For the apologists, in short, Christianity was an ancient, philosophically respectable, and highly moral religion that stood over against the false religions of both pagans and Jews. Eventually this message caught on, as more and more pagans converted to the faith. Ultimately, once Christianity became the religion of the empire, the apologists’ view would be accepted as obvious and commonsensical. Before that, though, Christians had to fight for their religious beliefs and practices. And one of the ways they fought was through their literary endeavors, which included the production of forgeries.
Some Resultant Forgeries
SEVERAL FORGERIES ALREADY SEEN
A number of the forgeries we have already considered functioned as well in the apologetic defense of the faith against pagan assaults. Here I need to stress a point I have not yet made. It would be a mistake to think that an author must have produced a forgery for one and only one purpose. This isn’t the case for other books, and it is certainly not the case for forgeries either.
This book that I’m writing now—what is its purpose? In fact, there are multiple purposes. I want to inform my readers about an important ancient literary phenomenon. I want to correct mistakes that other scholars have made in discussing that phenomenon. I want readers to think more deeply about the role of lies and deception in the history of the Christian religion. I want to show the irony in the fact that lies and deception have historically been used to establish the “truth.” I want my readers to see that there may be forgeries in the New Testament. I want to tell interesting stories about intriguing and relatively unknown writings from antiquity. I want to entertain my readers. In fact, I want to accomplish lots of things. Hardly any writing has just one purpose. So too forgeries. As a rule they were multifunctional.
Take, for example, the group of writings that I have called the “Pilate Gospels.” These serve to show that the Jews were the ones responsible for the death of Jesus. They do so by emphasizing, quite strenuously, that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate declared Jesus to be innocent of all charges. That emphasis functions as a kind of Christian anti-Judaism, allowing Christian readers to conclude that Jews were wicked Christ-killers. But it also functions to help Christians defend themselves against attacks leveled at them by pagans. In response to pagans who insisted that Jesus was a convicted criminal opposed by the Roman state, Christians could argue that it wasn’t true, that the appointed governor of Judea found Jesus innocent and crucified him only because the maleficent Jews forced him to do so. Jesus was no criminal, and neither are his followers.
Or consider the letters between the apostle Paul and the Roman philosopher Seneca. On one level these letters satisfied Christian curiosity. How could the most significant theologian of the young faith not have been known to the other great minds of his day? These letters showed that in fact Paul was known and respected by the greatest thinker of them all, the incomparable Seneca. But more than satisfying curiosity, these letters fulfilled an apologetic role in showing that, far from being a backwater religion of lower-class peasants, Christianity from the outset was a highly respectable philosophical tradition. How highly respected was it? The greatest Roman philosopher of the first century revered the apostle Paul and praised his uncanny insights.
In a different way some of the earliest Christian letters—the New Testament ones allegedly by Peter and Paul—may well have served to try to ward off attacks from pagan antagonists. Take 1 Peter as an example. Here is a letter in which a pseudonymous author, claiming to be Simon Peter, comforts Christians of Asia Minor who are undergoing suffering. But the letter is not only meant to provide comfort; it is also meant to provide a defense against precisely the accusations leveled against the Christians that created the conditions for suffering.
For example, Christians are thought to be opposed to the government, and so the author urges his readers: “Be submissive to every human institution for the Lord’s sake, whether to the emperor as the one who is supreme or to overseers who have been sent by him for the punishment of those who do wrong and praise of those who do right. For this is the will of God: that by doing good you silence the ignorance of foolish people” (2:13–15). Pagans also charge Christians with living flagrantly immoral lives, and so the author urges: “Abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul; maintain good behavior in front of the Gentiles, so that if they slander you as evildoers they may observe your good works and glorify God” (4:11–12). Pagans claim that Christians are socially disruptive, and so the author tells slaves to be submissive to their masters, wives to be submissive to their husbands, husbands to treat their wives considerately, and all to behave well: “Do not return evil for evil or verbal abuse for verbal abuse, but give a blessing instead” (3:8). Since these admonitions allegedly come from Peter himself—the most important leader of the early church—they take on special importance as representing the very core of the Christian message, from the very beginning.
There was a very different function for one other forgery we have already looked at, the Gospel of Nicodemus. In antiquity this book was sometimes called the Acts of Pilate, since its first half records an account of Jesus’s death from the perspective of the Roman governor himself, Pontius Pilate. This account is, of course, very sympathetic toward both Pilate and Jesus. Jesus is innocent of the charges brought against him, and Pilate proclaims his innocence repeatedly, acknowledging the divine character of Jesus’s miracles and life and finally ordering his execution only after being forced to by Jesus’s Jewish opponents.
