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

interpolations (e.g., in the writings of the New Testament).
    • I will not be considering ancient instances of plagiarism, unless they have something to do with forgeries (e.g., possibly, 2 Peter).
    I should stress that the preceding topics are all important and deserve full examination. But in this study, I will be restricting myself to books whose authors appear to make false authorial claims, for polemical purposes, within the Christian tradition of the first four Christian centuries.
    Finally, I want to take special care to circumvent a possible misreading of my study, which would think or claim that I am trying to advance some kind of positivist agenda in promoting one kind of Christian thought and its literature over another. When I call a text forged I am making a literary-historical claim about its author; I do not mean to imply any kind of value judgment concerning its content or its merit as a literary text (religious, theological, ethical, personal, or any other kind of merit). In particular, I am not claiming that it is somehow inferior in these ways to a work that is orthonymous. I am not, that is, contrasting later forged texts with texts that are somehow pristine, “original,” and therefore better or more worthy of our attention.
    Another way to express this caveat is this: my ultimate concerns do not lie (at least in this study) with theological or ontological questions of ultimate truth, but in historical questions about how Christianity developed as a religion. From a historical perspective—just to take an example—writings that were actually written by Paul were themselves products of their time, based on things Paul heard, experienced, and thought, just as were the writings produced by others in his name. As a historian I do not value the authentically Pauline writings any more or less than later “Pauline” writings that were forged.

    1 . I will be defining the term
forgery
, and related terms, soon, and justify the way I will be using them. See pp. 29–32. For now it is enough to state my general conception. A “forgery” is a literary work with a false authorial claim, that is, a writing whose author falsely claims to be a(nother) well-known person.
    2 . I am excluding for now the writings of Ignatius from this tally; were he to be considered—on the grounds that he probably wrote prior to the appearance of 2 Peter—then seven additional works and one additional author would be added to the totals.
    3 . See further, R. M. Grant, “The Appeal to the Early Fathers,”
JTS
11 (1960): 13–24.
    4 . Wolfgang Speyer’s rightly famous
vade mecum, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum: Ein Versuch ihrer Deutung
(München: Beck, 1971). It is now, obviously, over forty years old, but nothing has come along to replace or even to supplement it.
    5 . See especially the recent collection of essays edited by Jörg Frey, Jens Herzer, Martina Janssen, and Clare K. Rothschild,
Pseudepigraphie und Verfasserfiktion in frühchristlichen Briefen
. WUNT 246 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).
    6 . That forgers were consciously lying about their identity in an effort to deceive their readers will be the burden of much of the following four chapters; in particular see pp. 128–32.
    7 . Thomas Lechner,
Ignatius adversus Valentinianos? Chronologische und theologiegeschichtliche Studien zu den Briefen des Ignatius von Antiochen
, VCSup 47 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); R. M. Hübner, “Thesen zur Echtheit und Datierung der sieben Briefe des Ignatius Antiochien,”
ZAC
1 (1997): 44–72; Reinoud Weijenborg,
Les lettres d’Ignace d’Antioche
(Leiden: Brill, 1969); Robert Joly,
Le Dossier d’Ignace d’Antioche
, Université libre de Bruxelles, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres 69 (Brussels: Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, 1979); Josep Rius-Camps,
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
(Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1979). For responses, see Caroline Hammond