Forged

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Other forgers produced their work for more noble ends, for example, to provide hope for their readers. One of the most common forms of forgery in Jewish writings around the time of early Christianity is the literary genre known as the apocalypse. An apocalypse (from the Greek meaning a “revealing” or an “unveiling”) is a text that reveals the truth of the heavenly realm to mortals to help them make sense of what is happening here on earth. Sometimes this truth is revealed through bizarre and highly symbolic visions that the author allegedly sees and that are explained by some kind of angelic interpreter. An example is in the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible. At other times the author is said to be taken up to heaven to see the ultimate truths of the divine realm that make sense of the horrible events transpiring here on earth. A Christian example is the book of Revelation in the New Testament.

  These books are meant to inspire hope in their readers. Even though things seem to be completely out of control here on earth, even though there is rampant pain and misery and suffering, even though wars, famines, epidemics, and natural disasters are crushing the human race, even though things seem to be completely removed from God’s hand—despite all this, everything is going according to plan. God will soon make right all that is wrong. If people will simply hold on for a little while longer, their trust in God will be vindicated, and he will intervene in the course of things here on earth to restore peace, justice, and joy forever.

  Apocalypses are almost always written pseudonymously in the name of some renowned religious figure of the past.23 In Christian circles we have apocalypses in the names of Peter, Paul, and the prophet Isaiah. In Jewish circles we have apocalypses in the names of Daniel, Enoch, Abraham, and even Adam! Scholars typically claim that these books cannot be considered forgeries, because writing them pseudonymously was all part of the task; the literary genre requires them, more or less, to be written by someone who would “know” such things, that is, someone highly favored by God. But I think this view is too simplistic. The reality is that ancient people really did believe that they were written by the people who claimed to be writing them, as seen repeatedly in the ancient testimonies.24 The authors of these books knew it too. They assumed false names precisely because their writings would prove more effective that way.

  This relates to the single most important motivation for authors to claim they were someone else in antiquity. Quite simply, it was to get a hearing for their views. If you were an unknown person, but had something really important to say and wanted people to hear you—not so they could praise you, but so they could learn the truth—one way to make that happen was to pretend you were someone else, a well-known author, a famous figure, an authority.

  Thus, for example, if you wanted to write a philosophical treatise in which you dealt with some of the most confounding ethical problems facing the world, but you were not a famous philosopher, you might write the treatise and claim that you were, signing it Plato or Aristotle. If you wanted to produce an apocalypse explaining that suffering here on this earth is only temporary and that God would soon intervene to overthrow the forces of evil in this world, and you wanted people to realize this was a message that needed to be heard and proclaimed, you wouldn’t sign it with your own name (the Apocalypse of Joe), but the name of a famous religious figure (the Apocalypse of Daniel). If you wanted to narrate a Gospel of Jesus’s most important teachings, but in fact were living a hundred years after Jesus and didn’t have any real access to what Jesus said, you would write down the sayings you found most compelling and claim to be someone who had actually heard Jesus speak, calling your book the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Philip.

  This motivation was at work in both Christian and non-Christian circles. We know this because ancient authors actually tell us so. For example, a commentator on the writings of Aristotle, a pagan scholar named David, indicated: “If someone is uninfluential and unknown, yet wants his writing to be read, he writes in the name of someone who came before him and was influential, so that through his influence he can get his work accepted.”25

  This is the case with the one instance we have of a Christian forger who was caught and who later explained in writing what he did. In the fifth Christian century, a church leader named Salvian lived in Marseille. As did many others in his day Salvian decided, with his wife, to express his devotion to God by renouncing the world and taking on an ascetic form of life. Salvian was outraged by the worldliness of the church and by church members who were more concerned with personal comfort and wealth than with the demands of the gospel. So he wrote a letter called Timothy to the Church. Written in an authoritative style, the letter seemed to its readers actually to have been written by Timothy, the famous companion of the apostle Paul four hundred years earlier. But somehow Salvian’s bishop came to suspect that Salvian had written it. He confronted Salvian with the matter, and Salvian admitted that he had done it.

  But Salvian was a defensive fellow, and so he wrote an explanation for why he had produced a pseudonymous letter. As defensive individuals often do, Salvian made lots of excuses. The name Timothy, for example, literally means “honored by God,” and so, he said, he used that name to show that he wrote for the honor of God. His main defense, though, was that he was a nobody, and if he himself wrote a letter to the churches, no one would pay attention. Or as he put it in his written defense, the author had “wisely selected a pseudonym for his book for the obvious reason that he did not wish the obscurity of his own person to detract from the influence of his otherwise valuable book.”26

  By writing in the name of Timothy, on the other hand, he hoped to get a reading. His views were important enough for him to adopt a false name. There is nothing in the story to suggest that Salvian’s bishop accepted this excuse with equanimity (the story is related to us by Salvian, not his bishop). On the contrary, if the bishop was like every other reader from the ancient world who comments on such things, he was not at all pleased that Salvian had lied about his identity.

