The crucial question is this: Is it possible that any of the early Christian forgeries made it into the New Testament? That some of the books of the New Testament were not written by the apostles whose names are attached to them? That some of Paul’s letters were not actually written by Paul, but by someone claiming to be Paul? That Peter’s letters were not written by Peter? That James and Jude did not write the books that bear their names? Or—a somewhat different case, as we will see—that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
Scholars for over a hundred years have realized that in fact this is the case. The authors of some of the books of the New Testament were not who they claimed to be or who they have been supposed to be. In some instances that is because an anonymous writing, in which an author did not indicate who he was, was later named after someone who did not in fact write it. Matthew probably did not write Matthew, for example, or John, John (see Chapter 7); on the other hand, neither book actually claims to be written by a person named Matthew or John. In other instances it is because an author lied about who he was, claiming to be someone he was not. As I have already intimated, some scholars have long been reluctant, and even opposed, to calling this authorial activity lying and to call the literary products that resulted forgeries. As I will explain at length in the following chapters, most of the scholars who have actually read what ancient authors say about the phenomenon have no such hesitancy.
It is true that the ancient authors who lied about their identity may well have felt they had a clear conscience, that what they did was completely justified, that they were ultimately in the right. They may have thought and believed, at least in their own minds, that they had very good reasons for doing what they did. But as we will see in later chapters, by ancient standards these authors engaged in fraudulent activities, and the books they produced were forgeries.
Let me conclude this introduction simply by saying that I have spent the past five years studying forgery in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, especially but not exclusively within Christianity. My goal all along has been to write a detailed scholarly monograph that deals with the matter at length. The book you’re reading now is not that scholarly monograph. What I try to do in the present book is to discuss the issue at a layperson’s level, pointing out the really interesting aspects of the problem by highlighting the results of my own research and showing what scholars have long said about the writings of the New Testament and pseudonymous Christian writings from outside the New Testament. The scholarly monograph to come will be much more thoroughly documented and technically argued. The present book, in other words, is not intended for my fellow scholars, who, if they read this one, will be doing so simply out of curiosity. It is, instead, intended for you, the general reader, who on some level is, like me, interested in the truth.
CHAPTER ONE
A World of Deceptions and Forgeries
WHENEVER I TEACH ABOUT FORGERY, I think back to my first lecture on the subject, twenty-five years ago now, at Rutgers University. As odd as this might seem, forgery was on everyone’s mind at the time. Only a few months earlier forgery had been front-page news for weeks in major newspapers around the world. The diaries of Adolf Hitler had been discovered, authenticated by one of the world’s leading experts on the Führer, the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. The diaries had been purchased for millions of dollars, first by Stern magazine in Germany, then by Rupert Murdoch for English publishing rights. But just as they started to appear, they were shown to be worthless forgeries.1
The forger of the diaries was a West German named Konrad Kujau. Ironically, even before he perpetuated the biggest con job of modern times, his friends called him Connie. Kujau had grown up as a poor working-class fellow; at an early age he discovered an artistic ability that led him to a career of forgery. He spent some time in jail as a young adult, having been caught forging lunch vouchers. But he had a number of aliases, and the people to whom he sold the Hitler diaries were not assiduous in making a background check.
The Hitler diaries consisted of some sixty books of handwritten notes that Hitler himself had allegedly made during his time in power, from June 1932 to the very end in 1945. For collectors of Nazi memorabilia, such a discovery would be priceless. We have a number of documents and paintings that Hitler produced, but nothing like this, an account of his daily activities, encounters, successes, excesses, companions, loves, hates, and rambling thoughts. When Stern had come into possession of the books and decided to publish them in 1984, the publishers consulted with Trevor-Roper, who, despite an initial suspicion that they must be a hoax, became convinced of the authenticity of the books upon a quick perusal of some of their pages. The documents looked old; they contained numerous pieces of accurate data and lots of asides and irrelevancies that one would expect in a personal diary. And there were so many of them! What forger would go to that much trouble?
Moreover, there was a plausible explanation for how they had managed to survive the war. It was well known that when defeat was imminent, Hitler had several metal boxes filled with his personal effects flown out of Berlin; but the plane had been shot down and its pilot killed. Local villagers near the wreck site pillaged the plane, and the boxes ended up in private hands. Collectors of memorabilia later paid for the materials, and one such collector, named Konrad Fischer (an alias for Konrad Kujau), had ended up with the diaries. They had allegedly been smuggled out of the East by his brother, a general in the East German army.
But in fact it was all a hoax by Kujau himself, who had learned to imitate Hitler’s handwriting, had read authoritative biographies of the Führer to get his facts more or less straight, and had painstakingly produced the accounts over a three-year period in the early 1980s. To make the pages look aged and worn, he blotted them with tea and repeatedly slapped them on the table. And he fooled the experts, long enough, at least, to be paid $4.8 million for his efforts.
