Papias is not recorded as having said anything about either Luke or John. I’m not sure why. But the bottom line is this: we do not have any solid reference to the authors of our four Gospels in which we can trust (for example, that the author is actually referring to our Matthew and our Mark) until closer to the end of the second century—nearly a full hundred years after these books had been anonymously placed in circulation.
The Witness of Irenaeus and Others
The first certain reference to the four Gospels is in the writings of the church father Irenaeus. In a five-volume attack on Christian heresies he names as the four Gospels of the church Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. By the time of Irenaeus (180 CE), it is not surprising that church fathers would want to know who wrote these anonymous books. As we will see in a later chapter, there were lots of other Gospels floating around in the early church—most of them actually claiming to have been written by disciples of Jesus, for example, Peter, Thomas, and Philip. How was one to decide which Gospels were to be trusted as apostolic? This was a thorny problem, since most of these “other” Gospels represented theological perspectives branded heretical by the likes of Irenaeus. How can one know the true teachings of Jesus? Only by accepting Gospels that actually were written by his followers, or close companions of his followers.
But the Gospels that were widely accepted as authoritative in Irenaeus’s circles were originally anonymous. The solution to the problem of validating these texts was obvious: they needed to be attributed to real, established authorities. Traditions had been floating around for decades that Matthew had written a Gospel, and so what is now our first Gospel came to be accepted as that book. Mark was thought to be a companion of Peter: our second Gospel came to be associated with him, giving Peter’s view of Jesus’ life. The author of our third Gospel wrote two volumes, the second of which, Acts, portrayed Paul as a hero. Church leaders insisted that it must have been written by a companion of Paul, and so assigned it to Luke.10 And to round it all out, the fourth Gospel, which explicitly claims not to be written by an eyewitness, was nonetheless attributed to one, John, one of Jesus’ closest disciples (he is never actually named in the Fourth Gospel).
None of these attributions goes back to the authors themselves. And none of the Gospels was written by a follower of Jesus, all of whom were lower-class Aramaic speakers from Galilee, not highly educated Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation.
And so we have an answer to our ultimate question of why these Gospels are so different from one another. They were not written by Jesus’ companions or by companions of his companions. They were written decades later by people who didn’t know Jesus, who lived in a different country or different countries from Jesus, and who spoke a different language from Jesus. They are different from each other in part because they also didn’t know each other, to some extent they had different sources of information (although Matthew and Luke drew on Mark), and they modified their stories on the basis of their own understandings of who Jesus was.
The fact that the Gospels were not actually written by apostles does not make them unusual in the New Testament. Quite the contrary, it makes them typical. Most of the books of the New Testament go under the names of people who didn’t actually write them. This has been well known among scholars for the greater part of the past century, and it is taught widely in mainline seminaries and divinity schools throughout the country. As a result, most pastors know it as well. But for many people on the street and in the pews, this is “news.”
ARE THERE FORGERIES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT?
Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, only eight almost certainly go back to the author whose name they bear: the seven undisputed letters of Paul (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) and the Revelation of John (although we aren’t sure who this John was).
The other nineteen books fall into three groups.
Misattributed writings. As we have already seen, the Gospels are probably misattributed. John the disciple did not write John, and Matthew did not write Matthew. Other anonymous books have been wrongly attributed to someone famous. The book of Hebrews does not name Paul as its author, and it almost certainly was not written by Paul.11 But it was eventually admitted into the canon of Scripture (see chapter 7) because church fathers came to think it was written by Paul.
Homonymous writings. The term “homonymy” means “having the same name.” A “homonymous writing” is one that is written by someone who has the same name as someone who is famous. For example, the book of James was no doubt written by someone named James, but the author does not claim to be any particular James. It was an extraordinarily common name. Later church fathers accepted the book as part of Scripture because they claimed that this James was James the brother of Jesus. In the book itself there is no such claim.
