PSEUDONYMITY
PSEUDONYMITY
In antiquity it was not uncommon for writings to appear bearing a claim to have been written by a given author but commonly understood not to be from that author. Apocalyptic writings, for example, are often said to have been written by Enoch or Moses or some other great person from antiquity. It is not known whether the first readers would have accepted the stated authorship as accurate or not, but later readers have not accepted them as coming from the great names they bear.23 Writings other than apocalyptic were published under assumed names, among the Greeks and Romans as well as among the Jews and the Christians.
One noteworthy fact among the Jews and the Christians is the rarity of pseudepigraphic letters. Writers might claim great names as having been responsible for other kinds of literature, but only two pseudonymous letters have come down to us from Jewish sources, namely, the Epistle of Jeremy and the Letter of Aristeas, neither of which is really a letter. The former is a little sermon, and the latter an account of the translation of the Old Testament into Greek. There is no epistle among the canonical writings of the Old Testament, so there was no authoritative precedent to follow. A false claim to writing a letter would probably be easier to detect than, say, a false claim to writing an apocalypse. Whatever the reason, pseudepigraphic letters among the Jews are extremely rare.
Nor are they common among the Christians. If we may start with the New Testament itself, we find Paul instructing the Thessalonians to give no credence to any "prophecy, report or letter supposed to have come from us” (2 Thess. 2:2) and telling them of "the distinguishing mark” in all his letters (2 Thess. 3:17). This suggests that pseudonymous letters were not entirely unknown; on the other hand, it certainly shows that the apostle did not agree with the practice of pseudonymity—at least in the case where someone was writing a letter in his name! He does not regard this as acceptable; in principle, he repudiates the practice, regarding pseudonymity as something to be guarded against, for he gives his readers a token whereby they might know which writings come from him and which make a false claim.
Some scholars give the impression that letters claiming to have been written by one person but actually written by another were in common circulation among adherents of the new faith. But this is not so. The Christians produced pseudonymous forms of other types of literature, such as gospels and acts, but very few epistles. M. R. James cites six only, mostly ranging from the fourth to the thirteenth century, and none that he dates anywhere near New Testament times. We can only conjecture the reasons for the rarity
of epistles when there are so many examples of gospels, acts, and apocalypses. Perhaps the letter was a more personal and intimate writing. One might produce, for example, an apocalypse, sincerely written in the style one imagines some great person from the past would use and publish it in his name in order to give him honor. But to write a letter as coming from him might seem to claim too close an intimacy, too sure a knowledge of him. James suggests as a reason that "the Epistle was on the whole too serious an effort for the forger, more liable to detection, perhaps, as a fraud, and not so likely to gain the desired popularity as a narrative or an Apocalypse.” 24 Whether any of these is the correct reason or not, we should not approach the New Testament epistles as though it were common for the early Christians to write letters in a name not their own. As far as our knowledge goes, there is not one such letter emanating from the Christians from anywhere near the New Testament period, and precious few even from later times. It may be correct that New Testament Christians commonly wrote letters in names not their own (an opinion that scholars routinely perpetuate), but we should be clear that it flies in the face of all the evidence we have about the way letters were written in first-century Jewish and Christian communities.25 It is often said that the recipients of pseudepigraphic letters recognized the genre and were well aware that the letters they were reading did not come from Paul or Peter or some other putative author. But for this, too, there is no evidence.
The early Christians appear to have had no great urge to attach apostolic names to the writings they valued. More than half of the New Testament consists of books that do not bear the names of their authors (the four gospels, Acts, Hebrews, 1 John; even "the elder” of 2 and 3 John is not very explicit). Apparently the truth in the documents and the evidence that the Holy Spirit was at work in the people who wrote them carried conviction, and the attachment of apostolic names was not judged necessary. The onus is on upholders of theories of pseudonymous authorship to explain why this strong tradition of anonymity was discarded in favor, not of authors attaching their own names to what they wrote (as Paul did), but of other people’s names.
The way the church dealt with those few spurious letters of which we have knowledge does not favor the view that pseudonymity was regarded as acceptable. We learn of one comparatively early spurious letter from the fact that it is quoted in the apocryphal Acts of Paul. As this book is referred to by Tertullian, it must have been written about the middle of the second century (James proposes c. A.D. 160). Among other things this Acts contains a letter Paul was supposed to have written to the church at Corinth ("3 Corinthians”), a letter that was so highly esteemed in parts of the church that for a time it was included in the canon of the Syrian and Armenian churches, evidently under the impression that Paul had written it. Elsewhere, however, it was recognized that the writing was pseudonymous, and it was for that reason rejected; its edifying content was not enough to secure its recognition. Tertullian speaks of writings "which wrongly go under Paul’s name” and tells us that "in Asia, the presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul’s fame from his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from his office.” 26 It did not matter that the work was seen as orthodox and edifying. It did not matter that it was done "from love of Paul.” It claimed to have been written by Paul and was not. Its author was therefore a guilty man, and he was deposed from his honorable office.
Another spurious epistle ascribed to Paul is the Epistle to the Laodiceans (clearly an attempt to fill the vacuum created by the loss of the letter mentioned in Col. 4:16). 27 It is little more than a "worthless patching together of Pauline passages and phrases, mainly from the Epistle to the Philippians.” 28 Its only value is that it is one of such a small number of letters circulating among Christians under a false name. There is no doubt that its author had a high regard for Paul. But there is also no doubt either that, although the letter was orthodox, it was not accepted by the Christian church. That church simply did not accept spurious letters.
