The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  But for early proto-orthodox Christians, including the forger of Corinthians, it was important to think not only that God created this material world but also that he would redeem it, along with everything in it, including the human body. The body would therefore be raised from the dead, not left to corrupt. Corinthians deals with the heretical claims of Simon and Cleobius one by one. "Paul" here insists that Jesus really was born of Mary, that he was truly a flesh and blood human, and that God was the creator of all there is, who sent the Jewish prophets and then Jesus in order to overcome the devil, who had corrupted the flesh.

  For I delivered to you first of all what I received from the apostles before me who were always with Jesus Christ, that our Lord Jesus Christ was born of Mary of the seed of David, the Father having sent the Spirit from heaven into her that he might come into this world and save all flesh by his own flesh and that he might raise us in the flesh from the dead.... For the almighty God, maker of heaven and earth, sent the prophets first to the Jews to deliver them from their sins.... [Those] who assert that heaven and earth and all that is in them are not a work of God ... have the accursed belief of the serpent.... And those who say that there is no resurrection of the flesh shall have no resurrection. Whoever deviates from this rule, fire shall be for him and for those who preceded him, since they are Godless people, a generation of vipers." (3 Cor. 4-9, 24-25, 37-38)

  Here then, we have a proto-orthodox forgery created precisely in order to counter the views of "heretical" teachers of the second century.

  More Subtle Proto-orthodox Forgeries

  Other proto-orthodox forgeries served a similar end, but they achieved it by more subtle means.

  It is probably safe to say that most of the Apocryphal Acts were written not to advance any particular theological agenda but for other reasons, for example, to provide entertaining tales of the heroes of the faith for some Christian light reading, or to promote a certain view of asceticism (e.g., the Acts of Thomas), especially among Christian women (e.g., the Acts of Thecla). But some of these tales do function to support a proto-orthodox doctrinal position, none more clearly than the episodic record of the adventures of Jesus' chief disciple in the Acts of Peter.

  These tales, like those of the other Apocryphal Acts, may have originated as oral traditions about Jesus' disciples; possibly they were written down near the end of the second century or the beginning of the third. In them we find a plotline similar to that already encountered in the Pseudo-Clementine literature, for here, too, there is an ongoing set of confrontations between Peter, head of the apostolic band and faithful representative of the Lord Christ, and that nefarious father of heretics, Simon Magus. In this instance, however, Simon does not appear to be some kind of cipher for the apostle Paul; here he is the man of evil himself, the original Gnostic, from whom, according to this author, flowed villainy of every kind. The doctrinal function of these confrontations is clear: The representative of proto-orthodoxy, Peter, eventually bishop of the church of Rome, is shown to be superior in every way to Simon, father of the Gnostics. This superiority is demonstrated in numerous miracle-working contests throughout the narrative. In these tales, the good guys always win, and the truth is vindicated by their acts of power.

  A good portion of the text, then, narrates a series of miraculous one-upmanship, sometimes as the apostle and the heretic go head to head. And the stakes are rather high. At one point the entire Roman Senate gathers in the arena, with Peter and Simon placed as combatants in the ring. The challenge goes forth from Peter to Simon to do his worst, so to speak, to support his views. Peter's own views are clear: "I believe in the living God, through whom I shall destroy your magic arts." Simon, who has already taken a beating hither and yon by the apostle, nonetheless opts to take up the challenge, first by declaring the folly of Peter's proclamation: "You have the impudence," says Simon, "to speak of Jesus the Nazarene, the son of a carpenter, himself a carpenter, whose family is from Judea. Listen, Peter. The Romans have understanding. They are no fools." Then, addressing the crowd he says, "Men of Rome, is a God born? Is he crucified? Whoever has a Lord is no God" (Acts of Peter 23). Here, then is a Gnostic proclamation against a proto-orthodox theology of the real incarnation and death of Jesus.

  But the matter comes down to proof, and the proof comes in miraculous power. The Roman prefect challenges the adversaries to prove who is superior. Sending a favored slave into the arena, he instructs Simon to kill him and Peter to raise him from the dead. Obviously it is easier to kill than to raise, but Simon performs his act with panache, simply speaking a word in the servant's ear. With yet greater flair, however, Peter raises him from the dead through the power of God. The God of Peter is the God of life. And to cap off his demonstration, he also raises the dead son of a lonely widow, brought into the arena for just the occasion. The people standing by realize the implication and make the appropriate proclamation: "There is only one God, the God of Peter." (Acts of Peter 26)

  Other miraculous demonstrations are a bit more humorous, involving bizarre animal tricks, as in Peter's use of a talking dog to castigate the chief of all heretics in front of the crowds, and his demonstration of power by bringing a smoked tuna back to life:

  But Peter turned round and saw a smoked tuna fish hanging in a window; and he took it and said to the people, "If you now see this swimming in the water like a fish, will you be able to believe in him whom I preach?" And they all said with one accord, "Indeed we will believe you!" Now there was a fish pond near by; so he said, "In your name, Jesus Christ, in which they still fail to believe" (he said to the tuna) "in the presence of all these be alive and swim like a fish!" And he threw the tuna into the pond, and it came alive and began to swim. And the people saw the fish swimming; and he made it do so not merely for that hour, or it might have been called a delusion, but he made it go on swimming, so that it attracted crowds from all sides and showed that the tuna had become a live fish; so much so that some of the people threw in bread for it, and it ate it all up. And when they saw this, a great number followed him and believed in the Lord." (Acts of Peter 5)

