Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics Read Free

to one another. To take one obvious example, the Protevangelium Jacobi. The author calls himself James, and he almost certainly is claiming to be “that” James—the brother of Jesus, who, according to the account itself, would have been the son of Joseph from a previous marriage, that is, Jesus’ older step brother. This, of course, would put him in a particularly strong position to tell the prehistory of Jesus’ appearance in the world, which forms the subject for the bulk of the narrative. But why did the author write the account? In fact, the (forged) work may well have functioned on numerous levels. It may have been written to provide readers an entertaining account of the prehistory of Jesus’ birth and of its immediate aftermath. It may have been produced to celebrate the greatness of the mother of God. More than that, it may have been created in order to answer pagan opponents of Christianity such as Celsus (and the fabricated claims of his “Jew”), by showing that the charges they leveled against Mary (a peasant girl who had to spin for a living), Joseph (a poor common laborer), and the child Jesus (born into poverty) were precisely wrong. But there is more. Against adoptionist Christians the account shows that Jesus was in fact the Son of God from his birth; and against Marcionites it shows that Jesus actually came into the world as a child—that he did not simply descend from heaven, fully grown, in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar. The text, in other words, functions on a number of fronts in the proto-orthodox attempt to establish itself and its views in the face of opponents, Jewish, pagan, and heterodox Christian. Was it written to deal with just one set of problems? Possibly so. But it is virtually impossible to say, without having the author available to interview, since features of the account successfully counter the claims of this, that, or the other opponent of the proto-orthodox.
    Finally, in view of my ultimate concerns in this study, I should emphasize what I will
not
be addressing here:
    • I will not be discussing literary texts that have been taken by some scholars to be forgeries but that I consider to be authentic. Thus, for example, I will certainly be dealing with the fourth-century Pseudo-Ignatian letters, but I will not be discussing the seven letters of the Middle Recension, even though there is a history—some of it quite recent—of taking these letters also as forgeries. I do not find the recent arguments of Hübner andLechner to be any more persuasive than the older arguments by Weijenborg, Joly, and Rius Camps on the matter 7 ; I think the seven letters are authentic, and so I will not be discussing them as polemical forgeries.
    • I will not be examining pseudepigrapha that are not Christian in origin but came to be transmitted, cherished, and sometimes also altered by Christians as part of their literature (e.g., the Testaments of Twelve Patriarchs and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve). 8
    • I will not by and large be considering polemical forgeries from after the fourth century (e.g., Pseudo-Titus; the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea).
    • I will not be considering forgeries that are not polemical in some obvious way (e.g., the Prayer of the Apostle Paul or a number of other nonpolemical pseudepigrapha of the Nag Hammadi Library).
    • Conversely, I will not be considering polemical works that are not forgeries (the Nag Hammadi Testimony of Truth, for example, makes no authorial claim).
    • I will not be considering books that are no longer extant, in full or in part.
    • I will not, for the most part, be considering falsely attributed books (since their authors made no false authorial claims: so, for example, the New Testament Gospels; the Epistle of Barnabas; Pseudo-Justin; Pseudo-Tertullian; etc.).
    • I will not, with a few key exceptions in passing (such as the Sibylline Oracles and the Pseudo-Ignatians), be considering the closely related matter of false