WHENEVER I TEACH ABOUT FORGERY, I think back to my first lecture on the subject, twenty-five years ago now, at Rutgers University. As odd as this might seem, forgery was on everyone’s mind at the time. Only a few months earlier forgery had been front-page news for weeks in major newspapers around the world. The diaries of Adolf Hitler had been discovered, authenticated by one of the world’s leading experts on the Führer, the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. The diaries had been purchased for millions of dollars, first by Stern magazine in Germany, then by Rupert Murdoch for English publishing rights. But just as they started to appear, they were shown to be worthless forgeries.¹

The forger of the diaries was a West German named Konrad Kujau. Ironically, even before he perpetuated the biggest con job of modern times, his friends called him Connie. Kujau had grown up as a poor working-class fellow; at an early age he discovered an artistic ability that led him to a career of forgery. He spent some time in jail as a young adult, having been caught forging lunch vouchers. But he had a number of aliases, and the people to whom he sold the Hitler diaries were not assiduous in making a background check.

The Hitler diaries consisted of some sixty books of handwritten notes that Hitler himself had allegedly made during his time in power, from June 1932 to the very end in 1945. For collectors of Nazi memorabilia, such a discovery would be priceless. We have a number of documents and paintings that Hitler produced, but nothing like this, an account of his daily activities, encounters, successes, excesses, companions, loves, hates, and rambling thoughts. When Stern had come into possession of the books and decided to publish them in 1984, the publishers consulted with Trevor-Roper, who, despite an initial suspicion that they must be a hoax, became convinced of the authenticity of the books upon a quick perusal of some of their pages. The documents looked old; they contained numerous pieces of accurate data and lots of asides and irrelevancies that one would expect in a personal diary. And there were so many of them! What forger would go to that much trouble?

Moreover, there was a plausible explanation for how they had managed to survive the war. It was well known that when defeat was imminent, Hitler had several metal boxes filled with his personal effects flown out of Berlin; but the plane had been shot down and its pilot killed. Local villagers near the wreck site pillaged the plane, and the boxes ended up in private hands. Collectors of memorabilia later paid for the materials, and one such collector, named Konrad Fischer (an alias for Konrad Kujau), had ended up with the diaries. They had allegedly been smuggled out of the East by his brother, a general in the East German army.

But in fact it was all a hoax by Kujau himself, who had learned to imitate Hitler’s handwriting, had read authoritative biographies of the Führer to get his facts more or less straight, and had painstakingly produced the accounts over a three-year period in the early 1980s. To make the pages look aged and worn, he blotted them with tea and repeatedly slapped them on the table. And he fooled the experts, long enough, at least, to be paid $4.8 million for his efforts.

The day before the diaries were to be released to the public, however, Trevor-Roper started having second thoughts. Over the course of the next few days, after Stern had announced the most significant historical find in decades, other specialists were brought in. The diaries were shown beyond any doubt at all to be fakes. Forensics experts found that the paper, the glue, and the ink were all of post-1945 vintage; historians showed that the diaries were filled with errors.

Kujau was convicted of forgery, a crime by modern standards, though, as we’ll see, not by ancient ones, and spent several years in prison. He emerged unrepentant, however, and spent a good bit of the rest of his life painting forgeries of great art—imitations of Monet, Rembrandt, and van Gogh—and selling them precisely as imitations. This eventually created a market for other forgers to produce and sell replicas of Kujau’s imitations. As a climax to this seemingly never ending story, at the end of Kujau’s life he produced an autobiography, which was never published. Instead, a different book appeared in his name, called Die Originalität der Fälschung (“The Originality of Forgery”). Kujau claimed, evidently in all truthfulness, that he had not written a word of it.

Forgeries in the Ancient World

WHEN I GIVE PUBLIC lectures on forgery, I am often asked, “Who would do such a thing?” The answer is, “Lots of people!” And for lots of different reasons. The most common reason today, of course, is to make money. Konrad Kujau may be the most infamous and egregious case in point, but he has many hundreds of lesser-known colleagues and disciples. The forgery trade continues to thrive; forgeries in the names of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, and many, many others continue to flood the market, as recent literature on modern forgery so aptly attests.² These forgeries are almost always produced in order to be sold as authentic. There was a good deal of that kind of activity in the ancient world as well (and far fewer forgery experts who could detect a forgery if they saw one), although it was not a major factor within early Christianity. This was for a simple reason: Christian books were not, by and large, for sale.

Other scoundrels today will occasionally forge a document just to see if they can get away with it. This too is something that occasionally happened in the ancient world. The most famous account is the well-known case of Dionysius the Renegade.

Dionysius was a literary scholar and philosopher of the third century BCE. He eventually earned the epithet “Renegade,” because he had a falling out with his fellow Stoic philosophers when he came to realize that his philosophical views did not jibe with real life as he experienced it. Stoics taught that people should remove themselves, mentally and emotionally, from the pain and anguish of this life to experience inner tranquility of spirit. Dionysius for a long time subscribed to this view. But then he became very ill, experienced a good deal of pain, and started to think that his earlier philosophizing about pain was bogus in the face of pain itself. So he left the Stoics and was called by them a renegade.

What he is most famous for in the annals of history, however, is a ruse that he pulled on a fellow literary scholar, his former teacher but eventual opponent, Heraclides of Pontus. The ruse involved a forgery, and it was a pure set-up, produced to make Heraclides look bad.³

Dionysius wrote and put in circulation a tragic play he called the Parthenopaeus, claiming that it was the work of the famous Greek dramatist Sophocles. The play made its way into the hands of Heraclides, who had no reason to doubt its authenticity. Heraclides eventually quoted it to illustrate a point about Sophocles. This is just what Dionysius was hoping for, a chance to show up his opponent. He triumphantly confronted Heraclides and told him that the play was forged, that in fact he himself had written it. Heraclides, however, did not believe it and insisted that Dionysius was lying. But Dionysius had an ace or two up his sleeve. He showed Heraclides that if he took the first letter of a series of lines in the first part of the play and strung them together as an acrostic, they spelled the name Pankalos, which happened to be the name of Dionysius’s male lover.

