Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (86 page)

By no stretch of the imagination can the Pseudo-Clementine
Recognitions
and
Homilies
be seen as principally polemical confrontations with Paul and Pauline Christianity. These are long, complex, and involved books with an array of other agendas.
⁷⁵
At the same time, there are clear anti-Pauline elements scattered throughout their narratives and speeches. These anti-Pauline elements stand in stark contrast with the views we saw earlier in forgeries that championed Paul and his message, most notably the New Testament book of Acts. In these fourth-century forgeries, Paul’s vision of the resurrected Jesus is not affirmed as an experience that authorizes his gospel message; on the contrary it is maligned and mocked. Here Paul is not shown standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Peter in his missionary activities; instead he is portrayed as one of Peter’s enemies, attacked with some vehemence by the one chosen by Christ to be the foundation for the church. So too with James, whom Paul tries to murder and whose success in converting the entire Jewish nation is disrupted by none other than Paul. Here Paul’s law-free gospel is portrayed as being at odds with the gospel of Christ, as we will see further in the chapter that follows.

In this connection it is interesting to see how two of the “co-workers” of Paul known from the New Testament writings are portrayed here. Barnabas figures importantly in the Pseudo-Clementine narrative (see
Recognitions
1.7–13). He is the one who, at the beginning of the account, first comes to Rome, makes contact with the pagan Clement, preaches the true gospel in his presence, urges him to sail to Palestine to learn the truth of the gospel, and then meets him in Judea and introduces him to Peter, the hero of the account. There is nothing that ties Barnabas to Paul here; on the contrary, he is Peter’s man and follows Peter’s gospel. In fact, the reason he does not personally accompany Clement to Judea, but must precede him, is because he has to hurry back to celebrate a Jewish festival: “he hastened his departure, saying that he must by all means celebrate at Judea a festal day of his religion that was approaching” (1.10). Barnabas, companion of Peter, and responsible for the fate of the future leader of the Roman church, Clement, is Jewish to the core, continuing to observe Jewish festivals still as a Christian. Is this a poke at the Pauline law-free gospel? In any event, not just Peter but also Barnabas stands over against Paul in this account, even though in the book of Acts Barnabas is closely connected precisely with Paul.

Then there is Clement. In the New Testament he has no connection with Peter but only with Paul, his “co-worker” who “contended together with me in the gospel” (Phil. 4:3). But not in these books forged in his name. He is converted by Peter, he follows Peter, he accepts Peter’s gospel, he accepts Peter’s castigation of Paul. And so not only Barnabas but also Clement has been taken from Paul and given to Peter, the foundation of the church who stands against Paul, his authority, and his message.

It has generally been conceded by scholars of the Pseudo-Clementines that the anti-Pauline polemic of
Recognitions
1.66–71 is part of a larger unit (chapters 27–71), which was taken over by the author, but not from the Grundschrift.
⁷⁶
The grounds are solid: it is a coherent unit, it has no parallel in the
Homilies
, and its views in some ways contrast with those of the
Recognitions
otherwise, for example, in the elevated role it gives to Jesus in relationship to Moses.
⁷⁷
Gerd Lüdemann argued that the passage was intended to present an alternative view of the development of church history to that found in the New Testament book of Acts, in fact that it “sets out to correct a section of Luke’s Acts with its own version of the story.”
⁷⁸

No one has developed this line of thought more fully than F. Stanley Jones, and although the argument is generally made with reference to the source itself, the same can be said of its incorporation in the fuller account of the
Recognitions
.
⁷⁹
Jones lists a number of parallels between the account and the book of Acts, including as the most secure: Rec. 1.65.2–3 parallels Acts 5:34–39 (Gamaliel calming the crowd); Rec. 1.71.3–4 parallels Acts 9:1–2, 22:4–5, 26:10–12 (Paul arranges with the high priest to persecute the Christians); and Rec. 1.36.2 parallels Acts 3:22–23 (quotations of Deut. 18:15 and Lev. 23:29). Several other overlaps Jones considers “probable”: Rec. 1.34.2 parallels Acts 7:8 (summary of the genealogy of Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve patriarchs); Rec. 1.41.1–2 parallels Acts 2:22–24 (Jesus is crucified even though he performed signs and wonders); and Rec. 1.71.2 parallels Acts 4:4 (five thousand flee Jerusalem to Jericho). Jones finds twenty-two other instances of parallels that he considers “possible.” What he finds particularly striking is that in many of these instances the overlaps include aspects of Lukan redaction, showing that the author of this portion of the
Recognitions
is actually using Acts.

