Pseudonymity? Pseudepigraphy? Pseudo*.*?

--could the New Testament letters be such?

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(Rewritten: Oct 2002) | Part Two: Post-Easter Data and Discussion

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In modern discussions about the teachings and history of the New Testament, the issue of pseudonymity (i.e. "false(ly) named") generally comes up. This term refers to the position of some NT scholars that the stated authors of some of the NT epistles are not the actual authors of those documents--that someone other than Paul wrote an epistle which claims it was written by Paul, or that someone other than Peter wrote an epistle which claims it was written by Peter.

The term 'pseudepigraphy' (lower case p) is somewhat related: its narrow meaning refers to pseudonymous writings (i.e., writings which state the author to be someone else than the actual author). The term 'Pseudepigraphy' (capital P)--a much 'looser term'-- refers to a collection of books not included in the canons of the Hebrew or Christian bibles. Most of these books (in the pre-NT writings) are actually anonymous (making no explicit claim to authorship), but were either (a) later attributed to someone other than the actual author; or (b) seem to imply--in the text-- an author other than the actual one.

Pseudonymity would include 'mild' forms, of course, such as simple pen-names (e.g. Charlotte Bronte writing as Currer Bell, Charles Dodgson as Lewis Carol, Samuel Clemens as Mark Twain), but in our context of religious/philosophical writing in antiquity, the pen-name would be of some famous character of antiquity (e.g., Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Adam, Moses). We will call this latter form 'high pseudonymity'. [I will henceforth refer to pseudonymity and pseudepigraphy by the generic 'pseudox', for typing brevity…sigh]

The type of pseudox we are dealing with in the NT epistles is of course VERY high pseudox. The letters explicitly claim to be from Paul (or Peter, etc.), and generally give personal details about his life/situation. They claim to be authoritative, also, as apostolic missives.

For example, under the issue of literary authorship (we will discuss the content-continuity theory of Meade later), this high pseudox forces the issue of 'forgery' and 'deception' on us:

"Given the unique authority of the apostle of Jesus Christ in the church, writings by others in his name but without his involvement inevitably carried the taint of forgery. Even if done by later disciples to express their view of the apostle's thought, they still represented a deceptive imposition of apostolic status on a non-apostolic writing. New Testament letters of Paul and of Peter explicitly and repeatedly refer to their apostolic author. If they are pseudepigrapha, they are clearly deceptive and fully deserve the condemnation leveled at them by L. R. Donelson: The author of the Pastorals 'is not employing pseudepigraphy as an exercise ... ; he is trying to deceive.... [He will] employ any device . . . to accomplish his deception. Facile forgeries do not normally last.'" [NT:MNTD:322ff]

And the deception of origination has to be followed up with the deception of 'sneaking it in'…

"The third model is applicable to the majority of the pseudepigrapha. This is that the documents were variously "discovered" and presented to the churches as authentic. A later example of this technique is the Apocalypse of Paul, which relates the story of its own discovery in the foundations of Paul's house in Tarsus. It may be that the textual mutilation of Ephesians 1:1 is a deliberate attempt to suggest an original address while at the same time obscuring its origins. Since I have already suggested that the Pastorals may have been written to supplement a growing Pauline collection, it is easy to see how several more Pauline "letters" would be readily accepted, and the personal nature of their address (to Timothy and Titus, rather than churches) would be sufficient explanation for the lateness of their arrival on the scene. 2 Peter also gives an awareness of a collection of Pauline letters (3:16) as well as of I Peter (3:1). It is highly likely that 2 Peter was circulated as a rediscovered circular letter of Peter, in an era where interest in the recovery of apostolic literature was growing. This is probaby [sic] also the case for the other pseudepigrapha we have discussed. If 3 Corinthians is not an independent work, its inclusion in the "historical" work of the Acts of Paul and Thecla may have served as a cover for its pseudonymous origins." [PsC, p.198, Meade]

It is customary in modern Western culture (as inheritors of the traditions in Graeco-Roman culture) to call this 'forgery' and forgery has a long, long history in antiquity.

