Eventually, though, it came to be seen as necessary to assign authors’ names to the four Gospels that were being most widely used in orthodox circles, to differentiate them from the “false” Gospels used by heretics. The process is not hard to detect for the First and Fourth Gospels. Since it was thought that Matthew had written a Gospel (thus Papias), one of the Gospels was called by his name, the one thought to be most Jewish in its orientation, since Matthew was, after all, a Jew. The Fourth Gospel was thought to belong to a mysterious figure referred to in that book as “the Beloved Disciple” (see, e.g., John 20:20–24), who would have to have been one of Jesus’s closest followers. The three closest to Jesus, in our early traditions, were Peter, James, and John. Peter was already explicitly named in the Fourth Gospel, and so he could not be the Beloved Disciple; James was known to have been martyred early in the history of the church and so would not have been the author. That left John, the son of Zebedee. So he was assigned the authorship of the Fourth Gospel.
Some scholars have argued that it would not make sense to assign the Second and Third Gospels to Mark and Luke unless the books were actually written by people named Mark and Luke, since they were not earthly disciples of Jesus and were rather obscure figures in the early church. I’ve never found these arguments very persuasive. For one thing, just because figures may seem relatively obscure to us today doesn’t mean that they were obscure in Christian circles in the early centuries. Moreover, it should never be forgotten that there are lots and lots of books assigned to people about whom we know very little, to Philip, for example, Thomas, and Nicodemus. Furthermore, Mark was far from obscure; he was at one time Paul’s companion and was thought to be Peter’s right-hand man, so that what he wrote could be trusted to be Peter’s version of the Gospel. This connection is made not only in Papias, but eventually in the writings of Tertullian, who states explicitly: “That which Mark published may be affirmed to be Peter’s, whose interpreter Mark was.”7
With respect to the Third Gospel, it should be remembered that its author also wrote the book of Acts, and there he implicitly claims to have been a companion of Paul’s. Because Acts stresses that Christianity succeeded principally among Gentiles, the author himself may have been a Gentile. Since there was thought to be a Gentile named Luke among Paul’s companions, he was assigned the Third Gospel.
The authority of the Gospels was then secure: two of them were allegedly written by eyewitnesses to the events they narrate (Matthew and John), and the other two other were written from the perspectives of the two greatest apostles, Peter (the Gospel of Mark) and Paul (the Gospel of Luke). It does not appear, however, that any of these books was written by an eyewitness to the life of Jesus or by companions of his two great apostles.8 For my purposes here it is enough to reemphasize that the books do not claim to be written by these people and early on they were not assumed to be written by these people. The authors of these books never speak in the first person (the First Gospel never says, “One day, Jesus and I went to Jerusalem…”). They never claim to be personally connected with any of the events they narrate or the persons about whom they tell their stories. The books are thoroughly, ineluctably, and invariably anonymous. At the same time, later Christians had very good reasons to assign the books to people who had not written them.
As a result, the authors of these books are not themselves making false authorial claims. Later readers are making these claims about them. They are therefore not forgeries, but false attributions.
OTHER FALSE ATTRIBUTIONS
Very much the same can be said about the remaining anonymous books of the New Testament. Scholars are highly unified in thinking that Paul did not write the book of Hebrews, even though it was included in the canon of the New Testament by church fathers who thought that it was.9 The letters 1, 2, and 3 John sound in many ways like the Gospel of John, but they are strikingly different as well, especially in the historical context they presuppose. They were probably not written by the same author, who was not John the son of Zebedee in any event, but by a later Christian living in the same community, which had begun to experience a different range of problems from those presupposed in the Fourth Gospel. Later Christian writers who accepted the books as sacred authorities needed to assign them to an apostle, however, and so it made sense to claim that they, like the Fourth Gospel, had been written by John the son of Zebedee.
Assigning anonymous books to known authorities did not stop with the writings of the New Testament. Just to give one additional example, I might mention one of the most interesting books not to make it into the canon of Scripture. For centuries there were Christians who thought the book should be included. I think we can all be glad that it was not. This book provides one of the most vitriolic attacks on Jews and Judaism from early Christianity. Had it been included in Scripture, Jewish-Christian relations may well have turned out even worse, if that can be imagined, than they did. This book was originally written anonymously, but it later came to be attributed to one of Paul’s closest companions and co-workers and so is known as the Epistle of Barnabas.10
This book is somewhat like a letter in that its author addresses a group of readers, but it is really more like an extended essay. The point of the book is to show the superiority of Christianity to the Jewish religion. The author makes this point by maligning Judaism as a religion that is and always has been false, all the way back to the time of Moses himself. That is because, according to this author, the ancient Israelites broke the covenant that God made with them at the very beginning, when Moses was given the Ten Commandments. When Moses descended from Mount Sinai with commandments in hand, he saw that the people had already committed idolatry. In anger he threw the two tablets of the law down, smashing them into bits. According to the author of Barnabas, this represented the breaking of the covenant (4.7–8; 14.1–4). And God never did renew the covenant with the Jews. They were lost from that day on.
