Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (76 page)

Among other things, this is a “history” that celebrates Paul’s miraculous conversion by a vision of Jesus himself, as recounted on three occasions in the narrative so as to highlight its importance. The book stresses Paul’s divine commission to preach the gospel; it emphasizes his supernatural miracle-working power, his compelling preaching, the divine interventions that allow him to overcome all opposition and personal antagonism. Paul is portrayed as the one figure most responsible for the spread of the gospel “to the ends of the earth” (1:8), eventually in the capital city of Rome itself. Paul is the leading spokesperson in the church, God’s chosen one to fulfill his mission on earth. The book in short, is both an encomium on Paul and an apology for his life, ministry, and message, allegedly written by someone who was there to see these things happen. But why would an apology be necessary?

We have already seen, and will see in greater length in the next chapter, that Paul was a controversial figure in the early church. So far as we can tell, he had at least as many enemies as friends. In most of his undisputed letters (Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians) he counters the views of his enemies and attacks their persons. These are enemies from
within
the Christian
church, inimical teachers who take opposing points of view, and argue, in the context of their opposition, precisely against Paul, his message, and his authority for preaching it. And these are simply the enemies that we know about (though only allusively), from within his own churches. It is impossible for us to gauge how widely Paul was maligned by those in the churches founded by others, or for what reasons.

Acts answers many of the objections raised against Paul and his gospel message. It is not that the author of the book had access to the Pauline letters and writes a direct response to them; he never mentions Paul even writing letters to his churches, and if he did know Paul’s writings, he did not know them well. Otherwise it is hard to explain why, in so many places, he appears to contradict them. The situation instead appears to be this: there were widely known charges leveled against Paul, some of them evidenced in his letters, and the author of Acts writes, in part, to set the record straight.

The Judaizers of Galatians claimed that Paul had no authority for his message and that he had corrupted the teachings of the apostles of Jerusalem, especially the pillars of the church, Peter, James, and John. Acts shows that in fact the authority for Paul’s message came directly from the resurrected Jesus himself, and that his views were in complete harmony with the apostles before him, with whom he consulted immediately upon being converted and with whom he agreed on every major (and minor) point about both the gospel message and his mission to proclaim it.

The super-apostles of Corinth attacked Paul for being weak in speech and paltry in person. Acts shows that in fact he was a powerful and effective rhetorician, a great worker of miracles, and empowered by God in all his work. No human force could bring him down and his divinely appointed mission could not fail. If he is stoned in one place, he simply gets up and goes on to evangelize the next.

The opponents who maligned Paul to the Romans maintained that his gospel message discounted the role of Israel in the plan of God, severed God’s relationship with the Jews, and led to a lawless and godless lifestyle. Acts shows on the contrary that Paul himself was a good, pious, faithful Jew from beginning to end, never doing anything opposed to the laws of his people, never urging lawless lifestyles, even among the gentiles; and Paul’s mission was always “to the Jew first.” It was unfaithful Jews who have rejected Paul; Paul never rejected Jews or the Jewish faith. His gospel was the fulfillment of all that is true in Judaism.

As we will see in the next chapter, eventually it was Paul’s “lawless” gospel—which for him meant a gospel message that all people are restored to a right relationship with God apart from keeping the Jewish Law—that created the biggest rift between his followers and their Christian opponents, as there were other Christians for centuries to come who insisted that faith in Jesus was necessarily a Jewish faith, and that Paul had corrupted the truth of the message of Jesus. For them, Paul was not a divinely commissioned spokesperson of God; he was, instead, the personal enemy of Peter, James, and other apostles of the church. Acts is an early attempt to rescue Paul from such charges, an account allegedly by a
personal companion of Paul meant to set the record straight. Paul was converted directly by Jesus, he was empowered by the Spirit just as was Jesus himself and his disciples after him, he proclaimed the true gospel, and he was God’s tool in fulfilling the divine plan—which is why he was both powerful and unstoppable. Most important for the purposes of internecine Christian polemic, Paul never did anything to violate the laws God had given to his people the Jews. Moreover, in all his views—about Jesus, the salvation he brought, the role of the Jewish Law, the standing of the gentiles among the people of God—he saw eye-to-eye with the other apostles, and in particular the leaders of the church in Jerusalem. He and they proclaimed the same message.

Even so, the message that they all proclaim in Acts is not, historically, the message of either the historical Paul or of the historical Peter and James. It is the message of “Luke,” a later, anonymous author falsely claiming to have been a one-time companion of Paul.

1
. “The Rehabilitation of an Exegetical Step-Child: 1 Peter in Recent Research,”
JBL
95 (1976): 243–54.

2
. M. Eugene Boring, “First Peter in Recent Study,”
WW
24 (2004): 358.

3
. “One might call this an imitation of Paul, without begrudging it the name.” (Imitationem Pauli liceret dicere, sine inuidia nominis.)
Paraphrasis in Epistolam I. Petri
, praef. Abs. 3; quoted in Ferdinand-Rupert Prostmeier,
Handlungsmodelle im ersten Petrusbrief
(Würzburg: Echer Verlag, 1990), p. 31 n. 66.

4
. H. H. Cludius,
Uransichten des Christenthums nebst Untersuchungen über einige Bücher des neuen Testaments
(Altona: Hermann Heimart, 1808), pp. 296–302.

