Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (63 page)

In the next chapter I will argue that both the explicit reference to the letters of Paul as Scripture and the numerous resonances with Pauline thought in 2 Peter are not incidental to the polemical purposes of the letter but are, in fact, a fundamental component of them. For the purposes of the present chapter, it is enough
to note the severity of the polemic and its centrality to the letter. The letter is, in fact, entirely polemical, directed against “false teachers” from within the community who adopt eschatological views counter to those received by the author from the early Christian apocalyptic tradition. The heart of the letter (virtually all of
chapters 2
and 3) is directed to this polemic, and it is important to recognize that the charges of licentiousness that dominate
chapter 2
are tied from the outset to the false teachings (2:1, “destructive heresies” that revile “the way of truth” and involve “false words”). In other words, the opponents are not simply unprincipled reprobates; they are false teachers whose errant views have, in the author’s opinion, led to lascivious behavior. This connection between false teaching and immorality is reconfirmed in the author’s antidote, which involves “holy and pious conduct” rooted in a correct understanding of eschatology (3:11–13). The idea that bad theology led to unconscionable behavior was to become standard fare among proto-orthodox heresiologists in the decades and centuries to follow.
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And indeed, much of what the author says about his opponents involves stock polemic: they deny the Master; they secretly bring in heresies; they are licentious; they lead to the reviling of truth; they are greedy; they exploit with false words; they are sure to be destroyed; they despise authority; they are wild, dissipated, carousers.

With stereotypes such as these, we are handcuffed in trying to identify the opponents, if in fact there was some kind of actual, historical group lying behind the polemic. It may bear noting that the author’s opposition to them resonates with later attacks on various Gnostic groups. His adversaries appeal to knowledge but are “without knowledge” (
2:12); they urge freedom from bodily constraints (passim); they “revile the glorious ones” (comparable to Gnostic denigration of the world creators? 2:10); they base their views on myths rather than historical verities (1:16). But in the end, such charges cannot contribute significantly to any firm identification. Only two features of the opposition appear clear from the polemic leveled against them: the author insists that they are enemies who have emerged from within the Christian community, and they endorse false eschatological views.

As to the first point, 2:20 and 3:15–16 seem decisive. The opponents had formerly “escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” but then they “became entangled in them again and were worse off than before.” Obviously the opponents did not see themselves in this light, and may well have been amazed at the charges of immorality and licentious behavior leveled against them. But it appears that these enemies, at least as portrayed by the forger, have developed views at variance with the “original” teaching, and they have done so based on their interpretation of the letters of
Paul, which they, as “ignorant and unstable” persons, “twist as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.” In other words, these are Christian Scripture scholars who have interpreted Paul in a way that this author finds offensive and scandalous.

This misuse of Paul coincides with a general approach to authority by the false teachers, as portrayed by their enemy, the forger of the letter. That the issue is authority is clear already in 1:20, where the author insists that the prophecies “of Scripture” are not a matter of private, personal exposition
Prophecy came not from human
it came from the Spirit of God. Presumably, then, human interpretations of prophecy—such as those practiced by the enemy—are strictly verboten. Here we seem to have an adumbration of modern hermeneutical debates, as this author simply wants the texts in question to “speak for themselves,” since, after all, they are divinely inspired and can only be corrupted when humans apply their minds to them.

The teachings of prophetic scripture are consistent with the teachings of Jesus (3:2) and naturally of his apostles (3:2), especially “our brother Paul” (3:15). Since these are the writings explicitly invoked (though never quoted), is the author imagining that it was specifically the Christian prophets who were “moved by the holy spirit” and so “spoke from God” (1:21)? If so, the reference to “the rest of the Scriptures” (
3:16) may be referring, as Lindemann has suggested, to Christian writings, rather than the “Old Testament.”
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Or, it may be, as in the standard interpretation, that the author is simply equating the two sets of writings in authority. In either event, the author positions two sets of indubitable authority against the fallacious reasonings of his opponents: (1) the clear meaning of authoritative texts when read without human sophistry, and (2) his own voice, as one who does not follow myths but knows the truth whereof he speaks since he, unlike they, was an actual companion of Jesus and beheld his glory on the holy mountain.

