Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (134 page)

This exhortation to speak and live apologetically is given by one of early Christianity’s ultimate authorities, the apostle Peter, “witness to Christ’s sufferings,” who himself, of course, was reputed to have suffered the ultimate penalty, in having been martyred under Nero in Rome. The letter, though, was not actually written by Peter from beyond the grave, but by a forger who was intent on using Peter’s name to provide authorization for the message he needed to deliver.

As a final example of a previously examined forgery that functioned apologetically, we should consider anew the fourth-century Acts of Pilate.
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As already indicated, the genesis of the book has generated considerable interest among scholars, in no small measure because of the intriguing circumstance mentioned by Eusebius, that earlier in the fourth century, during the reign of Maximin Daia, a pagan version of an “Acts of Pilate” appeared and made an enormous splash among readers throughout the Empire.

Although this pagan Acts of Pilate does not survive, the Christian version does. In this imaginative account, as we have seen, rather than condemning Jesus justly for warrantable crimes, Pilate finds Jesus completely innocent of all charges. It is only the recalcitrant Jews who force his hand. Pilate himself is convinced that Jesus is the true King. So too is everyone else in the narrative, apart from the Jewish antagonists. Even the standards bearing the image of Caesar bow down,
of their own accord, before him. Caesar himself, then, recognizes not just Jesus’ complete innocence but his divine royalty.

This in itself is an apologetic motif, but in many ways it is the very existence of this Christian version of an Acts of Pilate that functions as an apology. This appears to be a case of counterforgery, a forged Christian Acts countering an earlier forged pagan Acts. To that extent, the book is the apologetic equivalent to the polemical letter of the Laodiceans, whose very existence shows that the Marcionite forgery could not really be by Paul. With the Acts of Pilate, the Christian edition discredits and refutes the pagan account simply by giving the “true” version of the story. To do so it had no need to refer explicitly to the earlier work. Its appearance and dissemination themselves corrected the errant portrayal of the older forgery.

In addition to these forgeries that we have already considered under other rubrics, there are several whose primary function may well be considered apologetic, including one that was, in many ways, more historically and culturally significant than many of the books that eventually became Scripture, the Protevangelium Jacobi.

The title, Protevangelium Jacobi, is not original or even ancient. It comes from the first publication of the book by G. Postel in 1552,
Protevangelion sive de natalibus Jesu Christi et ipsius Matris virginis Mariae, sermo historicus divi Jacobi minoris
.
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The title is appropriate to the book’s contents, as the narrative relates events leading up to and immediately following the birth of Jesus, especially those involving Mary: her own miraculous birth, upbringing, young life, and engagement to Joseph. In addition, the account narrates, as a kind of Christian midrash on the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke,
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the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, Mary’s continued virginity (demonstrated famously by a midwife’s postpartum inspection), and the opposition to the Christ child by King Herod, leading to the miraculous protection of John the Baptist and his mother, while his father, Zacharias, the high priest of the Jews, is murdered in the Temple. The book is allegedly written by “James,” by whom is certainly meant the brother of Jesus, or for this account, his stepbrother, the son of Joseph from a previous marriage.

The account is usually dated to the second century, for reasons we will see below, and became particularly popular in eastern Christendom.
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It was not unknown in the West: there are still fragments of a Latin version and, more important, it was taken over by the widely read Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which popularized many of its stories. But for the most part the Protevangelium was not transmitted in the West because its portrayal of Jesus’ brothers as sons of Joseph from a previous marriage was roundly condemned by no less an authority than Jerome, in whose forcefully stated view Jesus’ alleged brothers were in fact his cousins.
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This interpretation was closely tied to Jerome’s ascetic agenda; for him, not only was Mary a perpetual virgin, but so too was Joseph, the earthly father of the Lord. The Protevangelium was explicitly condemned in 405
CE
by Pope Innocent I
¹¹
and eventually in the sixth-century Gelasian Decree.

The earliest reference that is virtually certain comes in Origen’s
Commentary on Matthew
10.17 (on Matt. 13:55), where he claims that the view that James was the son of Joseph from a previous marriage is taught either in the Gospel of Peter or the Book of James, the latter of which, he says, stresses the ongoing virginity of Mary. As this is a key theme of the Protevangelium, there is little doubt that Origen is referring to our text. More questionable are possible references in Clement of Alexandria, who knows the story of Mary’s postpartum inspection by a midwife, but does not indicate the source of his knowledge
(Strom. 7
. 16. 93), and earlier in Justin, who knows the tradition that Jesus was born in a cave outside Bethlehem, but does not refer to the Protevangelium itself (
Dial
. 78).

