Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (116 page)

What is clear is that Paul could be, and was, appealed to by various sides in debates over both the resurrection and the related issue of the status of the flesh. It
is no accident that the Marcionites—harsh opponents of the flesh—appealed to forged letters of Paul to the Alexandrians and Laodiceans (according to the Muratorian Canon). 3 Corinthians can well be seen, then, as a kind of counterforgery to the views of certain Paulinists (Marcion and some Gnostics), and possibly to actual forgeries that they produced. It also counters the views found in certain docetic fabrications, such as the Acts of John and its remarkable portrayal of a phantasmal Christ (e.g., Acts of John 93),
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as well as (possibly) Gnostic works not connected with Paul, such as the
Book of Thomas the Contender
considered earlier. And when “Paul” claims in the letter that “I delivered to you first of all what I received from the apostles before me who were always with Jesus Christ” (v. 4; cf. 1 Cor. 15:3), the forger provides an even more precise counterforgery to claims such as those found in the forged Epistula Petri and the book it introduces, the Pseudo-Clementine
Homilies
, where Paul stands precisely at odds with the views of Peter, the one who was with Christ for his public ministry and knew Christ far better than did Paul, who acquired his “knowledge” from a brief and unreliable vision. Here then, in 3 Corinthians, we have a “Paul” who appears to be fighting against other “Pauls.”

What is most striking of all is that this particular “Paul” stands at odds with what we know about the real, historical Paul, at least as he is represented in the undisputed Pauline epistles. This has been shown above all by Benjamin White in his recent analysis of 3 Corinthians.
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For one thing, the forged letter—in dealing with the question of Christ’s nature—places almost no importance on the death of Jesus, and overlooks questions about the Jewish Law, focusing instead on the role of the Spirit in the teachings of the prophets. Of greater importance, the pseudonymous author embraces views found nowhere in Paul, such as the incarnation of Christ through Mary and the remarkable “proofs” of the resurrection through the stories of Jonah and the bones of Elisha. Most significant, however, is that the author presents views that stand precisely at odds with Paul. In particular, the author has taken Paul’s teaching of the resurrection of the “body” (
) and transformed it into a doctrine of the resurrection of the “flesh” (
). As White has shown, the stress on “flesh” is not simply different from Paul, it is counter to Paul, who insisted that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15:50). For Paul, the flesh is the fallen part of humans that cannot and will not be redeemed. It is the body that is to be raised, not the
. As a result, 3 Corinthians represents a forged attempt to salvage Paul that does so only by altering a critical aspect of his actual message.

At the same time, the author was standing in a clearly demarcated line of Pauline tradition, as White has further shown. In particular, his views coalesce strikingly with the views of Paul found in the Pastoral epistles and in the somewhat later writings of Irenaeus. Here then we find the irony we have run across before.
Paul is used to combat Paul; but it is a “twisted” Paul—to use the language of 2 Peter—that has been created in order to counter an otherwise “twisted” Paul.

It may seem highly irregular to include a Gnostic treatise among early Christian texts that champion the flesh and oppose a docetic understanding of Christ, but that is precisely what we have in “Melchizedek,” the first treatise of codex 9 discovered at Nag Hammadi. The surviving copy is a highly lacunose revelation to Melchizedek by the angel Gabriel that includes a liturgical rite spoken by Melchizedek. The original text comprised 750 lines. Only 19 of these survive complete, 467 are fragmentary, many of them largely so. The remaining 264 lines, over a third of the entire treatise, are lost altogether.

The pseudepigraphic character of the piece is nonetheless intact. The author claims to be the famous but mysterious royal/priestly figure known from Genesis 14, Psalm 110, and Hebrews 5–7: “And [I immediately] arose—I, Mel[chizedek]—and I began to [glorify] God” (14.15–18);
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“For I have a name: I am [Melch]izedek, the priest of [God] Most High” (15.7–10); “and they said to me, ‘[Greetings, Mel]chiz[ed]ek, [Priest] of God [Most High]’” (19.12–14). Whether in this tractate Melchizedek is to be identified as Christ himself, or as distinct from him, has been a matter of dispute.
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The book shows strong ties to the Sethian tradition, as seen, for example, in 5.17–19, “I [am Gamal]iel. It is to [snatch away] the assembly of the [children] of Seth that I have come.”
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Among its Gnostic features are a myth of descent through the realms of the aeons (but cf.
Ascension of Isaiah
) in 1.1–5: “Jesus Christ, the Son of God … from … the aeons, that he might pass through all of the aeons and see in each one of the aeons the nature of the aeon, as to what kind it is, and that he might put on as a garment sonship and goodness….” Moreover, a host of Gnostic divinities are invoked by the piece: Autogenes, Barbelo, Aithops, Doxomedon, Domedon, Harmozel, Oraoiael, Daveithe, Eleleth (5.23ff.); and later Barbelo Doxomedon Harmozel, Oriael, and others (16.17ff.).

