Forged (28 page)

Despite this ancient tradition, the problems with identifying Luke as the author of the book are rife. For one thing, the idea that Luke was a Gentile companion of Paul comes from Colossians, a book that appears to have been forged in Paul's name after his death. To be sure, there is also a Luke named in Paul's authentic letter of Philemon (v. 24), but nothing is said there about his being a Gentile. He is
simply mentioned in a list of five other people. An even bigger problem presents itself in the fact that there are so many discrepancies between what Acts says about Paul with what Paul says about himself.

I've mentioned only three of these discrepancies. There are many others.
⁹
They involve just about every aspect of the historical Paul. Paul's theology and preaching differ between Acts and the letters; other differences are in Paul's attitude toward pagans, his relationship to the Jewish law, his missionary strategy, and his itinerary. At just about every point where it is possible to check what Acts says about Paul with what Paul says about himself in his authentic letters, there are discrepancies. The conclusion is hard to escape that Acts was probably not written by one of Paul's traveling companions.

But why would the author then speak in the first person on four occasions? Anyone reading this book so far should have no trouble figuring out why. The author is making a claim about himself. He is not naming himself. He is simply claiming to be a traveling companion of Paul's and therefore unusually well suited to give a “true” account of Paul's message and mission. But he almost certainly was not a companion of Paul's. On the one hand, he was writing long after Paul and his companions were dead. Scholars usually date Acts to around 85
CE
or so, over two decades after Paul's death. On the other hand, he seems to be far too poorly informed about Paul's theology and missionary activities to have been someone with firsthand knowledge. If the author is claiming to be someone he is not, what kind of work is he writing? A book written with a false authorial claim is a forgery. Obviously the authorial claim in this case is not as boldfaced as in, say, 1 Timothy or
3 Corinthians,
whose authors directly say they are Paul. But the claim of Acts is clear nonetheless; the author indicates that he was a participant in and eyewitness to Paul's mission, even though he was not.

It should not be objected that if the author wanted his readers to be convinced he was a companion of Paul, he would have been a lot more explicit about his identity, that is, he necessarily would have
named himself or been more emphatic in his self-identification as a cotraveler with Paul. This kind of objection about what an author “would have” done is never very persuasive. For modern readers to tell ancient authors what they should have done in order to be more convincing is actually a bit amusing. Why should the author of Acts have done anything other than what he did? How could he possibly have been any more successful at deceiving his readers? He was spectacularly successful doing it the way he did. Readers for eighteen hundred years accepted without question that the author was none other than Luke, the traveling companion of Paul. By inserting just a small handful of first-person pronouns into his account the author succeeded in producing a forgery that continues to deceive readers down to the present day.

The reason for the forgery, in any event, is clear, or at least one of the many reasons is. This author wants his readers to think he is Paul's companion and therefore has firsthand knowledge of Paul's mission. Paul, in this account, agrees with the apostles before him, especially Peter and James, on every point of theological and practical importance. The earliest church was in firm and essential harmony. Peter and Paul were not at odds, as other authors were claiming. Together they declared that salvation has gone to the Gentiles, who do not have to be Jews in order to be Christians.

Gnostic and Anti-Gnostic Forgeries

E
ARLY
C
HRISTIAN
G
NOSTICISM

The most intense and vitriolic conflicts of the second and third centuries involved a variety of Christian groups that scholars have called “Gnostic.” Gnostic Christianity was a remarkably complex phenomenon, but for our purposes here I need give simply a broad and basic overview.
¹⁰

As I mentioned in Chapter 3, the term “Gnostic” comes from the
Greek word
gnosis,
which means “knowledge.” A wide range of early Christian groups claimed that salvation did not come from faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but from acquiring the secret knowledge,
gnosis,
that Christ taught. This knowledge was actually self-knowledge, knowledge of who you really were, deep inside, where you came from, how you got here, and how you can return. Gnostics maintained that some of us are not just flesh-and-blood human beings. We have a spark of divinity within us that originated in the heavenly realm, but that has fallen into the material world and become trapped inside our mortal bodies. The goal of Gnostic religions was to teach the secret knowledge needed to free this element of the divine, so that it can return to its heavenly home. In the Christian forms of Gnosticism (there were non-Christian forms as well), it is Christ who comes from the heavenly realm above to provide us with this secret knowledge.

