There are lots of problems with taking this one statement as an indication of what “typically” happened in the philosophical schools of antiquity as a model for what the Christian authors did when claiming to be Peter, Paul, James, Thomas, Philip, and others:
1. For this tradition to have made an impact on such a wide array of early Christian authors, it would have had to be widely known. But it wasn’t. The tradition is not mentioned by a single author from the time of Pythagoras (sixth century BCE) to the time of Iamblichus (third to fourth century CE). As a result, there is nothing to suggest this view was widely known. Quite the contrary, no one else seems to have known it for eight hundred years.
2. More specifically, Iamblichus was living two hundred years after the writings of 1 and 2 Peter and the Deutero-Paulines. There is no reference to this tradition existing in the time of the New Testament writings. It could scarcely have been seen as a widely accepted practice at the time.
3. Iamblichus refers to what happened only within one of the many philosophical schools. He makes no claims about a wider tradition in philosophical schools outside of Pythagorean circles.
4. As recent scholars of Pythagoreanism have pointed out, there is reason to think that what Iamblichus says in fact is not even true of the Pythagorean school:23
a. First, he was writing eight hundred years after Pythagoras and would have had no way of knowing that what he was saying is true. He may well simply have thought this is how it worked.
b. None of the other philosophers or historians who talk about Pythagoras and his school prior to Iamblichus says any such thing about pseudonymous works written in his name.
c. Iamblichus’s comment is completely casual and off the cuff.
d. To cap it all off, when Iamblichus’s statement can be checked, it appears to be wrong. The vast majority of the writings of the Pythagorean school were not done in the name of Pythagoras. His followers wrote in their own names.24
As a result, the brief and casual comment by Iamblichus (who, it must be remembered, lived more than two hundred years after Paul and Peter) cannot at all be taken as evidence of what happened in the days of Pythagoras and his students (six hundred years before Paul and Peter), let alone what happened commonly in the philosophical schools, let alone what probably happened in early Christianity.25
For these reasons, New Testament scholars need to revise their views about philosophical schools and their impact on the forgery practices of early Christians. There is almost nothing to suggest that there was a tradition in these schools to practice pseudepigraphy as an act of humility. I would suggest that scholars have latched onto this idea simply because it gives them a way of talking about what happened in the literary tradition of early Christianity without saying that early Christian authors were guilty of forgery.
The Secretary Hypothesis
THE THREE GROUPS OF scholars I have mentioned all think that under certain conditions pseudepigraphy was an acceptable practice in antiquity. For that reason, in these scholars’ opinion, the authors of early Christian writings should not be thought of as lying when they claimed to be someone other than who they were. There is one other school of thought to consider, one that says that in a number of cases what appears to be forgery in fact is not. The scholars who argue this are not claiming, on theological grounds, that there could be no such thing as forgery in early Christianity. They are claiming, on historical grounds, that some books that appear to be pseudonymous in fact are not. That is because the real author, who actually was who he claimed to be, used a secretary, and the secretary wrote in a different style from the author himself. Sometimes the real author may have dictated a letter word for word to a secretary. But other times he may have asked his secretary to rework his letter to improve the style. At still other times an author may have simply told a secretary to write a letter for him, so that both the contents and the style of the letter are the secretary’s, even if the ultimate “authority” for the letter is the author who is named.
This is a very popular theory; you will find it expressed everywhere in biblical commentaries on the deutero-Pauline and Petrine letters. It explains why 1 Peter seems to have a different writing style from 2 Peter. It explains why the views of the disputed “Pauline” letter of Ephesians seem to differ so radically from the views of the undisputed letter to the Romans. Virtually all of the problems with what I’ve been calling forgeries can be solved if secretaries were heavily involved in the composition of the early Christian writings. Despite the popularity of this theory, I am going to argue, once again, that it simply does not have credible evidence to back it up.
Whole books have been devoted to the question in recent years. The fullest and most exhaustive is by E. Randolph Richards, called The Secretary in the Letters of Paul.26 Richards looks at all the evidence for secretaries in the ancient world. He diligently peruses the letters of the most famous letter writer of Rome, the statesman and philosopher Cicero. For most of these letters Cicero used secretaries. Richards considers all the other great figures of the empire known to have used secretaries (Brutus, Pompey, and Marcus Aurelius, for example). He looks at every reference to secretaries he can find in the ancient letters that still survive on papyrus, most of which have been discovered in Egypt over the course of the past century. And he considers what early Christian sources themselves have to say about letters and secretaries. It is a full and very useful study.
There is no doubt that the apostle Paul used a secretary on occasion. One of his secretaries tells us that he has written the letter! In Romans 16:22 we read, “I Tertius, the one who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord.” Tertius does not mean to say that he was the “author” of the letter. He was the scribe who wrote what Paul told him to write. Paul also used a scribe for his letter to the Galatians, since at the very end he tells his readers, “See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand” (6:11). Commentators are widely agreed that Paul had dictated the letter to a secretary, but here at the end he was writing the final bit himself. He used larger handwriting either because he wasn’t as skilled at writing as the secretary, because he had problems with his eyesight and so wrote larger letters, or for some other reason.
