How Would First-Century Christians Have Viewed Pseudepigraphy

How Would First-Century Christians Have Viewed Pseudepigraphy?

How would first-century Christians have viewed the practice of pseudepigraphy? For several reasons, this is a notoriously difficult question to answer. In attempting an answer, one must also address questions such as: What exactly is pseudepigraphy? What sources are available to tell us what early Christians would have thought about the practice? To what degree will knowing why an author chose to write pseudonymously give us insight into the general acceptability of the practice? Such questions, in various forms, have been the focus of modern scholarship on ancient pseudepigraphy. This brief study will outline some of the answers that have been given to these questions and will offer an answer to the question posed in the title of this essay.

Let me begin by defining the term ‘pseudepigraphy’. I understand ‘pseudepigraphy’ to be the practice whereby the person who is responsible for the intellectual content of a work deliberately attributes the work to another actual person. With this definition, I hope to eliminate several related concepts from the discussion. First, I hope to exclude the unintentional attribution of a work to the wrong author. The New Testament (NT) book of Hebrews is an oft-cited example of this. The book itself makes no attribution of authorship, but some parts of the early church thought that Paul had written the book, which is very unlikely. Thus, authorship was mistakenly attributed to Paul. Mis-attribution of anonymous works was a frequent occurrence in antiquity, and cannot be seen as the intention of the author.

Second, I hope to avoid consideration of problems surrounding the use of amanuenses. In this case the intellectual content derives from a source other than the author of the text in such a way that the author of the intellectual content endorses the work of the author of the text. In this way two tasks that are normally held together (i.e., creation of the intellectual content and creation of the text) are separated in a way that justifies attribution of authorship to the creator of the intellectual content rather than to the creator of the actual text. An example of this may be seen in Paul’s use of a scribe/amanuensis in writing his letter to the Romans (Rom 16.22).

Third, I would like to exclude from discussion the use of noms de plum, because, although they can be used to deceptively mask the identity of an author, they are also used simply to achieve anonymity. Practically speaking, however, it will probably be impossible to discern whether an author has used a nom de plum, and it will certainly be impossible to discern whether a pen-name has been used as an intentional deception. So, this discussion will centre on the question of how early Christians viewed the practice of intentional attribution of authorship to an actual person who was not, in fact, at all responsible for the intellectual content of the work.

Now that ‘pseudonymity’ has been defined,[1] let us consider some past and recent approaches to the subject. It is traditional to note at the outset that theological or psychological explanations of the practice of pseudepigraphy have been unsatisfying, both because they require an extraordinary amount of guess-work that cannot be verified, and because they fail adequately to take into account the views of pseudonymity actually expressed in various ancient writings; but I will avoid making note of this. I will proceed, instead, to consider how a few important literary-historical approaches have attempted to understand the problem. Let me proceed roughly chronologically.

In the 1960’s, Kurt Aland wrote an article that sparked debate, but the thesis of which seems largely to have been rejected.[2] The value of mentioning Aland’s views is in providing an example of what most scholars think pseudepigraphy was not. Aland suggested that to properly address the question of pseudonymity in the NT writings, one must first examine the body of Christian literature from the first and second centuries.[3] (This has been widely accepted). In examining this literature, Aland finds that there is a tendency, as the end of the second century draws near, for authors to publish their writings and to seek recognition as writers in their own names.[4] (This does not seem to be questionable either). What is questionable is Aland’s thesis that early Christian pseudonymity was due to the author’s and audiences’ awareness that what the author had written was inspired and written under the influence of the Holy Spirit (or of Jesus or of the apostles), so that for the author to attribute the work to him/herself would have been to deny its inspiration; the work was best attributed to the one whose influence directed the writing.[5] Thus, the inspired written word would be treated no differently than the inspired spoken word—both would be accepted as from the source of inspiration rather than from the one who spoke or wrote:[6]

What happened in pseudonymous literature of the early period was nothing but the shift of the message from the spoken to the written word. In this change not only was the tool by which the message was given irrelevant, but according to the view of that time it would have amounted to a falsification even to name this tool, because, according to this conception, it was not the author of the writing who really spoke, but only the authentic witness, the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the apostles. When the pseudonymous writings of the New Testament claimed the authorship of the most prominent apostles only, this was not a skilful trick of the so-called fakers… but the logical conclusion of the presupposition that the Spirit himself was the author.[7]

Aland’s thesis faces some problems: 1) It does not explain why obscure apostolic names were chosen for books like Jude, Matthew or Mark. 2) It does not explain why apostolic names would be used at all. If inspiration was by the Holy Spirit, why should Christians attribute authorship to the apostles? It seems unlikely that early Christians thought that the dead apostles inspired and spoke through them.