There were a large number of Gnostic groups with a mind-boggling array of different teachings and beliefs. Many of these groups described the fall of the divine sparks through complicated and confusing mythological tales that tried to explain how both the divine realm above and this material world below came into existence. Even though the myths of the various groups differed from one another significantly, many of them shared similar features.

In many of these myths the originating point of all that is was a divine being who was completely spirit; there was nothing material about him/it. This divine being generated other divinities who were manifestations of his various characteristics: silence, intellect, truth, word, life, and so on. Some of these divine beings generated yet other divine beings, until there was a populated realm of the divine. But one of these beings—in some texts it is Sophia, the Greek word for “Wisdom”—fell from the divine realm and generated other beings who were not fully divine, since they came into existence outside of the realm of the divine. One of these other beings ignorantly thought that it was the superior God and, with the help of the others, captured its mother and created the material world as a place to imprison her,
inside human bodies. This ignorant creator God is the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Jews.

So the material world we live in is not a good place; it is a place of imprisonment. The God of the Jews is not the ultimate divinity, but is inferior, ignorant, and possibly even malicious. The goal of salvation is not to be put into a right relationship with the creator God, but to escape his clutches. Salvation does not come when this fallen creation is returned to its original pristine state (a return to the Garden of Eden); it comes by escaping this material world. The end of time will not bring a salvation of the flesh; it will bring a deliverance
from
the flesh. This salvation comes when the sparks trapped within our bodies learn the secrets of how they came to be here and the knowledge of how they can escape.

Since in the Christian Gnostic systems it is Christ who comes from the divine realm to deliver this secret knowledge, he obviously could not be a part of this material world itself. He was not a fleshly being. So we have the two forms of docetic thought that I mentioned in Chapter 2. Some Gnostics maintained that Jesus only appeared to be human (like Marcion, who was not a Gnostic). Others claimed that the divine Christ entered into the man Jesus at his baptism and then left him before he died, since the Christ could not suffer. In either way of understanding Christ, he was not a real, flesh-and-blood, suffering, and dying human who was returned to the flesh at his resurrection. Like the other sparks of the divine, he escaped the flesh and the material world, which houses it, in order to return to his heavenly home.

Because Gnostics who taught such views denigrated the material world and the God who created it, they were seen as a serious threat by other Christians who maintained that there was only one God, not an entire realm of divinities; that God had made the world and that it was good, not inferior or evil; that he had formed human flesh and would redeem human flesh; and that salvation came in the body, not separate from the body. Moreover, Christian opponents of Gnosticism maintained that Christ himself was a real flesh-and-blood
human being whose real suffering and death brought salvation and whose resurrection was a resurrection in the flesh, in which he now lives and will live forevermore.

These alternative anti-Gnostic views were taught by such prominent Christian authors as the second-century Irenaeus and the third-century Tertullian, authors whose writings have been known and widely read for many centuries. The Gnostics ended up losing these debates, and their own works were by and large destroyed. It is only in modern times that Gnostic writings have been discovered, most notably in a remarkable but completely serendipitous uncovering of an entire library of Gnostic texts in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.
¹¹

This so-called Nag Hammadi library contains forty-six different documents, a few of which are in duplicate. Some of them detail the mythological views of this or that Gnostic group, others are mystical reflections on the nature of reality or of the human's place in it, others are secret revelations that Jesus delivers to his disciples after his “resurrection,” and still others are collections of Jesus's earthly teachings. Some of these writings were produced in the names of the apostles. They are, in other words, Gnostic forgeries.