We may be able to isolate a more precise reason for the writing of this book. According to Eusebius, in the year 311, an anti-Christian pagan book was forged called the Acts of Pilate. This writing portrayed Jesus in an extremely negative way, indicating that he fully deserved everything he got, as seen through the eyes of Pontius Pilate. So impressed with this book was the Roman emperor Maximin Daia that he had it posted in public places throughout the empire and decreed that it should be used in schools for training children to read.22
This pagan Acts of Pilate, then, was an enormously popular and widespread book; unfortunately it no longer survives. Is it an accident that some years later an alternative version of the Acts of Pilate appeared, one in which Jesus is portrayed as innocent, not guilty, and in which Pilate is shown to support Jesus and declare him divine, rather than oppose him and declare him worthy of death? In the opinion of a number of scholars, the Acts of Pilate that we now have (also known as the Gospel of Nicodemus) was produced precisely in order to counter the pagan Acts of Pilate, as a way of setting the record straight.
THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES
In ancient Rome it was believed that there had been, in remote antiquity, a prophetess who was known as the Sibyl. She was extraordinarily long-lived; according to the poet Ovid she lived a thousand years.23 According to venerable tradition, the Sibyl had written extensive poems that were prophetic in nature, designed not only to tell the future, but also to tell rulers of Rome what to do in times of crisis. The various writings attributed to the Sibyl were collected over the years and stored in one of the great sacred spaces in Rome, the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. A group of priests, eventually named “The Fifteen,” were appointed to preserve and interpret these writings as the need arose and as they were directed by the Roman senate. Some records indicate that the Sibylline oracles, as they were called, were consulted some fifty times between 500 and 100 BCE, in times of plague, famine, or prodigy (i.e., when some highly unusual supernatural event seemed to occur), in order to learn what the prophetess had said concerning what should be done about it.24
A great tragedy occurred in 83 BCE when the Temple of Jupiter was burned, and the books of the oracles with it. The senate directed that other copies of the oracles should be collected from various places, especially the city of Erythrea, and an attempt was made to reconstitute the original writings. Eventually these too came to be destroyed. Today we know of only two brief sayings that probably belonged to this s
econd group of Sibylline oracles, and none from the first.
The tradition that there had once lived a pagan prophetess who could reliably foretell the future was so strong that the temptation to create oracles, or prophecies, in her name proved irresistible to later peoples, especially to Jews, and after them Christians. As I have already pointed out, Jews were widely accepted throughout the empire. Even so, they occasionally had to fight for their right to coexist with pagans and to defend their religion against pagan attacks. By forging oracles in the name of the Sibyl, Jews were able to claim that their religion was very ancient, as attested by this most ancient of prophetesses, and compatible with the best of the pagan religions.
A number of forged Jewish Sibylline oracles were brought together into a collection, which was later taken over by unknown Christian authors.25 These writers modified a number of the oracles by inserting their own Christian “prophecies” into them; they also added some entirely new oracles to the collection. This Christianized version of the Sibylline Oracles was handed down through the centuries, and we still have twelve books of them today.
The Jewish and Christian writings forged in the name of the Sibyl were written over a span of some seven hundred years and were finally assembled by a Byzantine Christian scholar sometime in the sixth century CE. Because of problems in how the books were copied over the centuries, the twelve books are numbered somewhat out of sequence, as books 1–8 and 11–14. Some of these are Jewish; some of them are Jewish books that have had extensive Christian insertions made into them (e.g., books 1–2 and 8); and others are exclusively Christian (book 6 and probably 7). The Christian portions of the oracles forged in the name of the Sibyl predict the coming of Christ and attack Jews for failing to believe in this one who was to come.
Just to give an example of how these apologetic forgeries work, consider the first book, which is largely Jewish until the final section, which contains a Christian insertion. The book begins with the Sibyl’s statement: “Beginning from the first generation of articular men down to the last, I will prophesy all in turn, such things as were before, as are, and as will come upon the world.”26 Here, then, is a reliable ancient pagan prophetess who will tell the future. After narrating the creation of the world and then all the generations of the human race, the Sibyl continues, in the Christian insertion, to indicate the following:
Then indeed the son of the great God will come, incarnate, likened to mortal men on earth…. He will show eternal life to chosen men. He will cure the sick and all who are blemished, as many as put faith in him. The blind will see, and the lame will walk. The deaf will hear; those who cannot speak will speak.
But, she says, “Israel, with abominable lips and poisonous spittings will give this man blows.” She goes on to describe Christ’s death and resurrection, and the eventual destruction of “the Hebrews” for the evil deed they performed against Christ.
One of the more powerful passages in the surviving Sibylline oracles is the very short book 6, which represents a hymn to Christ: “I speak from my heart of the great famous son of the Immortal, to whom the most High, his begetter, gave a throne to possess before he was born.” It goes on to talk about his glorious coming into the world, his rejection, and the consequences for Israel, for whom evil afflictions are in store:
For with your hostile mind you did not perceive your god when he came before mortal eyes. But you crowned him with a crown from the thornbush and you mixed terrible gall for insult and drink. That will cause great afflictions for you.
Possibly the most intriguing passage in the Sibylline Oracles comes in the Christian insertion in book 8, where a long section of prophecies forms an acrostic. If you take the first letter of each of these lines and put them together in sequence, they spell out the Greek words “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, Cross.” This kind of acrostic is meant to have symbolic, hidden meaning. Among other things it shows that there was considerable forethought that went into the composition of the poem, made all the remarkable by the fact that it was allegedly constructed by a pagan prophetess living centuries before the birth of Jesus.