In contrast to this use of pseudepigraphy, which he believes was operative at an early period, Aland proposes another use of pseudepigraphy for the latter portion of the second century. He says that the influence of the Spirit, under which early ‘authentic’ pseudonymous works were written, began to wane in the early second century. That trend continued until “It was no longer possible by means of Spirit-possession to throw a bridge across the generations and to speak as the mouth of an apostle.”[8] In that situation, pseudepigraphy became a way to garner ‘apostolic’ support for one’s views.[9] Aland suggests that the Pastorals may have been written in a time when these two forms of pseudepigraphy were mixed, and the former practice had not yet fully disappeared.[10] Thus, Aland sees two stages in the development of pseudepigraphy separated by the cessation of ‘Spirit-possession’.

A decade after Aland’s initial article, Bruce Metzger proposed an understanding of pseudepigraphy that distinguished between pseudepigraphy as practiced to deceive and pseudepigraphy that was not intended to deceive.[11] Metzger’s view was not really new (he drew on the works of others), but I mention it here because it was suggested reading for this essay. Metzger distinguishes between forgeries and pseudepigraphy, the latter being a larger category that includes the former.[12] “A literary forgery is essentially a piece of work created or modified with the intention to deceive.”[13] I question whether one really should include ‘modification’ within the boundaries of forgery. For modification may be done with the intention to deceive, it is also dependent upon the prior existence of an unmodified, original work. Presumably copies of the unmodified work would still have been available for reference,[14] so the modification cannot truly be considered an effective means of deception or a significant sub-category of pseudepigraphy. It may also be asked whether Metzger is able to point to any documents that have clearly been modified with the intention to deceive (as opposed to the intention to ‘correct’ or ‘enhance’).

Metzger concludes by reflecting on the historical and theological aspects of the issue. He seems say that the presence of pseudepigraphy in the NT is not inconsistent with the doctrine of inspiration, because pseudepigraphy was not necessarily intended to deceive:

In short, since the use of the literary form of pseudepigraphy need not be regarded as necessarily involving fraudulent intent, it cannot be argued that the character of inspiration excludes the possibility of pseudepigraphy among the canonical writings.[15]

Metzger appears to be looking for a way to reconcile the authority of the NT with the view that it includes pseudonymous writings. His proposal may accomplish this, but it cannot be accepted without verification.

Before Metzger’s theory can be accepted, he must demonstrate that pseudepigraphy in the ancient world was not always a calculated attempt to deceive. To this end, Metzger lists several possible reasons why one might have written pseudonymously in the ancient world. Of those he lists, some are possibly non-deceptive in nature: 1) Pseudonymous composition may have been done out of respect for the supposed author—Metzger mentions only the Neo-Pythagoreans as support for this motivation, saying that they routinely attributed their works to Pythagoras himself in order to give him honour and respect.[16] I will discuss this point again later, for it seems that Metzger may be mistaken in his understanding of what the Neo-Pythagoreans actually did. 2) It may have been done out of modesty—Metzger adduces only the pseudepigraphal letter of Salvian (c. AD 440).[17] Note that Salvian’s bishop apparently condemned the pseudepigraphal action regardless of Salvian’s appeal to modesty. Even if Salvian represents a ‘noble’ reason for writing pseudonymously, the response of Salvian’s bishop demonstrates that at least one Christian in a position of authority refused to consider such a ‘noble’ reason as a sufficient reason. Furthermore Salvian’s response is in his own defence, and so may be rationalisation on his part. Finally, this does not explain why Salvian wrote pseudonymously, for the same purpose could have been accomplished by writing anonymously. 3) Metzger lumps together into one category the practices of writing speeches in the style of famous orators and the practice of inventing speeches for historical figures when what was spoken could not be remembered with accuracy.[18] One might question the validity of this. The former is a didactic method of oratorical education; there was probably never any intention that these practice speeches should be widely distributed. The latter, as Metzger admits, is blatant invention—the authors were pretty clear that they were making up speeches for their characters. No pseudepigraphy is in fact present here, because the authors admitted that they themselves had composed the speeches.

