Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (109 page)

An even more specific proposal has been developed by Birger Pearson, who takes up the argument of Terrence Smith that there is a direct literary relationship between the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter and the pseudepigraphic 2 Peter.
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Pearson maintains that Smith is wrong to think that the Apocalypse is a direct polemic against 2 Peter (if it were, it would be a counterforgery in the strong sense); instead he thinks the Apocalypse is reading the book of 2 Peter in a Gnostic way, appropriating its message, sympathetically, in a different context.
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In particular, Pearson is impressed by the fact that the Apocalypse portrays Peter as “the founder of the Gnostic community and the chief protagonist in a struggle against orthodox ecclesiastical Christianity.” This is Peter, the founder of the Roman church, of all people.
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It is also striking that the work makes extensive use of materials drawn, evidently, from the Gospel of Matthew, which was otherwise used to establish Peter as the “rock” of the Catholic church.
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But there are especially striking verbal parallels with 2 Peter, which Pearson lists at length. Most intriguing is the polemic against church leaders as “dry canals” (79.30–31), strikingly close to 2 Peter’s polemic against those who “are waterless springs” (2:17). In Pearson’s view, the author of the Coptic Apocalypse has slightly modified the image in light of “an Egyptian geographical environment.”
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One is also struck by the “strong eschatological expectation” of the Coptic Apocalypse, which may not be expected in a Gnostic work. But judgment is said to come on the false teachers at the parousia; and nowhere is the parousia more
in evidence than in 2 Peter. “Now we have a Gnostic text that not only contains a vigorous eschatological expectation but even uses 2 Peter itself in giving expression to it.” Pearson cites a number of other parallels between the two texts as well, and concludes that the author of the Coptic Apocalypse has found 2 Peter “a very congenial piece of Petrine teaching, one that can freely be used in his own presentation of Petrine
gnosis
.”
⁹⁸

The Coptic Apocalypse does not engage with polemic against the views of 2 Peter, however; instead, it uses the language and images of 2 Peter in order to attack the proto-orthodox ecclesiastical establishment. Here we have two Petrine forgeries, one building on the other and interpreting it in its own context in order to attack Christians who also use Peter for precisely the opposite purpose, to justify the church hierarchy that was destined to prevail within the early Christian movement. The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, then, is a minority voice in the struggle to establish dominance within the broader community. Its protests went virtually unheard, as the church refused to move away from a hierarchical organization, but in just the opposite direction, as Peter came to be thought of as the head of the church or Rome, the leader of all the churches of Christendom. It was the “dry canals” that won the day, and the Peter of orthodoxy who triumphed over the Peter of the Gnostics.
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The Paraphrase of Shem, the first tractate in Nag Hammadi codex 7, is another Gnostic apocalypse, although there are debates over its particular Gnostic allegiances. Given our limited knowledge of the followers of Basilides, it is difficult to conclude with M. Tardieu that the text is best understood as a Basilidean production.
¹⁰⁰
The view of Michel Roberge appears more credible, that even though the
author “follows his own way,” he appears to have been heavily influenced by both Sethian and Valentinian systems, the latter, in particular, because he embraces a tripartite anthropology comprising psychics, noetics, and pneumatics.
¹⁰¹

The revelation in the text is delivered by the son of infinite Light, Derdekeas, to Shem, the son of Noah. For our purposes, it is important that the account is written in the first person, allegedly by Shem himself, “The paraphrase about the unbegotten Spirit—what Derdekeas revealed to me, Shem…. My thought in my body snatched me away from my race and carried me up to the summit of creation…. I heard a voice speaking to me, Shem, since you are from pure power….” (1.1–19).
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Like other apocalypses, in other words, this is pseudepigraphic. The revelation involves both a Gnostic cosmogony and anthropogony, but then moves to a historical description of key salvific events: the flood, the overthrow of Sodom, the baptism of the Savior, and his ascent at the crucifixion, ending in two eschatological discourses and a description of Shem’s ascent to the planetary spheres.

Of particular interest is the polemic of the work, which begins in 30.4–31.14 with the appearance of the “demon” who comes “to baptize with an imperfect baptism and to disturb the world with bondage of water.” This is none other than John the Baptist, whose water baptism is a baptism “in error” and is described as “the baptism of the demon.” This denigration of John’s baptism sets up the discourse directed against the church’s practices of baptism.

The polemical character of the account is evident in a revelation of Derdekeas to Shem in 34.16–36.24: “Many in the generation of Nature will seek the security of power, but they will not find it, nor will they be able to fulfill the will of Faith. For they are the seed of universal Darkness” (35.7–13). In contrast are “the perceptive.” As Derdekeas reveals “I disclosed to them all the concepts and teaching of the righteous” (36.9–11). The others—those who are not perceptive and are tied to “the flesh”—will be led astray, thinking that baptism in water will save them. This becomes clear in the disparagement of Christian baptism by Derdekeas:

Then many who wear flesh that leads them astray will descend into the harmful waters by means of the winds and the demons, and they are bound with the water. But water will provide an ineffective treatment. It will mislead and bind the world…. O Shem, people are deceived by the many forms of demons, and they think that through the baptism of unclean water this substance that is dark, feeble, ineffective, and disturbing will take away sins. They do not know that coming from the water and going to the water are bondage, error, defilement, envy, murder, adultery, false witness, heresies, robberies, lusts, babbling, wrath, bitterness. (36.25–38.28)

The upshot of this revelation then becomes clear: “I proclaim to those who have a mind that they must abandon defiled baptism … for where water has been invoked, there is Nature with a ritual formula, a lie, and injury.”