5
. “First Peter in Recent Study,” p. 359.

6
. Claus-Hunno Hunzinger, “Babylon als Deckname für Rom. und die Datierung des 1 Petrusbriefes,” in Henning Graf Reventlow, ed.,
Gottes Wort und Gottes Land
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), pp. 67–77.

7
. See the discussion of the Sibyllina on pp. 508–19.

8
. “Das einhellige jüdische Belegmaterial zwingt zu dem Schluß, daß
die Bezeichnung Roms als Babylon unter dem Eindruck der erneuten Zerstörung des Jerusalemer Tempels zustande gekommen ist
.” P. 76, italics his. Neugebauer and Thiede have called Hunzinger’s view into question; Ferdinand-Rupert Prostmeier shows why their objections are not convincing (
Handlungsmodelle
, pp. 127–28, n. 327).

9
. The argument is most recently embraced by Lutz Doering, “Apostle, Co-Elder, and Witness of Suffering: Author Construction and Peter Image in First Peter,” in Jörg Frey et al., eds.,
Pseudepigraphie und Verfasserfiktion
, pp. 645–81, who also points out that since the claim to authorship is false, there is no reason to think the book was actually written from Rome, any more than that it had to be written to the churches of Asia Minor. It was instead written by a later Christian who “knows” that Peter was closely associated with the Roman church.

10
. William Harris,
Ancient Literacy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

11
. Meir Bar-Ilan, “Illiteracy in the Land of Israel in the First Centuries
CE
,” in
Essays in The Social Scientific Study of Judaism and Jewish Society
, ed. Simcha Fishbane et al. (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1992), vol. 2, 47.

12
. Cribiore,
Gymnastics of the Mind
, p. 250.

13
. Ibid. See also her earlier study, Raffaella Cribiore,
Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996). Among the other significant studies of ancient education in reading and writing, see esp. Teresa Morgan,
Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

14
. P. 177.

15
. P. 175.

16
. Meir Bar-Ilan, “Illiteracy,” pp. 46–61; Catherine Hezser,
Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).

17
. See the preceding note.

18
. P. 426.

19
. P. 91.

20
. P. 243.

21
.
Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian
(Princeton: Princeton University, 1993), p. 19.

22
. Mark Chancey,
Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

23
. Contrast the bizarre view set forth in the Louw/Nida,
Lexicon
*, 27.23, who reject the definition of “illiterate” for
agrammatos
in Acts 4:13: “this is highly unlikely in view of the almost universal literacy in NT times, and especially as the result of extensive synagogue schools.” An understanding of ancient society and culture would go a long way in correcting this kind of mistake, even in such basic fields as lexicography.

24
. James Strange in IDBSup., p. 140. Jonathan Reed estimates six hundred to fifteen hundred inhabitants in the time of Jesus (
Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence
, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000, p. 152). The wildly inaccurate claims of Bellarmino Bagatti (“Caphernaum”
MB
[1983] 9) that Capernaum was a city of two thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants, “as urbanized and urbane as anywhere else in the empire,” were based, as Jonathan Reed has pointed out, on the erroneous estimates of Eric Meyers and James Strange,
Archaeology, the Rabbis and Early Christianity
(Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1981), p. 58 (which Strange later modified as noted above), themselves based on the size of the town as described by Charles Wilson’s report in 1871 [!] that the area of the ruins covered 30 hectares. In fact, the area is no more than 6 hectares, and is not as densely populated as Meyers and Strange originally thought (four hundred to five hundred persons per hectare).

25
. Reed,
Archaeology
, p. 159.

26
. The indication of Luke 7:1–10 that a centurion, with his century, was stationed in town is completely fictitious. Sometimes it is thought that since Zebedee had “hired servants” fishing must have been a relatively lucrative profession in Capernaum (Mark 1:16–20). But the reference is thoroughly literary. There is no reason to suspect that Mark ever visited the place on a tour of the holy land to note its affluence. Moreover, these “hired servants” may just as well have been very low-level peasants eking out a hand-to-mouth existence.

27
. John H. Elliott, “Peter, First Epistle of,”
ABD
V, 269–78.

28
.
1 Peter: A New Translation and Commentary
(New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 64.

29
. Paul Achtemeier,
1 Peter
, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. 3.

30
. Prostmeier,
Handlungsmodelle
, pp. 1–32.

31
. I am completely unpersuaded by Karl Matthias Schmidt,
Mahnung und Erinnerung im Maskenspiel: Epistolographie, Rhetorik und Narrativik der pseudepigraphen Petrusbriefe
(Freiburg: Herder, 2003), recapitulated in K. M. Schmidt, “Die Stimme des Apostels erheben: Pragmatische Leistungen der Autorenfiktion in den Petrusbriefen,” in Jörg Frey et al., eds.,
Pseudepigraphie und Verfasserfiktion
, pp. 625–44, that 1 Peter was meant to be a “fictional” letter. So far as we know it was never read that way, and there are no clear indications that the author meant for it to be taken that way—one of the major criteria for fictions over forgeries, in Schmidt’s own reckoning. Decisive for Schmidt is 1 Peter 5:1,
which he reads as meaning not that Peter saw the passion, but that he had been martyred. And if he was martyred, he must not be writing this letter! But throughout the book of Acts, as we will see, Peter is repeatedly referred to as a
to Jesus, while still very much alive.