I’ve mentioned only three of these discrepancies. There are many others.9 They involve just about every aspect of the historical Paul. Paul’s theology and preaching differ between Acts and the letters; other differences are in Paul’s attitude toward pagans, his relationship to the Jewish law, his missionary strategy, and his itinerary. At just about every point where it is possible to check what Acts says about Paul with what Paul says about himself in his authentic letters, there are discrepancies. The conclusion is hard to escape that Acts was probably not written by one of Paul’s traveling companions.
But why would the author then speak in the first person on four occasions? Anyone reading this book so far should have no trouble figuring out why. The author is making a claim about himself. He is not naming himself. He is simply claiming to be a traveling companion of Paul’s and therefore unusually well suited to give a “true” account of Paul’s message and mission. But he almost certainly was not a companion of Paul’s. On the one hand, he was writing long after Paul and his companions were dead. Scholars usually date Acts to around 85 CE or so, over two decades after Paul’s death. On the other hand, he seems to be far too poorly informed about Paul’s theology and missionary activities to have been someone with firsthand knowledge. If the author is claiming to be someone he is not, what kind of work is he writing? A book written with a false authorial claim is a forgery. Obviously the authorial claim in this case is not as boldfaced as in, say, 1 Timothy or 3 Corinthians, whose authors directly say they are Paul. But the claim of Acts is clear nonetheless; the author indicates that he was a participant in and eyewitness to Paul’s mission, even though he was not.
It should not be objected that if the author wanted his readers to be convinced he was a companion of Paul, he would have been a lot more explicit about his identity, that is, he necessarily would have named himself or been more emphatic in his self-identification as a cotraveler with Paul. This kind of objection about what an author “would have” done is never very persuasive. For modern readers to tell ancient authors what they should have done in order to be more convincing is actually a bit amusing. Why should the author of Acts have done anything other than what he did? How could he possibly have been any more successful at deceiving his readers? He was spectacularly successful doing it the way he did. Readers for eighteen hundred years accepted without question that the author was none other than Luke, the traveling companion of Paul. By inserting just a small handful of first-person pronouns into his account the author succeeded in producing a forgery that continues to deceive readers down to the present day.
The reason for the forgery, in any event, is clear, or at least one of the many reasons is. This author wants his readers to think he is Paul’s companion and therefore has firsthand knowledge of Paul’s mission. Paul, in this account, agrees with the apostles before him, especially Peter and James, on every point of theological and practical importance. The earliest church was in firm and essential harmony. Peter and Paul were not at odds, as other authors were claiming. Together they declared that salvation has gone to the Gentiles, who do not have to be Jews in order to be Christians.
Gnostic and Anti-Gnostic Forgeries
EARLY CHRISTIAN GNOSTICISM
The most intense and vitriolic conflicts of the second and third centuries involved a variety of Christian groups that scholars have called “Gnostic.” Gnostic Christianity was a remarkably complex phenomenon, but for our purposes here I need give simply a broad and basic overview.10
As I mentioned in Chapter 3, the term “Gnostic” comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means “knowledge.” A wide range of early Christian groups claimed that salvation did not come from faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but from acquiring the secret knowledge, gnosis, that Christ taught. This knowledge was actually self-knowledge, knowledge of who you really were, deep inside, where you came from, how you got here, and how you can return. Gnostics maintained that some of us are not just flesh-and-blood human beings. We have a spark of divinity within us that originated in the heavenly realm, but that has fallen into the material world and become trapped inside our mortal bodies. The goal of Gnostic religions was to teach the secret knowledge needed to free this element of the divine, so that it can return to its heavenly home. In the Christian forms of Gnosticism (there were non-Christian forms as well), it is Christ who comes from the heavenly realm above to provide us with this secret knowledge.
There were a large number of Gnostic groups with a mind-boggling array of different teachings and beliefs. Many of these groups described the fall of the divine sparks through complicated and confusing mythological tales that tried to explain how both the divine realm above and this material world below came into existence. Even though the myths of the various groups differed from one another significantly, many of them shared similar features.
In many of these myths the originating point of all that is was a divine being who was completely spirit; there was nothing material about him/it. This divine being generated other divinities who were manifestations of his various characteristics: silence, intellect, truth, word, life, and so on. Some of these divine beings generated yet other divine beings, until there was a populated realm of the divine. But one of these beings—in some texts it is Sophia, the Greek word for “Wisdom”—fell from the divine realm and generated other beings who were not fully divine, since they came into existence outside of the realm of the divine. One of these other beings ignorantly thought that it was the superior God and, with the help of the others, captured its mother and created the material world as a place to imprison her, inside human bodies. This ignorant creator God is the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Jews.
So the material world we live in is not a good place; it is a place of imprisonment. The God of the Jews is not the ultimate divinity, but is inferior, ignorant, and possibly even malicious. The goal of salvation is not to be put into a right relationship with the creator God, but to escape his clutches. Salvation does not come when this fallen creation is returned to its original pristine state (a return to the Garden of Eden); it comes by escaping this material world. The end of time will not bring a salvation of the flesh; it will bring a deliverance from the flesh. This salvation comes when the sparks trapped within our bodies learn the secrets of how they came to be here and the knowledge of how they can escape.