  In the ultimate showdown between the heretical sorcerer and the man of God, Simon the magician announces that he will use his powers to leap into the air and fly like a bird over the temples and hills of Rome. But once the impressive aerial show begins, Peter is not to be outdone. He calls upon God to smite Simon in midair. God complies, much to the magician's dismay. Unprepared for a crash landing, Simon plunges to earth and breaks his leg in three places. Seeing what has happened, the crowds rush to stone him as an evildoer. He eventually dies of his injuries.

  A yet more subtle and certainly less entertaining use of forgery may be found in a proto-orthodox composition known as Paul's Letter to the Laodiceans. We have seen that it was a popular exercise to forge letters in Paul's name. This was happening already by the time of Thessalonians, as the author there mentions a letter "reputedly" from Paul (2:2). Moreover, it appears that the Pastoral epistles of the New Testament were written by someone other than Paul, as were the correspondence with Seneca and Corinthians. The Letter to the Laodiceans, however, is a peculiar case. In most of the other instances, there are reasonably clear and obvious reasons for the forgeries, as the letters convey a decided point of view, for example, against apocalyptic enthusiasm in Thessalonians or against docetic Christologies in Corinthians. But the Letter to the Laodiceans appears banal and harmless; it has no real ax to grind, no major points to stress. In fact, it appears to be little more than a simple pastiche of Pauline phrases thrown together one after the other. Fairly typical is the following:

  For my life is in Christ and to die is joy. And his mercy will work in you, that you may have the same love and be of one mind. Therefore, beloved, as you have heard in my presence, so hold fast and work in the fear of God, and eternal life will be yours. For it is God who works in you. And do without hesitation what you do. (vv. 8-12)

  Most of this is reminiscent of Philippians, but it scarcely dr
ives home a hard lesson. At an earlier point the author does say: "And may you not be deceived by the vain talk of some people who tell tales that they may lead you away from the truth of the gospel which is proclaimed by me" (v. 4). This sounds more promising from a heresiological perspective, but the author never indicates what these vain talkers say in their various tales.

  Why would an author forge a letter that does not appear to advance any kind of agenda? Scholars have long recognized one piece to this puzzle, but have not considered another which, I think, can provide the answer. The widely recognized motivation for the letter involves its concluding request: "See that this epistle is read to the Colossians and that of the Colossians to you" (v. 20). This is an important line, because it mirrors the advice found in the New Testament letter of Colossians (which, ironically enough, is also suspected by critical scholars to be non-Pauline): "And when this letter is read by you, have it read as well to the church in Laodicea, and be sure that you read the letter to the Laodiceans" (Col. 4:16). It may be that someone, knowing that Paul had allegedly written a letter to the Laodiceans, forged one to fill the void created by its known absence.

  But there may be another motivation for the letter, one that is slightly more subtle, making this seemingly harmless forgery full of proto-orthodox intent. As we will see in a later chapter, the earliest surviving "canon list" to come down to us from early Christianity—that is, a list of books that an author considered to be canonical Scripture—is called the Muratorian Canon, named after the eighteenth-century scholar who discovered it, L. Muratori. In addition to listing books that were thought to belong to the Scriptures, the anonymous author of this fragment also cites a number of writings to be excluded, some of them as heretical forgeries. Among these he numbers a Letter to the Laodiceans, which he claims was a "Marcionite forgery."

  Some scholars have argued that the surviving Letter to the Laodiceans is just this forgery. Not many people have been convinced, however, since there is nothing particularly Marcionite about the letter, nothing that intimates a Marcionite understanding of God, Christ, or Scripture, for example. Yet if it is not the Marcionite forgery mentioned in the Muratorian canon, how does one explain the creation of this pastiche of Pauline catchphrases? One solution is that it is an anti-Marcionite production—not in the sense that it attacks Marcionite views head on, but in the sense that it was produced by a proto-orthodox author as the letter of Paul to the Laodiceans, so as to show that the Marcionite forgery, which was in circulation, but which no longer survives for us today, was not that letter. A simple pasting together of Pauline-sounding ideas would suit the purpose perfectly. Once this document was produced, the other could be discounted as a forgery, and the proto-orthodox agenda was thereby fulfilled.

  The Falsification of Sacred Texts

  We have seen a number of weapons used in the literary battles for Christian supremacy: the construction of polemical refutations, the publication of character slurs, the creation of forged documents in the names of the apostles. These did not exhaust the arsenals of the various combatants, however. In the next chapter we will see how the formation of a canon of sacred authorities proved to be a particularly valuable instrument in battle. Here we will consider one other. This involved not the creation of "new" (i.e., forged) documents in the names of the apostles but the. falsification of writings that had already been produced, that is, the alteration of the wording of documents held to be sacred, in order to make them more clearly oppose "false" teachings and more clearly support "correct" ones. Once again, this was a strategy available to all sides of the conflict, and there is good evidence to suggest that all sides did in fact make use of it. It is certainly clear that all sides were accused of tampering with their texts to make them say what they wanted them to mean.