Whenever the Protevangelium achieved its final form (if one can speak of a “final” form for a textual tradition as malleable as this one),
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the text as it has come down to us gives clear signs of being based on yet earlier sources available to the pseudonymous author. Not only is chapter 18 narrated in the first person (Joseph describing how “time stood still” when the son of God came into the world), so too is the postscript: “I James, the one who has written this account” (ch. 25). Obviously, the first person of chapter 25 is different from the first person of chapter 18; the two accounts almost certainly come from different sources, or at least from one later redaction of another source. Harnack made the influential argument that there are three major sources that have been incorporated into the longer account: (1) a kind of biography of Mary in
chapters 1
–17, beginning with the circumstances of her miraculous birth to the wealthy Jerusalemite Joachim and his hitherto barren wife, Anna, and through her holy
and protected infancy, to her upbringing in the Jerusalem Temple, where she is daily fed by an angel, through her engagement to the elderly Joseph, and then her virginal conception; (2) an account of Joseph and the birth of Jesus in chapters 18–20, including the trip to Bethlehem, the firsthand account of Joseph’s vision of time standing still, and the narrative of the postpartum inspection of Mary, which showed her to be a virgin even after giving birth; and (3) an account of the death of Zacharaias, the father of John the Baptist, in the wake of Herod’s wrath, in chapters 22–24.
¹³

Other scholars, such as de Strycker, have argued for an original unity of the text, largely on the grounds of literary style and vocabulary.
¹⁴
What is clear, in any event, is that the subject matter does shift in the final chapters of the book, where Mary, the key figure of the narrative as a whole, disappears from sight, and the family of John the Baptist assumes center stage. Even if this latter account was “original” to the text, it probably comes from a different oral or written source, as did the vision of Joseph in chapter 18.

Whatever his sources, it is not difficult to reconstruct some of the driving forces that led the pseudonymous author to generate his account. The canonical Gospels are notoriously silent about key issues and events involving the time up to and including Jesus’ appearance into the world. This Gospel tries to fill in some of the gaps. It would be a mistake, however, to see the Protevangelium driven by biographical concerns pure and simple, or even by the impulse to provide an encomium on Mary, as such scholars as Hock have maintained.
¹⁵
The narrative does indeed function in both of these ways. But it also functions apologetically, to answer charges leveled against Jesus by non-Christian authors who were opposed both to him and to the religion founded in his name. It answers these charges pseudonymously, in a forgery allegedly written by Jesus’ own (step)brother, James, who would obviously be well positioned to know the family secrets about events leading up to Jesus’ appearance in the world.

There can be little doubt that by using the pseudonym “James” the author meant for his readers to identify him as Jesus’ brother, the leader of the church in the Jewish capital, James of Jerusalem. Not only does he not identify himself further, so that readers naturally assume it must be “that” James, but at the end he associates himself with the holy city (cf. Gal. 2:9):

But I James, the one who has written this account in Jerusalem, hid myself away in the wilderness when there was a disturbance at the death of Herod, until the disturbance in Jerusalem came to an end. There I glorified God, the Master, who gave me the wisdom to write this account. (ch. 25)
¹⁶

This Herod, then, is “Herod the Great,” known to be violently opposed to the family of Joseph (Matthew 2). But it is also possible that the author is making an implausible intertextual connection, or that he is himself somewhat confused about the facts of biblical history, by referring to the association of “James” and “Herod” from Acts 12:1–2. In the latter episode, it is another James (the son of Zebedee) who is persecuted, and by one of the other Herods (Antipas), who had him executed. According to the Protevangelium, James escaped the persecution, which in any event happened after Herod’s death; but possibly the author meant the passage to provide a foreshadowing of persecution yet to come (another James, another Herod). History knows of no connection between James of Jerusalem and Herod Antipas, but one should not object that this text, of all texts, could be expected to get the historical record straight.

In any event, in the Protevangelium, Joseph is said to have grown sons already when he is chosen to be Mary’s husband (9.2); of these one is named Samuel (17.2). The James writing the book is obviously another son, and so an impeccable authority for events involving his “brother.”
¹⁷
As H. Smid points out, the fact that he claims to be writing after the persecution of Herod had died down is meant to indicate that the book was produced very soon after the events described, while Jesus was still a child.

The Protevangelium is widely thought to have as one of its purposes the “defense” of Mary against the attacks of pagan critics such as Celsus.
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Mary Foskett claims that this view is held by the “majority of interpreters,” although she herself prefers Hock’s position that the book is meant as an encomium, not an apologia.
¹⁹
It is not clear, however, that these generic options are to be imagined as mutually exclusive.
Encomia, among other things, can perform apologetic functions, and no one thinks that the narrative is in the
form
of an apologia.

The narrative may not be a direct response to Celsus’
but if not, it is a response to an attack on Mary and Jesus that was remarkably close to it in tenor and content. Celsus’ attempt to disprove that Jesus could be a true son of God is worth quoting at length. The charges are placed on the lips of an antagonistic Jew:

After this he represents the Jew as having a conversation with Jesus himself and refuting him on many charges as he thinks: first because he fabricated the story of his birth from a virgin; and he reproaches him because he came from a Jewish village and from a poor country woman who earned her living by spinning. He says that she was driven out by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, as she was convicted of adultery. Then he says that after she had been driven out by her husband and while she was wandering about in a disgraceful way she secretly gave birth to Jesus. And he says that because he was poor he hired himself out as a workman in Egypt, and there tried his hand at certain magical powers on which the Egyptians pride themselves. (1.28)

… The mother of Jesus is described as having been turned out by the carpenter who was betrothed to her, as she had been convicted of adultery and had a child by a certain soldier named Panthera. (1.32)
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Then, in an attempt to attack the idea that Jesus was conceived by the Spirit of God:

Then was the mother of Jesus beautiful? And because she was beautiful did God have sexual intercourse with her, although by nature He cannot love a corruptible body? It is not likely that God would have fallen in love with her since she was neither wealthy nor of royal birth; for nobody knew her, not even her neighbours. It is just ridicule also when he says: When she was hated by the carpenter and turned out, neither divine power nor the gift of persuasion saved her. (1.39)