Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics

837 Pages·2012·6.52 MB·English

by  Bart D. Ehrman

FORGERY AND COUNTERFORGERY
FORGERY
and
COUNTERFORGERY
The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics
BART D. EHRMAN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehrman, Bart D.
Forgery and counterforgery : the use of literary deceit
in early Christian polemics / Bart D. Ehrman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-992803-3
1. Christian literature, Early—History and criticism.
2. Literary forgeries and mystifications. I. Title.
BR67.E37 2014
270.1—dc23
2012009020
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For J. Christiaan Beker and Bruce M. Metzger
In memoriam
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
PART I Forgery in the Greco-Roman World
2. Forgers, Critics, and Deceived Deceivers
3. Terms and Taxonomies
4. Forgery in Antiquity: Aspects of the Broader Phenomenon
5. Forgery in Antiquity: Motives, Techniques, Intentions, Justifications, and
Criteria of Detection
PART II Forgery in Early Christian Polemics
6. Introduction to Forgery and Counterforgery in Early Christian Polemics
7. Early Pauline Forgeries Dealing with Eschatology
8. Later Forgeries Dealing with Eschatology
9. Forgeries in Support of Paul and His Authority
10. Forgeries in Opposition to Paul and His Message
11. Anti-Jewish Forgeries
12. Forgeries Involving Church Organization and Leadership
13. Forgeries Involving Debates over the Flesh
14. Forgeries Arising from Later Theological Controversies
15. Apologetic Forgeries
16. Lies and Deception in the Cause of Truth
Bibliography
Index of Ancient Sources
Index of Subjects
Index of Modern Scholars
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I became seriously interested in questions of literary forgery just over twenty
years ago in the course of doing research for my book The Orthodox Corruption
of Scripture. It occurred to me at the time that the scribal falsification of texts is
in many ways analogous to the forgery of texts. In both instances a writer
(whether a scribe or an author) places his own words under the authority of
someone else. Moreover, both practices were widely discussed and condemned
in antiquity. To pursue the matter, I devoured Wolfgang Speyer’s seminal
treatment, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum,
a great book to which I have returned on a number of occasions in the two
decades since. My debt to Speyer will be seen in the opening chapters of this
book. It will be clear, however, that my study is altogether different, as I focus
on the use of forgery in Christian polemics of the first four centuries.
Abbreviations are standard ones in the field; see, e.g., Patrick H. Alexander et
al., The SBL Handbook of Style (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), pp. 89–153.
There remains the happy occasion to thank those who have helped me in my
work. As always, I am endlessly grateful to and for my wife, Sarah Beck-with, a
remarkable human being, scholar, and dialogue partner, without whom my work,
not to mention my life, would be immeasurably impoverished. My thanks to the
National Humanities Center, which awarded me a fellowship in 2009–10,
allowing me to pursue this academic passion without interruption, in the daily
company of other scholars pursuing theirs. My thanks to my brother, Radd
Ehrman, professor of Classics at Kent State University, for occasional help on
matters of Greek and Latin literature and culture. My thanks to members of the
UNC-Duke “Christianity in Antiquity” reading group (CIA), and members of the
Duke-UNC “Late Ancient Studies Reading Group,” for vigorously discussing
sundry aspects of the work. My thanks to Elizabeth Clark, friend and colleague
in the Duke Department of Religion, and to Zlatko Pleše, friend and colleague at
UNC, for incisive comments and invaluable assistance on several of the
chapters.
Early in my work I had the benefit of two bright and hard-working graduate
students at UNC serving as my research assistants, Jared Anderson and
Benjamin White. For the past three years, a massive amount of work has been
undertaken with inordinate skill by Jason Combs, also a graduate student at
UNC. Without his assistance, this book would have taken decades longer to
write and contained thousands more errors. In the final stages, Maria Doerfler,
graduate student at Duke, has joined forces and also done extensive and
remarkable things, efficiently and with grace. To all of these research assistants I
am deeply grateful.
I am especially indebted to three colleagues who read every word of the
manuscript and made innumerable corrections and suggestions: Andrew Jacobs
at Scribbs College, Joel Marcus at Duke Divinity School, and Dale Martin at
Yale University. The world would be a happier place if every author had such
friends, colleagues, and readers. All remaining mistakes are, alas, mine.
In the penultimate draft of the book I had determined to leave all foreign
language materials cited in isolated and block quotations in their original
languages, reasoning that this was, after all, meant to be a work of scholarship.
My readers (all of them, actually) insisted that this was a very bad idea. I have
yielded to their pleas (in this one instance) and asked the aforementioned Maria
Doerfler, her of many languages, to translate the quotations (principally German,
but also French and some of the Latin). She has complied in a remarkable way,
and I cannot say how much I owe her. In places I have altered her translations,
and the final responsibility for their accuracy (or inaccuracy) is all mine. I have
resituated the original language quotations themselves to the footnotes. Unless
otherwise noted, the translations of Greek texts are mine, including those of the
New Testament.
Finally, thanks are due to my close friend and longtime editor Robert Miller
at Oxford University Press, who has willingly and eagerly come forth from his
normal world of college publishing to take on the task of editing the book.
I have dedicated the book to the memory of two of my former teachers at
Princeton Theological Seminary: Bruce M. Metzger and J. Christiaan Beker.
Among white, middle-class, New Testament scholars you could not find two
more different human beings. But they both influenced me significantly, and
they both shared my passion for learning the truth about early Christian literary
deceit.