Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Caught Red Handed An Unrepentant Christian Forger Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Ken Teutsch.
[00:00:11] I have long argued that, contrary to what you may hear a lot of people say, especially New Testament scholars, the act of writing a book in someone else's name, for example, claiming to be Paul or Peter or John, knowing full well that you aren't, was not regarded as an acceptable practice in the ancient world, but was classified as a kind of lying.
[00:00:34] Scholars who think otherwise argue that the authors were not doing anything duplicitous.
[00:00:40] There are different ways scholars have made this argument, but the basic line is pretty much the same, that everyone knew that pseudepigraphy was a practice, and since they knew it was a practice, they could see through it and either weren't deceived or weren't bothered if they found out they were deceived.
[00:00:59] I continue to think this view is absolutely and precisely wrong.
[00:01:04] In my books on forgery, I point out that whenever ancient readers talk about the phenomenon, actually saying anything about it, they condemn it.
[00:01:14] I'm not saying that the people who did it condemned it. They might have thought they were justified in doing it.
[00:01:20] What I am saying is that whatever the perpetrator said, the practice wasn't socially respectable or accepted. It's kind of like cheating on an exam, on a lover, on a tax return. It's done a lot, but when it's talked about, it's condemned.
[00:01:37] To my knowledge, no one in the ancient world ever approved of someone publishing a book in the name of some other famous person.
[00:01:46] It might be hard for modern scholars to believe. It may not be what we want to hear, it may not be what makes sense to us, but the reality is that no one approves of it. It was seen as lying, a kind of literary deceit, not something that anyone should do.
[00:02:04] There is one instance in antiquity where an ancient Christian author forged a writing and then was discovered it didn't work well for him. Here is how I talk about it in my fuller study, Forgery and Counter Forgery. I've edited it a bit to make it more accessible. This will take two posts.
[00:02:25] The author of the work in question was a Christian presbyter of Marseilles, France, named Salvian, who around 440 CE, published a book Timothe ad Ecclesiam. In Latin, obviously, the title means Timothy to the Church. The name Timothy, of course, had clear apostolic connections from Pauline times. As one of Paul's traveling companions and allegedly the recipient of two of Paul's letters. Ironically, Paul didn't write either one.
[00:02:56] In Salvion's letter to the Church, Timothy the author, he is claiming to be inveighed against a community that had grown rich and soft and advocated radical almsgiving to the Church, so saying rich people should give up all their property for the poor.
[00:03:12] In his concern for total commitment to the Gospel and an ascetic style of life, Salvion was not far removed from the concerns of another author. From about the same time that we know of a pseudonymous, that is forged Titus, the other of Paul's pastoral companions, who wrote a scathing attack on Christians who indulged in the joys of the flesh, condemning anyone, married or not, who engaged in sexual activities.
[00:03:39] The author of this forged letter of Titus was never discovered, but the author of the forged letter of Timothy was by none other than his own bishop, named Salonius.
[00:03:50] Long before the incident, Salonius and Salvian had been members of the monastic community, where for a time Salvian was Salonius own teacher.
[00:04:01] But eventually the student surpassed the instructor in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and when the letter of Timothy came to Salonius attention, he immediately, for reasons never given, suspected that in fact it had been written by his former teacher and colleague. He confronted Salvian on the matter and Salvian wrote a letter in self defense. We still have Salvion's letter in it. Salvian does not directly admit to having written Timothe ad ecclesiam, but there is really no doubt about the matter as he explains why the pseudonymous author of whom he speaks in the third person did what he did. That is to say, he explains his motivations.
[00:04:45] On the one hand, Salvian insists the name of an author should not matter to a reader.
[00:04:51] In the case of every book, we ought to be more concerned about the intrinsic value of its contents than about the name of its author.
[00:05:00] So too, since the name of the author is immaterial, there is no use in asking about the author's name so long as the reader profits from the book itself.
[00:05:10] These pleas ring hollow, however, in light of the rest of Salvian's self defense.
[00:05:16] If he really thought that an author's name did not matter, why would he write pseudonymously? Why not write in his own name? Or even better, if names do not matter, why not write the book anonymously?
[00:05:29] The question is exacerbated by the fact that Salvion otherwise did write extensively in his own name. His De Gubernatione DEI on God's Government still survives and other works were known in Christian antiquity.
[00:05:45] Still, Salvion's self justification is straightforward. He recognizes his own insignificance and knows that that readers do in fact think it matters who produced a writing. He therefore wisely selected a pseudonym for his book for the obvious reason that he did not wish the obscurity of his own person to detract from the influence of his otherwise valuable book.
[00:06:07] If the authority of a book is rooted in the prestige of an author, then obviously a pseudonym is necessary.
[00:06:14] For this reason, the present writer chose to conceal his identity in every respect for fear that his true name would perhaps detract from the influence of his book, which really contains much that is exceedingly valuable.
[00:06:27] Given this confession of motivation, what Salvion claims next may seem a bit surprising, if not downright duplicitous. Why did he choose the name Timothy? In particular, readers naturally took the name to refer to Paul's pastoral companion. Hence Salonius distraught reaction, but in clear tension with his earlier assertion that an unknown person would not be accepted as an authoritative source, Salvion claims that he chose the name purely for its symbolic associations.
[00:06:58] Just as the evangelist Luke wrote to Theophilus because he wrote for the love of God, so too the author of this treatise wrote as Timothy, that is, for the honor of God.
[00:07:12] In other words, he chose the pseudonym as a pen name.
[00:07:16] Clearly that doesn't fly. If he's right that it's a pen name, meaning no one in particular, just someone who honors God, then he can't also be right that the name was chosen to provide it with an apostolic authority by linking it to a famous apostolic person.
[00:07:32] Despite the fact that many critics today continue simply to take Salvion's word for it, the explanation does not satisfy.
[00:07:40] I will explain why in in the next post. You'll need to see the two together to see the strength of my argument.