  We have already seen some of these accusations. Most (in)famous, of course, was Marcion and his followers, who not only rejected the entire Old Testament but also claimed that the writings of Paul and the Gospel (of Luke) had been altered by Christians with Jewish sympathies, so that references to God as creator, quotations of the Old Testament, and affirmations of the goodness of creation had been inserted into these texts, which originally lacked them. Their solution was to remove these false insertions so as to return the texts to their pristine state. The proto-orthodox, of course, saw this attempt at restoration to be nothing short of mutilation, and argued that the Marcionites were falsifying their texts simply by removing from them anything that did not coincide with their own theological agenda.

  Marcion was not the only one susceptible to the charge. Near the opposite end of the theological spectrum from Marcion were the Theodotians, the second-century Christians in Rome who followed Theodotus the Cobbler in claiming that Jesus was a human being, pure and simple (as opposed to the Marcionites, who thought he was divine). According to an anonymous tractate quoted by Eusebius, the Theodotians, like the Marcionites, intentionally corrupted their texts of Scripture, altering its sacred words in light of their own adoptionistic views. The evidence for the charge was the discrepant copies of Scripture produced by the leaders of the group:

  If anyone will take the trouble to collect their several copies and compare them, he will discover frequent divergences; for example, Asclepiades' copies do not agree with Theodotus's . . . nor do these agree with Hermophilus's copies. As for Appoloniades, his cannot even be harmonized with each other; it is possible to collate the ones which his disciples made first with those that have undergone further manipulation, and to find endless discrepancies. (Eusebius Church History 5.28)

  Thus Theodotians are accused of altering their sacred texts in different ways, but always to the same end of serving their own purposes. So, too, the Ebionites, Jewish-Christian counterparts of our Roman adoptionists, were accused of excising the first two chapters of the Gospel according to Matthew to accommodate their rejection of the doctrine of Jesus' virginal conception.

  Various groups of Gnostics proved susceptible to the charge as well, even though in their case one might expect to find it with less frequency, given their uncanny ability (at least in the eyes of their proto-orthodox opponents) to discover their views in virtually any text, regardless of its wording. Nonetheless, they occasionally stood condemned on precisely such ground, as when Tertullian argued that the Valentinians had altered the verbal form of John 1:13 from the singular to the plural. Originally, claimed Tertullian, the verse referred to the miraculous birth of Jesus ("who was born not from blood nor from the will of the flesh nor from the will of man, but from God"); the Valentinians, however, had modified the text to make it refer to their own supernatural generation through gnosis ("who were born not from blood ...").

  What is revealing about this particular instance is that Tertullian was clearly in the wrong: It is he who preserves the corruption. Of all our surviving Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John, none gives the verse in the form cited by Tertullian, and of all the surviving Latin manuscripts, only one does. This leads to the striking observation that despite the fact that "heretics" were commonly charged with altering their texts of Scripture, there are almost no traces in our surviving manuscripts of their having done so.

  This does not mean that the alternative forms of Christianity were guiltless in the matter. The winners not only write the history; they also reproduce the texts. Even if there were instances in which manuscripts of the books that came to be included in the New Testament had been altered to support one heretical view or the other, as surely there were, these particular manuscripts would not have been preserved or recopied for posterity. Burning heretical books did not only mean destroying books created by heretics; it also meant destroying (or not reproducing) books altered by heretics.

  If "heretically altered" texts of Scripture do not survive, what about texts altered by the proto-orthodox? Did scribes standing in the tradition that eventually claimed victory ever falsify their texts in order to make them more serviceable for the proto-orthodox cause, making them say what they wer
e already thought to mean? In fact, this did happen, as is abundantly evident throughout our manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I will give a few examples in a moment. First I need to give some background information to help make sense of the discussion.

  Some Background Information

  We do not have the "originals" of any of the books that came to be included in the New Testament, or indeed of any Christian book from antiquity. What we have are copies of the originals or, to be more accurate, copies made from copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. Most of these surviving copies are hundreds of years removed from the originals themselves.

  I can explain the situation by giving a solitary example of how things worked. When the Thessalonians received Paul's first letter, someone in the community must have copied it by hand, one word at a time. The copy itself was then copied, possibly in Thessalonica, possibly in another community to which a copy was taken or sent. This copy of the copy was also copied, as later was this copy of the copy of the copy. Before long, there were a number of copies of the letter circulating in communities throughout the Mediterranean, or rather a number of copies of copies, all made by hand at a pace that would seem outrageously slow to those of us accustomed to the world of word processors, photocopiers, desktop publishing, and electronic mail.

  In this process of recopying the document by hand, what happened to the original of Thessalonians? For some unknown reason, it was eventually thrown away or burned or otherwise destroyed. Possibly it was read so much that it simply wore out. The early Christians saw no need to preserve it as the "original" text. They had copies of the letter. Why keep the original?