  Forgers’ Techniques

  WE ARE NEVER TOLD how Salvian’s bishop came to realize that the letter allegedly by Timothy was in fact written by his presbyter, Salvian. But it is probably not too hard to figure out. The letter addressed major concerns that Salvian himself had had and that he no doubt had articulated repeatedly among his fellow churchgoers and the church leaders. Since he was a literate person, he may well have written other treatises on this and related subjects. If his bishop knew Salvian’s ultimate concerns and had read his other writings, so that he was familiar with his writing style, he may have put two and two together and realized that this letter, which suddenly appeared out of nowhere, was a modern production written pseudonymously.

  Very few forgers in the ancient world were actually caught red-handed.27 The reasons should seem fairly obvious. For one thing, ancient scholars who were invested in detecting forgeries did not have the sophisticated methods of analysis that we have today, with our computers, databases, intricate analyses of writing style, and so on. An ancient scholar frequently could tell that a literary text was not by the same author who wrote another text (e.g., that the book of Revelation was not written by the same author who wrote the Fourth Gospel). But it’s much easier to say who did not write a book (Paul did not write Hebrews) than who did write it (Ephesians, if not by Paul, was written by whom?).

  Even more important, forgers went out of their way not to get caught. Most of the time, they were successful. In one of the fascinating modern discussions of forgery, Anthony Grafton, of Princeton University, shows that over the centuries the art of forgery became increasingly refined as the art of detecting forgery improved its methods. The better scholars became at recognizing a forgery, the better forgers got at avoiding detection. This compelled the scholars to refine their methods, which in turn drove the forgers to improve their craft.28

  Ancient forgers typically used several methods to escape detection. First and most obviously, anyone forging a document in the name of a well-known author di
d his level best to imitate the author’s writing style and vocabulary. Everyone has a distinctive style of writing, and every style, in principle, can be imitated. Less skillful imitators simply recognized unusual words commonly used by an author and used those words a lot (sometimes much more than the author being imitated). Others tried to imitate the distinctive ways the author used grammar: sentence length, use of participial phrases, use of sentence fragments, and so on. For highly educated authors, this matter of imitating writing style was almost second nature; in the advanced education of “rhetorical” schooling that the upper-class elite received, a regular exercise involved writing an account or a speech in the style of a famous author or speaker. The most highly educated people in the empire were trained to do this as a matter of course.29 Most of those people, of course, were not involved in the business of forgery.

  The fact that a forger tried to imitate an author’s style can make it difficult to detect forgeries. But the reality is that some people were more skilled at it than others. Just as most people today couldn’t forge a Rembrandt if their life depended on it, so too most people can’t sound “just like” Aristotle, Plutarch, or Paul.

  A second trick of forgers was to include verisimilitudes in their writings. The term “verisimilitude” refers to a statement, a comment, or an off-the-cuff remark that makes a writing look “very similar” to what you would expect the alleged author to have said. Forgers would make personal comments about the recipients of a letter, even if in fact they were not actually sending it to anyone. Why say you’ll be praying for the letter’s recipients during their time of persecution, if you’re not actually sending it to people experiencing persecution? Because if you say that, it certainly sounds as though you’re sending it to those experiencing persecution! Why ask for a personal favor from a person you’re writing to, if you’re not really writing to that person? (“Hey, James, be sure to say hello to your mother for me; and don’t forget to bring that book that I left at your house.”) Because there’s no better way to make it look as if the letter is authentic. Why fabricate names of recipients, your past relationship with these recipients, remembered experiences you’ve shared, and so on? All of these add credibility to your writing, making it look as though you really are writing this person, at this time, in this situation, even if you’re writing three hundred years later to no one in particular.

  We’ve already seen one kind of verisimilitude in our earlier discussion. In both 2 Thessalonians from the first century and the Apostolic Constitutions three hundred years later, the pseudonymous author tells his readers not to read pseudonymous writings. Or to be more precise, the forger warns his readers not to read forgeries. Why? In part because it makes readers less likely to suspect that the book they have is itself a forgery. That is, it’s a kind of verisimilitude.

  One final technique used by some forgers involves a “discovery narrative.” If a book shows up this week claiming to have been written two hundred years ago, one might well wonder where it has been all this time. Forgers sometimes begin or end their writing by describing what has led to the book’s disappearance and discovery. For example, an author might begin a book by explaining that he had a dream, and in this dream he was told to dig a deep hole on the south side of the oak tree in the field across the stream from his farm. When he dug the hole, he found an ancient wooden box. Inside the box was a deteriorating manuscript. He has now copied this manuscript out by hand, and this is it, a revelation given directly by Christ to the apostle James and hidden from the world until now.

  The book then claims to have been written by James, as “copied” by the discoverer of the manuscript. The book is not widely known, because it has been hidden all these years. But now it has come to light, and here it is. Except it’s not really here. What is here is a book not written by James, but by a forger claiming to be James, who has conveniently included an explanation for why no one has ever heard of this book before.

