Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (62 page)

And so, from all of antiquity, we are left with a few references to a secretary composing a letter in connection with Cicero. These references show that Cicero realized the practice was deceitful (he instructs Atticus to lie about the matter). Moreover, the correspondence involved short, stereotypical letters, not complex treatises in letter form. But is the evidence sufficient to establish a typical practice in antiquity of secretary-composed writings? Richards himself does not think so, as he repeatedly emphasizes: “Nowhere was there
any
indication that an ordinary secretary was asked, much less presumed, to compose a letter for the author…. [O]ne cannot assume that [Cicero’s] use of such a questionable secretarial method is indicative of an acceptable custom of the day… [T]his secretarial method probably should not even be considered a valid option.”
⁶²

What, on balance, is the evidence to support the secretary hypothesis to explain the early Christian pseudepigrapha? That secretaries took dictation in a variety of ways is clear and certain. This creates no problem for authorship: the author delivered an oral communication that was written down word-for-word by an amanuensis who simply performed the task of recording. In addition, on rare
occasions members of the upper-crust elite used their resources to hire highly literate secretaries to copyedit their letters in places. There is no evidence that this ever happened in other cultural settings, with, say, the poorer lower classes. Moreover, there is not a shred of evidence, at least none that Richards has been able to locate, to indicate that secretaries sometimes coauthored a letter. What is the evidence that secretaries actually composed letters in another person’s name? Apart from a completely different phenomenon—the use of a scribe by illiterate persons to produce documents (wills, land deeds, sales contracts, etc.) or very brief stereotyped communications—the evidence appears to be limited to a few instances from the end of the life of Cicero, who admits that the practice involved a deceit, that is, that it was tantamount to forgery, willingly engaged in because of the impossible constraints placed upon his time.

In sum, what might we conclude about the evidence for the secretary hypothesis put forth by commentators wanting to affirm the authenticity of the Deutero-Pauline or Petrine letters of the New Testament? It is thin at best, almost nonexistent. Why then is the hypothesis so universally invoked? If it is not because of the evidence, it must be for other reasons, and one can only suspect that it involves wishful thinking. History, however, proceeds on the basis of evidence. What evidence exists, on the other hand, for the contrary position, that ancient authors forged writings in the names of other well known persons, not successfully replicating their style and producing anomalous content? That kind of evidence can be found all over the map. Scholars must constantly ask themselves whether evidence matters, that is, whether they prefer history or romance.

To this point we have considered only Deutero-Pauline letters in our query into forgeries produced to counter eschatological views that were deemed aberrant. “Aberrant” eschatology affected other writings as well, into the second century, including one that is distantly related to Paul, not because he is claimed as its author, but because its pseudonymous author, “Peter,” appealed to Paul’s support in opposition to the false eschatological teachings he addressed. The book of 2 Peter is a polemical treatise written to oppose Christians who maintained that there would be no future apocalyptic moment in which Jesus would return to right all that was wrong with the world. Unlike the “Pauline” letters we have considered so far, there is very little debate in this instance concerning authorship. More than any other New Testament writing, 2 Peter is widely recognized to be forged, even among scholars otherwise loath to admit the presence of pseudonymous works within the canon of Scripture.

2 Peter is among the least well attested works of the New Testament from Christian antiquity, although it is found already in P
⁷²
, ca. 300
CE
, along with 1 Peter
and Jude, the two canonical letters with which it is most closely associated. Still, during the first four centuries the book had an unsettled status among those interested in establishing the contours of the New Testament. Origen doubted its authenticity, in words quoted by Eusebius: “Peter … left us one acknowledged epistle, possibly two—though this is doubtful” (
H.E
. 6.25.8). Eusebius himself also considered 1 Peter genuine, but rejected 2 Peter, even though, as he notes, some readers have found it valuable: “Of Peter, one epistle, known as his first, is accepted, and this the early fathers quoted freely, as undoubtedly genuine…. But the second Petrine epistle we have been taught to regard as uncanonical” (
H.E
. 3.3.1). Somewhat later Jerome expressed the opinion of his day: “[Peter] wrote two epistles which are called Catholic, the second of which, on account of its difference from the first in style, is considered by many not to be his.”
⁶³
Most emphatic was Didymus the Blind, who indicated, “We must therefore not be ignorant of the fact that the epistle at hand is forged, which, even though published, is nevertheless not in the canon.”
⁶⁴

Those modern scholars who do not share this concern with establishing the contours of the canon nonetheless agree with these ancient assessments of 2 Peter and often use the same faulty logic in support, that the book differs so significantly from 1 Peter that it could not have been written by the same author.
⁶⁵
The flaw in the logic, as we will see, is that Peter probably did not write the first epistle either, so that variations from it say nothing, per se, about whether he wrote the second. Nonetheless, there are compelling reasons for thinking that 2 Peter came into existence long after the death of Jesus’ disciple, and that it is simply one of a stack of a books that eventually appeared in his name. Still extant are the Gospel of Peter, the Epistula Petri of the Pseudo-Clementines, the Letter of Peter to Philip from Nag Hammadi, three apocalypses of Peter—all falsely claiming to be written by the great apostle. We will later see that Peter could not have written any of these books (no one, of course, claims that he did); but I will reserve that discussion for my assessment of 1 Peter, the one book scholars have been most inclined to consider authentic.

