their work off as someone else’s. Not only would the competent forger claim to be another person; he would also try to imitate the style of the person’s writing and introduce verisimilitudes into the writing. He sometimes might include a discovery narrative to explain why the writing was not widely known before. He might warn his readers against those who forge writings in his name. He might introduce various prophylaxes into his
account to assure his reader that it is genuine—seals, signs, acrostics, and the like. If he expected his reader to see through his ploy, why go to all the trouble? So too orthonymous writings tried to protect their integrity and to assure their readers by the same means. Why would this be necessary if forgeries were transparent? Why bother to protect what needs no protection?

And if no one was deceived, why are the reactions to forgers consistently negative and often harsh? Why do we have accounts of forgers being maligned, attacked, slurred, exiled, and murdered for their efforts—if no one was deceived and no one, frankly, cared? And why would ancient literary scholars need to go to all the bother of exposing forgeries and deciding for their readers which works circulating under an author’s name were genuine and which were not, if no one was deceived?

All of the evidence points in the same direction. Forgers meant to deceive their readers. And they very often succeeded. So often did they succeed that in many instances—not just from early Christianity, but certainly at least from there—forgeries have not been detected until the modern period.

Forgery therefore involved literary deception. For nearly as long as there have been forgers there have been critics trying to expose forgeries, as we will see in greater detail shortly. Forgery was not an acceptable practice in the ancient world, any more than other forms of lying and deception were acceptable practices. Why then did forgers engage in their craft? Here I am not asking the question of motivation, which I have already addressed, but the question of self-justification. Forgers engaged in a culturally despised activity. Some of these forgers—as we can assume, for example, within much of the Christian tradition—were proponents of traditional moral values. So how did they explain to themselves what they did? This is a topic to which we will return at greater length at the end of our study, when we query specifically why the Christian forgers did what they did, or at least how they justified their actions to themselves.

The psychological question can never, of course, be answered in any definitive way, as we have no access to the inner mental and emotional processes of our anonymous forgers. We know very little about these people. Among other things, we do not even know their names, let alone anything concrete about them. Nonetheless, it may be worth our while to try to situate the activities of forgers in some kind of plausible psychological or, at least, philosophical context, if we are to make sense of the practice in a broader way.

It is much to be regretted that we have such scant traces of forgers’ self-reportage.
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Sometimes appeal is made to Tertullian’s discussion of the Acts of
Paul, produced by an unnamed presbyter of Asia Minor, who declared that he did it “for the love of Paul” (
De baptismo
, 17). Unfortunately, as we have seen, in this instance we are dealing not with a forgery but with the fabrication of a historical narrative (the author did not claim to be Paul). One author who did admit to producing pseudepigrapha—“Mithridates,” who penned pseudonymous epistolary responses to Brutus from those to whom he had addressed letters—regrettably tells us nothing about how he understood what it was he was doing.

The one instance in which we have an ancient forger explain himself is the fifth-century Salvian of Marseille. As we have seen, Salvian refuses to admit guilt but states, as we have seen, that whereas readers should not assign authority to a mere name, he wrote in the name of Timothy because his own name carried no weight or authority. Salvian claims that he did nothing wrong: the “Timothy” named in the letter was not meant to be the apostolic companion of Paul but a pure pseudonym. He was writing “for the honor of God.” This claim, as we have seen, stands in direct tension with Salvian’s simultaneous insistence that for the book to be read it needed to be produced in the name of an authority. In any event, Salvian carefully avoids any admission of guilt, and if he refuses to acknowledge what he has done, then it is impossible for us to know how he justified it to himself. Possibly Salvian and most other forgers were so conflicted by what they were doing—deceiving others when they believed deceit was wrong—that they were unable even to explain to themselves why they did what they did.

