In the last post, I talked about the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy in the ancient world – documents that are, in the text itself, falsely attributed to specific people. Looking at a couple of examples, we discovered that this was considered to be a form of lie or deceit. The care for authenticity and the condemnation of forgeries was not exclusive to Graeco-Roman authors. The corpus of early Christian texts provides ample examples which illustrate my basic point: people in the ancient time didn’t approve of that practice at all.
Tertullian (3rd century CE) mentions a priest from Asia Minor who was apparently involved in forging the Acts of Paul and Thecla: “But if certain Acts of Paul, which are falsely so named, claim the example of Thecla for allowing women to teach and baptize, let men know that in Asia the presbyter who compiled that document, thinking to add of his own to Paul’s reputation, was found out, and though he professed he had done it for love of Paul, was deposed from his position”. Despite claiming to have noble motives, this presbyter was removed from the position he held. It seems obvious that early Christians in Asia Minor didn’t approve of the practice of pseudepigraphy. The emphasis on the importance of the distinction between authentic and forged documents was especially acute in the case of early Christianity since that period was marked by the development of the New Testament canon (more about that see: here). So, for example, Origen (3rd century CE) claims there are those in the community that question the authenticity of the Second and Third Epistle of John. Eusebius (4th century CE) cites the suspicions of Dionysus of Alexandria (3rd century CE) regarding the authenticity of the Book of Revelation: “Therefore that he was called Jon, and that this book is the work of one John, I do not deny. And I agree also that it is the work of a holy and inspired man. But, I cannot readily admit that he was the apostle, the son of Zebedee, the brother of James, by whom the Gospel of John and the Catholic Epistle were written.” Another example comes from Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria in the 4th century CE. It seems that an opponent of his forged a letter in Athanasius’ name. His reaction? The bishop compared this act to the act of lying that, he claims, comes from Satan and is in complete opposition to God who is the embodiment of the absolute Truth. Careful analysis of the sources indicate the existence of a strong symbiosis between authorship and authority, on the one hand, and authenticity and content validity on the other hand. Here, caution is required! It cannot be concluded that in the ancient world it was only important to show that the content of work corresponds to the teachings of a person that the work is being ascribed. The author of the Muratorian Fragment refuses to acknowledge the status of the epistles to the Laodiceans and Alexandrians because he does not believe that they were written by the apostle Paul. Nowhere is this symbiosis as clear as it is in the example of Origen who believes that the content of the Epistle to the Hebrews corresponds to Paul’s theological tradition. However, nota bene, he refuses to accept the canonical status of the epistle because he believes it was not written by Paul.
Despite all of this, the idea that pseudepigraphy had a moral stance in the ancient world is quite popular among New Testament scholars. There are several theories developed precisely to combat this problem and to show that there are circumstances in which falsely attributed documents were morally acceptable. D. Meade argued that in order to understand pseudepigraphy in the New Testament (e.g. we have at least 4 epistles that claim to be written by Paul, but they weren’t), one must look toward the Jewish literary tradition. Mead thinks that there we can find a practice in which an unknown author would write a book following the line of thought of a known person who was considered to be the father of that tradition. For example, the book of Isaiah (Old Testament) is not entirely the work of the prophet Isaiah. Two later unknown authors wrote some parts of it and combined everything together. The crucial part, according to Meade, is this: they did not try to deceive anybody. Quite the contrary, they were re-actualizing the old tradition for a new context. There are numerous problems with his theory. For one thing, Meade’s explanation is motivated by the theologically driven agenda. In other words, on what ground does he claim that First Timothy (part of the New Testament) is an example of re-actualizing the tradition, but Paul’s Third Epistle to Corinthians (which is not a part of the New Testament) is a clear example of pseudepigraphy? How does he make this distinction? Moreover, he assumes that the authors of pseudepigraphic works were Jews familiar with the practice in question. But the vast majority of the early Christian authors, in particular the anonymous and pseudepigraphic writers after Paul, were not Jews, did not originate in the Jewish tradition, and show no signs of being familiar with the Jewish practice of re-actualizing the tradition – if such a practice ever existed! Furthermore, what evidence indeed do we have that such a practice existed in 1st century Palestine? On what basis does Meade claim that a Jew living in Jerusalem at the end of the 1st century didn’t know that Isaiah was actually a work of three authors put together onto one scroll. People in ancient times didn’t have access to twentieth-century scholarship and linguistic analysis of the higher criticism. Not that they were not interested in the question of authorship. The problem is that they lacked modern scientific methods for establishing the authorship of problematic documents. Admittedly, Meade was correct in assuming that whoever, for example, wrote 1 Timothy wanted his readers to believe that the author is standing in line with the Pauline tradition and that historical Paul would agree with everything written therein. But this assumption does not resolve anything since that is a common feature of the vast majority of early Christian pseudepigraphy – precisely because, during that time, different groups of Christians were in competition claiming that they are the only ones who stand in line with the original and authentic teachings of Jesus.
