The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  The convert Marcion, whose heretical beliefs were subdued in the middle of the second century, knew of Paul’s letters, but did not include in his canon the Second Epistle to Timothy. An alert reader, Marcion believed only Luke’s Gospel was necessary for salvation (though even that benefited from some judicious pruning), and he must have been struck by the contradiction between the letter supposedly by Paul and the accounts of Paul’s travels in Acts, Luke’s continuation of the history of the earliest church. In 2 Timothy, the author impersonating Paul says that he has left Trophimus sick at Miletus: nonetheless, a perfectly healthy Trophimus is with Paul in Jerusalem after the saint’s departure from Miletus in Acts of the Apostles. Was it this inconsistency that suggested to Marcion that the letter was not, in fact, by Paul? Or was it the overly vehement assertion that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God”?

  On his way to Damascus to continue the extirpation of the Jesus cult, Saul was confronted with the object of his hatred. In a blinding vision, the risen Christ asked, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Saul’s sight was restored by a follower of the Way in Damascus, and the erstwhile intimidator performed the most famous volte-face in the history of religion. Saul’s name did not immediately change; it was only when he struck the sorcerer Elymas blind through the power of the Holy Spirit that we learn he was now also called Paul.

  Paul’s mission was not to convert the orthodox Israelites whose rejection of Christ he had so recently enforced, but to proselytize among the Gentiles. His evangelical itinerary took him to Antioch, Athens, Ephesus (where he burned “books of curious arts” worth fifty thousand pieces of silver), and eventually Rome. He was mistaken for the god Mercury in Lystra, and was told by the Roman governor Festus at Caesarea that “too much learning doth make thee mad.” He was whipped thirty-nine times on five occasions, beaten thrice with rods, stoned once, and shipwrecked three times. Although the Book of Acts informs the reader of numerous miracles, including even the raising of the dead, his own Epistles are remarkably coy about supernatural powers, preferring instead a catalogue of his physical sufferings.

  In 367, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, decreed that the New Testament had twenty-seven books. Paul, of course, had not been writing a testament, and would have been surprised that his letters dealing with specific crises in various churches now had universal relevance (though he would have been equally surprised that the world still existed). Although Athanasius commanded, “Let no one add, let nothing be taken away,” the newly crystallized “Bible” still retained the traces of its less than monolithic conception. In 1 Corinthians 5:9, Saint Paul had said, “I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators.” The “0 Corinthians” letter is lost, presumably because its antilibertine agenda was adequately dealt with elsewhere (or, an admittedly remote possibility, because it was rather too specific about the sexual proclivities of the Corinthians; the demotic expression “to corinthicate”—κορινθιαζεσθαι—meant to whore around).

  Paul hoped to preach the gospel as far as Spain. Conflicts and tensions between converted and traditional Jews, however, meant that he was forced to return to Jerusalem and defend himself against a charge of sedition. A conspiracy of forty men loyal to the Sanhedrin had sworn an oath not to eat before they had murdered Paul, and it was therefore in Paul’s own interests to allow the Roman overlords to decide his case, rather than the Jewish Temple authorities; moreover, being a Roman citizen, Paul had the right to appeal to the emperor himself. Unluckily, in this case the emperor was Nero.

  Agrippa, the client-king, and Festus, the Roman overlord of Judaea, agreed to Paul’s request, ruefully noting that if he had not invoked this right, they were minded to set him free anyway. Paul was transferred to Rome, and while the boat was buffeted by tempests and stymied in doldrums, he impressed the crew by prophesying that none of them would come to harm, for it was decreed that he would stand before Caesar. They safely reached Rome, and, practically at that point, the Acts of the Apostles unexpectedly ends. The whole narrative has been moving toward this encounter, yet the final climactic showdown between Nero and Paul is either lost or was never even written.

  We do not know how Paul died. One tradition asserts that he did reach Spain, but, given the emperor’s notorious sadism and insanity (he used Christians dipped in pitch to light the streets), it would be nothing short of miraculous for Paul to have persuaded Nero to let him go free. But miracles had been known to happen, if we trust the author of Acts.

