Telling Tales (30 page)

One of the most popular subjects in Germany at that time was the supernatural, and literature across Europe was in thrall to the vogue for gothic fiction. Meinhold decided that a ‘discovered’ book about a medieval witch trial which would also give him the opportunity to pontificate on the history of the Thirty Years’ War and the behaviour of the Catholic church in relation to magic and paganism, was just the thing. So the story of
The Amber Witch
was born. The given author was to be Reverend Abraham Schweidler, a pastor at the church of Koserow in the seventeenth century who had nearly lost his only child, Mary, to a witch trial; and in the preface, the ‘editor’, Wilhelm Meinhold, would describe how the manuscript had come into his possession:

At Koserow, in the Island of Usedom, my former cure, the same which was held by our worthy author some two hundred years ago, there existed under a seat in the choir of the church a sort of niche, nearly on a level with the floor. I had, indeed, often seen a heap of various writings in this recess; but owing to my short sight, and the darkness of the place, I had taken them for antiquated hymn-books, which were lying about in great numbers. But one day, while I was teaching in the church, I looked for a paper mark in the Catechism of one of the boys, which I could not immediately find; and my old sexton, who was past eighty . . . stooped down to the said niche, and took from it a folio volume which I had never before observed, out of which he, without the slightest hesitation, tore a strip of paper suited to my purpose, and reached it to me. I immediately seized upon the book, and, after a few minutes’ perusal, I know not which was greater, my astonishment or my vexation at this costly prize. The manuscript, which was bound in vellum, was not only defective both at the beginning and at the end, but several leaves had even been torn out here and there in the middle. I scolded the old man as I had never done during the whole course of my life; but he excused himself, saying that one of my predecessors had given him the manuscript for waste paper, as it had lain about there ever since the memory of man, and he had often been in want of paper to twist round the altar candles, etc. The aged and half-blind pastor had mistaken the folio for old parochial accounts which could be of no more use to any one.

No sooner had I reached home than I fell to work upon my new acquisition, and after reading a bit here and there with considerable trouble, my interest was powerfully excited by the contents . . .

This story is so similar to others of the found object school of literary hoaxing that it is hard not to echo the Shakespeare scholar Malone’s response to the William Henry Ireland affair in saying that ‘after the demolition of the chest with six keys [Chatterton’s], I did not expect to have heard again, for some time at least, of such a repository for ancient manuscripts’.

Meinhold, however, goes on in his preface to play a far more complex game with his learned readers than the boys Chatterton and Ireland, admitting that he has filled in a few of the missing pages in the text himself in a manner he hopes is consistent with the tone and content of the ‘original’ author’s work:

This I have done with much trouble, and after many ineffectual attempts; but I refrain from pointing out the particular passages which I have supplied, so as not to disturb the historical interest of the greater part of my readers. For modern criticism, which has now attained to a degree of acuteness never before equalled, such a confession would be entirely superfluous, as critics will easily distinguish the passages where Pastor Schweidler speaks from those written by Pastor Meinhold.

The story that follows is an account of Mary Schweidler’s wrongful arrest and trial after a spurned suitor decided to get revenge on her by accusing her of magic acts. Unfortunately for Mary and her God-fearing father, the suitor is the local sheriff and he brings all his corrupt power to bear on those trying her for the crimes her father knows she did not commit. Ultimately, the girl confesses that she is indeed a witch in an attempt to avoid the terrible tortures she is being threatened with, and is sent to the scaffold to die. At the eleventh hour, however, she is saved by a valiant man of noble birth who is able to reveal the sheriff’s true motivation, prove that she was lying about the witchcraft, and see that justice is done.