The day before the diaries were to be released to the public, however, Trevor-Roper started having second thoughts. Over the course of the next few days, after Stern had announced the most significant historical find in decades, other specialists were brought in. The diaries were shown beyond any doubt at all to be fakes. Forensics experts found that the paper, the glue, and the ink were all of post-1945 vintage; historians showed that the diaries were filled with errors.
Kujau was convicted of forgery, a crime by modern standards, though, as we’ll see, not by ancient ones, and spent several years in prison. He emerged unrepentant, however, and spent a good bit of the rest of his life painting forgeries of great art—imitations of Monet, Rembrandt, and van Gogh—and selling them precisely as imitations. This eventually created a market for other forgers to produce and sell replicas of Kujau’s imitations. As a climax to this seemingly never ending story, at the end of Kujau’s life he produced an autobiography, which was never published. Instead, a different book appeared in his name, called Die Originalität der Fälschung (“The Originality of Forgery”). Kujau claimed, evidently in all truthfulness, that he had not written a word of it.
Forgeries in the Ancient World
WHEN I GIVE PUBLIC lectures on forgery, I am often asked, “Who would do such a thing?” The answer is, “Lots of people!” And for lots of different reasons. The most common reason today, of course, is to make money. Konrad Kujau may be the most infamous and egregious case in point, but he has many hundreds of lesser-known colleagues and disciples. The forgery trade continues to thrive; forgeries in the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, and many, many others continue to flood the market, as recent literature on modern forgery so aptly attests.2 These forgeries are almost always produced in order to be sold as authentic. There was a good deal of that kind of activity in the ancient world as well (and far fewer forgery experts who could detect a forgery if they saw one), although it was not a major factor within early Christianity. This was for a simple reason: Christia
n books were not, by and large, for sale.
Other scoundrels today will occasionally forge a document just to see if they can get away with it. This too is something that occasionally happened in the ancient world. The most famous account is the well-known case of Dionysius the Renegade.
Dionysius was a literary scholar and philosopher of the third century BCE. He eventually earned the epithet “Renegade,” because he had a falling out with his fellow Stoic philosophers when he came to realize that his philosophical views did not jibe with real life as he experienced it. Stoics taught that people should remove themselves, mentally and emotionally, from the pain and anguish of this life to experience inner tranquility of spirit. Dionysius for a long time subscribed to this view. But then he became very ill, experienced a good deal of pain, and started to think that his earlier philosophizing about pain was bogus in the face of pain itself. So he left the Stoics and was called by them a renegade.
What he is most famous for in the annals of history, however, is a ruse that he pulled on a fellow literary scholar, his former teacher but eventual opponent, Heraclides of Pontus. The ruse involved a forgery, and it was a pure set-up, produced to make Heraclides look bad.3
Dionysius wrote and put in circulation a tragic play he called the Parthenopaeus, claiming that it was the work of the famous Greek dramatist Sophocles. The play made its way into the hands of Heraclides, who had no reason to doubt its authenticity. Heraclides eventually quoted it to illustrate a point about Sophocles. This is just what Dionysius was hoping for, a chance to show up his opponent. He triumphantly confronted Heraclides and told him that the play was forged, that in fact he himself had written it. Heraclides, however, did not believe it and insisted that Dionysius was lying. But Dionysius had an ace or two up his sleeve. He showed Heraclides that if he took the first letter of a series of lines in the first part of the play and strung them together as an acrostic, they spelled the name Pankalos, which happened to be the name of Dionysius’s male lover.
Heraclides was still not convinced, and so Dionysius showed him two other acrostics embedded in the lines of the text. The first formed a poetic couplet:
An old monkey is not caught by a trap;
Oh yes, he is caught at last; but it takes time.
The other line was completely decisive:
Heraclides is ignorant of letters and is not ashamed of his ignorance.
We find nothing quite so hilarious or outrageous in the writings of the early Christians. In fact, there is scant evidence to suggest that any Christian authors forged documents simply in order to see if they could get away with it. Even so, there were plenty of early Christian forgers who produced lots of forged documents, probably for lots of reasons. As I pointed out in the Introduction, we still have numerous forged documents that emanated from the early church, numerous Gospels, Acts, letters, and apocalypses (these are the four literary genres of the New Testament), all of them claiming to be written by apostles.
Many of these noncanonical books are fascinating and still worth reading.4 Among the Gospels, for example, there is an account allegedly written by Peter that gives a detailed narration of the resurrection. This is striking because—most readers have never noticed this—the New Testament Gospels do not narrate the resurrection. They do say that Jesus was buried and indicate that on the third day his tomb was empty, but they do not narrate the account of his actually emerging from the tomb. There is such an account in the Gospel of Peter, however. In it Jesus walks out of the tomb supported by two angels who are as tall as mountains, although Jesus is taller still; behind them, out of the tomb, emerges the cross, which speaks out to God in heaven. Other “apostolic” Gospels tell yet other amazing stories about Jesus or record bizarre teachings supposedly spoken by him, Gospels allegedly written by Jesus’s brother Thomas, his disciple Philip, and his female companion Mary Magdalene. All of these books claimed to be authentic, but each of them was classified as a “forgery” by other early Christians who did not believe the apostles had actually written them.