There is no doubt, in any event, that the act of forgery was not just an act of deception but an active act of deception, involving a conscious literary lie. This is clearly recognized by Morton Smith, in his account of Jewish pseudepigrapha, where he states what should be—but regrettably is not always—obvious: even if a forger thought he had good reasons for doing what he did, “these considerations would not alter the fact that he knew he wrote the work, and he knew that the pretended author had not.”
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In this connection it is important to stress again the difference between fiction and forgery. Antiquity had its own forms of writing that correspond roughly to our notion of fiction, and which were recognized as such, even if there continue to be debates among scholars about the nature of ancient fiction in relation to genres today.
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But in a world of retold myths, epic poems, novels, and satires (cf. Lucian’s “True Story”) there was—even there—a tacit agreement between an author and a reader in which the requirement of factual reporting was suspended. As Michael Wood helpfully indicates, “Fiction is pure invention, any sort of fabrication.
It is invention which knows it is invention; or which knows
and says
it is invention; or which, whatever it knows and says,
is known
to be invention.”
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The reports of forgery, on the other hand, consistently show that there was no agreement between author and reader for the assumption of a false name.
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There is no need for me at this stage to provide a lengthy evaluation of the ancient discourses on lying and deceit.
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This is a matter to which I will return at the conclusion of our study. Suffice it to say, at this stage, that there was not one opinion about what lying was and under what circumstances it was acceptable. When Augustine wrote his two famous treatises on lying—the two most famous discussions from all of Christian antiquity—he staked out clear and precise positions both on what constituted a lie (a fissure between thought and utterance that is evident to the speaker in an act of speaking undertaken precisely with the intent of creating the fissure) and when telling a lie was admissible (never, under any circumstances whatsoever). But it is important to recall, with Paul Griffiths,
the most compelling commentator on Augustine’s position, that especially with respect to the latter point, “Few Christians agreed with him when he wrote.”
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On the contrary there was a widespread notion among thinkers from Socrates to Chrysostom—that is, throughout the entire period of our concern, and considerably prior—that lying was in some circumstances acceptable and not, necessarily, morally condemned. As Jane Zembaty has stated in a study of Plato’s Republic, lying or deception was sometimes “justified by more important moral considerations.”
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Plato is known to have advocated the moral justification of lying to one’s enemies, and more significant, to have proposed the “noble lie,” reserved for the protectors of the state in his Republic, who needed to deceive their subjects in order to promote the greatest possible good. These notions did not originate with Plato, however; Socrates before him, for example, maintained that there were occasions in which lying was both necessary and useful, as when a field general needed to lie to his disheartened troops that reinforcements were near in order to spur them to more valiant efforts, or when a doctor needed to deceive a child in order to convince him to take medication that was good for him. Or so, at least, Xenophon reports in the
Memorabilia
(4, 2, 15–18).

Aristotle agreed with Plato, in Paul Griffiths’ words, “damning some lies, excusing others, and recommending yet others (though they did not agree on which lies belong to which category).”
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Sextus Empiricus showed that later Stoics accepted Plato’s view (
Adv. Mathematicos
), and by our period the idea had become a commonplace, as seen in its reappearance, in appropriately modified forms, in such widely disparate sources as Quintilian (“Is not this another case where the orator will not shrink even from lies, if so he may save one who is not merely innocent, but a praiseworthy citizen?”)
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and Heliodorus (“For lying is good whenever it benefits those who speak but does no harm to those who hear”).
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Christian authors could and did appeal to numerous instances from Scripture itself in order to justify their own practices of lying and deception (as Augustine notes, disapprovingly): the midwives of Exodus 1:15–22, who protected the Hebrew babies from the unjust wrath of Pharaoh; Abraham and Isaac, who saved their own skins, and the posterity of Israel, by lying about their wives (e.g., Genesis 22); Rahab, who lied about the spies in Joshua 2; Michal, whose deception in 1 Samuel 19:11–18 saved David, the father of the future messiah; Jonathan, who lied to protect him a chapter later; and Jesus himself, who declared he was not going to Jerusalem in John 7, knowing full well that he was; and after his resurrection when he deceived his two followers on the road to Emmaus by assuming a false appearance in Luke 24. Even God is said to have employed deception in
Scripture, most famously in Jeremiah’s lament, “O Lord, you have deceived me and I have been deceived” (Jer. 20:7).

We do not know, of course, what explanations or excuses forgers made to themselves when they engaged in their acts of conscious deception. But it has plausibly been argued by such scholars as Norbert Brox and Armin Baum that these authors—some of them? most of them?—subscribed to the secular and biblical idea of the “noble lie”—that it was better in some circumstances to practice deception so that a greater good might result. As Brox stresses:

Notions that those kinds of deceptions, lies, and tricks carried out for the sake of truth and for the effective communication of truth, were expressly permitted were widespread, even if other contemporaries held different views.… Thus we cannot continue to say that all forgers (including Christian ones) must have forged with a troubled conscience.
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