Did Paul use a secretary for all of his letters? It is impossible to say. Did the secretaries contribute to the contents of the letter? This is easier to say. Despite what scholars often claim, all of the evidence we have suggests that the answer is no. The same evidence applies to the authors of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and in fact to all the other early Christian writers.
In his study Richards argues that secretaries were used in four distinct ways for the writing of letters. Most of the time a secretary simply recorded what the author dictated to him, either slowly, syllable by syllable; in some kind of shorthand while the author spoke at natural speed; or something in between. Other times a secretary was asked by an author to correct the grammar and improve the style of what the author either wrote or dictated. On occasion, Richards claims, a secretary was a kind of coauthor who contributed his own thoughts and ideas to a letter. And sometimes, Richards states, a secretary actually composed an entire letter on behalf of the author, so that all the words and thoughts were actually the secretary’s, even if the author signed off on what he had written.
If secretaries actually did commonly, or at least occasionally, work in these latter ways, then it would make sense that different letters by the same “author” might read very differently from one another not just in writing style, but in content. So what is the evidence that it worked this way?
There is no doubt about Richards’s first category. There is abundant evidence—you can read it all in Richards’s study—that authors often dictated letters instead of writing them out themselves. When that happened, the author was really the author. He didn’t himself put pen to papyrus, but the thoughts are his thoughts, the words are his words, the grammar is his grammar. No problems there.
It is with the other three categories that
we begin to have problems. One very severe problem is the nature of our evidence. Virtually all of it comes from authors who were very, very wealthy and powerful and inordinately well educated. These were the very upper class, the highest tier of the cultured elite: emperors, consuls, and senators. It is a genuine question how relevant that evidence is for people who were of the lower classes, who may have been moderately well educated, which would put them way ahead of most people of course, but far below a Cicero or a Marcus Aurelius. The papyri—that is, the surviving private letters that were written by regular folk instead of the elite of society—do not give us any help in knowing about these other three categories.
Another problem has to do with the nature of the “letters” involved. Most letters in the Greco-Roman world were very short and to the point. They were one page or less. They had very limited content. Most commonly the author would say who he was, indicate to whom he was writing, offer a brief thanks to the gods for the recipient, indicate his information or his request, and then sign off. Bam-bam-bam and done.
The reason this is a “problem” is that the letters of early Christianity that we are concerned about—the letter to the Ephesians, for example, or 1 Peter—are not like that at all. They are lengthy treatises that deal with large and complex issues in the form of a letter. They do have the stylistic features of ancient letters: the names of the author and the recipient, a thanksgiving, the body of the letter, and the closing. But they are so much more extensive than typical letters, for example, in their theological expositions, ethical exhortations, and quotation of and interpretation of Scripture. These New Testament “letters” are really more like essays put in letter form. So evidence that derives from the brief, stereotyped letters typically found in Greek and Roman circles is not necessarily germane to the “letters” of the early Christians.
With these caveats in mind, what can we say about the three other categories that Richards lays out, secretaries who improve an author’s style, who coauthor a letter, or who compose a letter? There is some evidence, though it is very limited, that secretaries occasionally were asked to improve the author’s style. The evidence is all from the very top echelons of the upper class of ancient Rome, a letter from the military commander Brutus and another from the emperor Marcus Aurelius, for example. It is difficult to know whether this procedure was used widely, or at all, outside of the circles of the ultrarich landed aristocracy.
The evidence of the other types of letters—at least as cited by Richards—is virtually nonexistent, as he himself says. When talking about the possibility that some letters were coauthored by both the author and his secretary, Richards points to one possible example, letters written by Cicero and his secretary Tiro. But Richards then discounts the suggestion that Tiro coauthored the letters with Cicero and shows why the suggestion is probably wrong. Remarkably this is the one and only example that Richards mentions before concluding, “Evidently then…secretaries were used as coauthors”! It is hard to see what makes this “evident” when he hasn’t cited a single instance of it. Maybe other scholars (or Richards himself) will eventually be able to find some evidence.
There is a similar problem with the idea that secretaries sometimes composed letters themselves for someone else. It is true that illiterate persons sometimes required the services of a scribal secretary to draw up a land deed, marriage certificate, sales receipt, or some other document, and that they occasionally (but rarely) used scribal secretaries to write brief stereotyped letters. Even the upper classes would sometimes instruct a secretary to spin off a quick stereotyped letter for them to someone, as is evidenced on several occasions by Cicero. So far as Richards’s evidence goes, it is only Cicero who did this, no one else. But drafting a brief stereotyped letter is completely different from composing a long, detailed, finely argued, carefully reasoned, and nuanced letter like 1 Peter or Ephesians. What evidence is there that essay-letters of that sort were ever handed over to a secretary to be composed? There is absolutely no evidence that I know of.
Richards hasn’t seen any evidence of it either. When Cicero asked a secretary to compose a quick stereotyped letter for him and make it look as if it came from him, Cicero, he was doing what no other person is known to have done in antiquity. As Richards himself says: “It is tempting to conclude that an author-initiated request for deception was rare indeed, perhaps singularly restricted to Cicero and to this time in his life” (i.e., when he was old, tired, and unwilling to write a letter himself).27
What about other secretaries who may have composed a letter (not even a letter-essay) for another author? Again, according to Richards: “Nowhere was there any indication that an ordinary secretary was asked, much less presumed, to compose a letter for the author.” On the contrary, “without an explicit reference to the use of a secretary as a composer of a letter, this secretarial method probably should not even be considered a valid option.”28 There is certainly no such explicit reference in the deutero-Pauline or Petrine letters.
I don’t know of a single piece of evidence or a single analogy to suggest that Peter or Paul used a secretary who significantly—or insignificantly, for that matter—added to the contents of the letter. That is why it is important to consider not only the style of writing, but also the contents when considering whether Paul did or did not write, say, Ephesians or 1 Timothy, or that Peter did or did not write 1 or 2 Peter. When a person claimed to write a letter, he was owning up to the contents. Sometimes a letter attributed to Paul is at odds with what Paul says elsewhere, as when Ephesians differs from Paul’s view of the resurrection of believers as found in his letter to the Romans. Since secretaries did not produce the contents of letters (at least letter-essays of this sort), a secretary could not be responsible for the difference. So Paul is probably in no way responsible for the disputed letter. Other times what one finds in a letter cannot be plausibly explained as coming from the reputed author. Whoever wrote 1 Peter, for example, was a highly educated Greek-speaking Christian who understood how to use Greek rhetorical devices and could cite the Greek Old Testament with flair and nuance. That does not apply to the uneducated, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking fisherman from rural Galilee, and it does not appear to have been produced by a secretary acting on his behalf.
As I pointed out in Chapter 2, it also helps to think concretely about how the secretary hypothesis might explain how Peter himself could have written 1 Peter. He could not have dictated the letter to a secretary, because he was not trained in Greek compositional and rhetorical techniques. Nor could he have dictated the letter in Aramaic and asked the secretary to translate it into Greek, because the letter contains sophisticated forms of argumentation and presentation that work only in Greek and presupposes knowledge of the Greek Old Testament, not the Hebrew version, which Peter himself would have been familiar with. And it does not seem possible that Peter gave the general gist of what he wanted to say and that a secretary then created the letter for him in his name, since, first, then the secretary rather than Peter would be the real author of the letter, and second, and even more important, we don’t seem to have any analogy for a procedure like this from the ancient world.
Historians have to decide what probably happened in the past. Which is more probable—a scenario that does not have any known analogy (Peter asking someone else to write the treatise in his name) or a scenario that has lots and lots of analogies, since it happened all the time? Forgeries happened all the time. Surely that’s the best explanation for what is going on here.
The same applies to the letters bearing Paul’s name that he did not write, in which the contents, not just the style, differ significantly from the views of Paul himself. These letters were not produced by secretaries. They were produced by later Christian authors claiming to be Paul. As a result, the secretary hypothesis, as promising as it looks at first glance, simply can’t explain away the forgeries of the New Testament.
Conclusion
I CAN WRAP UP these first four chapters by making a
series of summary statements. There were a large number of literary forgeries in early Christianity, some of which may be found in the New Testament. These really are forgeries, books whose authors claim to be well-known authority figures, even though they were someone else. Some scholars today avoid the term “forgery” and call these writings pseudonymous or pseudepigraphal; technically speaking, these other terms are correct, but they are imprecise. Pseudonymous writings include writings produced under a pen name, and none of the writings we have been considering fall into that category. Pseudepigraphal writings include originally anonymous writings that were later wrongly attributed to well-known figures. The books we are talking about are by authors who lied about their identity in order to deceive their readers into thinking that they were someone they were not. The technical term for this kind of activity is forgery.
Forgery in antiquity was different from forgery today in some important respects, and these differences need to be constantly borne in mind. Most important, in the modern day, forgery connotes an illegal activity that can land a person in jail. In the ancient world there were no laws against such things, and so the practice should not be thought of as illegal. But this difference is not significant enough to require us to use a different term for the practice. “Books” in the ancient world, for example, were quite different from books today. They were written on scrolls and were not mass produced. Still, that doesn’t stop anyone from calling them books. Forgeries in the ancient world were different in some ways from forgeries today, but they were still forgeries.
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