Pseudepigraphic writings. Some books of the New Testament were written in the names of people who did not actually write them. Scholars have known this for well over a century. The term for this phenomenon is “pseudepigraphy”—literally, “writing that goes under a false name.” Scholars have not been overly precise in their use of this term and tend to use it because it avoids the negative connotations associated with the term “forgery.” Whichever term they use, biblical scholars have argued for a long time that there are New Testament books whose authors knowingly claimed to be someone other than who they were.
Pseudepigraphy in the Ancient World
To make sense of this situation we need to learn more about authorship and false authorship in the ancient world.
Definitions
To begin with, it is important to be precise in our terminology. The term “pseudepigraphy” can refer to any writing that has a false name attached to it. They may be false attributions, and they may be writings whose authors falsely claim to be someone else.
There are two kinds of falsely attributed writings. Some are books written anonymously that later readers, editors, or scribes wrongly claim to have been written by someone famous; others are books written homonymously, by someone who happens to share the name of someone else who was famous. In the ancient world, most people didn’t have last names, so “John” could refer to any one of hundreds or thousands of people. If an author named John wrote a book and someone later claimed that this John was in fact John the son of Zebedee (as some people claimed for the book of Revelation), then it would be a false attribution based on homonymity.12
There are also two kinds of “pseudonymous” writings, writings written under a “false name.” A pen name is a simple pseudonym. When Samuel Clemens wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and signed off as Mark Twain, he didn’t intend to deceive anyone; he simply was choosing a different name to publish under. There are very few instances of this kind of pseudonymity in the ancient world, although it did happen on occasion. The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his famous work, The Anabasis, under a pen name, “Themistogenes.” More frequently in antiquity we find the other kind of pseudonymous writing, where the author uses the name of someone else who is well known in order to deceive his audience into thinking that he really is that person. This kind of pseudonymous writing is literary forgery.
Prevalence of Forgery in the Ancient World
Literary forgery was a common phenomenon in the ancient world. We know this because ancient authors themselves talk about it, a lot. Discussions of forgery can be found in the writings of some of the best-known authors from antiquity. Among the Greeks and Romans you can find references to and discussions of forgery in such far-flung authors as Herodotus, Cicero, Quintillian, Martial, Suetonius, Galen, Plutarch, Philastratus, and Diogenes Laertius. Among Christian authors there are discussions in the writings of such well-known figures as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, Rufinus, and Augustine.
It is sometimes argued by scholars of the New Testament that forgery was so common in the ancient world that no one took it seriously: since the deceit could no
rmally be easily detected, it was never really meant to fool anyone.13 I have spent the past couple of years examining the ancient discussions of forgery and have come to the conclusion that the only people who make this argument are people who haven’t actually read the ancient sources.
Ancient sources took forgery seriously. They almost universally condemn it, often in strong terms. How widely was it condemned? Odd as it might seem, the practice of forgery is sometimes condemned even in documents that are forged. Furthermore, the claim that no one was ever fooled is completely wrong. People were fooled all the time. That’s why people wrote forgeries—to fool people.
I don’t need to give a detailed account of the ancient discussions of forgery here; there is plenty of scholarship on the problem, although unfortunately the most exhaustive works are in German.14 But I can illustrate the point by giving one particularly telling anecdote.
In second-century Rome there was a famous physician and author named Galen. Galen tells the story that one day, as he was walking through the streets of Rome, he passed by a bookseller’s stall. There he saw two men arguing over a certain book for sale, written in the name of…Galen! One man was insisting that the book really was Galen’s, and the other was equally vociferous in claiming that it could not be, since the writing style was completely different from Galen’s. This, needless to say, warmed the cockles of Galen’s heart, since he had not in fact written the book. But he was more than a little perturbed that someone was trying to sell a book under his name. And so he went home and composed a small book called “How to Recognize the Books of Galen.” We still have the book today.