Heraclides was still not convinced, and so Dionysius showed him two other acrostics embedded in the lines of the text. The first formed a poetic couplet:

The other line was completely decisive:

We find nothing quite so hilarious or outrageous in the writings of the early Christians. In fact, there is scant evidence to suggest that any Christian authors forged documents simply in order to see if they could get away with it. Even so, there were plenty of early Christian forgers who produced lots of forged documents, probably for lots of reasons. As I pointed out in the Introduction, we still have numerous forged documents that emanated from the early church, numerous Gospels, Acts, letters, and apocalypses (these are the four literary genres of the New Testament), all of them claiming to be written by apostles.

Many of these noncanonical books are fascinating and still worth reading.⁴ Among the Gospels, for example, there is an account allegedly written by Peter that gives a detailed narration of the resurrection. This is striking because—most readers have never noticed this—the New Testament Gospels do not narrate the resurrection. They do say that Jesus was buried and indicate that on the third day his tomb was empty, but they do not narrate the account of his actually emerging from the tomb. There is such an account in the Gospel of Peter, however. In it Jesus walks out of the tomb supported by two angels who are as tall as mountains, although Jesus is taller still; behind them, out of the tomb, emerges the cross, which speaks out to God in heaven. Other “apostolic” Gospels tell yet other amazing stories about Jesus or record bizarre teachings supposedly spoken by him, Gospels allegedly written by Jesus’s brother Thomas, his disciple Philip, and his female companion Mary Magdalene. All of these books claimed to be authentic, but each of them was classified as a “forgery” by other early Christians who did not believe the apostles had actually written them.

There are also noncanonical Acts, books that narrate the adventures of Jesus’s apostles after his ascension, such as the Acts of Paul, in which Paul preaches that, to have eternal life, followers of Jesus must refrain from sex even if married and avoid marriage altogether if single. This book was fabricated by a church leader in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the second century. We know about it because a famous church father, Tertullian, indicates that the person was caught and put on trial in the church for producing the account and then unceremoniously removed from his leadership position.⁵ Most church leaders did not appreciate fabricated documents. But there were plenty to go around. Today we still have extensive copies of Acts of John, Peter, Andrew, and Thomas as well as fragments of earlier works that no longer survive intact.

There were also forged letters, including a set of letters between Paul and the most famous philosopher of his day, Seneca, which showed not only that Paul was on intimate terms with the greatest minds of the empire, but also that he was respected and revered by them. Some later church leaders maintained that these letters were authentic, but others thought they had been forged for the purpose of making Paul look good. There were also debates over the authenticity of other letters of Paul, and of Peter, and even of Jesus. Some of these other writings still survive.

So too forged apocalypses dotted the Christian literary landscape, including a fascinating account discovered in 1886 in a tomb in Egypt, a firsthand account allegedly written by Peter in which he is given a personal guided tour, by Jesus himself, of heaven and hell and the respective blessings of the saved and the gruesome torments of the damned. This book, as it turns out, almost made it into the New Testament, as there were church leaders well into the fourth century who claimed that it was Scripture. Others, though, claimed it was forged.

These are just a few of the documents that were disputed in the ancient world. Some early Christians claimed they really were written by apostles and belonged in the New Testament. Others insisted that they were not written by apostles, but were forgeries. How many other such documents were there? We will never know. At present we know of over a hundred writings from the first four centuries that were claimed by one Christian author or another to have been forged by fellow Christians.⁶

Early Christian Forgeries

MOST OF THE INSTANCES I have just mentioned are forgeries from after the days of the apostles themselves, from the second, third, and fourth Christian centuries. Most of the books of the New Testament, on the other hand, were written during the first century. Is there any evidence that forgery was happening in this earlier period? In fact, there is very good evidence indeed, and it comes to us from the pages of the New Testament itself.

There are thirteen letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul, including two to the Thessalonians. In the Second Letter to the Thessalonians we find a most intriguing verse in which the author tells his readers that they are not to be led astray by a letter “as if by us” indicating that the “day of the Lord” is almost here (2:2). The author, in other words, knows of a letter in circulation claiming to be by Paul that is not really by Paul. This other letter allegedly teaches an idea that Paul himself opposes. Who would create such a forged letter? Obviously someone who wanted to advance his own views about when the end would come and decided to do so with the authority of Paul, even though he was not Paul.

But there is a terrifically interesting irony connected with this passage. Second Thessalonians, in which the passage appears, is itself widely thought among scholars not to be by Paul, even though it claims to be written by him (we’ll see the reasons for thinking this in Chapter 3). Is 2 Thessalonians itself a forgery in Paul’s name? If so, why would it warn against a forgery in Paul’s name? There can be little doubt about the answer: one of the “tricks” used by ancient forgers to assure readers that their own writings were authentic was to warn against writings that were not authentic. Readers naturally assume that the author is not doing precisely what he condemns.⁷

We have other interesting instances of this phenomenon in early Christian literature. Three hundred years later, at the end of the fourth century, there appeared a book that scholars have called the Apostolic Constitutions. This lengthy book, in eight volumes, gives instructions concerning how the church is to be organized and run by its leaders. The book claims to be written by a man named Clement, who was allegedly the fourth bishop of Rome (i.e., an early “pope”), appointed by the apostle Peter himself to lead the great church. But in reality the book was written three centuries or so after Clement himself was in the grave. That is, it is a forgery. More than that, the book is called “apostolic” Constitutions because it passes along the advice and instructions of the apostles of Jesus themselves, often in the first person: “I, Peter,” say to you this; “I, John,” say to you this; “I, James,” say to you this; and so on. One of the most fascinating instructions of the real-life author of this book (we don’t know who actually wrote it) comes at the end, where he warns his readers not to read books that claim to be written by the apostles, but are not. In other words, he’s telling his readers not to read books such as the one they are reading, an apostolic forgery. Why insert this instruction? Once again, as with 2 Thessalonians, it is because by doing so he throws his readers off the scent of his own deceit.