  Paul disappears from the narrative like Enoch or Isaiah ascending into Heaven. One ingenious speculation reads the text of Acts of the Apostles as a kind of legal briefing for the lawyer who would defend Paul: it insists, for example, that he has always been deferential to political authorities. The ending was not written because it had not yet happened. This hypothesis cannot, however, explain why no later writer appended the details of what transpired, the arguments for faith put forward by Paul or the emperor’s retort. There is no ancient account of the death of St. Paul.

  The very fact that Paul’s name was later used to bolster missives by other authors attests to his phenomenal standing among his peers. Never having met the physical Jesus, never even using the word “Christian,” Paul invents Christianity. If the whole of philosophy is merely footnotes to Plato, then the entirety of Christian theology is an attempt to unravel the insights of Paul.

  Origen

  {c. 185–254}

  ORIGEN, THE GREATEST of the early exegetes of Christianity, freely admitted that even he had, on one occasion, grievously misinterpreted the Bible. Reading the Gospel of St. Matthew, chapter 19, verse 12, he had taken rather too literally the phrase “and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it,” and castrated himself. In terms of his career this was bad enough, as his admission to the priesthood was repeatedly questioned on account of this self-mutilation; in terms of his scriptural hermeneutics, it was an embarrassing lapse into reading as verbatim a text that was deeply allegorical, anagogical, metaphorical, and mystical in its import.

  Origen was born in Alexandria into a Christian family. From an early age, he displayed an almost excessive zeal for reading scripture, to the extent that his father, Leonides, in a rather touching anecdote recorded by Eusebius, would kiss his son’s chest as a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit. Leonides was executed in 202 under the purges of Emperor Severus: no doubt this deeply affected Origen’s theology. At the age of only eighteen he became the head of the catechetical school in Alexandria, preparing candidates not only for baptism, but for the possibility of martyrdom. He sold his beautiful editions of the Greek philosophers and poets in order to support the family—a decision he may later have rued.

  His intellectual skills were soon applied to weightier matters than the simple induction of new converts. “I was sometimes approached by heretics and people educated after the Greek model, particularly in philosophy,” he wrote. “I therefore thought it advisable to make a thorough study both of heretical doctrine and of the philosopher’s views about the truth.” A school began to form around Origen, where he encouraged the students to “read all philosophy without preferring one . . . or rejecting another.” Except for the atheist Epicureans, “nothing was kept from us, nothing concealed or made inaccessible. We could learn any theory, barbarian or Greek, mystical or moral,” recorded one student, Gregory of Nyssa.

  Some students converted to Christianity, others merely improved their moral conduct. In effect, Origen was embarking on a massive liberal program of education that would have far-reaching consequences for the church, and equip him for the most intensive theological battle of his career. Listening to other philosophies had an immediate pragmatic goal: as Origen sagely observed, the established schools—Stoicism, Platonism, and so forth—found it difficult to effect change. “They never listen to those who think differently . . . that is why no old man ever succeeded in persuadi
ng any of the young.” In the intellectual melting pot of early third-century Alexandria, Origen had the opportunity to immerse himself in vastly different philosophies. “All wisdom is from God,” and the Christian scholar winnowed the errors from the inspired pagans.

  Origen’s fame as a philosopher, textual critic, and preacher won him praise from his adversaries, even from Julia Mamaea, aunt of the Emperor Heliogabalus. Seven amanuenses transcribed his sermons, although his Commentary on St. John was preserved in an imperfect Latin translation by Rufinus, who often “supplied the missing threads . . . readers would not stomach his habit of raising questions and leaving them in the air, as he often did when preaching.” Origen’s eight-volume Commentaryon Genesis is lost, as is Rufinus’ text, and the Commentary on XXV Psalms is a handful of fragments.

  Origen left Alexandria in 230 because of a dispute with his bishop, Demetrius. He was accused of preaching without being a priest, and then of becoming a priest in Palestine despite being a castrato. Finally excommunicated, he settled in Caesarea, where he participated in ecclesiastical councils, corresponded with other scholars, and, eventually, was tortured in the resurgence of anti-Christian edicts under the Emperor Decius.