More than that, the author behind
Recognitions
1.27–71 has changed the story of Acts in significant ways. Here Paul, as we have seen, is the villain rather than the hero of the story; he hinders instead of promotes the Christian mission; and he is never said to convert. In Jones’s opinion, the author of this source behind the
Recognitions
wanted to outstrip Acts by writing a better history; in fact, his account was intended to “replace Acts.”
⁸⁰

There are clear problems with this view as a wholesale explanation for Rec. 1.27–71. Most obviously, the majority of the passage does not cover the same scope or material as the book of Acts: it is a description of the history of the world from its very beginning up to the seventh year after Christ’s death. Most of it, in other words, has nothing to do with Acts, as recognized by Stanton: “so many of its traditions are unrelated to Luke’s Acts that rivalry as a primary purpose should not be pressed too far.”
⁸¹
Moreover, the way the passage treats Acts is not noticeably different from the way it treats its other sources, principally the Hebrew Bible, in radically shortening the narrative and emphasizing certain key points. Surely one would not argue that its author was trying to replace the Hebrew Bible as well.
⁸²

Even so, Lüdemann and Jones have made a good point, that the retelling of the incidents from Acts is, in Stanton’s words, “tendentious and imaginative.”
⁸³
To that extent, its narrative appears intent on countering the views of Luke, clearly from a Jewish-Christian (as opposed to Pauline) perspective. This portion of the Pseudo-Clementines can thus be considered a kind of counterforgery.

There may be a trace of Christian supercessionism in this passage as well, particularly in its polemic against Jewish animal sacrifice. The key text is the indication of why Moses allowed animal sacrifice in the first place—as a concession to the faulty religious leanings of his fellow Israelites who were not ready to abandon their pagan practices altogether:

When meantime Moses, that faithful and wise steward, perceived that the vice of sacrificing to idols had been deeply ingrained into the people from their association with the Egyptians, and that the root of this evil could not be extracted from them, he allowed them indeed to sacrifice, but permitted it to be done only to God, that by any means he might cut off one half of the deeply ingrained evil, leaving the other half to be corrected by another, and at a future time. (Rec. 1.36)

When Christ came as the prophet predicted by Moses in Deuteronomy 18, he fulfilled what Moses anticipated, by substituting baptism for sacrifice. As Annette Reed has argued, this attack on the practice of Jewish sacrifice would have been completely moot at the time of the writing, since the Temple had already been destroyed and no sacrifices were being performed in any event; moreover, the author is not maligning the religion of Moses but, as it were, affirming it. There is nothing “anti-Jewish” in the passage, to the extent that Jesus stands with Moses, not against him; Jews who have not accepted Christ are not condemned but are simply urged to change their minds: “the author’s Christian supercessionism looks a lot like Jewish messianism.”
⁸⁴
In any event, this understanding that Jesus has superseded Moses at all stands at some tension with the rest of the
Recognitions
and the
Homilies
, as Reed has shown. But since the Christology, and the relationship of “Jews” and “Christians,” is largely effected in nonpolemical terms through these two works, they are of less relevance to my present concerns.
⁸⁵
In a broader sense, however, one could see the whole of the Pseudo-Clementine
Recognitions
and
Homilies
as having a subtle but comparable polemical agenda:

H(omilies) and R(ecognitions) appeal to the authority of this apostle [Peter] to promote an account of early church history that counters the epistles of Paul and the Book of Acts. Most notably, they exalt James and Peter as the true guardians of Jesus’ message and the authentic leaders of the apostolic community, while condemning Paul and the law-free mission associated with him.
⁸⁶

Whereas
Recognitions
1.27–71 has sometimes been seen as a counterforgery to the book of Acts, Annette Reed has argued that the
Homilies
taken as a whole can be seen as standing in direct tension with that other great historian of Christianity’s first four centuries, Eusebius.
⁸⁷
A broad comparison of Eusebius’s ten-volume work with the twenty-book
Homilies
shows numerous parallels. They are practically contemporaneous, Eusebius from 290–312
CE
, the
Homilies
from a few decades later. Eusebius wrote from Caesarea, the
Homilies
come from Syria. Many of their concerns are the same: tracing apostolic succession, establishing ecclesiastical authority, responding to pagan critiques, defending orthodoxy against heresy, and explaining the relationship of the Christian church to Judaism. In addition, both extensively use earlier source materials.

Reed compares the views of the two under a number of enlightening rubrics. Eusebius maintains that apostolic succession occurs in all of the main churches of the orthodox tradition through “the successions of the holy apostles” (
H.E
. 1.1); the
Homilies
are concerned only about the succession through the Jerusalem church, and specifically Peter (Hom. 2.6–12; 3.15, 19; 11.35), who passes along the teaching of the “true prophet.” Eusebius claims that Christianity, though continuous with the religion of Abraham and those before him, is discontinuous with Judaism, basing his argument on Gen. 49:10, that a scepter would fall away from Judah, opening up the way for the “new” thing to arrive in Jesus (e.g.
H.E
. 1. 6. 1–8); the
Homilies
claim that Moses and Jesus are both to be identified with the true prophet (Hom. 2.16–17; 3.17–21) and that they represent a single teaching (Hom. 8.6–7). The incarnation was not needed because of the failure of the Jews, but in order to allow the message to go to the gentiles (Hom. 3.18.3–19.1). Eusebius asserts that the mission to Jews was destined to fail, leading to the mission to gentiles (e.g., 2.1.8); the
Homilies
insist that the mission to the Jews was unnecessary, since Jews can be saved by the teachings of Moses (Hom. 8.5–7). The mission is for the pagans alone. Eusebius maintains that orthodoxy precedes heresy, which is by nature derivative and impotent; the
Homilies
—in the teaching of the syzygies (Hom. 2.15–18)—claims that the false comes prior to the true, and that falsehood is far from impotent (as seen in the successes of “Simon”). For Eusebius, Christianity is a new “ethnos”; this obviously poses a problem, then, for Jewish converts (what are they, exactly?); the
Homilies
use the term
Jew
even for gentile followers of Jesus (Hom. 11.16).

In light of these contrasts, Reed postulates that Eusebius provides a “parade example” of what Amos Funkenstein has called “counter history”: “the process by which another group’s history and sources are appropriated and reworked in the service of contrasting aims.”
⁸⁸
As she notes, Eusebius draws extensively on Josephus and Philo to describe the failings of Judaism; moreover, he relies on Hegesippus, himself possibly a “Jewish Christian” to narrate the history of “Jewish Christianity.” If this view of Eusebius is right, then the possibility further presents itself that “the
Homilies
was compiled, at least in part, to counter this counter-history.” That is to say, with many of the same concerns as Eusebius, the
Homilies
spin the tale in precisely a contrary way. This involves not merely alluding to Paul “in order to exclude him,” but also telling the entire story of the Christian mission and message in a way that stands at odds with the “orthodox” historian. It is, then, a counterforgery in what I am calling the weak sense, a forgery designed to counter views found in another writing, in this case a writing that was destined to attain the status of orthodoxy and to determine how historians understood the development of the Christian church for many centuries to follow.

1
. E.g., a fifth-century anti-Jewish account of the Jewish mistreatment of Jesus and the early Christians, preserved in one Syriac and one Armenian manuscript; the James Liturgy of the sixth century, preserved in eighth- and ninth-century Greek and Syriac manuscripts, instrumental in the separation of the Syrian “Miaphysites” from the catholics; and the report of John Chrysostom, preserved in one Sahidic manuscript of the tenth century, to have discovered an ancient book by James that described Jesus’ ascent to the seventh heaven; on this last see E. A. W. Budge, “An Encomium on Saint John the Baptist,” in
Coptic Apocrypha in the Dialect of Upper Egypt
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), pp. 128–45, 335–51.