Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (34 page)

It is important not to miss the caveat, which cannot be worded strongly enough: “even if other contemporaries held different views.” We do not have any evidence of any Christian forger being welcomed and supported for his attempt to achieve a greater good through an act of deception. Some Christians may indeed have approved such practices, just as other Christians may have approved of lying under oath, stealing, armed rebellion, and murder, if the circumstances required it.

In any event, it is not at all implausible that forgers themselves may have excused their activities to themselves on the ground that they were accomplishing more good than evil in lying about their identity in order to have their point of view heard. One can easily imagine a situation where later followers of Paul, Peter, James, Thomas, or any of the other apostles may have thought that by producing a writing in the name of their teachers—even if several generations or centuries removed—they could deal more effectively with a problem that had arisen or with a situation that had to be addressed. They may well have thought that their writing was very much what their teacher would have said, had he been alive at the time to say it.

But the reality is that other persons with alternative points of view—even precisely the opposite points of view—may well have thought the same things about their own lies and deceits. In either instance the forger may have felt that he
engaged in a noble lie and that he was justified in claiming to be someone other than he was. His opponents—conceivably, other forgers—would have felt quite differently, and would have called him a liar and would have labeled his work a
It is not just that the contents of the works were false; the author himself had tried to deceive his readers about his identity.

Throughout these opening chapters we have seen a steady stream of ancient witnesses to a consistent attitude toward forgery. Ancient critics were concerned to know the names and identities of the actual authors of texts; if a writing was suspected of being pseudepigraphic, there was an active interest in knowing who the real author was.
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In no small measure, this was because of a widely unspoken assumption that the authority of a text resides in the person of the author. At the same time, the identity of the authorizing author was determined to some extent by the details of the text, so that a symbiotic relation existed between text and author: the author authorized the contents of the text, but the contents of the text established the identity of the author.

In an insightful study that effortlessly ranges from antiquity to early modernity, Anthony Grafton has shown that over the centuries the art of forgery grew and changed in relationship to the practice of criticism: the better critics became at determining forgery, the more skilled forgers became, by necessity, in hiding the traces of their deceit. As forgers improved their craft, critics further honed their skills, leading forgers to improve yet further.
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This escalating scale of deceit and detection does not mean that the essential character of criticism changed over the centuries; as it turns out, the ancients used many of the same methods and appealed to many of the same criteria that critics use today.

Some form of Echtheitskritik goes back at least as far as Herodotus.
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To be sure, as might be expected, in antiquity, as today, there was considerable gullibility on all sorts of matters, as sometimes lamented by the highly educated elite, such as Pliny the Elder: “It is astounding to what lengths Greek credulity (credulitas) will go; there is no lie (mendacium) so shameless as to lack a supporter.”
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And we have already seen what a modern critic has said about ancient credulity: “an uncritical approach to literature and gullibility of every kind were widespread. The history of literary gullibility has yet to be written.”
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Still, criticism
was widely practiced, at least in the rarified atmosphere of the cultural elite. The following were among the criteria explicitly invoked in deciding whether a work was
or

First and foremost was the matter of literary style. We have already seen Galen’s heartfelt approbation of the unnamed amateur critic who uncovered a forgery in Galen’s own name simply by perusing the first two lines:
“this is not the style of Galen.” Galen himself was a master of style, and used stylistic considerations to great effect in his massive effort to establish the authentic Hippocratic corpus and to uncover the pseudepigraphic works within it. Just on the Hippocratic
On the Nature of Man
, for example, he is able to show that parts of the work, at least, could not have been forged at the time of the construction of the great Hellenistic libraries—invoking a different criterion—because they are quoted already by Plato, whereas other portions are of more recent vintage: “Those words must come from recent doctors who did not know the ancient style.”
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The appeal to style was no Galenic invention. Two centuries earlier stylistic criteria were used to good effect by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. His essay on Dinarchus, the late-fourth-century Athenian orator, is nothing but a discussion of which speeches are genuinely his
and which are false,
or
The grounds he appeals to time and again are stylistic:
(
ch. 5
). Moreover, Dionysius claims that the same criterion can be applied to the works of Plato, Thucydides, Isocrates, or Demosthenes. Each author has a characteristic style, and Dionysius explains in rough form what it is. He then gives reasons for rejecting speeches that he considers “spurious”
Elsewhere, in his evaluation of the writings of Lysias, he argues that the speech about the statue of Iphicrates is “devoid of charm and does not at all display the eloquence of Lysias.”