With 2 Thessalonians we are presented with a particularly interesting situation. No matter how one understands the matter, the book shows that there were almost certainly forgeries in Paul’s name in circulation all the way back during the time of the New Testament writings. If scholars who think that 2 Thessalonians was not written by Paul are wrong—that is, if Paul really wrote it—then it shows that Paul himself knew of a forgery in his name that had come to the Thessalonian church. But if the other scholars are right, that Paul did not compose 2 Thessalonians, then this book itself is a forgery in Paul’s name that was floating around in the church. Either way, there must have been Pauline forgeries already in the first century.

Are there other forgeries from the earliest of Christian times? I deal with this question at length later in the book, looking into evidence that a number of the books of the New Testament were not written by the people who are claimed to be their authors. For now I’m interested in noting that this is not simply a finding of modern scholarship. A number of the books of the New Testament were disputed already in early Christianity, among the Christian scholars of the second to the fourth centuries, who were arguing over which books should be included in Scripture.

The most famous instance is the book of Revelation. A third-century Christian scholar of Alexandria, Egypt, named Dionysius, argued that the book was not actually written by Jesus’s disciple John, the son of Zebedee. Dionysius’s argument was compelling and continues to be compelling to scholars today. He maintained that the writing style of the book is so different from that of the Gospel of John that they could not have been written by the same person (modern scholars differ from Dionysius only in thinking that the Gospel too was probably not written by John). Dionysius thought there must have been two authors of the same name who later came to be confused as the same person. But it is interesting that Dionysius, according to the church father Eusebius, had a number of predecessors who had argued that Revelation was written not by a different man named John, but by a heretic named Cerinthus, who forged the account in order to promote his false teaching that there would be a literal future paradise of a thousand years here on earth.⁸

The small letter of Jude, allegedly written by Jesus’s own brother, was also debated in the early church. Some Christians argued that it was not authentic, in part, according to the famous fourth-century Christian scholar Jerome, because the book quotes an apocryphal book called Enoch as if it were authoritative Scripture.⁹ The book of 2 Peter was rejected by a number of early church fathers, as discussed by both Jerome and Eusebius, but none more straightforwardly than the notable Christian teacher of Alexandria Didymus the Blind, who argued that “the letter is false and so is not to be in the canon.”¹⁰ Peter, in other words, did not actually write it, according to Didymus, even though the author claimed to be Peter.

Other Christian teachers disputed whether 1 and 2 Timothy were actually by Paul, some claiming that their contents showed that he did not write them.¹¹ The book of Hebrews was particularly debated; the book does not explicitly claim to be written by Paul, but there are hints at the end that the author wants readers to think that he’s Paul (see 13:22–25). For centuries its Pauline authorship was a matter of dispute. The book was finally admitted into the canon only when nearly everyone came to think Paul must have written it.

In short, there were long, protracted, and often heated debates in the early church over forged documents. Early Christians realized that there were numerous forgeries in circulation, and they wanted to know which books were written by their alleged authors and which were not. As we will see more fully later, practically no one approved of the practice of forgery; on the contrary, it was widely condemned, even in books that were themselves forged (such as 2 Thessalonians and the Apostolic Constitutions).

Most of this book will focus on examples of forgery in early Christianity. To make sense of the early Christian forgeries, however, we need to take a step back and consider the phenomenon of forgery in the ancient world more broadly. That will be the focus of the rest of this chapter. We begin with a very important discussion of the terms that I will be using.

The Terms of the Debate

THE FIRST TWO TERMS are especially technical and, although I won’t be using them much, it is important to know what they mean. An “orthonymous” (literally, “rightly named”) writing is one that really is written by the person who claims to be writing it. There are seven letters of Paul, out of the thirteen in the New Testament that bear his name, that virtually everyone agrees are orthonymous, actually written by Paul.

A “homonymous” (literally, “same named”) writing is one that is written by someone who happens to have the same name as someone else. In the ancient world, the vast majority of people did not have last names, and a lot of people had the same first names. This was as true among Christians as it was for everyone else. Lots of people were named John, James, and Jude, for example. If someone named John wrote the book of Revelation and simply called himself John, he wasn’t necessarily claiming to be anyone but himself. When later Christians assumed that this John must be the disciple John, the son of Zebedee, it wasn’t really the author’s fault. He just happened to have the same name as another more famous person. The book is not forged, then. It is simply homonymous, assuming that John the son of Zebedee did not write it, a safe assumption for most critical scholars. It was included in the canon because of this mistaken identity.

Other writings are “anonymous,” literally, “having no name.” These are books whose authors never identify themselves. That is, technically speaking, true of one-third of the New Testament books. None of the Gospels tells us the name of its author. Only later did Christians call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; and later scribes then added these names to the book titles. Also anonymous are the book of Acts and the letters known as 1, 2, and 3 John. Technically speaking, the same is true of the book of Hebrews; the author never mentions his name, even if he wants you to assume he’s Paul.¹²

The term “pseudonymous” (literally, “falsely named”) is a little more slippery, and I need to explain how I will be using it. Technically it refers to any book that appears under the name of someone other than the author, but there are two kinds of pseudonymous writings. Sometimes authors simply take a pen name. When Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn and signed it “Mark Twain,” he was not trying to deceive his readers into thinking that he was someone famous; it was just a pen name to mask his own identity. So too when Mary Ann Evans wrote Silas Marner and signed it “George Eliot.” This use of a pen name did not happen a lot in the ancient world, but it did happen on occasion. The Greek historian Xenophon, for example, wrote his famous work the Anabasis using the pen name Themistogenes; and the Greek philosopher Iamblichus wrote his treatise On the Mysteries under the made-up name Abammon. In these instances there does not appear to have been any real attempt to deceive readers into thinking that the author was someone famous.¹³

The other kind of pseudonymous writing involves a book that is circulated under the name of someone else, usually some kind of authority figure who is presumed to be well known to the reading audience. For this particular kind of pseudonymous writing I will be using the technical term “pseudepigraphy” (literally, “written under a false name”). A pseudepigraphal writing, then, is one that is claimed to be written by a famous, well-known, or authoritative person who did not in fact write it.