There follows a peculiar description of the beheading of a female figure “Rebouel.” The gruesome act, however, is presented as a good thing. Rebouel has “the perception you will reveal upon the earth,” and so Shem can proclaim, “Blessed is Rebouel among all generations of people, for you alone have seen and will listen” (40.12–15). What is the meaning of her beheading? Roberge argues, “Just as Rebouel is declared blessed in her beheading, so the noetics should not hesitate to separate from the great church (early orthodoxy) which practices baptism, and enter the community of those who possess gnosis.”
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This, in short, is another case of Gnostic polemic against proto-orthodoxy, one that in particular rejects the practice of baptism: “the writing is best explained as the product of a group living on the fringe of Christianity and urging the members of the great church to separate and join the community of those who possess gnosis.”
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It is impossible to identify the target of the attack with any greater specificity; but it is worth noting, with J.-D. Dubois, that the polemic accords well with the two treatises that follow the Paraphrase of Shem in codex 7, the anonymous Second Treatise of the Great Seth and the forged Apocalypse of Peter, which we have already considered. In Dubois’s opinion, it is probably no accident that these three polemical attacks on proto-orthodoxy are grouped together in the codex.
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1.
See the discussion on pp. 172–74.

2.
See the discussion on pp. 218–22.

3.
Günter Haufe, “Gnostische Irrlehre und ihre Abwehr in den Pastoralbriefen,” in
Gnosis und Neues Testament: Studien aus Religionswissenschaft und Theologie
, ed., Karl-Wolfgang Tröger (Güterslow: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1973), pp. 325–39, argued that all three were combating the same opponents, and they were Gnostic (p. 325). The most influential twentieth-century spokesperson in support of this view of the corpus Pastorale is Peter Trummer, “Corpus Paulinum—Corpus Pastorale”; for him, the Pastorals were by a single author and were meant as a conclusion for the Pauline corpus. Even more extreme is Gerd Häfner, “Das Corpus Pastorale,” who argued, contrary to recent claims of such scholars as L. T. Johnson and W. Richards, that the Pastorals were generated and were meant to be read as a corpus of writings; the corpus is not an epistolary novel, but it has some of the characteristics of the genre, and the books are to be read in the order 1 Timothy–Titus–2 Timothy. Moreover, the claim that no single opponent emerges when the three are taken together as a unit, Häfner avers, is not necessarily true. Everything said about opponents can be subsumed under some such category as “Jewish-Christian Gnosis.” The idea that the letters could be read as an epistolary novel was most influentially advanced by Richard Pervo, “Romancing an Oft-Neglected Stone: The Pastoral Epistles and the Epistolary Novel,”
Journal of Higher Criticism
, 1 (1994): 25–47. Among the very basic problems of the thesis was the fact that Pervo was forced to argue that the entire “genre” of epistolary novel contains but one work, the letters of Chion of Heraclea. How can there be a genre of
one
writing? (He did allow that the Socratic letters were related, but not closely.) Moreover, the differences, as Pervo pointed out, between the Pastorals and the letters of Chion are stark: the Pastorals are a good deal longer, two of the three do not carry much of the narrative, and their coherence is not progressive, sequential, and narratological. As a conclusion, Pervo states that if the author of the Pastorals wanted to write a work of the genre, he “was not very successful” (p. 40).

4.
Difference and Distance
.

5.
The most careful analysis, methodologically, is Jerry Sumney,
“Servants of Satan
.” See my comments on p. 215.

6.
On the problem of the polemical stereotypes, see the now-classic article of Robert J. Karris, “The Background and Significance of the Polemic of the Pastoral Epistles,”
JBL
92 (1973): 549–63; and Luke Timothy Johnson, “II Timothy and the Polemic against False Teachers: A Reexamination,”
JRS
6 (1978): 1–26.

7.
See p. 207.

8.
There is an obvious connection (although it is not as obvious what to do with it) between 1:15,
and Mark 7:19, also written by a non-Jew,
See also Acts 10:14–15 and Rom. 14:20.

9.
See pp. 206, 211.

10.
One convenient way around the problem is to think of the
and
of the passage as husbands and wives, in view of 3:2. Still, apart from the fact that it does not let the author off the hook—even here, wives must be silent and submissive, and exercise no authority—the immediately preceding context of 3:8–9 (men and women, not husbands and wives) makes the interpretation implausible.