Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (61 page)

This is not a peripheral matter for any of these authors. Paul himself is quite emphatic that the death with Christ is a past event for those who have been baptized, but the resurrection with Christ is not to be thought of until Christ himself returns from heaven and the transformation of the mortal body takes place. That is clearly asserted in Romans 6 and stressed in 1 Corinthians 15. The reason for the emphasis in the latter passage is that it is directly related to Paul’s opponents. Within his own community at Corinth the opposition was conceivably claiming his proclamation in support: nothing indicates that they saw themselves as standing in opposition to him or as outside of the tradition which he began. The writers of Colossians and Ephesians, like the opponents in Corinth, have also taken a Pauline datum—in Christ “all things are new” (see 2 Cor. 5:17)—and moved it in a non-Pauline direction, insisting that the resurrection had already occurred, even if there was more yet to come. But believers are already raised with Christ and are ruling with him in the heavenly places. They already are enjoying the benefits of the resurrected existence. The resurrection has occurred for those who are in Christ.

This in turn is just the position that the author of 2 Timothy opposes. The resurrection is not a past spiritual event. It is a future physical one. Those who think the eschatological moment is past have been ensnared by a false, non-Pauline
teaching. They may deliver an attractive perspective, but it will lead people astray. The polemic against people engaging in vice (3:1–6)—standard and stock as it is—may be germane here. Throughout proto-orthodox polemic against firmly realized eschatology one sees the logic, not that the opponents used, but that the polemic demands: the devaluing of the physical life in the flesh is connected with abuses of the flesh.

What is particularly intriguing is the circumstance that, as we have already seen, this author appears to be familiar with “Paul’s” letter to the Ephesians. The evidence derives not only from the previously discussed restatement of Eph. 2:1–10 in Tit. 3:3–8, but also from 2 Timothy, as it is widely, and with good reason, thought that 4:12 (I have sent Tychicus to Ephesus) betrays knowledge of Eph. 6:21–22 (“Tychicus … will tell you everything; I have sent him to you”). If so, this is yet another indication, as if more is needed, that 2 Timothy is forged. Paul himself could scarcely have been expected to rely on a pseudepigraphon produced in his name.

But even if the author of 2 Timothy found Ephesians of some use for his own letter, he stood directly opposed to the eschatology that it presented. One might well suspect that what we have here is a correction of an earlier “aberrant” view in circulation in Paul’s name, written, allegedly, by the apostle himself. It should be recalled that the author of 2 Timothy indicates that the eschatological error arose among Paulinists within the Pauline community, among people who, evidently, claimed Pauline support. At least this much can be said for the author of Ephesians. But the later Paulinist resisted this strain of Pauline thought by embracing another, one which, as it turns out, could find clear support in letters later judged by scholars to be orthonymous. The end has not come; the resurrection has not occurred. On the contrary (this is where the author differs from Paul himself), the church needs to settle in for the long haul, and establish itself as an efficiently working community characterized by “true” teaching.

The possibility that 2 Timothy presents us with a counterforgery was recognized already by Lindemann.
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The author of the book does not provide us with a vague rejection of some kind of fantasized Gnostic teaching of the resurrection. He opposes a teaching that had arisen within the circles that the author himself is addressing, Pauline communities that had taken Paul’s teaching of the “new creation” in Christ in the wrong direction and to a false extreme, in arguing that the resurrection is a spiritual event that had already occurred. For the author of 2 Timothy, this is non-Pauline, devilish, and wrong. The resurrection is a future event, yet to be experienced, notwithstanding “Pauline” letters, such as Ephesians, that indicate otherwise.

