Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (32 page)

As should be clear from these sundry examples, discovery narratives functioned not only to explain the long-absence of a book or set of books, but also to establish their authoritative credentials. In many instances the “discovery” is a result of divine intervention. This was the case as well, for example, with the “discovery” of bronze tablets by Alexander, Lucian’s “False Prophet.”
¹⁰⁴
These tablets, which were planted by Alexander himself, indicated that Asclepeius and his father Apollo were planning to take up residence in Abonoteichus, the location of Alexander’s soon-to-be-established faux oracle (
Alexander the False Prophet
, 10).

Lucian was not the only one who recognized how a discovery narrative could serve as a ploy. We also have Cicero’s scathing comments on the “discovery” of lots as a means of divination. Cicero was quite forthright in his own opinion of the practice: “And pray what is the need, do you think, to talk about the casting of lots? It is much like playing at morra, dice, or knuckle-bones, in which recklessness and luck prevail rather than reflection and judgement.”
¹⁰⁵
But those who justified the use of lots claimed divine authorization, from a standard discovery narrative:

According to the annals of Praeneste Numerius Suffustius, who was a distinguished man of noble birth, was admonished by dreams, often repeated, and finally even by threats, to split open a flint rock which was lying in a designated place. Frightened by the visions and disregarding the jeers of his fellow-townsmen he set about doing as he had been directed. And so when he had broken open the stone, the lots sprang forth carved on oak, in ancient characters. The site where the stone was found is religiously guarded to this day. It is hard by the statue of the infant Jupiter, who is represented as sitting with Juno in the lap of Fortune and reaching for her breast, and it is held in the highest reverence by mothers.
¹⁰⁶

At other times discovery narratives were used to justify or explain political actions as foretold by a divine source (Suetonius,
Julius
81 and
Galba
9, 2). We are fortunate to have a full study of the phenomenon, covering these and a host of other related issues, in another important contribution by Wolfgang Speyer.
¹⁰⁷

An equally clever, if less elaborate, ruse occurs in forgeries that warn their readers against reading forgeries. Who would suspect a forger of condemning his own practice? Such warnings occur occasionally in Christian writings; in these contexts, the warning is invariably directed against the forgeries of “false” teachers, as opposed to the writer who issues the warning, who sees himself, of course, as representing the truth. As already mentioned, we have a fairly elaborate example near the end of our period in the Apostolic Constitutions:

We have sent all these things to you, that you may know our opinion, what it is; and that you may not receive those books which obtain in our name, but are written by the ungodly. For you are not to attend to the names of the apostles, but to the nature of the things, and their settled opinions. For we know that Simon and Cleobius and their followers, have compiled poisonous books under the name of Christ and of His disciples, and do carry them about in order to deceive you who love Christ, and us His servants. And among the ancients also some have written apocryphal books of Moses, and Enoch, and Adam, and Isaiah, and David, and Elijah, and of the three patriarchs, pernicious and repugnant to the truth. (6.16)
¹⁰⁸

Later in the text the forger issues a more severe warning: “If any one publicly reads in the Church the spurious books of the ungodly, as if they were holy, to the destruction of the people and of the clergy, let him be deprived” (8.47.60).

Also as we have seen, a similar ploy appears already near the beginning of the period of our concern, in 2 Thess. 2:2. Here an author falsely claiming to be Paul warns against a letter “as if by us.” An analogous concern is expressed by the forger of the Epistula Petri and the Contestio of the Pseudo-Clementine literature, whose false author warns his ostensible reader to protect his writings against falsifications.

Orthonymous writings sometimes employed forms of material and literary prophylaxis to assure their readers of their authenticity. Not surprisingly, forgers occasionally took the cue and inserted such forms of protection in their own works as a subterfuge. In the documentary realm we learn from Suetonius that Nero made provisions for the protection of wills: “It was in his [Nero’s] reign that a protection against forgers (adversus falsarios) was first devised, by having no tablets signed that were not bored with holes through which a cord was thrice passed.”
¹⁰⁹
Sometimes authenticity was “guaranteed” by a sign or seal, as when Augustine indicates in Letter 59: “I have sent this letter sealed with a ring which has a head of a man looking to one side.”
¹¹⁰
At other times the wording of a writing itself was to be taken as a sign of authenticity, as in the thirteenth letter of Plato, widely thought to be forged: “Plato to Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse, Wishes well-doing. Let this greeting not only commence my letter but serve at the same time as a token that it is from me”
.
¹¹¹
Something similar occurs in 2 Thessalonians, where some interpreters have thought that the author doth protest too much: “The greeting is in my own hand—the hand of Paul—which is a sign in my every epistle; this is how I write” (3:17).

Authors who wanted to implement a more sophisticated form of prophylaxis would sometimes resort to the use of embedded acrostics. Dionysius of Halicarnassus indicates that the acrostic was the mark of the pagan Sybilline oracles. After the collection of oracles was burned in the fire of 83
BCE,
the Roman senate sent out envoys to collect copies from various places, especially Erythrea in Asia. But not all those collected were judged authentic. As Dionysius indicates: “Some of these are found to be interpolations among the genuine Sibylline oracles, being recognized as such by means of the so-called acrostics. In all this I am following the account given by Terentius Varro in his work on religion.”
¹¹²

A later Christian forger accordingly followed suit and produced at least part of what is now book 8 of the Oracula Sibyllina with an elaborate acrostic that celebrated its own theme. The first letters of lines 217–50 produce the words
Acrostics could perform a variety of functions in forged works, as we saw at the outset with the mischievous Dionysius the Renegade and his pseudo-Sophoclean
Parthenopaeus
.

