by Scott McGill
The classical pedagogical method in grammar and rhetoric was studied and adopted by Christians. Very soon, from the middle of the second century, Christian scholars flourished: Justin Martyr (died 165), Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 240), Origen (184–254) and Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–339) applied the inherited philosophical and philological methodology to their theological discussions, which necessarily included an examination of pseudepigrapha (Grafton and Williams 2006). The interminable disputes of the patristic writers led to the sharpening of scholarly tools; as a consequence, forgers had to become more skillful, as Grafton (1990) has demonstrated.
Ehrman (2014, p. vii) handles the texts with a very effective topical division regarding chronology, demonstrating that forgery is inevitably an immediate product of its own time and circumstances. For example, “forgeries which attack Paul’s person and message” (Ehrman 2014, pp. 239–282, esp. 312) are found in the Pseudo‐Clementine Recognitions (ca. 310) and Homilies (360–380), both based on a Christian novel from the early third century.
“Anti‐Jewish forgeries” (Ehrman 2014, pp. 323–366, esp. 344) such as the Didascalia Apostolorum were common from the beginning of the tradition. The Didascalia (early fourth century) claims to have been written by the apostles: Its original Greek version is lost but a complete Syriac version has been preserved. The Acts of Pilate (fourth century) are supposedly written by the Rabbi Nicodemus and thus are sometimes referred to as the Gospel of Nicodemus; Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian versions exist for the text, which was extremely popular during Middle Ages. The work may have been written as a counterforgery to delegitimize a previous Acts of Pilate, mentioned by Eusebius. This anti‐Christian and slanderous work has not been preserved, but apparently it caused a great commotion earlier in the fourth century, during the reign of Diocletian’s successor Maximinius Daia, who was, like his predecessor, an opponent of Christians and who ordered that the original forged Acts of Pilate be taught in schools. Similar examples are provided by the Anaphora Pilati (late fourth century) and several letters purporting to be written by or addressed to Pontius Pilate.
“Forgeries that deal with the organization and leadership of the Church” (Ehrman 2014, pp. 367–406) in this period mainly take the form of “church orders” like the Apostolic Constitutions (fourth century), which claims to have been written by the apostles: The text even warns its readers to beware of forgeries. The work was put together from other documents, such as the Didascalia, mentioned above, the anonymous Didache, and the Apostolic Tradition, wrongly attributed to Hippolytus, along with 85 “apostolic canons.”
The Edict of Milan (313) would occasion further proliferation of pseudepigrapha, as the periodic systematic purges or anathemata issued (Speyer 1981, pp. 142–14) to preserve orthodoxy necessitated hiding certain beliefs, but also hiding the existence of banned texts. At the Council of Nicaea (325) the teachings of Arius were anathematized: His works as well as those of Porphyry were condemned. Following the imposition of Nicene orthodoxy (383), Theodosius gave the order that the writings of the Eunomians be burned. Under Theodosius II the Council of Ephesus (431) had sanctioned the works of Nestorius, but in 435 Theodosius ordered the burning of Nestorian books. The resilience of Nestorian Christological views and the continued appeal of Nestorian teachings forced the banning of his “heretical” works again, at the Councils of Chalchedon (451) and Constantinople (553). In Constantinople, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, Apollinaris, Eutyches, and Origen were also anathematized. The Council at Trullo (691) banned pagan practices and commanded the burning of forged martyrologies, a Christian apologetic genre that proliferated beginning in the early third century with numerous extant examples of both nonpseudepigraphic forgeries (for third‐person narratives) as well as pseudepigraphic forgeries narrated in the first person such as the Martrydom of Polycarp (mid‐third century?).
Any religious faction that was interested in perpetuating their teachings and writings in the face of official opposition had to comply with orthodoxy or else disguise their texts by using pseudepigraphical methods. Consequently, forged writings abounded in this period, but not many of the texts survived the persecution of heretics. One of the most skilled sources of forgery in this period were the Apollinarians, highly specialized interpolators (Tuilier 1987, p. 590), whose altered versions of the works of Athanasius would be used by Cyril in his theological writings. The pseudo‐Athanasian formula “one incarnate nature of God the Word” was one of their interpolations that became sanctioned by later theologians and would eventually prompt the resolutions in the Council of Chalcedon (451) that led ultimately to the schism of the eastern churches.
Among the forgeries arising from “later theological controversies” (Ehrman 2014, pp. 455–480) are the Abgar Correspondence (end of the third century), purporting to be a letter from the ruler of Edessa to Jesus, complete with Jesus’s written reply, which has a rather charming formal epistolary style. The work was Christian anti‐Manichean propaganda written by a threatened orthodox minority.
The aforementioned Pseudo‐Clementine Recognitions and Homilies, combining anti‐Pauline polemic with Arian savior, also date from this later period, as do the six Pseudo‐Ignatian letters (late fourth century) whose forger added them to the seven originals, which contained heavy interpolations by him. This forger, an otherwise‐unknown Julian, was well versed in the language of these texts and also very industrious: He apparently also produced the Apostolic Constitutions and a Commentary on Job attributed (falsely) to Origen.
The purpose of these forgeries is still debatable, as they may have had multiple polemical targets and purposes, even as they demonstrate some evidence of the forger’s own theological agenda. Outside of internal disputes concerning orthodoxy, the apologetic forgeries also appeared frequently as a means of defending the faith from non‐Christian adversaries. The aforementioned Acts of Pilate are a good example of this type.
Because of the formal and rhetorical nature of letters in antiquity, epistolography has been particularly dogged by questions of authenticity (Neil and Allen 2015). Forged letters (like those of Phalaris) were particularly common, and among religious pseudepigrapha examples include the mentioned correspondence of Abgar of Edessa with Jesus Christ or of Herod Antipas with Pontius Pilate and later the Letters of Paul and Seneca (mid‐fourth century). In their attempt to create some organic connection between the Roman Empire and Christianity, these works resemble the extant Oracula Sibyllina, with heavy interpolation by Christians (who create book 6 and perhaps 7 at the end of the fourth century). Other forged Christian texts have different purposes and include many writings attributed to John Chrysostom (Aldama 1965) and the treatise De virginitate attributed to Eusebius (mid‐fourth century) as well as a similarly titled treatise appearing under the name of Basil of Caesarea; the Paraphrase of the Psalms attributed to Apollinarius the elder (fifth century); and numerous apocalyptic texts that appeared in the seventh century under the authoritative names as Pseudo‐Methodius, and Pseudo‐Athanasius (Alexander and Abrahamse 1985).
All kinds of pseudepigrapha are found in Syriac (Lied 2012) and Coptic texts. The latter are by far the most affected by this phenomenon. Besides the later forgeries attributed to the successors of Pachomius, Theodore, and Horsiesi and the Pseudo‐Shenoute, we find the regular attributions to prominent church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries increasing especially in the seventh and eighth centuries. It seems to be a mere routine of ascribing texts of doubtful origin to a single previous period and one homogenous literary school, but probably also because of some kind of authorial inhibition against publishing in propria persona (Orlandi 1991, pp. 1456–1458, 2016).
At the end of this period (and especially from the ninth century onward), the wealth and institutional power of the church gave new motives for forgery, establishing rights and property of the church itself, as we can see with the Le Mans Forgeries (mid‐ninth century, Goffart 1966) and the Pseudo‐Isidorian Decretals (mid‐ninth cent
ury). The latter are a compilation of diverse fraudulent and authentic materials dating from the fourth century onwards (Zechiel‐Eckes 2001), which contains the oldest known version of the Donatio Constantini forged in the mid‐eighth century (Fried 2007). The Donation of Constantine was fabricated mainly in order to establish church ownership of the Lateran Palace and subsequently rights to the city of Rome itself (Lieu 2012).
One of the most interesting and influential (up to modern times!) forgeries of this period is the corpus of Pseudo‐Dionysius the Aeropagite (late fifth century, called Corpus Areopagiticum or Corpus Dionysiacum), written by an unknown person but attributed to Paul’s Athenian convert (mentioned in Acts 17:34): starting with Eusebius, various different attributions were proposed (EH 3.4.11). The works are the product of a highly trained intellectual who was well acquainted with the contemporary Neoplatonic school of Athens and seem intended to provide (or “forge”) a Neoplatonic intellectual structure for the orthodox doctrines of Christianity (Klitenic and Dillon 2007; a pagan Neoplatonist is proposed by Louth 2009). The authority of Pseudo‐Dionysius was already recognized in 532 in a convocation that was assembled by Justinian, where the work would be authenticated along with Athanasius, Cyril, and Gregory Thaumaturgus. The forgery was still regarded as wholly authentic by both opposing sides in the Sixth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (680), which ironically had been termed the council of “antiquaries and paleographists” (von Harnack 1990, 2: p. 433).
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