But as it turns out, there are also two kinds of pseudepigraphal writings. Sometimes a writing was published anonymously, with no author’s name attached, for example, the Gospel of Matthew. But later readers and copyists asserted that they knew who had written it and claimed it was by a well-known, authoritative person, in this case the disciple Matthew. In writings of this sort, which are wrongly attributed to a well-known person, the author is not trying to deceive anyone.¹⁴ He or she remained anonymous. It is only later readers who claimed that the author was someone else. This kind of pseudepigraphy, then, involves a “false ascription” a work is “ascribed” to someone who didn’t write it.

The other kind of pseudepigraphy does involve a kind of intentional deceit by an author. This is when an author writes a work claiming to be someone else. This is what I am here calling forgery. My definition of a forgery, then, is a writing that claims to be written by someone (a known figure) who did not in fact write it.

Over the years I have had several people object to my use of the term “forgery,” and I well understand the hesitancy of other scholars to use the term. In modern times, when we think of forgery, we think of highly illegal activities (forging precious stones, money, or books for profit) that can send a person to prison. Ancient forgers were not as a rule thrown in jail, because there simply weren’t laws governing the production and distribution of literature. There were no copyright laws, for example. But ancient authors did see this kind of activity as fraudulent, they recognized it as deceitful, they called it lying (and other even nastier things), and they often punished those who were caught doing it. So when I use the term “forgery,” I do mean for it to have negative connotations, in part because, as we will see, the terms used by ancient authors were just as negative, if not more so.

My use of the term “forgery,” however, does not say anything about the legal status of the document in question or the criminal activity of the author. It is a technical term referring to one kind of pseudepigraphal writing, one in which an author knowingly claims to be someone else. One of the overarching theses of my book is that those who engaged in this activity in the ancient world were roundly condemned for lying and trying to deceive their readers.

Motivations for Forgery

IF, AS I SHOW later, forgery was widely condemned, why did people do it? And how did they justify what they were doing in their own eyes? Those will be two of the leading questions for the rest of this chapter. The question of “why” they did it is a bit complicated, and here I need to differentiate between two ideas that people sometimes confuse in their minds. These are the notions of “intention,” on the one hand, and “motivation,” on the other. I think the difference between the two can be easily explained.

If my wife asks me, “Why are you going to the store?” I could give a variety of answers. One answer might be, “To buy something for dinner.” Another might be, “Because there is nothing in the fridge.” These are actually two different kinds of answers. The first indicates what I intend to do once I’m at the store: I intend to buy some food for tonight. The second indicates what is motivating me to go to the store in the first place: I am motivated by the fact that there is no food in the house. Intentions are not the same as motivations. The “intention” is what you want to accomplish; the “motivation” is the reason you want to accomplish it.

This is also the case when it comes to forgers and their forgeries. There is a difference between a forger’s intention and motivation. A forger’s intention, in almost every instance, is to deceive readers about his identity, that is, to make readers believe that he is someone other than who he is. But he may have lots of different reasons (motivations) for wanting to do that.

Authors have always had numerous reasons for wanting to write a forgery. In the modern world, as we have already seen, the principal motivation is to make money, as in the case of Konrad Kujau and the Hitler diaries. This does not appear to be the main reason for forgeries back in antiquity. The market for such “original books” was limited then, because the book-selling industry was so modest—books could not be mass-produced and widely published. Still, there were instances in which forged books could turn a profit, as we learn from a famous author named Galen, a second-century physician who lived in Rome.

Galen was extremely learned and one of the most prolific authors from the ancient world. This was a world that did not, for the most part, have public libraries for people to use. But on occasion a local king would start up a library, principally for scholars, and there was sometimes competition among libraries to acquire greater holdings than their rivals as a kind of status symbol. The two most important libraries in antiquity were those of Alexandria in Egypt and Pergamum in Asia Minor. According to Galen, the kings who built these libraries were keen to increase their holdings and were intent on getting as many original copies as they could of such authors as Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Having original copies of these writings was important in an age when scribes could and did make mistakes when reproducing the text. If you had the original, you knew you had the author’s own words, not some kind of error-ridden copy botched by the local scribe. So these two libraries were willing to pay cash on the barrelhead for original copies of their coveted authors’ works.

You’d be amazed how many “original” copies of Plato, Aristotle, and Euripides start showing up, when you are willing to pay gold for them. According to Galen, forgeries started to appear by unscrupulous authors who simply wanted the money.¹⁵

We have seen another motivation, or combination of motivations, in the case of Dionysius the Renegade. One could argue that Dionysius perpetrated his fraudulent play, the Parthenopaeus, principally in order to see if he could get away with it. Or he may have done it to make a fool out of his nemesis, Heraclides. We have other instances in the ancient world of a similar motivation, to pull the wool over someone’s, or everyone’s, eyes. As it turns out, some such motivation may still be at work in our world today, as some scholars have thought that one of the most famous “discoveries” of an ancient Gospel in the twentieth century was in fact a forgery by the scholar who claimed to have discovered it. This is the famous Secret Gospel of Mark allegedly found by Morton Smith in 1958.¹⁶

Other authors forged documents for political or military ends. The Jewish historian Josephus, for example, reports that an enemy of Alexander, the son of King Herod, forged a letter in Alexander’s name in which he announced plans to murder his father. According to Josephus, the forger was a secretary of the king who was “a bold man, cunning in counterfeiting anyone’s hand.” But the plan back-fired; after producing numerous forgeries, the man was caught and “was at last put to death for it.”¹⁷