Consider some of the observations of Anthony Grafton ("Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship" [HI:FCCDWS]):

· "In fact, some evidence from the classical period suggests that sensitivity to forgery was almost as widespread as its practice." (p.10)

· "The first real heydey of the forger and the critic, however, began in the fourth century B.C. The existing traditions of forgery blossomed anew. " (p.10)

· "Literary forgery flourished as well, since literary traditions were transformed in Hellenistic times in ways favorable to the production of good fakes. By then the principle had been established that a literary work was the product of a specific individual with a distinctive style and set of concerns. A loose canon of classic texts in prose and verse had also begun to take shape, one which identified the most excellent writers in each genre as models for imitation. The rhetoric schools trained their pupils to turn out excellent pastiches of earlier writers, especially in the form of private letters, a favorite exercise. These could easily be taken as genuine once they came into circulation." (p.10f)

· "The Athenian book market in the fourth century BC had already seen dubious orations and plays begin to drive out genuine literary currency. But the new, refined demand for rare items naturally provoked the deliberate creation by forgery of a self-renewing supply. Vast numbers of faked texts accompanied the genuine ones into the libraries; spurious tragedies infiltrated the collections of Aeschylus and Sophocles, while spurious prose works clung like barnacles to the genuine ones of Plato, Hippocrates, and Aristotle. " (p.12)

· "Between the first century B.C. and the third A.D., in short, the scholar confronted a mass of forgeries, some purporting to come from the Greek literary tradition that anyone with a good education could control, others from foreign environments about which Greeks scholars knew almost nothing precise. Some were produced simply for gain, others to support or refute complex philosophical and religious doctrines. And as one might expect, the methods used to forge works by religious and philosophical authorities infiltrated imaginative literature and other forms of extended narrative as well. The claim to derive from earlier texts written in mysterious languages and stored in mysterious places, for example, crops up in the Greek novel about the Trojan War ascribed to Dictys the Cretan." (p.18)

But this was not 'morally accepted' by the GR world at all--and much of the vast apparatus of criticism was born to combat such a problem:

· "The scholars, headed by that patron of all later librarians, Callimachus, fought back. They apparently did not excise the texts they condemned as fakes from the canons. But they drew up lists (pinakes) of the genuine works of each major author, and identified the spurious ones as well. Though only remnants of these critical manuals, the ancestors of modern library catalogues and literary histories, survive, these show that their authors distinguished clearly between the genuine and the forged. Genuine works of a writer they classified as gnesioi (legitimate), the same term applied to legitimate children; spurious ones were nothoi (bastards); thus the ancient Katalogos of the works of Aeschylus includes Aitnaiai gnesioi and Aitnaiai nothoi. Genuine writing, in short, had for them an organic relation to the writer who produced it-and that relationship distinguished it from forged writing, even though the latter might be retained in libraries and lists. And they used a variety of tests to identify spurious texts." (p.12)

· "And despite the critics it flourished mightily, both in the Greek world and--after Greek literary forms and grammatical, or scholarly, skills were transplanted to Latin soil--in Rome as well. The polymaths of later republican and early imperial Rome also confronted vast arrays of texts that needed to be judged and classified. In Rome too experts flourished, like the friend of Cicero who became known for his ability to pronounce that "this is a verse by Plautus"; "this is not." And here as well the bad currency of the forgers threatened to drive out the good; of the 130 plays of Plautus in circulation, the scholar Varro judged 109 to be forged and 21 genuine, while another canon included 25." (p.13)

And this, of course, applied to our general time period as well…

• "The pervasiveness of sophisticated forgery and the concomitant need for acute criticism are clear from the experience of some of the prolific and cultured literary men of the early Christian era. The medical writer Galen, himself a textual critic of formidable competence, saw a forged work of his own, entitled "Galen Physician," on sale in the booksellers' district of Rome, and felt impelled to write a whole book distinguishing his genuine works from the wholly and partly falsified ones that circulated under his name. The satirist Lucian showed off his forger's dexterity and his critic's competence at one and the same time by forging a work in so convincing a replica of the notoriously obscure style of Heraclitus that it deceived a famous critic. And Galen, who wrote elaborate text-critical and medical commentaries on many of the works ascribed to Hippocrates, frequently showed his awareness of forged passages and whole works." (p.19f)