The Muratorian Canon speaks of the letter to the Laodiceans with which it links one to the Alexandrians, "both forged in Paul’s name.” The document goes on to say that such "cannot be received into the Catholic Church; for it is not fitting that gall be mixed with honey.” 29 This accords with what we have seen from other sources: pseudonymous letters were not received.
Mention should be made of Serapion, bishop of Antioch toward the end of the second century. He discovered that the Gospel of Peter was in use in the church at Rhossus, and although he seems not to have known the book, he at first allowed the church to continue to read it. When he later read the book and found that it was promoting heresy, he forbade its use. Clearly his permission to use it was predicated on the view that it was harmless, not that it was authoritative. He wrote, "For our part, brethren, we receive both Peter and the other apostles as Christ, but the writings which falsely bear their names we reject, as men of experience, knowing that such were not handed down to us.” 30 There is, of course, a further difference in that we are now dealing with a spurious gospel, not a spurious epistle. But it is important to notice that Serapion made a sharp distinction between the apostolic writings he received wholeheartedly ("as Christ”) and those that "falsely bear their names.” The latter, if harmless, might be used, but they were not canonical. They had no place among the authoritative Scriptures.
Those who maintain that one or several of the New Testament epistles are pseudonymous should take a closer look at the evidence than they usually do. We do not say that it was impossible for New Testament Christians to use the pseudepigraphic method. We can easily imagine an early Christian feeling so sure he knew what Paul or Peter would have said in a given situation that he would write some piece, claiming the apostle’s name for what he had himself composed. We should surely sympathize with the second-century presbyter who composed a "Pauline” writing "from love of Paul” and find little difficulty in imagining an earlier example of the same kind of thinking. The difficulty is not the idea of pseudonymity but the lack of evidence that the New Testament Christians gave any countenance to the idea. Nowhere is evidence cited that any member of the New Testament church accepted the idea that a pious believer could write something in the name of an apostle and expect the writing to be welcomed. The contrary, as we have seen, is often maintained. For example, in his standard textbook P. N. Harrison says that the pseudo-Paul who wrote the Pastorals "was not conscious of misrepresenting the Apostle in any way; he was not consciously deceiving anybody; it is not, indeed, necessary to suppose that he did deceive anybody. It seems far more probable that those to whom, in the first instance, he showed the result of his efforts, must have been perfectly well aware of what he had done.” 31 But Harrison produces no evidence for this alleged practice; he simply says that it was so. This is scarcely good enough. The onus is on those who uphold the idea that the writing of pseudonymous
letters was an accepted practice among the early Christians to produce some evidence for their view. On the contrary, the evidence we have is that every time such a writing could be identified with any certainty, it was rejected.
Sufficient attention is not given to this point in the recent study by David G. Meade. 32 Meade sees pseudonymity as rooted in Jewish religion, and he finds a series of pseudonymous writings associated with Isaiah, Solomon, and others. For him the Pastorals are simply the normal development of the tradition. Paul was a great teacher, and those who followed him carried on and developed the tradition that emanated from him. 33 Meade sees the process as "not mere reproduction, but an attempt to reinterpret a core tradition for a new, and often different Sitz im Leben." 34 He makes out a strong case for the development of an ongoing tradition in Judaism and early Christianity. But he takes little notice of the fact that this is not associated with letters. Indeed he holds that this process is independent of the kind of literature in which it is embedded. 35 But it is one thing to say that Jews and early Christians wrote pseudonymous apocalypses and acts and quite another to say that they wrote letters purporting to come from one person but actually written by someone else. For that we need evidence, and Meade supplies none.
There is an added problem with the Pastorals in that they all contain a warning about deceivers (1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 3:13; Titus 1:10), and in one passage the writer says that while in the past he had been a deceiver, that has all been changed now that he has been saved (Titus 3:3). Would a person who speaks of deceit like this put the name of Paul to a letter he himself had composed? 36 Would he say so firmly, "I am telling the truth, I am not lying” (1 Tim. 2:7)? 37
Pseudonymity must be seen in the light of the church’s discussions about canonicity. There were serious doubts in the early church about whether some books should or should not be received into the list of the accepted books, and those discussions tended to center on the question of authorship. In the case of 2 Peter, for example, the question discussed was whether the author was in fact the apostle Peter. If it was, then the book was accepted; if it was not, then the book was rejected. There appears to be no example of anyone in the early church accepting a book as truly canonical while denying that it was written by the author whose name it bears. A well-known example of the typical approach is Eusebius, who was prepared to accept Revelation if it could be shown that the author was the apostle John but who wholeheartedly rejected it if it was not apostolic. It apparently did not occur to him as a possibility that a pseudonymous writing could be accepted into the canon. And if this was so with regard to an apocalypse, much more was it the case with an epistle.
In the light of all this, we should exercise great care before we accept the view than any writing in the New Testament is pseudonymous. That there was pseudonymity in the ancient world is clear. That the Jews and the early Christians sometimes wrote pseudonymous apocalypses is also clear, as is the fact that the early Christians sometimes produced pseudonymous gospels and acts. But to this date there is no evidence that the church accepted any pseudonymous epistle. The very few examples of such literature that were produced were firmly rejected, and in the only case of which we have knowledge in which the author was identified, he was defrocked. We need much more evidence than we are usually offered before we can agree that any New Testament epistle is pseudonymous. 38