Now that we have explored six of the Deutero-Pauline epistles, we are in a position to consider the hypothesis widely invoked by advocates of authenticity to explain how a letter allegedly by an author should differ so radically from other writings he produced. The notion that early Christian authors used secretaries who altered the writing style and contributed to the contents of a writing—thereby creating the anomalies that arouse the critics’ suspicion—is so widespread as to be virtually ubiquitous. There is no need here to cite references; one need only consult the commentaries, not only on the Pauline corpus but on 1 and 2 Peter as well. At the same time, almost no one who invokes the secretary hypothesis sees any reason to adduce any evidence for it. Instead, it is simply widely assumed that since authors used secretaries—as Paul, at least, certainly did (Rom. 16:22; Cor. 16:21; Gal. 6:11)—these otherwise unknown persons contributed not only to the style of a writing but also to its contents. There is a good reason that commentators who propose the hypothesis so rarely cite any evidence to support it. The ancient evidence is very thin, to the point of being nonexistent.

The fullest study is by E. Randolph Richards, who is to be commended for combing all the literary sources and papyri remains in order to uncover everything that can reasonably be said about secretaries and their functions in the Roman world during our period.
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He explores every reference and allusion in the key authors: Cicero, Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius, and so on. He plows through all the relevant material remains from Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere. It is a full and useful study, valuable for its earnest attempt to provide the fullest accounting of evidence possible. Somewhat less commendable are the conclusions that Richards draws, at times independently of this evidence.

Richards maintains that secretaries in antiquity could function in four ways: as recorders of dictation; as copy editors who modified an author’s style; as coauthors who contributed both style and content; and as composers who produced a letter from scratch, at the instruction of the “author.”

The first category is both abundantly attested in the sources and completely nonproblematic. Secretaries often took dictation, either syllabatim or, if they had the requisite tachygraphic skills, viva voce. If Paul dictated a letter like Romans, his secretary Tertius simply wrote down what he was told, making himself known only in his somewhat temerarious insertion of 16:22. Otherwise he recorded the words as Paul spoke them. Whether Paul was composing orally or dictating from written drafts is another question, but of no relevance to the present issue. The words on the page are the words Paul spoke, in his style.

It is with the second category that the significance and the evidence begin to move in opposite directions. If secretaries regularly edited the dictations they received, possibly taking down a draft by dictation and then reworking it into a style they preferred, then all sorts of options would open up for early Christian writings deemed pseudepigraphic on stylistic grounds. The differences between Colossians and the undisputed Paulines could be explained, as would the discrepancies between 1 and 2 Peter. What, then, is the evidence? And is it directly relevant?

Unlike the first category, the evidence that secretaries routinely reworked letters for style is very thin indeed. All of it derives from the very upper reaches of the Roman highest classes, among authors who used highly educated and skilled writers in helping them produce their correspondence. There is a serious question of how such data are relevant for a completely different social context, with the impoverished and lower-class authors of the Christian writings. Still, it is worth noting that Cicero, at least, appears to have allowed Tiro on occasion to assist him in stylistically shaping his letters. And Cicero suggests that the secretary of Atticus, Alexis, may have helped him similarly.
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Moreover, Cicero speaks of one letter of Pompey that appears to have been written (or rewritten?) instead by Sestius, and intimates that Sestius wrote other writings in his name (mildly castigating Pompey for this proceeding).
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Finally, there is an off-the-cuff comment in the handbook on style by Philostratus that the letters of Brutus may have been stylized by the secretary he used. This is not so much evidence for the historical Brutus (from three hundred years earlier) as evidence of what would have seemed culturally plausible in this later period.
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This evidence is notably sparse, but it does indicate that a secretary would occasionally edit an author’s letter stylistically. Could this not explain, then, why Colossians differs so significantly (in style) from the other Pauline letters? Or why 1 and 2 Peter are so different from one another? Several points should be stressed. First, as already mentioned, the evidence all derives from fabulously wealthy, highly educated, upper-class elites with very highly trained secretaries. We have no evidence at all for the kinds of letters being dictated by a Paul, or, even more, by an illiterate Aramaic-speaking peasant such as Peter.
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Second, the kinds of writings in question may be incommensurate. The vast majority of letters in Greco-Roman antiquity were very short and to the point. The letters of the papyri appear to average fewer than a hundred words; at the other end of the spectrum, letters of Cicero averaged around
three hundred words, Seneca’s around a thousand. The letters of Paul are much longer, on average about twenty-five hundred words.
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What really matters, however, is not simply length, but complexity. The Christian letters we have examined so far in this study are not simply pieces of correspondence: they are complicated theological and paranetic treatises, with interwoven themes and subthemes, and intricate modes of argumentation, written in letter form. Apart from purely formal features (address, thanksgiving, body, closing, etc.) they are simply not like typical Greco-Roman letters, precisely because of what happens in the “body.” What evidence is there that secretaries were ever given the freedom to rewrite this kind of letter—an extended treatise in letter form—in accordance with their preferred style? As far as I know, there is no evidence.