• "Julius Africanus, Christian scholar and Roman librarian, wrote a devastating letter to Origen about the story of Susanna and the elders which appears at the outset of the Greek--but not the Hebrew--text of the Book of Daniel. He thought it inauthentic for several reasons: the Jews it portrayed seemed to enjoy more freedom than was consistent with the real conditions of the Babylonian captivity, and the Daniel of the story, unlike the real prophet Daniel, prophesied in direct speech instead of by angelically inspired visions. The story as a whole, he acutely remarked, was too silly to be a Greek mime. But his chief argument was as simple as it was definitive. The story contains two crucial, elaborate puns--in Greek. Therefore it could not be a straight translation from the Hebrew, in which the puns would have been meaningless." (p.21)

And just after our period (but during many of the church discussions of canonicity):

"In the late-antique marketplace of ideas, as we have seen, an ancient or an oriental pedigree, or preferably both at once, was the most enticing guarantee a seer could give for the power and beauty of his revelations…Porphyry defended his Platonic sect against all purportedly older and more exotic rivals. At Plotinus' request, for example, he composed a refutation of a work attributed to Zoroaster, 'which I showed to be entirely spurious and modern, made up by the sectarians to convey the impression that the doctrines they had chosen to hold in honor were those of the ancient Zoroaster'" (Vita Plot. 16, 1:44-45)" Forgers and Critics, p.83f)

Occasionally it is argued, btw, that the philosophical schools were not so 'legalistic', that somehow they didn't mind about spurious works much, but the data is otherwise. Many of the philosophical schools (with the possible exception of the Pythagoreans and Cynics) developed intensive criteria and methods for separating the wheat from the chaff:

Plato:

"Authenticity and the proper order of works within a corpus are two of the major questions typically addressed in such introductions. As with most literary collections in antiquity, certain works attracted critical suspicion. Ancient critics raised doubts about several of the thirty-six dialogues typically included in both ancient and modern editions of Plato's works. At least one editor, however, did not expunge such works from the corpus on this account: Thrasyllus questioned whether Plato wrote the Anatores, but still included it in his fourth tetralogy (D.L. 9.37) Other pseudonymous dialogues sprang up at various times and places, but none of them attained a status approaching that of the dialogues assigned to the nine tetralogies." [HI:TTAW:94f]

Aristotle:

"Andronicus devoted himself to determining the genuineness of Aristotle's work…Aristotelians of the first and second centuries CE never explicitly stated a set of philological criteria for judgments about pseudepigraphic texts; at least, no such remarks survive. But arguments for and against the authenticity of certain texts reveal five basic criteria for such judgments…So when it came to determining whether a work derived from its putative author, it appears that Aristotelians share several critical methods with members of other philosophical schools." [HI:TTAW:69f]

Epicurean:

"Less of a popularizer and public figure than Philonides, Zeno of Sidon, active c. 125-75 BCE, is notable for his wide range of philosophical and philological activities. He was also a beloved teacher of Philodemus, who used many of Zeno's writings in his own treatises. Two areas of particular interest to the present study are Zeno's work on spurious Epicurean texts and his textual work on Epicurus' writings.

"Zeno's work exists only in fragments, but several of these showcase his philological labors. One fragment in particular sheds light on his critical approach to certain Epicurean literature:

based on his accurate understanding of the doctrines of the Founders, he was suspicious from the start about certain books, for example, certain letters, the epitome To Pythocles concerning heavenly phenomena, On Virtue, Counsels [attributed to Metrodorus], Testimonies, and especially the second book Against the Gorgias of Plato, the books Against the Rhetors, attributed to Polyaenus, and Concerning the Moon and works [attributed] to Hermarchus.

"Apparently, some of the works circulating under the names of the Founders were not to be trusted. Diogenes Laertius confirms that certain scandalous letters issued under Epicurus' name were a deliberate attempt to tarnish his reputation: "Diotimus the Stoic, who is hostile to him, has assailed him with bitter slanders, adducing fifty scandalous letters as written by Epicurus; and so too did the author who ascribed to Epicurus the epistles commonly attributed to Chrysippus." So Zeno was certainly justified in his suspicion. In fact, it may be a result of his efforts that none of the writings called into question here (with the possible exception of the Letter to Pythocles) were taken as authentic by later Epicureans.