Since in the Christian Gnostic systems it is Christ who comes from the divine realm to deliver this secret knowledge, he obviously could not be a part of this material world itself. He was not a fleshly being. So we have the two forms of docetic thought that I mentioned in Chapter 2. Some Gnostics maintained that Jesus only appeared to be human (like Marcion, who was not a Gnostic). Others claimed that the divine Christ entered into the man Jesus at his baptism and then left him before he died, since the Christ could not suffer. In either way of understanding Christ, he was not a real, flesh-and-blood, suffering, and dying human who was returned to the flesh at his resurrection. Like the other sparks of the divine, he escaped the flesh and the material world, which houses it, in order to return to his heavenly home.
Because Gnostics who taught such views denigrated the material world and the God who created it, they were seen as a serious threat by other Christians who maintained that there was only one God, not an entire realm of divinities; that God had made the world and that it was good, not inferior or evil; that he had formed human flesh and would redeem human flesh; and that salvation came in the body, not separate from the body. Moreover, Christian opponents of Gnosticism maintained that Christ himself was a real flesh-and-blood human being whose real suffering and death brought salvation and whose resurrection was a resurrection in the flesh, in which he now lives and will live forevermore.
These alternative anti-Gnostic views were taught by such prominent Christian authors as the second-century Irenaeus and the third-century Tertullian, authors whose writings have been known and widely read for many centuries. The Gnostics ended up losing these deba
tes, and their own works were by and large destroyed. It is only in modern times that Gnostic writings have been discovered, most notably in a remarkable but completely serendipitous uncovering of an entire library of Gnostic texts in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.11
This so-called Nag Hammadi library contains forty-six different documents, a few of which are in duplicate. Some of them detail the mythological views of this or that Gnostic group, others are mystical reflections on the nature of reality or of the human’s place in it, others are secret revelations that Jesus delivers to his disciples after his “resurrection,” and still others are collections of Jesus’s earthly teachings. Some of these writings were produced in the names of the apostles. They are, in other words, Gnostic forgeries.
GNOSTIC FORGERIES
We knew about Gnostic forgeries for a long time before we actually had any of them. The fourth-century heresy hunter Epiphanius, for example, in a book that attacks eighty different groups of “heretics,” talks about one particularly nefarious Gnostic group that he calls the Phibionites. In his attack on this group Epiphanius reports that they used a whole range of pseudonymous writings, including a Gospel of Eve, the Lesser Questions of Mary (Magdalene), the Greater Questions of Mary, the Books of Seth, the Apocalypses of Adam, the Birth of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip.12 The Gospel of Philip was discovered at Nag Hammadi, although it is impossible to know whether it is the same book that Epiphanius was referring to. We also have a writing called the Birth of Mary, but there is nothing Gnostic about it, and so it too may be a different book. None of the other books survives.13
But plenty of other Gnostic forgeries do. Among the Nag Hammadi writings that set forth Gnostic views in the names of the apostles is a Secret Book of John (i.e., the son of Zebedee), which lays out in graphic detail one version of the Gnostic myth, and an Apocalypse of Paul, which describes a mystical ascent of the apostle through the heavens, narrated in the first person. There are two apocalypses of James and the aforementioned Gospel of Philip. And most famously of all there is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus allegedly recorded by Judas Didymus Thomas, who was reputed in some regions of the early church to have been the twin brother of Jesus.14
Rather than discuss all the Gnostic forgeries here, I will consider just two, which are particularly interesting, because they not only attest a Gnostic point of view, but also argue against the view that eventually became “orthodox,” that is, the view represented by such authors as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius, which was eventually accepted as “true” over against the teachings of “false gnosis.”
The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
We have already seen one Apocalypse of Peter in Chapter 2. At Nag Hammadi a second one was discovered, a secret revelation given to Simon Peter.15 The one we already examined emphasized strongly the bodily nature of the afterlife, where people are blissfully rewarded or horrifically punished, physically, for how they lived in this life. The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter takes a radically different view, arguing that those who believe in the importance of the flesh, whether Christ’s own flesh or the fleshly life of humans, have completely misunderstood and corrupted the truth.
This book is also written in the first person, allegedly by Jesus’s disciple Peter. It begins with a discussion between Christ and Peter on the day of Jesus’s death, after which it narrates what “really” happened at the crucifixion. This is one of the more bizarre descriptions of Christ’s death that you will ever read. In the opening dialogue Christ strongly emphasizes the need for proper “knowledge” for salvation and condemns Christians who lack this knowledge, saying that “they are blind and have no leader” (72.12–13). The non-Gnostic leaders of the Christian churches who praise Christ are blaspheming him and are themselves both blind and deaf (73.13–14). This is especially the case, because they “hold on to the name of a dead man” that is, they think that it is the crucified Jesus who matters for salvation. But how wrong they are! “They do not understand” (76.28–35). These “bishops and deacons” are dried up and barren channels who provide no life-giving water.