There are also noncanonical Acts, books that narrate the adventures of Jesus’s apostles after his ascension, such as the Acts of Paul, in which Paul preaches that, to have eternal life, followers of Jesus must refrain from sex even if married and avoid marriage altogether if single. This book was fabricated by a church leader in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the second century. We know about it because a famous church father, Tertullian, indicates that the person was caught and put on trial in the church for producing the account and then unceremoniously removed from his leadership position.5 Most church leaders did not appreciate fabricated documents. But there were plenty to go around. Today we still have extensive copies of Acts of John, Peter, Andrew, and Thomas as well as fragments of earlier works that no longer survive intact.
There were also forged letters, including a set of letters between Paul and the most famous philosopher of his day, Seneca, which showed not only that Paul was on intimate terms with the greatest minds of the empire, but also that he was respected and revered by them. Some later church leaders maintained that these letters were authentic, but others thought they had been forged for the purpose of making Paul look good. There were also debates over the authenticity of other letters of Paul, and of Peter, and even of Jesus. Some of these other writings still survive.
So too forged apocalypses dotted the Christian literary landscape, including a fascinating account discovered in 1886 in a tomb in Egypt, a firsthand account allegedly written by Peter in which he is given a personal guided tour, by Jesus himself, of heaven and hell and the respective blessings of the saved and the gruesome torments of the damned. This book, as it turns out, almost made it into the New Testament, as there were church leaders well into the fourth century who claimed that it was Scripture. Others, though, claimed it was forged.
These are just a few of the documents that were disputed in the ancient world. Some early Christians claimed they really were written by apostles and belonged in the New Testament. Others insisted that they were not written by apostles, but were forgeries. How many other such documents were there? We will never know. At present we know of over a hundred writings from the first four centuries that were claimed by one Christian author or another to have been forged by fellow Christians.6
Early Christian Forgeries
MOST OF THE INSTANCES I have just mentioned are forgeries from after the days of the apostles themselves, from the second, third, and fourth Christian centuries. Most of the books of the New Testament, on the other hand, were written during the first century. Is there any evidence that forgery was happening in this earlier period? In fact, there is very good evidence indeed, and it comes to us from the pages of the New Testament itself.
There are thirteen letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul, including two to the Thessalonians. In the Second Letter to the Thessalonians we find a most intriguing verse in which the author tells his readers that they are not to be led astray by a letter “as if by us” indicating that the “day of the Lord” is almost here (2:2). The author, in other words, knows of a letter in circulation claiming to be by Paul that is not really by Paul. This other letter allegedly teaches an idea that Paul himself opposes. Who would create such a forged letter? Obviously someone who wanted to advance his own views about when the end would come and decided to do so with the authority of Paul, even though he was not Paul.
But there is a terrifically interesting irony connected with this passage. Second Thessalonians, in which the passage appears, is itself widely thought among scholars not to be by Paul, even though it claims to be written by him (we’ll see the reasons for thinking this in Chapter 3). Is 2 Thessalonians itself a forgery in Paul’s name? If so, why would it warn against a forgery in Paul’s name? There can be little doubt about the answer: one of the “tricks” used by ancient forgers to assure readers that their own writings were authentic was to warn against writings that were not authentic. Readers naturally assume that the au
thor is not doing precisely what he condemns.7
We have other interesting instances of this phenomenon in early Christian literature. Three hundred years later, at the end of the fourth century, there appeared a book that scholars have called the Apostolic Constitutions. This lengthy book, in eight volumes, gives instructions concerning how the church is to be organized and run by its leaders. The book claims to be written by a man named Clement, who was allegedly the fourth bishop of Rome (i.e., an early “pope”), appointed by the apostle Peter himself to lead the great church. But in reality the book was written three centuries or so after Clement himself was in the grave. That is, it is a forgery. More than that, the book is called “apostolic” Constitutions because it passes along the advice and instructions of the apostles of Jesus themselves, often in the first person: “I, Peter,” say to you this; “I, John,” say to you this; “I, James,” say to you this; and so on. One of the most fascinating instructions of the real-life author of this book (we don’t know who actually wrote it) comes at the end, where he warns his readers not to read books that claim to be written by the apostles, but are not. In other words, he’s telling his readers not to read books such as the one they are reading, an apostolic forgery. Why insert this instruction? Once again, as with 2 Thessalonians, it is because by doing so he throws his readers off the scent of his own deceit.
With 2 Thessalonians we are presented with a particularly interesting situation. No matter how one understands the matter, the book shows that there were almost certainly forgeries in Paul’s name in circulation all the way back during the time of the New Testament writings. If scholars who think that 2 Thessalonians was not written by Paul are wrong—that is, if Paul really wrote it—then it shows that Paul himself knew of a forgery in his name that had come to the Thessalonian church. But if the other scholars are right, that Paul did not compose 2 Thessalonians, then this book itself is a forgery in Paul’s name that was floating around in the church. Either way, there must have been Pauline forgeries already in the first century.
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