Forgery was widely practiced, it was meant to deceive, and it often worked. That it was not an accepted practice is clear from the terms that ancient authors used for it. Two of the most common terms for a forgery in Greek are pseudon, a lie, and nothon, a bastard child. This latter term is as harsh and unsavory in Greek as it is in English. It is often juxtaposed with the term gnesion, which means something like legitimate or authentic.
Motivations for Producing Forgeries
From a wide range of ancient sources it is clear that the intention of a literary forgery was to deceive readers into thinking that someone other than the actual author had written the book. But what motivated authors to do this? Why didn’t they just write books using their own names?
There were many motivations for pagan, Jewish, and Christian authors to forge literary texts. Here are ten:
1. To make a profit. The two greatest libraries in the ancient world were located in the cities of Alexandria and Pergamum. Acquiring books for a library collection in antiquity was very different from today. Since books were copied by hand, different copies of the same book might differ, sometimes sizably, from one another, so the most important libraries preferred to have an original of a book, rather than a later copy that might have mistakes in it. According to Galen, this led entrepreneurial types to create “original” copies of the classics to sell to the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum. If librarians were paying cash on the head for original copies of treatises of the philosopher Aristotle, you’d be amazed how many original copies of treatises of Aristotle would start to turn up. So far as I can tell, the profit motive did not have any effect on early Christian writings, since these were not sold in the marketplace until much later times.
2. To oppose an enemy. Sometimes a literary work would be forged in order to make a personal enemy look bad. A Greek historian of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, indicates that a philosopher named Diotemus forged and then circulated fifty obscene letters in the name of his philosophical nemesis Epicurus. This obviously did not do wonders for Epicurus’s reputation. I have sometimes wondered if something of the sort is happening in one of the more peculiar forgeries of early Christianity. The fourth-century heresy hunter Epiphanius indicated that he had read a book allegedly used by a group of highly immoral Christian heretics known as the Phibionites. This book, The Greater Questions of Mary, allegedly contained a bizarre account of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, in which Jesus takes Mary up to a high mountain and in her presence pulls a woman out of his side (much as God made Eve from the rib of Adam) and begins having sexual intercourse with her. When he comes to climax, however, he pulls out of her, collects his semen in his hand, and eats it, telling Mary, “Thus must we do, to live.” Mary, understandably enough, faints on the spot (Epiphanius, The Panarion, book 26). This strange tale is found nowhere outside of Epiphanius, who is famous for making up a lot of his “information” about heretics. I’ve often wondered whether he made this whole account up, claimed to have found it in one of the Phibionites’ books, but fabricated it himself out of whole cloth. If so, in a sense he forged a Phibionite book in the name of Mary in order to make his heretical opponents look very bad indeed.
3. To oppose a particular point of view. If I’m right about Epiphanius and The Greater Questions of Mary, then part of his motivation would have been to oppose a view, the Phibionite heresy, that he found noxious. Similar motivations can be found in the cases of a large number of other Christian forgeries. In addition to 1 and 2 Corinthians in the New Testament, we have from outside the New Testament a 3 Corinthians.15 This book was clearly written in the second century, as it opposes certain heretical views known from that time, which propose that Jesus was not a real flesh-and-blood human being and that his followers would not actually be resurrected in the flesh. According to this author, they would be resurrected, as he states in no uncertain terms—while claiming to be the apostle Paul. It may seem odd to try to counteract a false teaching by assuming a false identity, but there it is. It happened a lot in the forgeries of the early Christian tradition.
4. To defend one’s own tradition as divinely inspired. There is an ancient collection of writings known as the Sibylline oracles.16 The Sibyl was reputed to be an ancient pagan prophetess, inspired by the Greek god Apollo. Our surviving oracles, however, are mostly written by Jews. In them the prophetess, allegedly living long before the events she predicts, discusses the future events of history—and she is always right, since the actual author is living after these events—and confirms the validity of important Jewish beliefs and practices. Not to be outdone, later Christians took some of these oracles and inserted references to the coming of Christ in them, so that now this pagan prophetess accurately foresees the coming of the Messiah. What better testimony to the divine truthfulness of one’s religion than the prophecies allegedly delivered by the inspired spokesperson of one’s enemies?