The fairy-story structure and convincing eighteenth-century orthography (Meinhold was nothing if not a thorough scholar) captivated audiences immediately, and the text, originally published within a historical journal due to its relevance to the period of the Thirty Years’ War, became an instant hit among the German-speakers of Europe. Some libraries even classified it as a historical legal record. Certain experts, however, began to question just how much of it was the work of the ‘editor’ and how much was Schweidler’s, but it was not until one very important reader approached Meinhold for more information that the author was forced to confess.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, was an enthusiastic Romantic with a particular passion for all things medieval. He was also a committed Lutheran. As soon as he saw that a learned pastor had produced a historical study of a German girl caught up in a witch trial and saved by chivalric love, he knew he must read it. And no sooner had he read it than he sent to Meinhold praising his marvellous discovery and sensitive editing, and asking whether he wouldn’t like it to be published (lavishly, no doubt) as a stand-alone book with the king’s help. Appalled that his hoax had gone so far, Meinhold confessed to the king what he had, up until then, denied to everyone else: that the entire thing had been a fabrication designed to show up the poor literary critical skills of his theological bête noir. But the story was so well told that the king cared not one bit and insisted that the work should be published regardless, which it was, under the title
Die Bernsteinhexe
(
The Amber Witch
).

The king was not alone in disregarding Meinhold’s confession as a minor detail. Indeed, as happens so often with particularly well-crafted hoaxes, many of the book’s fans refused to believe it was the work of a quiet little pastor from Usedom. Meinhold was reduced to showing these determined fans his preparatory notes and rough drafts to prove what they did not want to believe was true.

Eventually, when the book’s true authorship was proved beyond doubt, the academic and publishing worlds, humiliated by Meinhold’s trickery, repaid him the only way they knew how: by ignoring him for the rest of his life. His literary output (which included another witch novel, about a girl called Sidonia von Bork) was never to receive the attention from German critics that others in Europe felt it deserved.

There is an amusing postscript to this story. In 1861 the eccentric Victorian translator and socialite Lucie Duff Gordon came across the book and knew that the horror-loving readers of her milieu would react enthusiastically to it. An accomplished writer in French and German as well as English, she prepared an excellent translation of
The Amber Witch
and published it in London. But nowhere did it say that the original author was Johannes Meinhold; she blithely passed it off as her own work, making her edition the first example of a literary hoax within a literary hoax. And Meinhold’s British afterlife did not end there: his book
Sidonia
was also taken up by an English-speaking lady novelist and translated for her countrymen. Indeed,
Sidonia the Sorceress
went on to be by far the best selling of the thirteen books published by the woman who wrote under the name Speranza. That woman was Lady Jane Francesca Elgee aka Lady Wilde, aka the mother of that real-life victim of a wrongful witch-hunt, Oscar Wilde.

S
UBSCRIBERS TO THE
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
in 1950 must have raised a quizzical eyebrow when they saw in the contents page that the respected Princeton historian Paul Robert Coleman-Norton had submitted an article called ‘An Amusing Agraphon’.

Agraphon is the Greek for ‘unwritten’ but to theologians it refers to teachings and sayings of Jesus which, although taken to be true, are not written down in the canonical Gospels. There are many examples, but few if any of them could be described as amusing. Coleman-Norton’s article began on page 439 of the esteemed journal and over the following ten pages told an extraordinary story. He was a teacher at Princeton when war broke out, and his intelligence work in Europe had, he wrote, taken him to Morocco. It was 1943 and his platoon found themselves in the French-controlled town of Fedhala, where there was a fine old mosque. Knowing his interest in matters of ancient history and literature, his colleagues were not surprised when he ventured inside to look around. He, however, got the surprise of his life when the kindly keeper of the place offered to show him some of the rare books and parchments that were held there, and proceeded to open up a book which contained, in amongst the usual Arab texts, a most unusual piece of Greek. It was one page only and had seemingly been slipped inside this other book at random. It was a Greek translation of a set of Latin homilies on the book of Matthew, concerning chapters 1–13 and 19–25. And there was something there that was entirely unfamiliar to him. It would of course have been a terrible
faux pas
to remove the scrap of paper for further study, and due to the circumstances of war there was no time to go back to his base and fetch a camera. Instead, Coleman-Norton sat down and made a hasty but perfectly accurate copy of the text and slipped it into his pocket to peruse at his leisure.