  There, he also completed his major work, Against Celsus. Celsus was a prominent Platonist scholar who, around 180, had written a major philosophical diatribe against Christianity entitled On the True Doctrine. Although seventy years old, the attack was still sufficiently pertinent for Ambrosius to encourage Origen to consider a rebuttal. Without Origen’s retort, we would know nothing of Celsus at all.

  Christianity had been attacked before, by satirists like Lucian of Samosata and the orator Fronto, but the basis of the criticisms had been so hyperbolic (ritual murder, atheism, cannibalism) that the earlier theologians, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement, had concentrated on suppressing internal division, heresy, and unorthodox teachings, rather than parrying criticism from outsiders. Celsus’ polemic was of a different order, and required a more substantial retort. Against Celsus is the first true work of Christian apologetics.

  Celsus’ On the True Doctrine is lost, but its substance can be inferred from the frequent quotation Origen deploys throughout his counterattack. Scholarly estimates have presumed that anything between 50 and 90 percent of Celsus’ treatise has been ossified in Origen’s work, though it would seem uncontentious that Origen would not choose to quote any hypotheses he could not disprove.

  What is evident is that Celsus had a certain gift for vituperation. In deliriously caustic prose he castigates the new religion: it is for “sinners, the stupid, the childish and, not to mince words, outcasts of all kinds . . . if you wanted to form a gang of thugs, who else would you ask to join?” Jesus was a two-bit street magician, the apostles were “miserable publicans and sailors,” and the only evidence of the resurrection came from a “fanatical woman.” Entertainingly arch though this is, it allows Origen to undermine him with considerable elegance. Each mocking exaggeration is held up to calm correction. Christians may evangelize sinners; does Celsus believe that there is anyone who has not sinned? Though Celsus mocks Jesus for allowing his own betrayer to become a disciple, Origen counters that even Celsus’ beloved Plato was intellectually betrayed by Aristotle.

  When Celsus points out parallels between classical and Christian mythology, such as the similarity between Deucalion and Noah, arguing that this new religion is merely derivative, Origen retaliates with an impassioned defense of the allegorical nature of scripture. Adam is not just a literal forefather, but the condition of all mankind. The new religion has more truth, even if the Greek versions have more beauty.

  Even if Origen did not introduce the concept of nonliteral reading into biblical exegesis after the incident with the knife, he certainly perfected it. In his commentaries on St. John, he addresses head-on the contradictions between John and the other evangelists. Such inconsistencies were deliberately present in the text like hermeneutic distress flares. The Holy Spirit allowed them to shock readers out of acquiescence and force them to consider the symbolic levels of the narrative. This manner of reading the Bible is an unquestionably profound legacy.

  Origen did not die during his torture, but soon afterward; thereby he was denied his longed-for status as a martyr. After his death, many of his works were banned and destroyed, particularly since he seemed to subscribe to an unorthodox belief (that God’s power was so great that, should He wish it, He could even redeem Satan) that ran against notions of election. Having been excommunicated in life, he was eventually deemed heretical in death. His works were destroyed, and the most substantial remnant twins him perpetually with the pagan Celsus, each forever preserving and subverting the other.

  Faltonia Betitia Proba

  {c. 322–c. 370}

  IN HER ONE extant poem, Faltonia Betitia Proba informs us of the other poems she had written:

  Once I wrote of leaders violating sacred truths Of them who cling to this terrible thirst for power.

  She had concerned herself with “the spectacles of trivial themes . . . horses, arms of men and their wars.” More specifically, she had written a panegyrical epic on the defeat of the usurper Magnetius by Emperor Constantius II. It was at a time when her husband, Adelphius of the Anicii, would have appreciated her public show of support. The emperor and his brothers and corulers, Constantine II and Constans, had found that dividing the empire led to a multiplication of problems: in the early 350s, Constantius II had faced four separate rebellions. When Adelphius was elevated to the post of prefect in 351, loyalty was at a premium.