The first of Metzger’s explanations listed above, that early Christians wrote pseudonymous literature analogously to the Neo-Pythagoreans, needs more investigation. In a D.Phil. dissertation that, in the moment it is published, is sure to shake the scholarly community to its knees, Jeremy Duff provides just such an investigation for us. Duff reassesses the frequently cited evidence provided by Iamblichus that Neo-Pythagoreans wrote pseudonymously in order to give glory to Pythagoras rather than to themselves.[19] Duff’s reassessment makes the following two points: First, “Iamblichus’ statement is not evidence that there was a group with these practices, but only that a scholar three hundred years later thought that this might have been the explanation.”[20] This is illustrated by the following points: a) Iamblichus (third century AD) wrote three hundred years after the pseudonymous Pythagorean texts were composed; b) other biographers of Pythagoras make no mention of the practice; c) Iamblichus gives no evidence for his claim. Second, the context of the frequently cited passage (On the Pythagorean Life 198) seems to indicate that Iamblichus did not have the Neo-Pythagoreans in mind at all, but Pythagoras’ contemporary disciples instead.[21] At the very least, then, we may conclude that the analogy of ‘Neo-Pythagorean pseudepigraphy’ is highly suspect.

The works of three other recent scholars must be considered before we may draw any conclusions about early Christian perceptions of pseudepigraphy. Each of these scholars seeks to meet the need for in depth study of ancient literature that will shed some light on the question. We will begin with Lewis Donelson, who makes the assumption that the Pastorals are pseudepigraphal and attempts to understand them within the context of other ancient pseudepigraphal epistles.

Donelson begins with the assumption that Paul did not write the Pastorals, and that the application of Paul’s name to them is intentional deception. “In so doing the author availed himself of the common Greco-Roman literary device of pseudonymity.”[22] Donelson uses his understanding of this type of Greco-Roman letter to illuminate the intentions of the author of the Pastorals. After examining pseudepigraphal letters he finds certain similarities. “And these common characteristics result more from the exigencies of deception and the shared milieu of doctrinal debate among religious or philosophical factions than from structural requirements.”[23]

Thus a pseudepigraphical letter functions more by providing possibilities than by prescribing restrictions. It provides the author with a specific way of participating in the doctrinal debates going on around him. It is a set of tools and the author of the Pastorals uses them as effectively as anyone in antiquity.[24]

Of course, this makes it sound like it was simply common practice to pick up a pen and write a pseudepigraphon with the same mind and the same results with which one might write one’s own work, as though just anyone in antiquity would have chosen to write pseudonymously in the same way they might have chosen to write poetry over prose. This seems unlikely.

Whether or not the practice of pseudepigraphy was as casual as Donelson makes it out to be, the research he performs is valuable. He finds very little evidence that Jewish apocalyptic or philosophical school pseudepigraphy were not meant to be taken seriously in their authorial claims. He also finds that, as a rule, pseudepigraphal writings were simply rejected when their pseudepigraphal nature was discovered.[25] Those who uphold Pauline authorship of the Pastorals often appeal to the personal remarks found in 2 Tim. 4.6-22 and Tit. 3.12-15. The idea is that no pseudepigrapher would dare, or even think to put that kind of personal detail into a pseudonymous letter. But Donelson thinks this personal information is just part of the ruse:

Of course, it is my contention that the author did just that; in the interest of deception he fabricated all the personal notes, all the fine moments of deep piety, and all the careless but effective commonplaces in the letters.[26]

Donelson says that the pseudepigraphal letter genre does the same thing; the letters give seemingly irrelevant personal information that is intended to enhance the deception.[27] Two strands are apparent in Donelson’s examples: inclusion of personal detail as a means of lending credibility to the statement of authorship, and as a springboard for philosophical discourse.