  Ancient Views of Forgery

  I HAVE ALREADY INDICATED that scholars are sometimes loath to use the term “forgery” for pseudepigraphal writings in which an author claims to be someone else. Later, I deal at greater length with what some scholars have claimed about this phenomenon in order to avoid thinking of such books as forgeries. This will come in Chapter 4, after we have had two chapters of data to help us assess these claims. As it turns out, many New Testament scholars who make pronouncements on forgery (“It wasn’t meant to be deceitful.” “No one thought of it as lying.” “It wasn’t looked down upon.”) simply haven’t read what the ancient sources say about it. Throughout this book it will become quite clear from the ancient writings themselves that even though forgery was widely practiced, it was also widely condemned and treated as a form of lying. To get us started here, I want to give just a few examples, which could easily be multiplied, of how ancients thought and talked about the practice of forgery.

  The first thing to note is that in virtually every instance in which an ancient author mentions forgery, he condemns it. There are a few exceptions, which I will discuss at greater length in Chapter 4. But these exceptions really are exceptional, for reasons we’ll see. By far the dominant discourse in the ancient world opposed forgery and saw it as a deceitful and illicit practice. That doesn’t mean that people didn’t engage in the practice—adultery is usually seen as a deceitful and illicit practice today, but that doesn’t stop a lot of people. Despite the condemnations of it, the practice of forgery thrived in antiquity.

  One of the more famous stories of forgery involves the second-century Roman physician Galen, whom I mentioned earlier. In one of his surviving writings, Galen gives an autobiographical account in which he tells of detecting a forgery. As he relates it, he was one day walking down a street in Rome and was passing by a bookseller’s shop. In the window were two men arguing about a book that was allegedly written by Galen! One man was heatedly arguing that Galen had in fact written the book; the other was insisting that the writing style was all wrong, that Galen could not have written it. This episode warmed the cockles of Galen’s heart, since in fact he had not written the book. So he went home and wrote a book, which we still have today. Sometimes the book is called How to Recognize Books Written by Galen.

  Did Galen think it was an acceptable practice for someone else to write in his name? Obviously not. Nor did anyone else who discovered forgeries in his own name. I earlier mentioned the poet Martial, who was incensed that other poets tried to pass off their own work (which he considered vastly inferior) as his. Among Christians we have outraged complaints about forgeries in the writings of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine. Forgery was so widely condemned in antiquity that even forgers condemned forgery—as we have seen in the case of 2 Thessalonians and the Apostolic Constitutions.

  Some scholars have argued, strenuously, but without much evidence, that it was a common and accepted practice in schools of philosophy to write a philosophical treatise and sign your master’s name to it (Plato, Pythagoras, etc.), rather than your own, and that no one looked askance at this practice. As we will see in Chapter 4, there is little evidence indeed that this happened. Ask a modern-day scholar who claims that in antiquity this was a widespread practice to cite an ancient source for it. In almost every instance, you will find a tongue-tied scholar.30

  That forgery was widely condemned in antiquity can be seen by some of the terms that were used to describe the practice, most of which were at least as negative as the modern term “forgery.” In Greek the two most common words to describe literary texts whose authors falsely claim to be a well-known figure are pseudos, which means “a falsehood” or “a lie,” and nothos, which means “an illegitimate child,” with connotations similar to our modern word “bastard.”31

  With respect to the first word, some scholars have stressed that pseudos does not have to have the negative connotation of a bald-faced lie, since it is sometimes used simply to indicate information that is incorrect, a falsehood. And that is certainly true, in
some contexts. But it means that only in contexts in which those speaking the falsehood do not realize that what they are saying is an error. When a person speaks something that is false, knowing that it is false, pseudos always means what “lie” means in English: an intentional falsehood with the intent of deceiving hearers or readers into thinking that it is right. There can be no question which connotation applies to ancient forgeries. The person who wrote the Gospel of Peter, claiming to be Jesus’s disciple Simon Peter, some sixty years after Peter’s death—did he realize that he was not in fact Simon Peter? Unless he was a lunatic, then of course he did. He intentionally claimed to be someone he was not. In Greek that would be called a pseudos; in English we would call it a lie.

  The other term, nothos, might seem a bit puzzling. It is often translated “spurious,” which may be accurate enough, but does not carry the same connotations as the Greek word, which refers typically to a bastard child. The logic of the term in the context of forgeries is clear. If a child born out of wedlock is raised by his mother and her husband (who is not the child’s father), then the child does not “belong,” by blood, to his alleged father; they are not related. Moreover, in antiquity, the child had no legal rights. So too with a literary text. If it goes under the name of an author who did not in fact produce it, then it is not actually related or legally connected to that person, but derives from someone else. So it is called a nothos, an illegitimate child, a text that does not belong to the author claimed for it.