As a final technique of authentication, I might mention the practice of inserting forged material into writings judged to be authentic, in order to establish credentials through association. We have seen a comparable ploy with respect to the treatise of Tertullian on the Trinity, which according to Rufinus (
De adult. libr. Origen
) was inserted into a manuscript that otherwise contained the authentic letters of Cyprian, in an attempt to validate Tertullian’s (discredited) views of the Holy Spirit. In this case, the Tertullian work was not forged; by leaving off the author’s name, however, the culprit(s) managed to pass the work off as that of a respected and unquestioned authority.

Similar tricks were used by other pagan and Christian forgers. And so, for example, it is widely held that the epistles of Plato—most of them forged—acquired their standing by being placed in a corpus that contained, as well, writings that were authentic. And the six forged letters of the Long Recension of Ignatius were intermingled with the authentic seven, which were themselves interpolated by the forger of the six. In both these instances the perpetrators were remarkably successful; their handiwork was not uncovered until relatively modern times.

At the outset of this chapter I stressed the importance of differentiating between an author’s intention and her motivation. Intention involves what an author wants to accomplish; motivation involves her reasons for wanting to accomplish it. There were numerous motivations that drove ancient authors to produce forgeries. In virtually every instance, however, their intention was the same. It was to convince their readers that they were the person they claimed to be. Their intention, in other words, was deceit.
¹¹³

Many scholars have argued otherwise, maintaining that no deceit was involved in the production of literary pseudepigrapha. This view flies in the face of the convincing arguments of such older scholars as J. S. Candlish and Frederik Torm, the latter of whom could write already some eighty years ago that the idea that pseudonymous writings were widely seen in antiquity simply as a literary form
is a “modern invention.”
¹¹⁴
The intervening years, regrettably, have seen no shortage of scholars who have subscribed to this “modern invention” of the notion of a literary forgery not meant to deceive its readers. Most of these scholars are experts in religion, and specifically in the New Testament. Their own intentions are in most instances clear: to absolve the authors of ancient forgeries of any guilt involved with lying and deception. All are heirs of the discredited scholars that Torm had in mind, such as the nineteenth-century J. Bernays: “Pagans, Jews and Christians have made use of the same [literary form]—one with greater, the other with lesser skill, but all without experiencing even the slightest scruple. This appeared to them to be a mere game of hide and seek, in which one deemed neither oneself nor another as a true forger.”
¹¹⁵
In the English world some such views were expressed repeatedly, for example in the classic work on the Pastorals by P. N. Harrison: The author “was not conscious of misrepresenting the Apostle in any way; he was not consciously deceiving anybody; it is not, indeed, necessary to suppose that he did deceive anybody.”
¹¹⁶

Even though such views have long been discredited by scholars of ancient forgery, they continue to live on among Neutestamentlers, in part, no doubt, because those in the guild rely on the work of others in the guild, and do not as a rule read widely outside of it, for example in the work of scholars of ancient forgery. And so, for example, we find in a recent introduction to the New Testament by P. Achtemeier, J. Green, and M. Thompson a repetition of the old chestnut: “Pseudonymity appears to have been primarily a literary technique, and not one meant to deliberately deceive its readers.”
¹¹⁷
Or writing in the wake of his student David Meade,
¹¹⁸
James Dunn can assert that an ancient pseudepigrapher standing in a(nother author’s) tradition “could present his message as the message of the originator of that stream of tradition, because in his eyes that is what it was.… There was no intention to deceive, and almost certainly the final readers were not in fact deceived.”
¹¹⁹

Similar views are expressed by commentators who want to insist that New Testament pseudepigrapha are “transparent fictions”—meaning that the readers were meant to see through them and in fact did see through them, so that no deception was involved. This is R. Bauckham’s claim with respect to 2 Peter: “Petrine
authorship was intended to be an entirely transparent fiction.”
¹²⁰
Even as good a scholar as Luke Timothy Johnson can write with approbation: “Later scholars [i.e., after Schleiermacher] became more sophisticated about pseudonymity, recognizing that it was both prevalent in antiquity and often a transparent fiction that did not seek to deceive.”
¹²¹
Such views are virtually ubiquitous among New Testament commentators.
¹²²

Scholars who have considered the early Christian pseudepigrapha not in a cultural vacuum, however, but in relation to the broader phenomenon have, as a rule, taken an opposite stand. In his presidential address to the SBL, for example, Bruce Metzger asked the rhetorical question: “How can it be so confidently known that such productions ‘would deceive no one’? Indeed if nobody was taken in by the device of pseudepigraphy, it is difficult to see why it was adopted at all.”
¹²³
The problematic notion of a “transparent fiction” was more carefully exposed, recently, by Annette Merz: