Forged
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Are there other forgeries from the earliest of Christian times? I deal with this question at length later in the book, looking into evidence that a number of the books of the New Testament were not written by the people who are claimed to be their authors. For now I’m interested in noting that this is not simply a finding of modern scholarship. A number of the books of the New Testament were disputed already in early Christianity, among the Christian scholars of the second to the fourth centuries, who were arguing over which books should be included in Scripture.
The most famous instance is the book of Revelation. A third-century Christian scholar of Alexandria, Egypt, named Dionysius, argued that the book was not actually written by Jesus’s disciple John, the son of Zebedee. Dionysius’s argument was compelling and continues to be compelling to scholars today. He maintained that the writing style of the book is so different from that of the Gospel of John that they could not have been written by the same person (modern scholars differ from Dionysius only in thinking that the Gospel too was probably not written by John). Dionysius thought there must have been two authors of the same name who later came to be confused as the same person. But it is interesting that Dionysius, according to the church father Eusebius, had a number of predecessors who had argued that Revelation was written not by a different man named John, but by a heretic named Cerinthus, who forged the account in order to promote his false teaching that there would be a literal future paradise of a thousand years here on earth.8
The small letter of Jude, allegedly written by Jesus’s own brother, was also debated in the early church. Some Christians argued that it was not authentic, in part, according to the famous fourth-century Christian scholar Jerome, because the book quotes an apocryphal book called Enoch as if it were authoritative Scripture.9 The book of 2 Peter was rejected by a number of early church fathers, as discussed by both Jerome and Eusebius, but none more straightforwardly than the notable Christian teacher of Alexandria Didymus the Blind, who argued that “the letter is false and so is not to be in the canon.”10 Peter, in other words, did not actually write it, according to Didymus, even though the author claimed to be Peter.
Other Christian teachers disputed whether 1 and 2 Timothy were actually by Paul, some claiming that their contents showed that he did not write them.11 The book of Hebrews was particularly debated; the book does not explicitly claim to be written by Paul, but there are hints at the end that the author wants readers to think that he’s Paul (see 13:22–25). For centuries its Pauline authorship was a matter of dispute. The book was finally admitted into the canon only when nearly everyone came to think Paul must have written it.
In short, there were long, protracted, and often heated debates in the early church over forged documents. Early Christians realized that there were numerous forgeries in circulation, and they wanted to know which books were written by their alleged authors and which were not. As we will see more fully later, practically no one approved of the practice of forgery; on the contrary, it was widely condemned, even in books that were themselves forged (such as 2 Thessalonians and the Apostolic Constitutions).
Most of this book will focus on examples of forgery in early Christianity. To make sense of the early Christian forgeries, however, we need to take a step back and consider the phenomenon of forgery in the ancient world more broadly. That will be the focus of the rest of this chapter. We begin with a very important discussion of the terms that I will be using.
The Terms of the Debate
THE FIRST TWO TERMS are especially technical and, although I won’t be using them much, it is important to know what they mean. An “orthonymous” (literally, “rightly named”) writing is one that really is written by the person who claims to be writing it. There are seven letters of Paul, out of the thirteen in the New Testament that bear his name, that virtually everyone agrees are orthonymous, actually written by Paul.
A “homonymous” (literally, “same named”) writing is one that is written by someone who happens to have the same name as someone else. In the ancient world, the vast majority of people did not have last names, and a lot of people had the same first names. This was as true among Christians as it was for everyone else. Lots of people were named John, James, and Jude, for example. If someone named John wrote the book of Revelation and simply called himself John, he wasn’t necessarily claiming to be anyone but himself. When later Christians assumed that this John must be the disciple John, the son of Zebedee, it wasn’t really the author’s fault. He just happened to have the same name as another more famous person. The book is not forged, then. It is simply homonymous, assuming that John the son of Zebedee did not write it, a safe assumption for most critical scholars. It was included in the canon because of this mistaken identity.
Other writings are “anonymous,” literally, “having no name.” These are books whose authors never identify themselves. That is, technically speaking, true of one-third of the New Testament books. None of the Gospels tells us the name of its author. Only later did Christians call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; and later scribes then added these names to the book titles. Also anonymous are the book of Acts and the letters known as 1, 2, and 3 John. Technically speaking, the same is true of the book of Hebrews; the author never mentions his name, even if he wants you to assume he’s Paul.12
The term “pseudonymous” (literally, “falsely named”) is a little more slippery, and I need to explain how I will be using it. Technically it refers to any book that appears under the name of someone other than the author, but there are two kinds of pseudonymous writings. Sometimes authors simply take a pen name. When Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn and signed it “Mark Twain,” he was not trying to deceive his readers into thinking that he was someone famous; it was just a pen name to mask his own identity. So too when Mary Ann Evans wrote Silas Marner and signed it “George Eliot.” This use of a pen name did not happen a lot in the ancient world, but it did happen on occasion. The Greek historian Xenophon, for example, wrote his famous work the Anabasis using the pen name Themistogenes; and the Greek philosopher Iamblichus wrote his treatise On the Mysteries under the made-up name Abammon. In these instances there does not appear to have been any real attempt to deceive readers into thinking that the author was someone famous.13
The other kind of pseudonymous writing involves a book that is circulated under the name of someone else, usually some kind of authority figure who is presumed to be well known to the reading audience. For this particular kind of pseudonymous writing I will be using the technical term “pseudepigraphy” (literally, “written under a false name”). A pseudepigraphal writing, then, is one that is claimed to be written by a famous, well-known, or authoritative person who did not in fact write it.