The Jews, of course, were given more laws by Moses, including a new set of the Ten Commandments. But since they had alienated themselves from God, they never understood these laws and made the fatal mistake of assuming that God meant them to be taken literally instead of figuratively. As a result the Jews had always misinterpreted their own laws. When God orders the Jews not to eat swine, for example, he does not literally mean for them to avoid pork. He means that people should not behave like swine, grunting loudly when hungry, but being silent when full. People should turn to God with their prayers not only when they are in need, but also when things are good (10.1–3).
So too when God commands that the day of the Sabbath be observed, he does not mean that everyone should be lazy one day of the week. The seventh “day” needs to be understood symbolically, bearing in mind that “with the Lord a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day.” The Sabbath commandment means that the Sabbath day, the millennium, should be looked forward to and anticipated by God’s people. The creation will last for six days—six thousand years—after which there will be a thousand-year period on earth in which God and his people will rule supreme. Jews misunderstood this message and foolishly assumed that God meant for them not to work on Saturdays (15.1–9).
Barnabas goes through a number of the laws of the Old Testament to show that God never intended them to be followed literally, but to be understood figuratively. Since Jews never understood the point, they never were the true people of God. It is the followers of Jesus who have the true interpretation of Scripture. As a result, Jews are not God’s people; Christians are. And the Old Testament is not a Jewish book, but a Christian one.
This “letter” was originally published anonymously, possibly because the first readers knew full well who had written it. It could not have been written by one of Paul’s closest co-workers and companions, Barnabas, because it did not appear until many years after his death—it is usually dated to 130–35 CE. But why was it eventually attributed to him? No one knows for sure, but I think a good case can be made that some rea
ders of the book wanted to make a particular point by the attribution, a point related to the arguments going on in Christianity in the second century, some fifty years or so after the book was written.
In the later second century one of the biggest threats facing “orthodox” Christianity was the worldwide church established by Marcion and his followers. If you’ll remember, Marcion had claimed Paul’s authority for his view that there were two Gods, the inferior wrathful God of the Old Testament and the superior loving God of Jesus. Paul was thought to be the true representative of Jesus’s message, the one who understood that salvation comes apart from the Jewish law. Marcion took Paul’s differentiation between the gospel of Christ and the law of the Jews to an extreme, so that there was in fact no connection between them. Christ represented a different God. The Old Testament God, the God of the Jews, the creation, and the law, was to be escaped by Christians, not worshiped by them.
Marcion therefore rejected the Old Testament entirely, claiming that it had nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas takes a different perspective. In fact, one could argue that it takes precisely the opposite perspective. Here, rather than having nothing to do with Christianity and the message of Jesus, the Old Testament has everything to do with them. It is the Christian book par excellence, because it proclaims the gospel of Christ—figuratively.
Why then assign the book to Paul’s closest companion? Because by doing so the book becomes the perspective of the real Paul, as opposed to the Paul of Marcion, who allegedly had nothing to do with the Old Testament and its laws. Now Paul, by association through Barnabas, proclaims the true message. The Old Testament in fact is Scripture. It is truth from God. It is a proclamation of the gospel of Christ. It is a fully Christian book.
By assigning this popular tractate to Barnabas, then, opponents of Marcion were able to claim Paul for their view and to show that the apostle stood for an understanding of Christianity that was very much at odds with the views set forth by the chief heretic of the second century, who had claimed Paul as his own.
Fabrications
AS I’VE INDICATED, A false attribution is not necessarily a deception; it may simply have been a mistake or someone’s “best guess” about the author of an anonymous work. My hunch is that most writers who claimed that a particular, famous person was the author of this or that writing probably believed it was true, whether or not they knew it to be true. The same thing decidedly cannot be said about forgers. Whoever wrote 1 Timothy knew full well that he wasn’t really the apostle Paul. He made that part up.
Other kinds of literature are “made up” as well. As with false attributions, however, it is not always clear that the person who writes this literature knows that it is made up. He may think that what he says is accurate. When this involves historical narratives, he may think that what he says is historically factual, even if his account is in fact legendary. But at some point, someone ultimately, always, comes up with a legendary account. Of course it is always possible that even in such cases the author who comes up with the story may think it really happened. And sometimes stories just seem to appear out of nowhere. But in many cases, surely the person who makes up the story knows what he is doing.
We have seen a number of made-up stories already in books that were forged. Whoever forged the Gospel of Peter wrote the account of Jesus emerging from the tomb so tall that his head reached above the skies, with a walking, talking cross emerging behind him. This is not a historical narrative; it is fiction. I would call it a “fabrication,” that is, a “made-up story that tries to pass itself off as historical.”
In many instances, fabrications are disseminated by anonymous authors who are not forgers. This was the case, for example, with the accounts found in the Acts of Peter, which tells stories of Peter’s miracle-working contests with Simon the Magician, in which he performs such astounding feats as raising a smoked tuna from the dead. These “historical” narratives are in fact fabrications. Whoever first came up with them—whether the author of the text or someone who told the story orally before the author heard it—was telling something that he possibly (likely? probably?) knew was not historically accurate. So too with the Acts of Paul (or the Acts of Paul and Thecla), where Paul is said to have preached a distinctive gospel of salvation that said a person is made right with God not through Jesus’s death and resurrection, but by living a chaste life, avoiding all sexual activity.