Political forgeries were usually not treated kindly. But sometimes they worked. In the third century the Roman emperor Aurelian had a private secretary, named Eros, who had incurred his master’s anger and was about to be punished. To forestall the outcome, he forged a list of names of political leaders whom the emperor had supposedly decided to have executed for treason and put the forged list into circulation. The men on the list rose up and assassinated the emperor.¹⁸

Sometimes the motivation for a forgery was less political than religious—to defend religious institutions or practices or to defend one’s religious claims against those of opponents. One of the more humorous accounts occurs in the writings of the second-century pagan author Lucian of Samosata, a brilliant wit and keen critic of all things hypocritical. One of Lucian’s hilarious treatises, Alexander the False Prophet, is directed against a man named Alexander, who wanted to set up an “oracle”—that is, a place where a god would communicate with humans—in the town of Abunoteichos. Alexander was a crafty fellow who knew that he had to convince people that the god Apollo really had decided to communicate through him, Alexander, at this newly founded place of prophecy, since he planned to receive payments for being able to deliver Apollo’s pronouncements to those who would come to inquire. So, according to Lucian, Alexander forged a set of bronze tablets and buried them in one of the oldest and most famous of Apollo’s temples, in the city of Chalcedon. When the tablets were then dug up, word got around about what was written in this “miraculous” find. On these tablets Apollo declared that he was soon to move to take up residence in a new home, in Abunoteichos. Alexander then established the oracle there and attracted a huge following, thanks in no small measure to the forged writings in the name of the god he claimed to represent.

An example of a Jewish forgery created to support Judaism can be found in the famous Letter of Aristeas.¹⁹ Aristeas was allegedly a pagan member of the court of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BCE). In this letter “Aristeas” describes how the king decided to include a copy of the Jewish Scriptures in his expanding library, and so he made arrangements with the Jewish high priest in Israel to send scholars to Egypt who could translate the sacred texts from their original Hebrew language into Greek. Seventy-two scholars were sent, and through miraculous divine intervention they managed to produce, individually, precisely the same wording for their translations of the Scriptures. Since the Letter of Aristeas is allegedly by a non-Jew, giving a more or less “disinterested” account of how the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, it has all the appearance of stating the facts “as they really were.” But in reality, the letter is a forgery, written by a Jew in Alexandria in the second century BCE. It was written, in part, in order to show the divine inspiration of the Jewish sacred texts, even in their Greek translation.

As already intimated in earlier examples, sometimes forgeries were created with the express purpose of making a personal enemy look bad (as with Dionysius the Renegade) or getting an opponent into serious trouble (as with the person who forged a letter to King Herod). As it turns out, this is one of the best-attested motivations for creating forgeries in the ancient world. The Roman poet Martial, author of a large number of witty and very funny poems, complains in several places that others have forged poems in his name that were either very bad or in very bad taste, precisely in order to make Martial himself look bad.²⁰ Even more slanderous is an episode reported by the historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius, who indicates that an enemy of the famous philosopher Epicurus, a rival named Diotimus, forged fifty obscene letters in Epicurus’s name and put them in circulation. Epicurus already had a problem with having a (totally undeserved) bad reputation as someone addicted to pleasure. These forgeries simply added fuel to the fire.²¹

Or consider the case of Anaximenes, as reported to us by a Greek geographer of the second century CE, Pausanias. Anaximenes was a clever but ill-natured fellow who had a quarrel with a famous public speaker named Theopompus. In order to strike out at his enemy, claims Pausanias, Anaximenes wrote a treatise in the writing style of Theopompus, naming himself as Theopompus. In this treatise he spoke abusively of the citizens of three chief Greek cities, Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. Once the treatise circulated in these cities, Theopompus became very much a persona non grata, even though he had nothing to do with it.²²

Other forgers produced their work for more noble ends, for example, to provide hope for their readers. One of the most common forms of forgery in Jewish writings around the time of early Christianity is the literary genre known as the apocalypse. An apocalypse (from the Greek meaning a “revealing” or an “unveiling”) is a text that reveals the truth of the heavenly realm to mortals to help them make sense of what is happening here on earth. Sometimes this truth is revealed through bizarre and highly symbolic visions that the author allegedly sees and that are explained by some kind of angelic interpreter. An example is in the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible. At other times the author is said to be taken up to heaven to see the ultimate truths of the divine realm that make sense of the horrible events transpiring here on earth. A Christian example is the book of Revelation in the New Testament.

These books are meant to inspire hope in their readers. Even though things seem to be completely out of control here on earth, even though there is rampant pain and misery and suffering, even though wars, famines, epidemics, and natural disasters are crushing the human race, even though things seem to be completely removed from God’s hand—despite all this, everything is going according to plan. God will soon make right all that is wrong. If people will simply hold on for a little while longer, their trust in God will be vindicated, and he will intervene in the course of things here on earth to restore peace, justice, and joy forever.

Apocalypses are almost always written pseudonymously in the name of some renowned religious figure of the past.²³ In Christian circles we have apocalypses in the names of Peter, Paul, and the prophet Isaiah. In Jewish circles we have apocalypses in the names of Daniel, Enoch, Abraham, and even Adam! Scholars typically claim that these books cannot be considered forgeries, because writing them pseudonymously was all part of the task; the literary genre requires them, more or less, to be written by someone who would “know” such things, that is, someone highly favored by God. But I think this view is too simplistic. The reality is that ancient people really did believe that they were written by the people who claimed to be writing them, as seen repeatedly in the ancient testimonies.²⁴ The authors of these books knew it too. They assumed false names precisely because their writings would prove more effective that way.