"Unfortunately, Zeno's precise methods for determining the authenticity of a work remain in doubt. Critical judgments about the authorship of written texts had been raised for a long time, at least as far back as Herodotus, who expressed doubts about the authenticity of the Cypria, attributed to Homer. For the most part, however, such judgments were intuitive and lacked a rigorous methodology. Dionysius of Halicarnassus [1st century BC] was the first critic known to us who specified precise categories for such literary judgments, testing a work on stylistic, artistic, and chronological grounds." [HI:TTAW:51-52f]

So, although there were vast amounts of spurious and pseudoxy works in antiquity, it is just not correct to assume it was 'okay' to do so:

• "A pre-critical attempt to resolve the tension, still found in isolation today, was to simply regard the writers of antiquity as unburdened with the 'copyright' mentality of our modern era. The sheer bulk of pseudonymous writing was cited as proof that correct attribution was of little concern. This view has been decisively shattered by the work of W. Speyer." [PsC:4, Meade]

• "Intellectual Ownership in the Ancient World. An early attempt was to argue that writers in antiquity did not share the modern idea of copyright. If writings had no author ownership as such and were in effect common property, then use of another’s name need not be understood as an attempt to deceive by claiming the named person’s authority for the writing. The strength of this argument is that there is a difference between modern copyright mentality and the lack of inhibition among ancient writers in the way they freely incorporated material written by others within their own works. Nevertheless, W. Speyer has shown that the sense of intellectual ownership was already well developed in Greek culture long before the first century .B.C.. And though the Israelite literary tradition was characterized by anonymity, the influence of Greek culture brought the concept into Judaism in the Hellenistic era. This is evident, for example, in the ready acknowledgment that the writer of 2 Maccabees makes to the five volumes of Jason of Cyrene (2 Macc 2.23) and in the sensitivities regarding false attribution in 2 Thessalonians 2:2 and Revelation 22:18." [NT:DictLNT, s.v. "Pseudepigraphy", J. D. G. Dunn]

• "In fact, the Greco-Roman world recognized and contested forgeries composed for a variety of reasons and thus presupposed the rights of literary property that could be violated. It also recognized a kind of pseudonymity--e.g. schoolboy exercises, romantic or historical fiction--that did not deceive and did not intend to do so. But as Wolfgang Speyer comments, to fall into this category in antiquity 'a pseudonym had to be independently created and must not be borrowed from a recognized author or from a famous personality since otherwise it would look as if the intention to forge directed the choice of the name." [NT:MNTD, p.322ff]

Now, to show how strong, incontrovertible, and well-supported this point is, let me cite the research results of Donelson, who has a monograph specifically on this subject (and who, incidentally, accepts the Pastorals as deceptive and high pseudox):

"It is undeniable that one of the primary motivations behind ancient pseudepigrapha was respect for figures of the past, but there is sparse evidence for the concomitant theory that these were executed innocently and openly. The appeal to Jewish apocalyptic is tenuous. The anachronistic dates in the beginning of Judith have been seen as a signal to its readers that the document is a pretense; but other examples are hard to come by. We cannot conclude therefore that Jewish apocalyptic provides any hard evidence of nondeceptive pseudepigrapha. Such school productions as the Pythagoreans, Cynics, Neo-Platonists, and Christians authored under the name of their respective progenitors are of a diverse and uncertain nature. In no case can it be deduced with certainty that this was done innocently with no intention to deceive.