As pointed out, there are numerous connections between
chapters 2
and
3
, in which the “teaching” (the “destructive heresy”) is tied to the “morality,” attacked in notoriously vague but consistently nasty terms in
chapter 2
, terms that are largely drawn from the book of Jude. One would be hard-pressed indeed to reconstruct the teaching of the opponents from the invective directed against them in the earlier polemic : “irrational animals … blaspheming in things about which they have no knowledge … who consider it pleasure to revel during the day…. blots and blemishes who revel in their dissipated lives…. eyes full of adultery, incessantly in sin” and so on (2:12–14). To learn what the opponents actually say the reader needs to wait for
chapter 3
. The content of the false teaching is not that Christians need to be licentious. It is that the apocalyptic end proclaimed by Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles is not to be expected. It is this anti-apocalyptic
view that leads, in the author’s opinion, to the immoral lifestyle of the enemies, possibly on the logic that if the end is not coming soon, there is plenty of time to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, an argument that the opponents, if they actually existed, may have found astonishing.

The specific teaching of these “mockers” (3:3) is posed in terms of their blasphemous question and the implication they draw from it: “Where is the promise of his parousia? For since the fathers fell asleep, everything remains just as it was at the beginning of creation.” The question has to do with the return of Jesus. There is no sign of it happening. The “fathers” must be the fathers of the church, the early Christian leaders who have all died, possibly in expectation that the end would occur within their own lifetimes. Rather than concede that these fathers were wrong, the opponents have interpreted their writings (“the letters of Paul… and the rest of the writings”) in such a way as to show they were not, in fact, in error, because they did not predict a literal parousia of Jesus. It is not the fathers who have erred; it is the Christian group represented by the author of this rebuttal, 2 Peter, the group who has held on to the belief that an apocalyptic crisis was still imminent and who insisted that this had been the teaching of Jesus and his apostles all along (3:2). For the opponents this was not the proclamation of Jesus or the teaching of his apostles, and certainly not the teaching found in the letters of Paul. The end is not coming right away and it is not coming in the way sometimes proclaimed. These nonapocalyptic opponents claimed that their view had been the view of Jesus, his apostles, and Paul.

Such Christians could certainly find support for their view in earlier Christian writings, as amply attested in the few that still survive. The apocalyptic message proclaimed by the Jesus of Mark, some forty years after the founding of the new faith, came to be muted in Luke; by the time of John it came practically to disappear. As we will see shortly, it is polemicized against in the still later Gospel of Thomas. Not just Jesus but also Paul went through a radical de-apocalypticizing transformation at the hands of his later followers, as we have seen already, for example, in the letters of Colossians and, even more, Ephesians. This transformation continued in some Pauline circles of the second century, as among those Paulinists opposed in the Acts of Paul are those who declared that the resurrection is not a future, physical event: people are resurrected in their children, here, in this life.
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We do not know if the opponents of 2 Timothy took this, or some similar line, but they too appear to have claimed Pauline support for their views that “the resurrection is past” (2 Tim. 2:18).

Pauline Christianity, much like Christianity at large, was enormously split on numerous issues, including this matter of eschatology. It was the nonapocalyptic view that eventually came to dominate within broader Christendom. It is no accident
that the book of Revelation had such difficulty finding a place among the books of Scripture. Later chiliasts who believed in a literal millennium on earth, such as the early-second-century Papias, came to be mocked by writers such as Eusebius, who labeled his proto-orthodox forebear a man of “very little intelligence” (
H.E
. 3.39). The harsh words were directed against Papias not because he was, in fact, stupid, but because he was foolish enough to believe that there would be a utopian existence here on earth to be brought by an apocalyptic crisis at the end of the age. In other words, he was fool enough to agree with early Christian preaching.

So too did the author of 2 Peter. Was this one of the reasons this book too eventually had difficulty making it into the canon of Scripture? For this author, God created this world by his word and destroyed it with water (3:5–6). Next it will be destroyed by fire (3:7). The author adumbrates his view earlier in his short epistle, as when he refers to the (true) believers’ “entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (1:11) and in his abundant stress on the coming of real and palpable judgment on the false teachers throughout
chapter 2
. But it is in his reasoned response of 3:8 :-15 that he sets forth views that contrast with the “destructive heresies” of his opponents. As proclaimed by Jesus and his apostles (3:2, 15–16) the end really is coming “soon.” But temporal proximity is determined by a divine, not a human, calendar. And as Scripture teaches (Ps. 90:4), with the Lord a day is fully commensurate with a thousand years. There has been a (seeming) delay only because of God’s forbearance, giving everyone a chance to repent. But the “Day of the Lord” is coming, like a thief, and it will involve a total, all encapsulating cosmic destruction (3:10, 12). In expectation of this apocalyptic moment, the true believers need to live in godly and pious ways (3:11).