Other scholars have tried to resolve the problem of New Testament pseudepigraphy by appealing to the pagan tradition. A classical explanation of this sort could be defined in the following way: it was common in philosophical schools for a disciple to write a book and not sign himself but his teacher out of respect. This theory is disputable since there are only two ancient sources for the existence of this kind of practice – both of which are extremely problematic. For the sake of the argument, I’ll just deal with the first one: a Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (234 – 305 CE). According to Baum, Porphyry is a key ancient witness to the accepted practice in ancient philosophical schools where a student would write something in the name of a teacher. Baum argues that Porphyry, in one passage, claims that Pythagoras (5. BCE) wrote eighty books, that his followers wrote two hundred in his name, and that twelve books were forged in Pythagoras’ name. First and foremost, any historian would view this source skeptically because Porphyry lived almost eight hundred years after the described events. Nevertheless, the biggest problem for Baum is the fact that the source in question does not say what Baum claims. This passage is not preserved in Greek. We only have it in a book by a philosopher and physician Ibn Abi Usaybi’a from the 13th century CE. Baum did not read it correctly and therefore derived different conclusions. This is not entirely surprising given the fact that he is not an expert in medieval Islam and cannot read Arabic, so he had to rely on a questionable secondary translation. Carl Ernst, whose area of expertise is medieval Islam, provided the scholarly translation:
- But as for the books of Pythagoras the sage, which Archytas the Tarentine philosopher collected by himself, they are eighty books. But those that he made a special effort, with all his strength, to compile, compose, and collect, from all the old men who were of the type of Pythagoras the philosopher, his school, and the inheritors of his sciences, man after man, these were two hundred books in number. And he who was unique in the essence of his intellect set aside from them the false books ascribed to the tongue of the sage and his name, which shameless people fabricated.
As the translation proves, Porphyry claims that Pythagoras wrote eighty books, that those who belonged to his group wrote two hundred books, and that there were twelve forgeries written in his name. The source clearly differentiates between authentic books (written by Pythagoras and written by his students) and forgeries. It even claims that counterfeiters are hideous people (which is implied by asserting that it was a shameless act). Nowhere does it say that Pythagoras had students who wrote books in his name. Furthermore, it is clear that Porphyry considers counterfeiters to be criminals who create fake books full of lies – which is perfectly in line with the already established position of pseudepigraphy in the broader Graeco-Roman culture.
In conclusion, pseudepigraphy is not a modern invention – it had its share of “glory” in ancient times as well. Contrary to many New Testament scholars, pseudepigraphy wasn’t considered to be a morally acceptable act in any circumstances. It was clearly connected to the act of lying or deceit. Nevertheless, people still engaged in those kinds of activities for numerous reasons. Sometimes they tried to embarrass their opponents by writing bad things and signing them as authors. Other times, they would create a pseudepigraphic document just to deceive someone and earn extra money. But in most cases (especially when it comes to the early Christian documents), creating a pseudepigraphic document was motivated by the desire to popularize your own theological opinions. To put it more bluntly, if you were a nobody in the early Christian community in (for example) Rome and you wanted to push your ideas, you would write a document and falsely claim that the document was actually written by some famous person such as the apostle Paul or Peter.