This relates to the single most important motivation for authors to claim they were someone else in antiquity. Quite simply, it was to get a hearing for their views. If you were an unknown person, but had something really important to say and wanted people to hear you—not so they could praise you, but so they could learn the truth—one way to make that happen was to pretend you were someone else, a well-known author, a famous figure, an authority.

Thus, for example, if you wanted to write a philosophical treatise in which you dealt with some of the most confounding ethical problems facing the world, but you were not a famous philosopher, you might write the treatise and claim that you were, signing it Plato or Aristotle. If you wanted to produce an apocalypse explaining that suffering here on this earth is only temporary and that God would soon intervene to overthrow the forces of evil in this world, and you wanted people to realize this was a message that needed to be heard and proclaimed, you wouldn’t sign it with your own name (the Apocalypse of Joe), but the name of a famous religious figure (the Apocalypse of Daniel). If you wanted to narrate a Gospel of Jesus’s most important teachings, but in fact were living a hundred years after Jesus and didn’t have any real access to what Jesus said, you would write down the sayings you found most compelling and claim to be someone who had actually heard Jesus speak, calling your book the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Philip.

This motivation was at work in both Christian and non-Christian circles. We know this because ancient authors actually tell us so. For example, a commentator on the writings of Aristotle, a pagan scholar named David, indicated: “If someone is uninfluential and unknown, yet wants his writing to be read, he writes in the name of someone who came before him and was influential, so that through his influence he can get his work accepted.”²⁵

This is the case with the one instance we have of a Christian forger who was caught and who later explained in writing what he did. In the fifth Christian century, a church leader named Salvian lived in Marseille. As did many others in his day Salvian decided, with his wife, to express his devotion to God by renouncing the world and taking on an ascetic form of life. Salvian was outraged by the worldliness of the church and by church members who were more concerned with personal comfort and wealth than with the demands of the gospel. So he wrote a letter called Timothy to the Church. Written in an authoritative style, the letter seemed to its readers actually to have been written by Timothy, the famous companion of the apostle Paul four hundred years earlier. But somehow Salvian’s bishop came to suspect that Salvian had written it. He confronted Salvian with the matter, and Salvian admitted that he had done it.

But Salvian was a defensive fellow, and so he wrote an explanation for why he had produced a pseudonymous letter. As defensive individuals often do, Salvian made lots of excuses. The name Timothy, for example, literally means “honored by God,” and so, he said, he used that name to show that he wrote for the honor of God. His main defense, though, was that he was a nobody, and if he himself wrote a letter to the churches, no one would pay attention. Or as he put it in his written defense, the author had “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.”²⁶

By writing in the name of Timothy, on the other hand, he hoped to get a reading. His views were important enough for him to adopt a false name. There is nothing in the story to suggest that Salvian’s bishop accepted this excuse with equanimity (the story is related to us by Salvian, not his bishop). On the contrary, if the bishop was like every other reader from the ancient world who comments on such things, he was not at all pleased that Salvian had lied about his identity.

Forgers’ Techniques

WE ARE NEVER TOLD how Salvian’s bishop came to realize that the letter allegedly by Timothy was in fact written by his presbyter, Salvian. But it is probably not too hard to figure out. The letter addressed major concerns that Salvian himself had had and that he no doubt had articulated repeatedly among his fellow churchgoers and the church leaders. Since he was a literate person, he may well have written other treatises on this and related subjects. If his bishop knew Salvian’s ultimate concerns and had read his other writings, so that he was familiar with his writing style, he may have put two and two together and realized that this letter, which suddenly appeared out of nowhere, was a modern production written pseudonymously.

Very few forgers in the ancient world were actually caught red-handed.²⁷ The reasons should seem fairly obvious. For one thing, ancient scholars who were invested in detecting forgeries did not have the sophisticated methods of analysis that we have today, with our computers, databases, intricate analyses of writing style, and so on. An ancient scholar frequently could tell that a literary text was not by the same author who wrote another text (e.g., that the book of Revelation was not written by the same author who wrote the Fourth Gospel). But it’s much easier to say who did not write a book (Paul did not write Hebrews) than who did write it (Ephesians, if not by Paul, was written by whom?).

Even more important, forgers went out of their way not to get caught. Most of the time, they were successful. In one of the fascinating modern discussions of forgery, Anthony Grafton, of Princeton University, shows that over the centuries the art of forgery became increasingly refined as the art of detecting forgery improved its methods. The better scholars became at recognizing a forgery, the better forgers got at avoiding detection. This compelled the scholars to refine their methods, which in turn drove the forgers to improve their craft.²⁸

Ancient forgers typically used several methods to escape detection. First and most obviously, anyone forging a document in the name of a well-known author did his level best to imitate the author’s writing style and vocabulary. Everyone has a distinctive style of writing, and every style, in principle, can be imitated. Less skillful imitators simply recognized unusual words commonly used by an author and used those words a lot (sometimes much more than the author being imitated). Others tried to imitate the distinctive ways the author used grammar: sentence length, use of participial phrases, use of sentence fragments, and so on. For highly educated authors, this matter of imitating writing style was almost second nature; in the advanced education of “rhetorical” schooling that the upper-class elite received, a regular exercise involved writing an account or a speech in the style of a famous author or speaker. The most highly educated people in the empire were trained to do this as a matter of course.²⁹ Most of those people, of course, were not involved in the business of forgery.

The fact that a forger tried to imitate an author’s style can make it difficult to detect forgeries. But the reality is that some people were more skilled at it than others. Just as most people today couldn’t forge a Rembrandt if their life depended on it, so too most people can’t sound “just like” Aristotle, Plutarch, or Paul.