The grounds for considering 2 Peter a forgery are varied and numerous. The first has to do with the quality of the Greek. Even if we assume that Peter could write in Greek, an assumption I will challenge in the chapter that follows, it seems
highly doubtful that he could have written Greek like this.
⁶⁶
The style is widely assessed as overly elaborate, and the vocabulary is excessively rich. As Bauckham puts it, the author is “fond of literary and poetic, even obscure words.”
⁶⁷
This is not what one would expect of an Aramaic-speaking peasant.
⁶⁸
By Elliott’s count, there are proportionally more hapax legomena in 2 Peter than in any other writing of the New Testament: 58 of its 402 words (14.4 percent).
⁶⁹

In addition, there are the clear indications that the book was written in a later period, after the death of the apostles. Most obviously, it was written in order to deal with the massive delay of the parousia: there had been a long passage of time since Christians widely held to the expectation of an imminent end of all things, a problem dealt with in a variety of ways by other postapostolic writings, such as Luke-Acts and the Fourth Gospel. In particular we are told that “the fathers” have “fallen asleep” (i.e., died) since the original promises of the coming end (3:4). Moreover, when the author is speaking in character, he feigns a knowledge of his own approaching death, based in part on a prediction of Jesus himself (1:12–14; see, for example the post-Petrine John 21:18–19 as well), giving this book, as widely recognized, the character of a testamentary fiction.
⁷⁰
He “knows” of his impending death and wants to give his readers his final instructions. As with all Testaments, this is a fiction put on the pen of someone already residing comfortably in his tomb.

Moreover, the author’s knowledge of earlier Christian texts indicates that he was writing after the death of Peter. Most obviously, he makes extensive use of the letter of Jude. By Elliott’s count, nineteen of Jude’s twenty-five verses reappear in modified form in 2 Peter.
⁷¹
We will later see clear reasons for thinking that Jude was not produced by Jesus’ brother, but is a forgery in his name written at a relatively late time, by someone looking back on the apostolic age. 2 Peter is, as a consequence, later still. Moreover, the author clearly knows of 1 Peter, as seen not only in what appears to be an explicit reference (“This, now, my beloved, is the second letter I have written to you”, 3:1) but also in numerous similarities, to be mentioned later. I will be arguing in the next chapter that 1 Peter is forged; that would necessarily make 2 Peter a forgery as well. Equally striking, and widely noted, is the fact that this author already knows of a collection of Paul’s letters (not just one or two in isolation), and that he is living at a time when Christians were already considering these letters to be Scripture (3:15–16). It is hard to imagine any such situation before the end of the first century, at best.

Finally, nothing that we know about the historical Peter as a Jewish missionary to Jews who continued to uphold the Law is true of this letter (e.g., Galatians 2).
There is, in fact, nothing Jewish about it. The reference to the false teachers who emerged from the community as those who had earlier escaped
suggests they started out as pagans, not Jews (2:20). And the use of Scripture bears no relation to what we would suspect of a law-abiding believer like Peter. It is true that he speaks of the prophecy of Scripture (1:20); but even if he is referring to Jewish Scripture (as opposed to the writings of Christians that, like Paul’s letters, are considered Scripture), there is nothing to suggest that the Law continues to be in force. On the contrary Scripture is read in a completely presentist way. The examples cited of disobedience in Scripture are merely illustrative of how God works. And there is no injunction to follow the dictates of Scripture. Quite the contrary, it is standard, high morals, not the works of the Law, that matter to this author.

It became common in Petrine forgeries to relate firsthand experiences with Jesus, a ploy that makes considerable sense: why else claim to be Jesus’ right-hand man, if you cannot appeal to the authority that experience provides? And so the author of 1 Peter states that he was a “witness to the sufferings of Christ” (5:1). So too, the author of the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter claims to have observed the crucifixion of Jesus, somewhat oddly, while conversing with Christ on a hill nearby. And the author of the Greek Apocalypse of Peter, also on a hill, is taken by Jesus himself on a guided tour of the realms of the blessed and the damned.

The ironies in the case of 2 Peter in particular are nonetheless striking. This author insists that he was present at the transfiguration precisely in order to validate the status of his authority: his views, he avers, are not based on fictions (as opposed to the false teachers he opposes) but on facts and personal experiences (1:16–18). Yet this claim itself is a fiction written by a forger who has invented the tale of the personal experience, as recognized by J. Frey.
⁷²
Moreover, this assertion of factual authority is used precisely in order to oppose the
and the
(2:1–3) who revile “the truth” and teach “false words”—all this in a
, a writing that is “inscribed with a lie” written by someone who deceives his readers about his own authoritative credentials. Rarely in early Christian texts do we find irony so exquisite.