"In fact, in many cases the contrary can be demonstrated. No one ever seems to have accepted a document as religiously and philosophically prescriptive which was known to be forged. I do not know a single example. We have instead innumerable examples of the opposite. Both Greeks and Romans show great concern to maintain the authenticity of their collections of writings from the past, but the sheer number of pseudepigrapha made the task difficult. When the great libraries emerged, hungry for documents from famous writers, the temptation to forgery was great, so that philosophic, historical, and religious literature all suffered from the onslaught of forgeries. But, even though the literary world was inundated by pseudepigrapha, we have no known instance of a pseudepigraphon recognized as such which acquired prescriptive and proscriptive authority as well. If discovered, it was rejected. The same holds true in Christian circles. As Candlish has pointed out, "no writing known as pseudepigraphical was ever accepted as authoritative in the early church". The history of the New Testament canon illustrates this clearly. The Muratorian canon for instance rejects both the Letter to the Laodiceans and the Letter to the Alexandrians since they were suspected of being forgeries. Eusebius frequently employs this criterion for rejecting writings."

"W are forced to admit that in Christian circles pseudonymity was considered a dishonorable device and , if discovered, the document was rejected and the author, if known, was excoriated." [HI:PEAPE:10-12, 16]

This is a strong statement that should be kept in mind as we consider this topic. The data of antiquity and Christian history is conclusive--high pseudonymity was NOT an acceptable praxis. No amount of verbiage about 'canon-consciousness', 'transition', 'changing times', 'Jewish mindsets toward attribution', 'pneumatic looseness', 'consciousness of living tradition' and the such like will change this fact--it was universally rejected when it became known.

Needless to say, such an appearance of forgery--in either our modern views or in the views of G-R antiquity--raises moral concerns (not to mention practical ones, such as those attending the "Donation of Constantine"!…smile). Consider this morally sensitive statement by Dunn:

"It is on the issue of falseness that the significance of pseudepigraphy within the NT hangs. The issue should not be confused with that of anonymity. Many NT writings are anonymous (the Synoptic Gospels, for example), but that fact raises no point of principle about such writings being included in the NT. Nor should pseudepigrapha be confused with apocrypha. Both terms were used in the early church regarding those books that today are almost universally known as the OT Pseudepigrapha (the books of Enoch, the testamentary literature attributed to the patriarchs), but in this case “apocryphal” has the sense of suitable for private reading, as opposed to the public reading of recognized apostolic and hence canonical works (Synopsis sacrae scripturae 75, attributed to Athanasius).

"By putting the emphasis on false attribution, however, the term pseudepigraphy implies a negative value judgment as to a document’s integrity and acceptability. This is clear from its earliest attested use in Christian circles, where Serapion (second century A.D.) applies it to the Gospel of Peter: “the writings that falsely bear their names [Peter and the other apostles] we reject . . . knowing that such were not handed down to us” (Eusebius Hist. Eccl. 6.12.3). It is this judgment of falseness, of an intent to deceive and mislead, particularly by passing off as apostolic what should not be so regarded, that makes the issue of pseudepigraphy in the NT so sensitive. J. I. Packer put the point tersely: “Pseudonymity and canonicity are mutually exclusive” (-).

"In the light of the negative judgment implicit in the term itself, the claimed presence of pseudepigraphy in the NT would seem to pose a moral and theological problem for the notion of an authoritative canon of Scripture. The uncomfortable fact is, however, that a large consensus of NT scholarship maintains that certain NT writings, particularly Ephesians, the Pastorals and 2 Peter, are pseudepigraphic, the first two attributed to Paul, the last attributed to Peter. How then to handle the seeming contradiction within the very phrase “NT pseudepigraphy”? [NT:DictLNT, s.v. "Pseudepigraphy", J. D. G. Dunn]

Now, as intense as this problem is in the NT epistles, we must recognize first of all that this problem only attaches to a small amount of Jewish and Christian literature, since most of it is not in this 'high' category:

"A more careful definition [of pseudonymity] is that of K. Koch: 'A text is pseudonymous when the author is deliberately identified by a name other than his own.' This would eliminate the designation 'pseudonymous' from most of the NT and OT, and much of the OT Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha as well. Though a great many of the books included in these are in fact incorrectly attributed, this is often due to the mistaken attribution of originally anonymous works and not from any calculated attempt to deceive." [PsC:1, Meade]

Indeed, the Jewish literature prior to the NT presents us with a wide range of levels of pseudox.