As with ancient myths (as mentioned in Chapter 2), it is often difficult to know whether readers of such stories took them as historical accounts, or simply as entertaining narratives, or as something else. But in many instances it is clear that some readers understood such stories to be “false” tales, since they were so vociferously opposed in some circles. One need think only of Serapion’s reaction to the Gospel of Peter (see Chapter 2) or Tertullian’s harsh words about the Acts of Paul (Chapter 3). In both cases the contents of the story were seen as objectionable and the account was charged with having been falsely fabricated in order to promote false understandings of the faith.
This shows that for some ancient readers, at least, such historical fabrications were not thought of simply as innocuous fictions, but either as false tales, in that they did not convey the “truth,” or as false histories, in that that they narrated events that did not actually happen. In either case, in the views of their opponents they were harmful fabrications. Whether harmful or not, numerous fabrications circulated in the early church about Jesus and those connected with him: his family, his disciples, and his other acquaintances. We have scores of such stories from the first four centuries of the church.
THE PROTO-GOSPEL OF JAMES
One of the most historically influential set of such tales comes in a book called the Proto-Gospel of James.11 The Proto-Gospel was enormously popular among Christians throughout the Middle Ages—even more popular than many books of the Bible. It had a significant impact on the Christian imagination and on Christian art.12 Readers have called it a proto-Gospel, because it mainly narrates events that transpired prior to the accounts of Jesus’s birth and life found in the New Testament Gospels. The book largely concerns Jesus’s mother, Mary, her birth and early life, her conception and giving birth to Jesus. I have said it is forged, because it falsely claims to have been written by Jesus’s half brother James, who in this account is the son of Joseph from a previous marriage. There are debates about when the book was first written, but since it appears to know the Gospels of Matthew and Luke from the end of the first century and appears to be referred to by the theologian Origen at the beginning of the third century, it is often dated sometime in the mid to late second century.
One of the chief questions driving this narrative concerns Mary’s suitability for her role as the mother of the Son of God. Surely Jesus’s mother was no ordinary person! And in this story, Mary is anything but ordinary. Her own birth is miraculous. Her mother, Anna, is barren, but miraculously conceives as a result of her prayers and the prayers of her husband, the wealthy aristocratic Jew Joiachim. As a young child Mary is inordinately special. Devoted to God from birth, she is taken by her parents to the holy Jewish Temple as a three-year-old and is raised there by the priests, who do not need even to feed her, since she receives her daily food from the hand of an angel.
When she is about to reach puberty, Mary can no longer remain in the Temple, presumably because menstruation was thought to bring ritual impurity. So the priests gather to decide how to find her a husband. Instructed by God, they have all the unmarried men of Israel come together, each of them bringing a wooden rod. The high priest gathers all the rods and takes them into the sanctuary. The next day he redistributes them to each man, and a great sign appears. A dove emerges from Joseph’s rod, flies around, and lands on Joseph’s head. He is thus the one chosen to take the young Mary as wife.
But Joseph is highly reluctant, since he is an old man who already has grown sons, and surely he will become a laughingstock among his fellow Isra
elites if he marries such a young girl. The high priest convinces Joseph that he has no choice, and so he takes Mary in marriage.
The stories about Mary and Joseph continue, often amplifying the accounts found in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke (the only two New Testament Gospels that speak about the birth of Jesus), sometimes giving completely new stories. None is as odd or memorable as the account of what happens immediately after Mary gives birth to Jesus outside of Bethlehem. Joseph is said to have gone off to find a midwife who can assist at the birth. He finds one, but they arrive too late. Coming to the cave where Mary had been left, they see a bright light and then an infant appearing out of nowhere. The midwife is immediately convinced that this has been a miraculous birth and runs off to find a companion, Salome, who refuses to believe that a virgin has given birth. She comes to the cave and decides to give Mary a postpartum inspection to see if her hymen has remained intact. It has indeed, to no surprise to readers. But Salome’s hand begins to burn as if it has caught fire. This is her punishment for refusing to believe in the power of God at the birth of Jesus. When she prays to God and asks for forgiveness, she is told to pick up the child. When she does so, her hand is healed.
Numerous other tales of the miraculous are found in the account, all of them, of course, originating in the pious imaginations of later storytellers or the author of the account rather than in historical events. These are not accurate accounts of events that actually transpired, but later stories put in the guise of historical narrative. Were they read as historical accounts or simply as entertaining narratives? A case can be made that they were read both ways. Some Christians based serious theological claims on them, such as the doctrine of the “perpetual virginity of Mary,” that is, the view that Mary remained a virgin even after giving birth to Jesus. Such Christians certainly thought these accounts were “true,” and surely many (most?) of them believed the events that they narrate really happened.
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