But as it turns out, there are also two kinds of pseudepigraphal writings. Sometimes a writing was published anonymously, with no author’s name attached, for example, the Gospel of Matthew. But later readers and copyists asserted that they knew who had written it and claimed it was by a well-known, authoritative person, in this case the disciple Matthew. In writings of this sort, which are wrongly attributed to a well-known person, the author is not trying to deceive anyone.14 He or she remained anonymous. It is only later readers who claimed that the author was someone else. This kind of pseudepigraphy, then, involves a “false ascription” a work is “ascribed” to someone who didn’t write it.
The other kind of pseudepigraphy does involve a kind of intentional deceit by an author. This is when an author writes a work claiming to be someone else. This is what I am here calling forgery. My definition of a forgery, then, is a writing that claims to be written by someone (a known figure) who did not in fact write it.
Over the years I have had several people object to my use of the term “forgery,” and I well understand the hesitancy of other scholars to use the term. In modern times, when we think of forgery, we think of highly illegal activities (forging precious stones, money, or books for profit) that can send a person to pris
on. Ancient forgers were not as a rule thrown in jail, because there simply weren’t laws governing the production and distribution of literature. There were no copyright laws, for example. But ancient authors did see this kind of activity as fraudulent, they recognized it as deceitful, they called it lying (and other even nastier things), and they often punished those who were caught doing it. So when I use the term “forgery,” I do mean for it to have negative connotations, in part because, as we will see, the terms used by ancient authors were just as negative, if not more so.
My use of the term “forgery,” however, does not say anything about the legal status of the document in question or the criminal activity of the author. It is a technical term referring to one kind of pseudepigraphal writing, one in which an author knowingly claims to be someone else. One of the overarching theses of my book is that those who engaged in this activity in the ancient world were roundly condemned for lying and trying to deceive their readers.
Motivations for Forgery
IF, AS I SHOW later, forgery was widely condemned, why did people do it? And how did they justify what they were doing in their own eyes? Those will be two of the leading questions for the rest of this chapter. The question of “why” they did it is a bit complicated, and here I need to differentiate between two ideas that people sometimes confuse in their minds. These are the notions of “intention,” on the one hand, and “motivation,” on the other. I think the difference between the two can be easily explained.
If my wife asks me, “Why are you going to the store?” I could give a variety of answers. One answer might be, “To buy something for dinner.” Another might be, “Because there is nothing in the fridge.” These are actually two different kinds of answers. The first indicates what I intend to do once I’m at the store: I intend to buy some food for tonight. The second indicates what is motivating me to go to the store in the first place: I am motivated by the fact that there is no food in the house. Intentions are not the same as motivations. The “intention” is what you want to accomplish; the “motivation” is the reason you want to accomplish it.
This is also the case when it comes to forgers and their forgeries. There is a difference between a forger’s intention and motivation. A forger’s intention, in almost every instance, is to deceive readers about his identity, that is, to make readers believe that he is someone other than who he is. But he may have lots of different reasons (motivations) for wanting to do that.
Authors have always had numerous reasons for wanting to write a forgery. In the modern world, as we have already seen, the principal motivation is to make money, as in the case of Konrad Kujau and the Hitler diaries. This does not appear to be the main reason for forgeries back in antiquity. The market for such “original books” was limited then, because the book-selling industry was so modest—books could not be mass-produced and widely published. Still, there were instances in which forged books could turn a profit, as we learn from a famous author named Galen, a second-century physician who lived in Rome.
Galen was extremely learned and one of the most prolific authors from the ancient world. This was a world that did not, for the most part, have public libraries for people to use. But on occasion a local king would start up a library, principally for scholars, and there was sometimes competition among libraries to acquire greater holdings than their rivals as a kind of status symbol. The two most important libraries in antiquity were those of Alexandria in Egypt and Pergamum in Asia Minor. According to Galen, the kings who built these libraries were keen to increase their holdings and were intent on getting as many original copies as they could of such authors as Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Having original copies of these writings was important in an age when scribes could and did make mistakes when reproducing the text. If you had the original, you knew you had the author’s own words, not some kind of error-ridden copy botched by the local scribe. So these two libraries were willing to pay cash on the barrelhead for original copies of their coveted authors’ works.