A second trick of forgers was to include verisimilitudes in their writings. The term “verisimilitude” refers to a statement, a comment, or an off-the-cuff remark that makes a writing look “very similar” to what you would expect the alleged author to have said. Forgers would make personal comments about the recipients of a letter, even if in fact they were not actually sending it to anyone. Why say you’ll be praying for the letter’s recipients during their time of persecution, if you’re not actually sending it to people experiencing persecution? Because if you say that, it certainly sounds as though you’re sending it to those experiencing persecution! Why ask for a personal favor from a person you’re writing to, if you’re not really writing to that person? (“Hey, James, be sure to say hello to your mother for me; and don’t forget to bring that book that I left at your house.”) Because there’s no better way to make it look as if the letter is authentic. Why fabricate names of recipients, your past relationship with these recipients, remembered experiences you’ve shared, and so on? All of these add credibility to your writing, making it look as though you really are writing this person, at this time, in this situation, even if you’re writing three hundred years later to no one in particular.

We’ve already seen one kind of verisimilitude in our earlier discussion. In both 2 Thessalonians from the first century and the Apostolic Constitutions three hundred years later, the pseudonymous author tells his readers not to read pseudonymous writings. Or to be more precise, the forger warns his readers not to read forgeries. Why? In part because it makes readers less likely to suspect that the book they have is itself a forgery. That is, it’s a kind of verisimilitude.

One final technique used by some forgers involves a “discovery narrative.” If a book shows up this week claiming to have been written two hundred years ago, one might well wonder where it has been all this time. Forgers sometimes begin or end their writing by describing what has led to the book’s disappearance and discovery. For example, an author might begin a book by explaining that he had a dream, and in this dream he was told to dig a deep hole on the south side of the oak tree in the field across the stream from his farm. When he dug the hole, he found an ancient wooden box. Inside the box was a deteriorating manuscript. He has now copied this manuscript out by hand, and this is it, a revelation given directly by Christ to the apostle James and hidden from the world until now.

The book then claims to have been written by James, as “copied” by the discoverer of the manuscript. The book is not widely known, because it has been hidden all these years. But now it has come to light, and here it is. Except it’s not really here. What is here is a book not written by James, but by a forger claiming to be James, who has conveniently included an explanation for why no one has ever heard of this book before.

Ancient Views of Forgery

I HAVE ALREADY INDICATED that scholars are sometimes loath to use the term “forgery” for pseudepigraphal writings in which an author claims to be someone else. Later, I deal at greater length with what some scholars have claimed about this phenomenon in order to avoid thinking of such books as forgeries. This will come in Chapter 4, after we have had two chapters of data to help us assess these claims. As it turns out, many New Testament scholars who make pronouncements on forgery (“It wasn’t meant to be deceitful.” “No one thought of it as lying.” “It wasn’t looked down upon.”) simply haven’t read what the ancient sources say about it. Throughout this book it will become quite clear from the ancient writings themselves that even though forgery was widely practiced, it was also widely condemned and treated as a form of lying. To get us started here, I want to give just a few examples, which could easily be multiplied, of how ancients thought and talked about the practice of forgery.

The first thing to note is that in virtually every instance in which an ancient author mentions forgery, he condemns it. There are a few exceptions, which I will discuss at greater length in Chapter 4. But these exceptions really are exceptional, for reasons we’ll see. By far the dominant discourse in the ancient world opposed forgery and saw it as a deceitful and illicit practice. That doesn’t mean that people didn’t engage in the practice—adultery is usually seen as a deceitful and illicit practice today, but that doesn’t stop a lot of people. Despite the condemnations of it, the practice of forgery thrived in antiquity.

One of the more famous stories of forgery involves the second-century Roman physician Galen, whom I mentioned earlier. In one of his surviving writings, Galen gives an autobiographical account in which he tells of detecting a forgery. As he relates it, he was one day walking down a street in Rome and was passing by a bookseller’s shop. In the window were two men arguing about a book that was allegedly written by Galen! One man was heatedly arguing that Galen had in fact written the book; the other was insisting that the writing style was all wrong, that Galen could not have written it. This episode warmed the cockles of Galen’s heart, since in fact he had not written the book. So he went home and wrote a book, which we still have today. Sometimes the book is called How to Recognize Books Written by Galen.

Did Galen think it was an acceptable practice for someone else to write in his name? Obviously not. Nor did anyone else who discovered forgeries in his own name. I earlier mentioned the poet Martial, who was incensed that other poets tried to pass off their own work (which he considered vastly inferior) as his. Among Christians we have outraged complaints about forgeries in the writings of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine. Forgery was so widely condemned in antiquity that even forgers condemned forgery—as we have seen in the case of 2 Thessalonians and the Apostolic Constitutions.

Some scholars have argued, strenuously, but without much evidence, that it was a common and accepted practice in schools of philosophy to write a philosophical treatise and sign your master’s name to it (Plato, Pythagoras, etc.), rather than your own, and that no one looked askance at this practice. As we will see in Chapter 4, there is little evidence indeed that this happened. Ask a modern-day scholar who claims that in antiquity this was a widespread practice to cite an ancient source for it. In almost every instance, you will find a tongue-tied scholar.³⁰

That forgery was widely condemned in antiquity can be seen by some of the terms that were used to describe the practice, most of which were at least as negative as the modern term “forgery.” In Greek the two most common words to describe literary texts whose authors falsely claim to be a well-known figure are pseudos, which means “a falsehood” or “a lie,” and nothos, which means “an illegitimate child,” with connotations similar to our modern word “bastard.”³¹

With respect to the first word, some scholars have stressed that pseudos does not have to have the negative connotation of a bald-faced lie, since it is sometimes used simply to indicate information that is incorrect, a falsehood. And that is certainly true, in some contexts. But it means that only in contexts in which those speaking the falsehood do not realize that what they are saying is an error. When a person speaks something that is false, knowing that it is false, pseudos always means what “lie” means in English: an intentional falsehood with the intent of deceiving hearers or readers into thinking that it is right. There can be no question which connotation applies to ancient forgeries. The person who wrote the Gospel of Peter, claiming to be Jesus’s disciple Simon Peter, some sixty years after Peter’s death—did he realize that he was not in fact Simon Peter? Unless he was a lunatic, then of course he did. He intentionally claimed to be someone he was not. In Greek that would be called a pseudos; in English we would call it a lie.