The Christian Sibylline oracles were well known in antiquity. As early as Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century they are referred to as predicting the truths of Christianity.27 As you might imagine, pagans intent on attacking Christians knew full well that these oracular “predictions” of the coming of Christ, his activities on earth, his rejection by the Jews, and his vindication were not original to an ancient Sibyl, but had been inserted into these writings or created whole cloth by Christian authors.28 This is one instance in which unknown forgers among the Christians were rightly suspected. They were also, of course, roundly condemned, as almost always happened with forgers in antiquity.
Conclusion
CHRISTIANS OF THE FIRST three centuries often felt themselves under attack for their faith, and for good reason. They were under attack. From the early years of the church, non-Christian Jews rejected the Christian message that Jesus was the Jewish messiah sent in fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures, and this led not only to serious debate over the proper interpretation of Scripture but also to serious animosity. The animosity heightened as Christian Jews felt that their non-Christian Jewish opponents refused to listen to reason and were obviously being either willful or blind. As Christianity grew in numbers and power, the tensions increased. Eventually, of course, Christianity would get the upper hand, and once that happened, it became an unfair fight. The entire ugly history of Christian anti-Judaism was the result.
While Christians were fighting their Jewish neighbors on the one hand, they were having to ward off the attacks of pagans on the other. Far more than official persecution, it was local opposition to Christians among their former families, friends, and neighbors—and eventually mobs—that caused Christians the most problems in the early centuries before the Roman emperors came to be active sponsors of empire-wide persecutions in the mid-third century. Many pagans viewed Christians as politically dangerous, socially disruptive, and flagrantly immoral. Christians had to defend themselves against these charges by showing they were obedient members of the state, socially coherent and conservative, and the most moral beings on the planet.
The two prongs of the Christian counterattack were, as we have seen, closely related. By attacking Jews for rejecting their own messiah, Christians were able simultaneously to declare the innocence of Jesus and his followers to governmental officials and other interested pagan observers. By claiming to be the true representatives of the ancient Jewish religion, Christians not only attempted to displace the Jews, but also to provide a sense of antiquity for their own religious claims; they were as old as Moses, who was older by far than any pagan lawgivers or philosophers. By painting the Jews as immoral haters of God, Christians were able to pass themselves off as superior moral beings of no threat to the social order.
Into this maelstrom of attack and counterattack, some Christian authors introduced the weapons of literary forgery. The ultimate goal of the church was to establish itself as true and, of course, to show that all other religions were, as a consequence, false. So once more we have one of the great ironies of the early Christian religion: some of its leading spokespersons appear to have had no qualms about lying in order to promote the faith, to practice deception in order to establish the truth.
CHAPTER SIX
Forgeries in Conflicts with False Teachers
I’VE ALWAYS ENJOYED A GOOD, reasoned debate on a controversial issue. In high school I was on the debate team and loved it. My debate colleagues and I were good at it already as sixteen-year-olds, able to take either side of a hot topic and argue for it, then turn around and argue the opposing side in the next debate. I still do public debates around the country today, almost always with evangelical Christian scholars, on topics of importance, especially to evangelical Christians. “Can Historians Prove That Jesus Was Raised from the Dead?” (I always argue that, no, no one can prove it.) “Are the Gospel Accou
nts of Jesus Reliable?” (No, not completely.) “Does the Bible Provide an Adequate Answer to Why There Is Suffering?” (No, not really.) And so on.
I also think debates can be useful pedagogically in the classroom; they help undergraduate students learn how to mount arguments, assess evidence, and see the strengths of a position they personally reject. So I have my students debate controversial topics in my course on the New Testament. “Did Paul and Jesus Represent Fundamentally Different Religions?” “Were the Apostle Paul’s Views of Women Oppressive?” “Does the New Testament Condemn Modern Practices of Homosexuality?”
Sometimes in setting up these debates I find out in advance which side students want to take (affirmative or negative) and then assign them to the opposite side, forcing them to argue for a position they personally reject. It’s a great exercise. Politicians should try it sometime, to see that their opponents may actually have something important and persuasive to say.
In my many years of formal debate and in my many more years of informal discussion, I’ve come to realize something very significant. We tend to get in the hottest arguments about topics that we really care about and with people we are closest to. Only rarely do we get intense and bothered about something that doesn’t matter to us. And our most heated arguments are almost always with friends and loved ones rather than absolute strangers.
Debates Among Early Christians
THE SAME WAS TRUE with the arguments carried out by the early Christians. As we saw in the previous chapter, Christians were in conflict with Jews and pagans over the validity of their religion. These debates were sometimes heated. They were, after all, about issues that mattered deeply to Christians. But the hottest early Christian debates were with other Christians, as they argued over the right things to believe and the right ways to live. These internal Christian debates were often filled with vitriol and hatred. Christians called one another nasty names, said ugly things about one another, and pulled out all stops to make their Christian opponents look reprehensible and stupid, denying, in many instances, that the opponents even had the right to call themselves Christian. Anyone perceived as a false teacher was subject to verbal lashing; outsiders to the faith—pagans and Jews—were treated with kid gloves by comparison.
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