G
NOSTIC
F
ORGERIES

We knew about Gnostic forgeries for a long time before we actually had any of them. The fourth-century heresy hunter Epiphanius, for example, in a book that attacks eighty different groups of “heretics,” talks about one particularly nefarious Gnostic group that he calls the Phibionites. In his attack on this group Epiphanius reports that they used a whole range of pseudonymous writings, including a
Gospel of Eve,
the
Lesser Questions of Mary (Magdalene),
the
Greater Questions of Mary,
the
Books of Seth,
the
Apocalypses of Adam,
the
Birth of Mary,
and the
Gospel of Philip
.
¹²
The
Gospel of Philip
was discovered at Nag Hammadi, although it is impossible to know whether it is the same book that Epiphanius was referring to. We also have a writing
called the
Birth of Mary,
but there is nothing Gnostic about it, and so it too may be a different book. None of the other books survives.
¹³

But plenty of other Gnostic forgeries do. Among the Nag Hammadi writings that set forth Gnostic views in the names of the apostles is a
Secret Book of John
(i.e., the son of Zebedee), which lays out in graphic detail one version of the Gnostic myth, and an
Apocalypse of Paul,
which describes a mystical ascent of the apostle through the heavens, narrated in the first person. There are two apocalypses of James and the aforementioned
Gospel of Philip.
And most famously of all there is the
Gospel of Thomas,
a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus allegedly recorded by Judas Didymus Thomas, who was reputed in some regions of the early church to have been the twin brother of Jesus.
¹⁴

Rather than discuss all the Gnostic forgeries here, I will consider just two, which are particularly interesting, because they not only attest a Gnostic point of view, but also argue against the view that eventually became “orthodox,” that is, the view represented by such authors as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius, which was eventually accepted as “true” over against the teachings of “false gnosis.”

The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter

We have already seen one
Apocalypse of Peter
in Chapter 2. At Nag Hammadi a second one was discovered, a secret revelation given to Simon Peter.
¹⁵
The one we already examined emphasized strongly the bodily nature of the afterlife, where people are blissfully rewarded or horrifically punished, physically, for how they lived in this life. The
Coptic Apocalypse of Peter
takes a radically different view, arguing that those who believe in the importance of the flesh, whether Christ's own flesh or the fleshly life of humans, have completely misunderstood and corrupted the truth.

This book is also written in the first person, allegedly by Jesus's disciple Peter. It begins with a discussion between Christ and Peter on the day of Jesus's death, after which it narrates what “really” hap
pened at the crucifixion. This is one of the more bizarre descriptions of Christ's death that you will ever read. In the opening dialogue Christ strongly emphasizes the need for proper “knowledge” for salvation and condemns Christians who lack this knowledge, saying that “they are blind and have no leader” (72.12–13). The non-Gnostic leaders of the Christian churches who praise Christ are blaspheming him and are themselves both blind and deaf (73.13–14). This is especially the case, because they “hold on to the name of a dead man” that is, they think that it is the crucified Jesus who matters for salvation. But how wrong they are! “They do not understand” (76.28–35). These “bishops and deacons” are dried up and barren channels who provide no life-giving water.

After Christ's attack on those who value material existence and who think that his death brings salvation comes the narrative of the crucifixion. While Peter and Christ are talking, Peter sees Jesus, down below the hill where they are standing, “apparently” seized by his enemies and crucified. But above the cross he sees another image of Christ, this one laughing at the entire proceeding. Considerably confused, Peter asks the Christ standing next to him what he is seeing. Christ replies that the one above the cross is the “living Jesus,” and the one on the cross “is the substitute,” that is, the stand-in for the real Jesus, who cannot be crucified because he is not really a flesh-and-blood human being. The body being crucified is “the abode of demons, the stony vessel in which they live, the man of Elohim” (the name of the Old Testament God). The one above the cross is laughing at the ignorance of those crucifying him, because they are blind and think that they can kill the Christ. But they can't. He is a spirit, beyond suffering.