When he did so, his suspicions were proved correct: he was in the presence of a never-before-seen report of something completely new that Jesus had said. And it seemed to fit exactly in to the known Gospel of St Matthew. Matthew 13:42 finds Jesus delivering a vivid warning to his disciples about all the people and things on earth which offend God and ‘do iniquity’. They will, he warns, find themselves thrown by angels ‘into a furnace of fire’ on judgement day, where ‘there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth’. The image of the gnashing of teeth has become famous thanks to its unusual evocation of the misery of hell as an emotional state as well as a physical one. In the canonical Gospel, that is the end of that. But in the agraphon discovered by Coleman-Norton, there is more . . .

But Rabbi, said one of his disciples, with a look of concern, ‘how can this happen for those people who have no teeth?’ (It is safe to assume there were a quite a lot of toothless people in biblical times, so this would not necessarily have been as facetious a question as it sounds.) ‘Ah, ye of little faith,’ replied the Messiah, ‘do not be troubled. If some have no teeth, then teeth will be provided!’

Jesus Christ promising false teeth to all on judgement day. Quite a coup. But as soon as it was published, those readers who knew the author smelled a rat. One such reader was the great Bible scholar Bruce Metzger, who had been a pupil of Coleman-Norton’s before the war. He recalled his old teacher telling a joke along exactly those lines to his theology students, and lent his voice to the chorus of academics who knew Coleman-Norton who all said that this was exactly the sort of prank the old fellow loved to play. Nobody much minded, of course (least of all the editors of the
Harvard Theological Review
, who had previously rejected the very article that the
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
published), because the author was, by all accounts, a harmless, eccentric professor of the old school. At Princeton he would often take seminars dressed in a dressing gown or cape and smoking a pipe. One old student of his even recalls a song sung by junior members of his faculty that went:

Here’s to Norton PRC

Of Oxford University

With cape and cane and pipe and Sapphics

And Greek and Latin pornographics.

This reference to classical pornographics is testament to Coleman-Norton’s considerable powers of composition in the ancient languages he had mastered so well. Whenever the university needed something formal written in Latin it fell to him to do it, but in his spare time – much to the amusements of students and colleagues – he would relish translating and inventing less salubrious texts. Knowing this about him, it is clear not only that he had the ability to compose, in Greek, a convincing fragment of an imagined Latin text, but that the sensitive readers of the
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
were lucky to have been spared exposure to the grinding of something far less polite than teeth.

O
NE OF AMERICA’S
most fascinating and gifted students of religion was the twentieth-century theologian Morton Smith. His lifelong absorption with the mystical early history of the Christian church began when, as a committed Christian and scholar, he moved to Israel to study Talmudic literature in 1940, becoming fluent in Hebrew, Latin and Greek, and became the first non-Jew to be awarded a doctorate by the Hebrew University. The war trapped him there and he lived for four years in Jerusalem, studying under the great Jewish scholar Gershon Scholem and conducting research on early rabbinical parallels to the Gospels. On moving back to America at the end of the war he briefly became an episcopalian minister but decided that that life was not for him – possibly because he was gay, probably because his intensely questing mind was more suited to academia – and returned to the classroom to become professor of ancient history at Columbia.

It was in 1973 that he published two books that rocked the Christian and theological communities across the world. One was for scholars, published by Harvard University Press and called
Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark
and the other was a layman’s companion to the research in that book,
The Secret Gospel
(Harper & Row). The books explained that he had been going through the library of the Orthodox monastery of Mar Saba in Israel back in the 1950s when he chanced upon a seventeenth-century edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch which contained a transcription on the back fly-leaf of a letter from Clement of Alexandria. The contents of that letter were astounding. It described a secret set of magical rites which Jesus had passed on to a few enlightened followers, and linked this to the Carpocratians, a cult of early Gnostics who believed in the contrary-sounding ethic of redemption through sinning. Carnal sinning particularly.