You’d be amazed how many “original” copies of Plato, Aristotle, and Euripides start showing up, when you are willing to pay gold for them. According to Galen, forgeries started to appear by unscrupulous authors who simply wanted the money.15
We have seen another motivation, or combination of motivations, in the case of Dionysius the Renegade. One could argue that Dionysius perpetrated his fraudulent play, the Parthenopaeus, principally in order to see if he could get away with it. Or he may have done it to make a fool out of his nemesis, Heraclides. We have other instances in the ancient world of a similar motivation, to pull the wool over someone’s, or everyone’s, eyes. As it turns out, some such motivation may still be at work in our world today, as some scholars have thought that one of the most famous “discoveries” of an ancient Gospel in the twentieth century was in fact a forgery by the scholar who claimed to have discovered it. This is the famous Secret Gospel of Mark allegedly found by Morton Smith in 1958.16
Other authors forged documents for political or military ends. The Jewish historian Josephus, for example, reports that an enemy of Alexander, the son of King Herod, forged a letter in Alexander’s name in which he announced plans to murder his father. According to Josephus, the forger was a secretary of the king who was “a bold man, cunning in counterfeiting anyone’s hand.” But the plan back-fired; after producing numerous forgeries, the man was caught and “was at last put to death for it.”17
Political forgeries were usually not treated kindly. But sometimes they worked. In the third century the Roman emperor Aurelian had a private secretary, named Eros, who had incurred his master’s anger and was about to be punished. To forestall the outcome, he forged a list of names of political leaders whom the emperor had supposedly decided to have executed for treason and put the forged list into circulation. The men on the list rose up and assassinated the emperor.18
Sometimes the motivation for a forgery was less political than religious—to defend religious institutions or practices or to defend one’s religious claims against those of opponents. One of the more humorous accounts occurs in the writings of the second-century pagan author Lucian of Samosata, a brilliant wit and keen critic of all things hypocritical. One of Lucian’s hilarious treatises, Alexander the False Prophet, is directed against a man named Alexander, who wanted to set up an “oracle”—that is, a place where a god would communicate with humans—in the town of Abunoteichos. Alexander was a crafty fellow who knew that he had to convince people that the god Apollo really had decided to communicate through him, Alexander, at this newly founded place of prophecy, since he planned to receive payments for being able to deliver Apollo’s pronouncements to those who would come to inquire. So, according to Lucian, Alexander forged a set of bronze tablets and buried them in one of the oldest and most famous of Apollo’s temples, in the city of Chalcedon. When the tablets were then dug up, word got around about what was written in this “miraculous” find. On these tablets Apollo declared that he was soon to move to take up residence in a new home, in Abunoteichos. Alexander then established the oracle there and attracted a huge following, thanks in no small measure to the forged writings in the name of the god he claimed to represent.
An example of a Jewish forgery created to support Judaism can be found in the famous Letter of Aristeas.19 Aristeas was allegedly a pagan member of the court of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BCE). In this letter “Aristeas” describes how the king decided to include a copy of the Jewish Scriptures in his expanding library, and so he made arrangements with the Jewish high priest in Israel to send scholars to Egypt who could translate the sacred texts from their original Hebrew language into Greek. Seventy-two scholars were sent, and through miraculous divine intervention they managed to produce, individually, precisely the same wording for their translations of the Scriptures. Since the Letter of Aristeas is allegedly by a non-Jew, giving a more or less “disinterested” account of how the Hebrew Bible wa
s translated into Greek, it has all the appearance of stating the facts “as they really were.” But in reality, the letter is a forgery, written by a Jew in Alexandria in the second century BCE. It was written, in part, in order to show the divine inspiration of the Jewish sacred texts, even in their Greek translation.
As already intimated in earlier examples, sometimes forgeries were created with the express purpose of making a personal enemy look bad (as with Dionysius the Renegade) or getting an opponent into serious trouble (as with the person who forged a letter to King Herod). As it turns out, this is one of the best-attested motivations for creating forgeries in the ancient world. The Roman poet Martial, author of a large number of witty and very funny poems, complains in several places that others have forged poems in his name that were either very bad or in very bad taste, precisely in order to make Martial himself look bad.20 Even more slanderous is an episode reported by the historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius, who indicates that an enemy of the famous philosopher Epicurus, a rival named Diotimus, forged fifty obscene letters in Epicurus’s name and put them in circulation. Epicurus already had a problem with having a (totally undeserved) bad reputation as someone addicted to pleasure. These forgeries simply added fuel to the fire.21
Or consider the case of Anaximenes, as reported to us by a Greek geographer of the second century CE, Pausanias. Anaximenes was a clever but ill-natured fellow who had a quarrel with a famous public speaker named Theopompus. In order to strike out at his enemy, claims Pausanias, Anaximenes wrote a treatise in the writing style of Theopompus, naming himself as Theopompus. In this treatise he spoke abusively of the citizens of three chief Greek cities, Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. Once the treatise circulated in these cities, Theopompus became very much a persona non grata, even though he had nothing to do with it.22