Forged (18 page)

New Testament scholars often claim that this can explain why someone claimed to be Paul when writing Colossians, Ephesians, or the pastoral letters. In one of the standard commentaries on Colossians, for example, we read the following: “Pseudonymous documents, especially letters with philosophical content, were set in circulation because disciples of a great man intended to express, by imitation, their adoration of their revered master and to secure or to promote his influence upon a later generation under changed circumstances.”
¹⁷
A more recent commentator on Colossians and Ephesians states something similar: “Viewing Colossians (or Ephesians)
as deutero-Pauline should not be mistakenly understood as meaning that these documents are simply examples of forgery. For example, to write in the name of a philosopher who was one's patron could be seen as a sign of honor bestowed upon that person.”
¹⁸

I should point out that, as happens so often, neither of these commentators actually provides any evidence that this was a common practice in philosophical schools. They state it as a fact. And why do they think it's a fact? For most New Testament scholars it is thought to be a fact because, well, so many New Testament scholars have said so! But ask someone who makes this claim what her ancient source of information is or what ancient philosopher actually states that this was a common practice. More often than not you'll be met with a blank stare.

The scholars who do mention ancient evidence for this alleged practice typically point to two major sources.
¹⁹
But one of the two says no such thing. This is the third-century Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, who is alleged to have said that in the school of the ancient philosopher Pythagoras (who lived eight hundred years earlier) it was a common practice for disciples to write books and sign their master's name to them.
²⁰
This statement by Porphyry is a little hard to track down, because it is not in his surviving Greek writings; it is only in an Arabic translation of one of his works from the thirteenth century.
²¹

I doubt if any of the New Testament scholars who refer to this statement of Porphyry's has actually read it, since it is, after all, in Arabic, and most New Testament scholars don't read Arabic. I don't either. But I have a colleague who does, Carl Ernst, an expert in medieval Islam. I asked Professor Ernst to translate the passage for me. As it turns out, Porphyry doesn't say anything about followers of Pythagoras writing books and then signing his name to them. Instead, he says that Pythagoras himself wrote eighty books, two hundred books were written by his followers, and twelve books were “forged” in the name of Pythagoras. The twelve books are condemned for using Pythagoras's name when he didn't write them. The forgers are called “shameless people” who “fabricated” “false books.” The two hundred books are not said to have been written by Pythagoras's fol
lowers in his name; they were simply books written by Pythagoras's followers.

This, then, is one of the two ancient references sometimes cited by scholars to indicate that the practice of writing in a master's name was “common.” I should point out that, in Porphyry's other writings as well as in this passage, he shows a keen interest in knowing which books are authentic and which are forged, and he condemns the forgeries, including the Old Testament book of Daniel, which he thinks could not have been written by an Israelite in the sixth century
BCE
.

The other reference to a tradition in the philosophical schools does say what scholars have said it says. This one is in the writings of Iamblichus, another Neoplatonic philosopher from about the same time as Porphyry. In his account of Pythagoras's life, Iamblichus says the following: “This also is a beautiful circumstance, that they [i.e., Pythagoras's followers] referred everything to Pythagoras, and called it by his name, and that they did not ascribe to themselves the glory of their own inventions, except very rarely. For there are very few whose works are acknowledged to be their own.”
²²

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:

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

T
HE 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 hand
writing 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.