Concerning the canonical pseudepigrapha, Donelson says they are of the same class as other Greco-Roman pseudepigraphal letters, and he feels that the device that dominates pseudonymous works in the NT is “slavish imitation of Pauline language and style.”[28] The overall thrust of Donelson’s statements about the intention of the Christian pseudepigraphers is that they were concerned with heterodoxy in the church and wrote letters to correct the problem, using Paul’s (or another apostle’s) name to give authority to what they wrote.

One difficulty with Donelson’s work is that he begins by assuming the pseudepigraphy of the Pastorals, and that assumption determines how he will read the theology of the epistles and in what time period he will place them—determinations that in turn govern how he will compare them to the other pseudepigrapha he studies. His assumption also leads him to be selective in his use of evidence; he calls up only the evidence that is relevant to a discussion of the Pastorals, which amounts to using only the evidence that supports his theory. Another difficulty with Donelson’s thesis is that what he finds to be true of the pseudepigraphal genre is also quite obviously true of authentic letters. It is not difficult to find examples of personal information, use of apostolic authority to argue doctrinal points, or use of apostolic personalities as paradigms in the ‘authentic’ Pauline epistles. What Donelson finds to be true of pseudepigrapha is not uniquely true of pseudepigrapha but is true of the epistolary genre more generally. That being the case, the presence of these things in a supposedly pseudepigraphal letter cannot be seen as lending support to the theory that it is pseudepigraphal.

The second of the authors still to be considered is David Meade. Meade looks at OT and inter-testamental Jewish literature in an attempt to understand how that literature relates the concepts of tradition, authorship and authority. He looks for a ‘pattern’ of pseudepigraphy in the Jewish sources and then looks to see if a similar pattern appears in the NT writings. Meade focuses on works within the prophetic, wisdom and apocalyptic traditions. In each of these three traditions, Meade concludes that the authority of a work is connected with the authority of its tradition rather than with its authorship. This pattern causes the three traditions to view authorship in a similar way: pseudonymity was seen as an appeal to an authoritative tradition, not as an indication of authorship. In each of the three traditions, “…attribution is primarily a claim to authoritative tradition, not a statement of literary origins.”[29]

A major concern with Meade’s approach is that he does not see the significance of how ‘later’ traditions made use of pseudonymity; viz., in Isaiah and Daniel, the traditions were not written as separate works, but were appended to the original so that no statement of authorship is actually made—the additions borrow authorship from the work to which they are appended. In that case, it makes perfect sense that ‘attribution is a claim to tradition, not a statement of origins’. But the case is quite different for the supposedly pseudepigraphal NT epistles, which were written as individual units with unique ascriptions of authorship. As Duff also points out, it may be doubted how beneficial it is to assume that attitudes that may have governed the production of the OT were still operative in the minds of the early Christians half a millennium later.

Finally, we must consider the masterful work of Jeremy Duff. In his glorious tome, Mr. Duff undertakes to examine texts from the early-Christian period (first and second centuries AD) in order to increase our understanding of the practices of early Christians with regard to pseudepigraphy. Duff does not attempt to assess the authorship of individual texts. Rather, he examines the literature of the first and second centuries AD in order to glean insight into the views and practices of the period. He begins with an examination of previous scholarship and moves to an examination of pagan, Jewish and early Christian texts that address the issue of authorship. After examining the pagan, Jewish and early-Christian evidence, Duff concludes that there is little evidence that any of these three groups considered pseudepigraphy to be an acceptable practice. Rather, in their own ways, each group closely relates authority of a text with authorship; that is, a text is authoritative not on the basis of what it says but on the basis of who wrote it.