  But we cannot be sure about Proba’s description of her lost works, since the poem in which she alludes to them is an example of a very peculiar genre: the cento, which means that Proba did not actually write any of the lines of her poem.

  A cento is a patchwork, where the writer rearranges lines by another poet to create a wholly new poem. Proba’s Cento shuffles 694 lines of Virgil to narrate a Christian history of the world, from the creation to Christ’s resurrection. Tradition has it that she composed the work in an attempt to convert Adelphius, showing the immanence of God’s truth even in his beloved pagan authors. She describes the deity in this manner:

  When He saw them all shining steadfast in the clear skies (Virgil, Aeneid, book 3, line 518)

  The Almighty gave his name and numbers to the stars (Virgil, Georgics, book 1, line 137)

  And the year was divided into four equal parts (Virgil, Georgics, book 1, line 258)

  Centos were a popular form. Ausonius composed an epithalamion version for the nuptials of Valentinian—H. J. Rose describes how “by a process of collocation, totally innocent phrases of the poet are twisted into indecent meanings.” The poet Hosidius Geta, according to Tertullian, had created a whole tragedy about Medea using the method. Theoretically, if any cento’s ur-text exists, and we knew the length of a lost cento, it would be possible to re-create it from the works of Virgil.

  Suppose, for example, that Proba’s Cento had joined her other works in oblivion, but a passing mention in a minor commentator retained the information that it had been 694 lines long. The number of possible permutations is given by the factorial formula where n denotes the size of the sample from which the lines are drawn, and r is the length of the finished work. This is a factorial—for example, factorial 3 (3!) is a way of expressing 3 × 2 × 1; similarly factorial 7 (7!) is 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1.

  Using the dimensions of Proba’s Cento, we would have to calculate very large factorials—12915! divided by the product of 694! and 12221!.

  Thus, the number of combinations is:

  —which hugely exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. Moreover, our formula does not take into consideration that the order of the lines is also important: it treats the combinations (a, b, c), (a, c, b), (b, a, c), (b, c, a), (c, a, b), and (c, b, a) as being identical. The actual number of permutations is a number longer than the rest of this book. But still, if only we knew the extent of any lost cento
and had sufficient Latin scholars to weed out the versions where the verbs do not agree, or the rhythm syncopates, or that are just meaningless, and had enough paper—a lost work could be found!

  As for Proba, we do not know if her poetic deck-shuffling had the desired effect of converting her husband. Scholars have speculated that it was written around 362, when the Emperor Julian, called the Apostate, had declared that classical texts were not sacrilegious: however, he also forbade Christians to teach and resurrected the old religions, so it would be daring, to say the least, for a writer to negotiate the political, cultural, and theological paradoxes of bending paganism to the ends of Christianity.

  Proba’s tragedy stems from her use of this singular form. Unlike the majority of female Roman authors, Proba is still represented by one work, although we have none of her own words. Without knowing the date of composition, it is impossible to decide if the Cento is a wry parlor game or a sly act of subterfuge. She shimmers, trapped on the cusp of becoming lost.

  {c. mid-fourth–c. early fifth century}

  KLIDSA TELLS US almost nothing of himself. He is traditionally associated with the court of Vikramditya, the “Sun of Valor”; however, this title was adopted by King Chandra Gupta II in the fourth century C.E., as well as referring to a semimythical king who defeated the aka, or Scythians, in the first century C.E. The earlier Vikramditya had his court at Ujjayina, a city praised by Klidsa in his lyrical poem The Cloud Messenger (Meghadutam). Conversely, it has been suggested that the poem was written for Klidsa’s wife, during a separation when he was advising the widow of Chandra Gupta II. Dates from the fifth century B.C.E. to the seventh century C.E. have been advanced for Klidsa, and evidence from Greek astronomical terms to Chinese manuscript acquisition has been proposed and countered. All that is certain is that he is the most highly regarded of all Sanskrit poets, the Kavi-kula-guru or Master of Poets, as a later writer was to call him.