Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (141 page)

As a final example of apologetic forgeries, we might consider the letters allegedly exchanged by Paul and the Roman philosopher Seneca. There are fourteen letters in this famous correspondence, eight of them from Seneca to Paul and six from Paul to Seneca. The first reference to the correspondence comes in Jerome’s
De viris illustribus
(393
CE):

Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Cordova, a disciple of the Stoic Sotion, and paternal uncle of the poet Lucan, was a man of very temperate life whom I would not place in a catalogue of saints, were it not that I was prompted to do so by those
Letters from Paul to Seneca
and
from Seneca to Paul
which are very widely read. In these, when Seneca was Nero’s teacher and the most influential person of the period, he said that he wished to have the same position among his own [i.e., the pagans] which Paul had among the Christians. Two years before Peter and Paul were crowned with martyrdom, he was put to death by Nero. (
Vir. ill
. 12)
⁸⁸

Soon afterward Augustine mentions them: “Rightly did Seneca say, who lived at the time of the apostles, some of whose letters to the apostle Paul are still read” (
Epist
. 153. 14).
⁸⁹
As A. Fürst notes, it is significant that the correspondence is not mentioned by Lactantius in the early fourth century.
⁹⁰
This absence cannot simply be written off as an argument from silence; Lactantius frequently cites Seneca otherwise and highly evaluates him, and had he known of the letters, and thought them authentic, he scarcely could have failed to cite them. In any event, the terminus ante quem for their appearance is 392
CE
and plausibly they date from some decades before that, so, say, middle of the fourth century.
⁹¹
They were certainly composed in Latin, given, among other things, Seneca’s castigation of Paul for his feeble Latinity.

That Paul and Seneca would have exchanged letters may have seemed altogether plausible to the fourth-century forger who created the correspondence and to the reading audience that eagerly accepted his work as authentic. The two
great figures were contemporaries; both of them died in Rome. Paul appeared before Seneca’s own brother, Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia, in one of his trial scenes in Acts (18:12–17). Moreover, when the historical Paul sent forth greetings from prison (in Rome?) to the Philippians, he includes a salutation from “those of Caesar’s household” (4:22), which could include any number of people, including Nero’s then advisor, Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Moreover, it has long been noted, classically by J. B. Lightfoot, that there are many clear parallels between the authentic writings of the two authors, especially in their teachings on ethics.
⁹²
That the two would have corresponded with one another may have seemed likely to ancient Christian readers, even if it appears completely out of the question for modern scholars.

The letters are filled with various verisimilitudes, as can be seen simply from the way the correspondence begins in letter 1:

Seneca to Paul, greeting. I believe that you have been informed, Paul, of the discussion which my friend Lucilius and I held yesterday concerning the apocrypha and other matters: for some of the followers of your teachings were with me. We had retired to the gardens of Sallust, and it was our good fortune that these disciples whom I have mentioned saw us there and joined us, although they were on their way elsewhere. You may be sure that we wished that you, too, had been present….
⁹³

Many of the letters from Seneca are filled with praise of Paul. This undoubtedly relates to the reason they were written in the first place. And so, for example, from letter 1: “when we had read your book… we were completely refreshed. These thoughts, I believe, were expressed not by you, but through you…. For they are so lofty and so brilliant with noble sentiments that in my opinion generations of men could hardly be enough to become established and perfected in them.” Or from letter 7: “For the holy spirit that is in you and high above you expresses with lofty speech thoughts worthy of reverence … I confess that Augustus was affected by your sentiments…. He was amazed that one whose education had not been normal could have such ideas.”

In turn, Paul, somewhat less than humbly, accepts Seneca’s praise and intimates that it is fully deserved: “I count myself fortunate in the approval of a man who is so great. For you, a critic, a philosopher, the teacher of so great a ruler, nay even of everyone, would not say this unless you spoke the truth” (letter 2).

At the same time, although Seneca is awed by the content of Paul’s writings, he is more than a little underwhelmed by his lack of rhetorical style: “I do wish you would obey me and comply with the pure Latin style, giving a good appearance to your noble utterances, in order that the granting of this excellent gift may be worthily performed by you” (letter 13). In letter 9 he indicates that he has sent his correspondent a “book on elegance of expression,” presumably a Latin equivalent of Strunk and White, to help Paul along in his writing.
⁹⁴

The most frequently commented aspect of this correspondence is its almost complete lack of substance, otherwise. There is very little content to the letters. The one exception is letter 11, where there is, finally, a good bit of meaty material and hints at courtly gossip, of a very serious nature. The letter discusses the fire in Rome and Nero’s role in it. At the same time, because it is so different in conception, content, and style from the other letters, because it is dated out of sequence with the rest (occurring between letters dated 58 and 59
CE
, even though it is given the date 64
CE),
and because it has a completely different (negative) view of Nero from elsewhere in the correspondence, it is generally conceded to have come from another forger.
⁹⁵
In any event, it provides the most “substance” of any of the letters. Seneca writes as follows:

Do you think I am not saddened and grieved because you innocent people are repeatedly punished? Or because the whole populace believes you so implacable and so liable to guilt, thinking that every misfortune in the city is due to you?… The source of the frequent fires which the city of Rome suffers is plain … Christians and Jews, charged with responsibility for the fire—alas!—are being put to death, as is usually the case. The ruffian, whoever he is, whose pleasure is murdering and whose refuge is lying, is destined for his time of reckoning, and just as the best is sacrificed as one life for many, so he shall be sacrificed for all and burned by fire. One hundred thirty-two private houses and four thousand apartment-houses burned in six days; the seventh day gave respite.

The insipid character of the rest of the letters is the subject of frequent comment, as early as Erasmus: “I do not see how he could have made up these letters in a more feeble or inept fashion.”
⁹⁶
A nineteenth-century study by G. Boissier states: “Never has a clumsy forger made such great spirits speak more foolishly.”
⁹⁷
And the most recent lengthy analysis sums up the common view: “The noticeable
peculiarity of the epistolary exchange between Seneca and Paul is the fact that content apparently does not matter; what matters are only the names of the correspondents.”
⁹⁸

The Senecan correspondence was popular throughout the Middle ages; from the thirteenth century up to the sixteenth it was regularly included in the manuscripts of Seneca’s writings. It has nonetheless been recognized as forged since the advent of historical criticism. Already Valla, in 1440, demonstrated its inauthenticity on stylistic grounds.
⁹⁹
Erasmus, after commenting on the insipid character of the writings, cited above, went on to say “nonetheless, whoever was the author, he wrote so as to persuade us that Seneca had been a Christian.”
¹⁰⁰
Lightfoot expressed the matter with characteristic clarity: “The poverty of thought and style, the errors in chronology and history, and the whole conception of the relative positions of the Stoic philosopher and the Christian Apostle, betray clearly the hand of a forger.”
¹⁰¹
Only very few scholars, most of them Italian, have thought it possible that parts of the correspondence are authentic.
¹⁰²

But why would someone forge a set of letters with virtually no substance? We have seen another instance of the phenomenon in the Greek letter to the Laodiceans, and we would not be far afield to suspect that the reason for that cipher may apply to these as well: it was the fact of their existence that mattered, not the character of their contents. But that has not always been the explanation for the forged Senecan correspondence. For some time, the
opinio communis
was far more specific, as Harnack argued that the letters were produced for a concrete purpose, in order to commend Paul and his writings, or even the entire Bible, to recently converted fourth-century Christians of the educated classes, by showing an enthusiastic approbation by Seneca.
¹⁰³
Fürst, however, shows the flaw in the reasoning: Seneca did not enjoy a high reputation among educated pagans of the fourth century, and his philosophy played virtually no role in the Neoplatonic thought world of late antiquity.
¹⁰⁴

An alternative was proposed by the editor of the first critical edition of the letters in 1938, Claude Barlow, who suggested that the simple, unadorned style of the letters indicates they may have originated as a rhetorical school exercise.
¹⁰⁵
If they were that, however, one would have to judge that the student did not receive high marks, as the faux Senecan letters are striking precisely for their failure to approximate Seneca’s elegant style. But the fatal blow to the view, attractive as it is on first sight, is that school exercises in rhetoric were by their nature designed to say something, to invent an imaginary substance as the topic of correspondence. That is precisely what is lacking here.

A more promising, but ultimately failed, proposal was floated by Bernhard Bischoff, who produced the editio princeps of a Latin letter recently discovered, in which a certain Annas (allegedly) wrote to Seneca condemning idolatry and pagan religion generally. This is a letter, in other words, that advances a kind of Jewish apologia. In fact, according to Bischoff, the Annas named in its title is to be seen as none other than Annas II, Jewish high priest for a short time in 62
CE
, and so a contemporary of Seneca. Bischoff maintained that the letter was actually written in the fourth century, and he ascribed it specifically to a Jewish author because there are (1) numerous parallels to the Wisdom of Solomon and (2) no specific Christian content.
¹⁰⁶

According to Bischoff, the existence of this Jewish letter cannot be thought of as unrelated to the Christian correspondence, also involving Seneca. One of the works may well have served as a motivating factor for the production of the other. In his provocative summary, Bischoff states:

Since the possibility cannot be excluded that either the Christian author of the Seneca/Paul letters knew the Annas epistle, or that the Jewish author was aware of that fictional correspondence, one of the two fictional writings might be a counter-move against the other side’s attempt to let the philosopher appear in conjunction with a representative of its own faith. If one considers content, the Annas letter may be able to lay claim to priority, which would suggest a fourth century date for its origin.
¹⁰⁷

This view found wide acceptance soon after its publication, for example by Wolfgang Wischmeyer and even, with some minor revisions, the great Arnaldo Momigliano.
¹⁰⁸
Eventually, however, A. Hilhorst showed that it was completely implausible. Hilhorst provided a new critical edition of the letter of Annas with text-critical and interpretive notes, and a brief discussion of its character and origin. On one hand, Hilhorst expressed skepticism over whether the letter was to be thought of as addressed, originally, to Seneca. The incipit that mentions Seneca is not followed by an epistolary opening. A forger creating a letter to Seneca would surely place his name in the text. Instead the letter is addressed to “the brothers.” The title of the work is therefore a later addition to the text and tells us nothing about the original design of its author.

Even more than that, Hilhorst insisted that the letter appears to be Christian rather than Jewish. “Fratres” in the address indicates co-religionists, not potential converts. And the term is quite common in specifically Christian writings. In addition, one has to deal with a specific set of historical probabilities. The reality is that we do not have a single prose writing from antiquity, in Latin, written by a Jewish author.
¹⁰⁹
What then is the likelihood that this one letter would be the exception, when nothing in the letter would prevent it from being seen as Christian? As Hilhorst states his case: “If I am right that there is no intrinsic evidence that the
Epistola
was written by a Jew any more than by a Christian, then it is reasonable to attribute this text to an environment in which all other a Latin writings of this kind originate, that is, Christianity.”
¹¹⁰

Hilhorst’s view has been forcefully supported, with additional arguments by Rainer Jakobi,
¹¹¹
who among other things points out that Christian authors such as Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Lactantius made abundant use of the Wisdom of Solomon, that a number of the arguments of the letter can be found in the works of Christian writers, and that there do indeed appear to be Christian allusions in the text. In particular, the author appears to know Lactantius, the Vulgate,
and the commentary on Isaiah by Jerome. All this provides us with the religious identity of the author and his date: the author is a Christian and he is writing after Jerome’s commentary, that is, sometime soon after 410
CE.