Moshe Bernstein, in studying the pseudepigraphic writings of the Second Temple Period [HI:PPAPLDSS], including Qumran scrolls, makes this helpful taxonomy of pseudepigraphic function (examples are his):

1. Strong/Authoritative pseudepigraphy: "The speaker of the work is purported to be a figure of antiquity"

· Enochian lit

· 2 Baruch

· 4 Ezra

· Testaments (mildly)

· Jubilees (maybe)

2. Convenient pseudepigraphy: "the work is anonymous and individual pseudepigraphic voices are heard within the work"

· Testaments

· Wisdom of Solomon

· Ecclesiastes

· Reworked Pentateuch (Qumran))

· Genesis Apocryphon (parts, but note "the author…avoided the appearance of forgery by writing [his additions] in Aramaic")

3. Decorative pseudepigraphy: "the work is associated with an ancient name with regard neither for content, nor, more significantly, for effect."

· Prayer of Manasseh

· Psalms of Solomon

· various non-canonical psalms at Qumran

And he draws some contrasts between them:

· "Convenient pseudepigraphy is particularly important for the genre we can rewritten Bible, since much rewritten Bible is anonymous, like Scripture itself. Jubilees is an exception to that rule and its strong authoritative pseudepigraphy makes it stand out (in contrast to 4QRP, for example). The addition of pseudepigraphic speeches to rewritten biblical narrative creates a localized, weaker form of pseudepigraphy which is completely conventional and which functions to render the work more vivid.

· "We should distinguish between texts which are both internally and externally pseudepigraphic, and thus strongly pseudepigraphic, and those which are pseudepigraphic only internally, where the pseudepigraphy is convenient. Only the former can be said to function pseudepigraphically as a whole. Decorative pseudepigraphy is only external.

· "We should probably employ the term "pseudepigraphy" only for authoritatively pseudepigraphic works.

· "Works which are partially pseudepigraphic, either through interpolation of legal material or of speeches, should not be classified as pseudepigraphic in toto.

· "Prophetic literature is only to be considered pseudepigraphic if it is authoritative and if the prophecies are pseudepigraphic. Narratives about prophetic figures are the same as any other rewritten Bible."

And, Meade's comment about most of the literature being non-high-pseudox can be easily demonstrated. In the pre-NT period we can note that:

1. Much of the Hebrew Bible is anonymous.

"In Jewish tradition, as in the Orient generally, documents did not emphasize their authorship and they were even catalogued by title rather than, as in the Greco-Roman world, by author. They were generally produced anonymously and only later attributed to an author . Apart from a few of the prophetic books the Old Testament documents fall into this anonymous category. [NT:MNTD, p.322ff]

2. Most of the Qumran literature is anonymous.

"With this point in mind, our first step is an acknowledgment of the obvious fact that Qumran literature is largely anonymous and not pseudonymous…If pseudepigraphy were ever de rigeur at Qumran as a literary device, it may have been used only in texts which were attempting to proclaim a legal or theological doctrine to the outside world and considered unnecessary in works intended for insiders. Otherwise, we would expect to find an authoritative figure such as Moses as the putative author of various legal texts at Qumran…the writings of the Qumran group avoid authoritative pseudepigraphy." [HI:PPAPLDSS, 8, 9,25]

3. Some of the intertestamental literature is reliably self-attributed (e.g., Ben Sira, Philo)

4. Most of the "Pseudepigrapha" is NOT high pseudox (referring to the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, as delineated in [OTP]. I will henceforth refer to OT pseudox sometimes as "OTP" below. Post-NT pseudox will come up in later discussion.).

Let's go through the table of contents of OTP, and look for high pseudox, in existence before the ministry of Jesus:

Vol	Work	Pre-NT?	Explicit claim to authorship by Biblical character?	First-person?	Name in text?
OTP:1	1 Enoch (2nd BC - 1st AD)	YES	Mostly (content)	Mixed	YES
OTP:1	2 Enoch (late 1st AD)
OTP:1	3 Enoch (5-6th AD)
OTP:1	Sibylline Oracles (2nd BC - 7th AD)	YES	NO
OTP:1	Treatise of Shem (1st BC)	YES	Questionable--in title only (copyist?)	NO	NO
OTP:1