5. Out of humility? It is commonly argued by scholars of the New Testament that members of certain philosophical schools would write treatises in the name of their master-teacher and sign his name to their own work as a gesture of humility, since one’s own thoughts are simply the extension of what the master himself said. This is said to be particularly true of a group of philosophers known as the Pythagoreans, named after the great Greek philosopher Pythagoras. There is, however, serious dispute as to whether the Pythagorean philosophers who claimed to be Pythagoras actually did it out of humility: no statements to that effect can be found in their own writings, only in the writings of authors writing centuries later.17 These Pythagoreans may have been inspired by other motives.
6. Out of love for an authority figure. In a similar vein, we do have one author from antiquity who claimed to have forged his work as an act of love and reverence. This is a most unusual situation, one in which a forger was caught red-handed. The story is told by the early-third-century church father Tertullian, who indicates that the wellknown stories of Paul and his female disciple Thecla, famous as a model disciple throughout the Middle Ages, were forged by a leader of a church in Asia Minor, and that he was discovered in the act and deposed from his church office as a result. In his self-defense the forger claimed that he had written his work “out of love for Paul.”18 It is not clear exactly what he meant by that, but it may mean that his devotion to Paul led him to invent a tale in Paul’s name to capture some of what he to
ok to be the apostle’s most important teachings and views. Actually, the teachings and views found in the surviving Acts of Paul and Thecla are not at all what Paul taught: among other things, we learn from this narrative that Paul proclaimed that eternal life would come not to those who believed in Jesus’ death and resurrection, as Paul himself proclaimed, but to those who followed Jesus in remaining sexually abstinent—even if they were married.
7. To see if you could get away with it. There were some ancient forgers who created their work simply in order to see if they could pull the wool over other peoples’ eyes. The technical term for this is “mystification.” The most famous instance, told by Diogenes Laertius, is of an author named Dionysius who set out to fool one of his sworn enemies, Heraclides of Pontus, by forging a play in the name of the famous tragedian Sophocles. Heraclides was fooled and quoted the play as authentic. Dionysius then uncovered his deceit—but Heraclides refused to believe him. And so Dionysius pointed out that if you took the first letters of several lines of the text and wrote them out as words (an acrostic), they spelled the name of Dionysius’s boyfriend. Heraclides claimed that it was just a coincidence, until Dionysius showed that later in the text were two other acrostics, one that spelled the message “an old monkey isn’t caught in a trap; oh yes, he is caught at last, but it takes time,” and another that said, “Heraclides is ignorant of letters and is not ashamed of his ignorance.”19 I don’t know of any certain instances of mystification among early Christian forgers.
8. To supplement the tradition. Especially in early Christianity there were lots of instances in which forgers would provide “authoritative” writings that would supplement what was thought to be lacking in the tradition. For example, the author of Colossians 4:17 (Paul?) tells his readers that they are also to read the letter sent to the Christians in the town of Laodicea. We don’t have an authentic letter of Paul to the Laodiceans, however. No surprise, then, that in the second century a couple of such letters turned up, forged in Paul’s name to supply the lack.20 Another example: it is well known that the Gospels of the New Testament say virtually nothing about Jesus’ early life. This had some early Christians puzzled, and in the second century, accounts of Jesus as a boy started cropping up. The most famous of these was claimed to have been written by someone named Thomas, a name that means “the twin.” This may be a reference to the tradition known from Syrian Christians that Jesus’ own brother, Jude, was in fact his twin brother, “Judas Thomas.” In any event, it is an intriguing narrative of the adventures of the young Jesus, starting when he was a five-year-old.21
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) Page 13