A variety of texts from Archaic and Classical Greece demonstrate what Duff calls a developing sense of ‘paternity’ that is widespread by the Classical period.[30] Duff defines ‘paternity’ as the right to be identified as the author of a work; it has two aspects: “positively, the right to be identified as the author of one’s own work; and negatively, the right not to be identified as the author of other (inferior or offensive) works.”[31]

Duff says that the concept of paternity was clearly widespread in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods as well.[32] Illustrations of this fact include the libraries of the Hellenistic era,[33] and Galen’s writings,[34] both of which place a premium on authentic authorship. Duff also indicates that the development of the Greek understanding of paternity occurred within the space of two or three hundred years, so it is not improbable to assume that the Jewish conceptions of paternity could have similarly changed over the course of several hundred years (contra Meade).[35]

Time and space will not allow a complete discussion of Duff’s research. We shall content ourselves with saying that Duff chose to examine, inter alia, the following texts: Tertullian on the Acts of Paul (On Baptism 17); Serapion and the Gospel of Peter (in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History 6.12); the Muratorian Fragment; Tertullian’s Against Marcion 4.5.3-4; 2 Thessalonians (esp. 2.1-3 and 3.17); several apocalypses including Daniel and 1 Enoch; the Mishnah; Josephus Against Apion; Philo; the Lives of the Prophets; and B.Bava Batra 14b-15a. What Duff finds is that Jewish and early Christian perceptions of the relationship between authorship and authority in the first and second centuries AD were quite similar to those that were contemporary among the Greeks. Pseudepigraphy was, of course, prevalent, but what is important is not whether it was prevalent but whether it was acceptable—acceptability cannot be directly inferred from prevalence.[36]

How then shall we answer our initial question? How would first-century Christians have viewed the practice of pseudepigraphy? As Donelson and Duff have demonstrated, there was clear resistance to the practice among Greeks and Christians in the first two centuries AD. The hypothesis that pseudepigraphy was a transparent literary device cannot be substantiated by the evidence; neither can the claim that Christians practiced pseudepigraphy in the same way that the ‘Neo-Pythagoreans’ did. Meade’s thesis fails to persuade, in part because he attempts to project mid-millennium BC Jewish views onto first and second century AD Christians. The research Duff has done compels us to reconsider several long-held perceptions about how ancients viewed the practice of pseudepigraphy. More specifically, Duff demonstrates that Jews, Greeks and Christians of the first and second century AD perceived an intimate relationship between the author of a text and that text’s authority. The resultant conclusion is that first and second century Christians rejected the practice of pseudepigraphy—at least those who were not themselves pseudepigraphers.

[1] I will not engage in further definition and differentiation of terms; though in a longer work one might choose also to discuss technical differences between the ‘pseudonym-’ and ‘pseudepigraph-’ roots, or the problems inherent in using (or refusing to use) words like ‘forgery’.

[2] Kurt Aland, “The Problem of Anonymity and Pseudonymity in Christian Literature of the First Two Centuries,” in Kurt Aland, et al. The Authorship and Integrity of the New Testament, p. 1-13 (London: SPCK, 1965); originally published in Journal of Theological Studies, N.S., 12/1 (April 1961).

[11] See Bruce M. Metzger, “Literary Forgeries and Canonical Pseudepigrapha,” in Journal of Biblical Literature, 91 (1972): 3-24.

[14] If a document was worth modifying, it was probably worth copying and distributing. So it seems unlikely that at the time of alteration the altered copy would have been the only one.

[19] For what follows, see Jeremy N. Duff, A Reconsideration of Pseudepigraphy in Early Christianity, D.Phil. Thesis (University of Oxford, 1998), 134-135.

[22] Lewis R. Donelson, Pseudepigraphy and Ethical Argument in the Pastoral Epistles (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1986), 7.

[25] See Donelson, 10-12; Donelson mentions the Muratorian Canon as an example.

[27] See Donelson, 25-37, where he refers to the Platonic Epistles, the Epistles of Anacharsis, Epistles of Crates (which use personal detail as a starting point for philosophising about life rather than as a support for authorship; the Epistles of Heraclitus and the Epistles of Socrates and the Socratics do the same thing), Letters of Apollonius of Tyana (Donelson notes that there may in fact be some authentic letters among these as well as among the Platonic Epistles—if there are then we certainly have a problem using them as evidence of the pseudepigraphal genre), Epistles of Diogenes, Epistles of Heraclitus, Epistles of Socrates and the Socratics.

[28] See Donelson, 49; he feels this to be the case in Eph., Col., 2 Thess., and to some degree in Jude, the Petrines and the Pastorals.