After Christ’s attack on those who value material existence and who think that his death brings salvation comes the narrative of the crucifixion. While Peter and Christ are talking, Peter sees Jesus, down below the hill where they are standing, “apparently” seized by his enemies and crucified. But above the cross he sees another image of Christ, this one laughing at the entire proceeding. Considerably confused, Peter asks the Christ standing next to him what he is seeing. Christ replies that the one above the cross is the “living Jesus,” and the one on the cross “is the substitute,” that is, the stand-in for the real Jesus, who cannot be crucified because he is not really a flesh-and-blood human being. The body being crucified is “the abode of demons, the stony vessel in which they live, the man of Elohim” (the name of the Old Testament God). The one above the cross is laughing at the ignorance of those crucifying him, because they are blind and think that they can kill the Christ. But they can’t. He is a spirit, beyond suffering.
This, then, is a Gnostic evaluation of the world and Christ’s place in it. Christ’s death is not what matters. Salvation comes by accepting his true teaching, which denigrates the material world and the human flesh. His flesh did not matter, and neither does the flesh of his followers. This view is presented through an impeccable authority, a firsthand account by Peter himself, or at least by a writing forged in his name.
The Book of Thomas the Contender
An even more direct attack on the flesh is found in another Gnostic writing known as the Book of Thomas the Contender, also found at Nag Hammadi.16 This book too is pseudepigraphal; it is said to be a revelation to Thomas, Jesus’s twin brother, but written down by “Matthaias.” Scholars typically take this figure to be Matthew, author of the First Gospel.
In this book Christ gives a revelation just before he ascends to heaven. The goal of the revelation is to emphasize the importance of self-knowledge: “Those who have not known themselves have known nothing, but those who have known themselves already have acquired knowledge about the depth of the All” (138.16–18). Knowing oneself means knowing that the real you is not the “you” of your body. It is the spirit, which is separate from the flesh.
Christ points out that the human body is like that of all the animals, as it comes into being through intercourse. Moreover, it survives by eating other creatures and changing. But anything that changes will eventually dissipate and exist no more. So too with humans: “The vessel of their flesh will pass away” (141.6–7). The one who hopes to have salvation in the flesh is therefore to be pitied: “Woe to you who hope in the flesh and in the prison that will perish.”
Since the body is not to be redeemed, the desires of the body are not to be indulged. One of the overarching points of the book is that fleshly lusts entrap a soul in the body, and anyone who succumbs to the fires of desire will be punished in the fires of the afterlife. So the author exhorts his readers to seek for the salvation that comes by escaping the body: “Watch and pray that you may not remain in the flesh, but that you may leave the bondage of the bitterness of this life…. When you leave the pains and the passions of the body, you will receive rest from the Good One. You will reign with the King, you united with him and he with you, from now on and forever” (145.9–14).
This is not really a revelation to Thomas written down by Matthias, however. It is another Gnostic forgery, produced in order to oppose the teachings of other Christians that fleshly existence matters.
ANTI-GNOSTIC FORGERIES
Gnostics were not, of course, the only ones who used forgeries to promote their views. The “orthodox” Christians who opposed them responded in kind by publishing forgeries of their own.
3 Corinthians
We have already seen one forgery that could well have served an anti-Gnostic purpose, 3 Corinthians. Earlier I talked about 3 Corinthians being directed against Marcion, who, like the Gnostics, d
evalued the life of the flesh. It is hard to know exactly whom the pseudonymous author has in mind when he affirms the flesh of Christ and the salvation of the flesh. Possibly he is attacking all groups that held to contrary views. But at least his own view is not hard to discern. His overarching emphasis is that Christ came into this world that he might “save all flesh by his own flesh and that he might raise us in the flesh from the dead as he has presented himself to us as our example.”
For this author, Jesus was really born of Mary. This was in fulfillment of what the prophets of the Old Testament had declared. These prophets were spokespersons of the one true God, who had created the world and who was the “almighty,” not some kind of lower, inferior divinity. Precisely in “his own body, Jesus Christ saved all flesh,” and it will be in the flesh that his followers will experience ultimate salvation at the resurrection. Here, then, in 3 Corinthians, forgeries of the heretics are countered by a forgery of the orthodox, a letter claiming to be written by Paul, but in fact written by an author living much later.
Epistula Apostolorum
As a second and final example of an orthodox forgery I can mention a second-century book known as the Epistula Apostolorum, the “Epistle of the Apostles.”17 This is a letter allegedly written after the resurrection by the twelve apostles, who name themselves and write in the first person, in opposition to the “false apostles” Simon and Cerinthus. Simon we have met before as the archheretic of the second century, maligned, for example, in the Acts of Peter and the Pseudo-Clementines. Here he is accompanied by another notorious heretic, Cerinthus. Both are attacked for being filled with “deceit.” This charge is thick with irony, of course, in a writing that is forged in order to make its readers believe the apostles were really writing it.
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