This latter point relates to the third. The kinds of “minor corrective editing” that Richards finds, for example, in the case of Tiro and Cicero
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is far removed from the complete rewriting of the letters that would have been necessary to make an Ephesians or Colossians come in any sense from the hand of Paul. Here there are wholesale changes of style at every point. Where is the evidence that copy editing ever went to this extreme? If any exists, Richards fails to cite it.

Finally, it should be noted that in none of the instances we have considered so far, and in none of the ones we will consider throughout this study, are questions of style the only features of the letter that have led scholars to suspect forgery. The most definitive demonstration of a non-Pauline style comes with Colossians, and even there it was the content of the letter that confirmed that it was not written by Paul. Moreover, it should be stressed that the person actually writing the letter also repeatedly claims not to be a secretary but to be Paul himself (“I, Paul”).

It is Richards’s third and fourth categories that are particularly germane to the questions of early Christian forgery. What is the evidence that secretaries were widely used, or used at all, as coauthors of letters or as ersatz composers? If there is any evidence that secretaries sometimes joined an author in creating a letter, Richards has failed to find or produce it. The one example he considers involves the relationship of Cicero and Tiro, cited earlier by Gordon Bahr as evidence for co-authorship. In Bahr’s words “Tiro took part in the composition of the letter.”
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But Richards points out that Bahr cites no evidence to support this claim, opting instead simply to assert the conclusion. Moreover, there is nothing stylistically in the Ciceronian correspondence to suggest a coauthorship. Richards concludes that at most Tiro sometimes engaged in “minor corrective editing.” What is oddest in Richards’ discussion, however, is the conclusion that he draws, once he discounts the evidence of Cicero, the one and only piece of evidence he considers: “Evidently then,… secretaries were used as co-authors.”
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It is not at all clear
what makes this view “evident,” given the circumstance that he has not cited a solitary piece of evidence for it.

There is better evidence that an author would sometimes commission someone else to write a letter in his name. This typically happened among the illiterate, who would hire a scribe for any necessary written communications. But this involved stock letters and documents, stereotyped and brief, of no relevance to the situation we are addressing with the early Christian pseudepigrapha. What about longer letters of some substance? Here there is at least some evidence, although all of it is connected with one author (out of how many?), Cicero. At one time Cicero asks Atticus “to write in my name to Basilius and to anyone else you like, even to Servilius, and say whatever you think fit.” And in doing so he even urges Atticus to employ a deceit: “If they look for [my missing] signature or handwriting, say that I have avoided them because of the guards.”
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In addition to these passages, Richards places a good deal of weight on a letter of Rufus, a friend of Cicero who had promised to write him during his exile of 51
CE
with news of Rome. Rufus indicates that he was too busy to fulfill his promise, and so “delegated the task to another.”
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This was a long and involved communication, and so is more like, in some respect, the lengthy letters of the early Christians we have been considering.

The problem is that the passage does not say what Richards says it says. Rufus never claims that he had someone else compose the account
in his own name
. He simply had someone else compose the account. That, of course, is a different matter altogether.
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