Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Plagiarism? Was it condemned in the ancient world? Is Matthew guilty of it? By Bart D. Ehrman read by John Paul Middlesworth just over a week ago I did an eight lecture online course on the Gospel of Matthew, not connected with the blog but with Beco Bart Ehrman courses online.
[00:00:22] You can find out more about that through a link on the online blog. Someone who came to the course asked me an intriguing question. If it's true that Matthew used Mark for a number of his stories, actually copying his account word for word in many places, wouldn't he be guilty of plagiarism? Ah, right, that's certainly something we would be thinking about today. Did people in the ancient world think about plagiarism? There weren't copyright laws or in fact any laws about the theft of intellectual property. So was plagiarism even a thing? As it turns out, this is a topic that I venture to say with good reason the vast majority of New Testament scholars don't know about. My good reason for saying so is that you can hear many such a scholars say oh so wrong things about it, either based on what they assume or what they have heard. My view is that if we want to know the views of ancient people, we should read what ancient authors say. Seems obvious.
[00:01:20] In any event, I had to deal with this question in my book Forgery and Counterforgery, Oxford University Press, 2013, and thought it might be useful to extract a portion of my discussion here to throw some light on the issue.
[00:01:33] Before getting to the issue of whether Matthew could be considered a plagiarist by ancient people standards, we need to think about what they ancients in the greek and roman worlds thought about plagiarism in general. Here's what I say in my book plagiarism. It is sometimes stated that plagiarism was either nonexistent or non problematic in greek and roman antiquity. As a prominent publication of the Jesus seminar tells us. Quote the concept of plagiarism was unknown in the ancient world, unquote. In point of fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Plagiarism was known, discussed and condemned in ancient sources as one of the best studies of the phenomenon by Bernard Lagris summarizes quote in spite of the reticence of our sources and assuming that our texts are indeed admissible, we have been able to establish that plagiarism and forgery of literary works were considered offenses and punished, unquote. Legris does go on to qualify his statement. Plagiarism and forgery were under legal sanction only in cases that appear to have affected the concerns of the state. There is no evidence of any proprietary laws at any time or place involving the concern to keep writings in general intact and safe from borrowing or stealing, as the ancients called it. The phenomenon, in any event, is not unknown to our sources, as we have already seen in the case of Heraclides Ponticus, who, according to Diogenes Laertius, not only published extensively works of his own but also occasionally published works of others as if he had written them. Quote Chameleon complains that Heraclides treatise on the works of Homer and Hesiod was plagiarized from his own unquote. This was plagiarism by a man who strikingly wrote two separate treatises. Or consider his athenian predecessor Eschinese, who stole dialogues of Socrates after the great man's death and was columnated for it on more than one occasion, especially by Menendimus of Eritrea, who claimed that, quote, most of the dialogues which Eschines passed off as his own were really dialogues of Socrates, obtained by him from Socrates'wife Xantopi. Moreover, eschines made use fraudulently of the little Cyrus, the lesser Heracles, and the Alcibiades of Antisthenes, as well as dialogues by other authors found in Diogenes Laertius's lives. 260 at other times, authors complained about writers who plagiarized their own work, none more memorably than Marshall quote, you mistake, you greedy thief of my works, who think you can become a poet at no more than the cost of a transcript and a cheap papyrus role. Applause is not acquired for six or ten sesters, unquote, from epigrams. 166 when plagiarism was detected in antiquity, it often had social repercussions. Thus Vetruvius recounts an incident involving Aristophanes of Byzantium, one of the judges of a literary contest staged by the king of Pergamum to celebrate the dedication of his famed library. Aristophanes, we are told, had, quote, read every book in the library, unquote. And when the authors who presented their work were judged, he ruled that only one was worthy of the prize, to the consternation of the other judges and the king. But Aristophanes demonstrated that except for the one, all the others quote recited borrowed work, whereas the judges had to deal with originals, not with plagiaris. Unquote. The king was more than a little dubious about the claim, and so Aristophanes proceeded to quote passages from books in the library to prove his point. The result, Vitruvius tells us, was that the plagiarizers were forced to confess that they were thieves. The king then ordered them to be brought to trial for theft. They were condemned and in disgrace, while Aristophanes was raised to high office and became librarian. Book seven, preface seven on occasion, the condemnation for plagiarism led to even harsher restrictions. Thus we learn of the expulsion of appendicles from the school of Pythagoras on the grounds of plagiarism. Quote Timaeus in the 9th book of his histories says he appendicles was a pupil of Pythagoras, adding that, having been convicted at that time of stealing his discourses, he was, like plato, excluded from taking part in the discussions of the school. Unquote. Diogenes Laertius lives, 8.54 I'll continue from here. In the next post.