In view of the tractate’s Gnostic character, what is most peculiar is precisely its anti-docetic Christology, which luckily survives in one of the few intact passages, in a series of polemically contrasting statements:

Furthermore, they will say of him

“He was not born,” though he was born;

“he does not eat,” though he does eat;

“he does not drink,” though he does drink;

“he is not circumcised,” though he was circumcised;

“he is without real flesh,” though he came in the flesh;

“he did not suffer death,” he did endure suffering;

“he did not rise from the dead,” he did rise from the dead. (5.1–11)

As Birger Pearson has noted, the balanced set of contrasts compare favorably to other Christological statements found throughout the early Christian literature, of varying persuasion. One thinks most immediately of the famous contrasting claims of the Acts of John, which function to emphasize precisely the opposite Christological point (in favor of a docetic interpretation):

So then I have suffered none of those things which they will say of me. … You hear that I suffered, yet I suffered not; and that I suffered not, yet I did suffer; and that I was pierced, yet I was not lashed; that I was hanged, yet I was not hanged; that blood flowed from me, yet it did not flow; and, in a word, that what they say of me I did not endure, but what they do not say, those things I did suffer. (Acts of John 101)
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More stark still are the disaffirmations of the Manichaean Psalms of Heracleides:

Amen, I was seized; Amen again, I was not seized.

Amen, I was judged; Amen again, I was not judged.

Amen, I was crucified; Amen again, I was not crucified.

Amen, I was pierced; Amen again, I was not pierced.

Amen, I suffered; Amen again, I did not suffer.… (Ps. Heracl.)
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These docetic statements are what one might more naturally expect to find in a Gnostic treatise such as Melchizedek. But instead, the tractate’s material similarities are much closer to the paradoxical affirmations of the proto-orthodox Ignatius: “For there is one physician, both fleshly and spiritual, born and unborn, God come in the flesh, true life in death, from both Mary and God, first subject to suffering and then beyond suffering, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
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At the same time, as Pearson points out, whereas the Ignatian statements are presented as paradoxes, those in Melchizedek are polemical contradictions, in which false Christological views are directly countered.

How does one explain such strong anti-docetic polemic in a Gnostic treatise? Pearson considers the possibility that the tractate is connected to the eponymous
group of Melchizedekians referred to by several heresiologists. In particular Epiphanius maintained that the Gnostic Melchizedekians subordinated Christ to Melchizedek and affirmed that Christ originated from Mary, that is, that he was born as a man (
Pan
. 55). Interestingly, a low Christology is also attested for the group in both Hippolytus (
Refut
. 7.24) and Pseudo-Tertullian (
Haer
. 8). For them, Christ was purely human, a “mere man,” in contrast to the heavenly power of Melchizedek, of which he was the image. The conclusion to hand is that this group stressed the real, fleshly humanity of Christ and his actual suffering in order to contrast these with their more exalted views of Melchizedek.

On the other hand, given the overwhelming unreliabilities of the heresiological reports—Epiphanius being the most obvious and extreme case—there may be a better explanation for the presence of an anti-docetic Christology in a Gnostic work. Schenke proposes a somewhat more economical solution. The Gnostic tractate of Melchizedek that we now have was at one point edited and revised along proto-orthodox lines, creating the odd amalgam that we now have:

The simplest solution[:] the assumption that in Melch the degree of secondary Christianization of Sethian gnosis has reached such force that it exceeded its categorical boundaries and that the Sethianism here lost its gnostic character. That is to say: Melch would represent a Christianized Sethianism that is no longer gnostic at all.
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However one evaluates the genesis of this odd tradition, it is clear that here in Melchizedek we have one Nag Hammadi document that simultaneously evinces clear Gnostic tendencies and celebrates the importance of the real fleshly character of Christ and his real tangible suffering.

The Epistula Apostolorum presents us with another emphatic declaration of the importance of the flesh of Christ and the future fleshly resurrection of his followers, in the face of false teachers who proclaim a docetic gospel. The document was unknown until Carl Schmidt discovered a Coptic fragment at the Institut de la mission archéologique française in Cairo in 1895.
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The complete Ethiopic text, extant in five manuscripts, was published by Louis Guerrier and Sylvain Grébaut
in 1912.
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It is generally thought that the Coptic presents the better form of the text, which was originally composed in Greek, even though it is more fragmentary than the Ethiopic.

A range of dates has been plausibly argued for the work, from around 120
CE
to the late second century. In addition to the general tone and theological character of the text, a good deal hinges on how one evaluates the striking claim of chapter 17, presented in variant forms in the Coptic and Ethiopic, concerning the time of the second coming of Christ. According to the Coptic this will occur when the “hundredth part and the twentieth part is completed”—that is, 120 years after Christ. According to the Ethiopic it will be “when the hundred and fiftieth year is completed.” The obvious interpretive issues involve the thirty-year difference between the two accounts and the question of when one is to begin the timetable: at Jesus’ birth, for example, or at his death? The temporal discrepancy is most easily explained by the passage of time, with the Ethiopic translation having been created some years after the 120th year had already been completed. As to when the counting should begin, it seems unlikely that the highly anticipated end of all things would be dated from Jesus’ birth, as that was not celebrated in the second century, but from his death and resurrection, which was commemorated not only every year at Easter but every single week of the year. If, as seems most plausible, the Coptic preserves the earlier form of the text, then it was in all likelihood produced sometime before 150
CE
or so, possibly close to that time.
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