The other term, nothos, might seem a bit puzzling. It is often translated “spurious,” which may be accurate enough, but does not carry the same connotations as the Greek word, which refers typically to a bastard child. The logic of the term in the context of forgeries is clear. If a child born out of wedlock is raised by his mother and her husband (who is not the child’s father), then the child does not “belong,” by blood, to his alleged father; they are not related. Moreover, in antiquity, the child had no legal rights. So too with a literary text. If it goes under the name of an author who did not in fact produce it, then it is not actually related or legally connected to that person, but derives from someone else. So it is called a nothos, an illegitimate child, a text that does not belong to the author claimed for it.

Both of these terms are negative, not neutral, and they show what ancients thought about the practice of forgery. An author who produces a writing in the name of someone else has produced a “false writing,” “a lie,” “an illegitimate child,” or a “bastard.” Similar words are used by Latin writers for the act of forgery, for example, words that mean “to lie,” “to falsify,” “to fabricate,” “to adulterate,” “to counterfeit.”

Contrary to what some scholars have claimed (again, see Chapter 4) forgers in the ancient world typically wanted to deceive their readers by claiming to be persons of authority and standing. This has been long recognized by the real experts in ancient forgery.³² And a moment’s reflection shows why this must be the case. Consider the motivations for forgery mentioned earlier. Forgers who wanted to see if they could get away with it, to see if they could pull the wool over someone’s eyes, would scarcely have tried to make their ploy transparent and obvious; they would have truly wanted to deceive people. If they wanted to make money by producing an “original” copy of, say, a dialogue of Plato, they wouldn’t get very far if everyone knew who they really were. If they wanted to justify a political institution or religious practice by citing the views of an authority or wanted to have their own views accepted as authoritative even if they themselves were completely unknown, it would make no sense to claim to be someone else knowing full well that no one would believe you.

That forgery was not a transparent fiction is evidenced as well by the negative things people say about it in the ancient sources—the practice, as I have argued, is condemned in virtually every instance it is discussed. Moreover, the reactions to forgers when they are caught show quite clearly that they meant to deceive, that they were often successful, and that people were not at all pleased when they discovered the truth. Galen and Martial were incensed to find someone else claiming their name for writings they did not produce. And sometimes the reaction was even more hostile.

The first time we hear of a forger being discovered occurs all the way back in the fifth century BCE, in the writings of the famous Greek historian Herodotus.³³ In a puzzling and enigmatic passage, Herodotus speaks of Onomacritus of Athens, who had invented an oracle (i.e., a prophecy from a divine being) and ascribed it to the ancient bard Musaeus, a mythical figure thought to be able to predict the future. This oracle indicated that a certain group of islands would sink into the sea. It is hard to understand why Onomacritus forged the oracle or why people were upset by it. But they were. The ruler of Athens, Hipparchus, banished Onomacritus from the city; he fled Greece and ended up in Persia. On yet other occasions Onomacritus was thought to have forged other oracles and was roundly chastised for it by other ancient authors, such as Plutarch.³⁴

Sometimes the punishment for forgery was even more harsh. Earlier I mentioned the fifty obscene letters that the philosopher Diotimus forged in the name of Epicurus in order to sully his reputation. According to one ancient source, Epicurus’s followers were not amused. One of them, a man named Zeno, tracked Diotimus down and murdered him for it.³⁵ This can be compared with the account already mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus, who indicates that someone forged a letter in the name of Alexander, son of King Herod, indicating Alexander’s plan to assassinate his father. As we have seen, the forger was the king’s own secretary, who, according to Josephus, “was at last put to death for it.”

From all of the discussions of forgeries in ancient sources, I think we can safely draw several major conclusions. Forgery was widely practiced in the ancient world, among pagans, Jews, and Christians. Forgers, motivated by a range of factors, intended to deceive their readers. Ancient authors who discuss the practice condemned it and considered it a form of lying and deceit. Forgers who were caught were reprimanded or punished even more severely.

Possible Justifications for Forgery

THE MOST THOROUGH STUDY of ancient forgery ever undertaken, by the Austrian classical scholar Wolfgang Speyer, maintains: “Every forgery feigns a state of affairs that does not correspond to the actual facts of the case. For this reason forgery belongs to the realm of lying and deception.”³⁶ This view coincides perfectly well with the one I have been trying to make in this chapter, but it leaves us with a problem. When we are considering Christian forgeries, in particular, we are dealing with writings produced by followers of Jesus, who presumably ascribed to Jesus’s ethical teachings and the moral norms set forth in the Hebrew Scriptures. Surely they knew that lying and deception were wrong. Why would they do what they knew was wrong? And surely the question applies to pagans and Jews as well, who as a whole were just as ethical as Christians. Why would any of them go against their own ethical views?

On one level, of course, the question is silly. All people do things they know are wrong. But I mean the question at a deeper level. Did the forgers who perpetrated their fraud think that they were justified in lying? Is lying ever justified? I return to this issue in Chapter 8, but for now I should at least set the stage by asking a more general question. What did people in antiquity think about lying and deceit?

Asking what ancient people thought about lying is like asking modern people—it depends completely on whom you ask. Some think lying is never acceptable under any circumstances; others think that in some circumstances it is the ethical thing to do. Yet others think nothing at all about lying whenever they feel like it, thank you very much!

Some ancient Greek philosophers, notably Aristotle, stressed the importance of normally being truthful.³⁷ But most philosophers thought there could be exceptions. Xenophon, for example, reports Socrates as saying it is a good thing to lie to a sick son or a friend who wants to commit suicide, if you can stop the person from doing so.³⁸ Socrates also said that it is useful for a field general to lie to his disheartened troops in battle, telling them that support troops are soon to arrive, in order to drive them to fight with greater valor; or for a parent to deceive a child into taking some unpleasant medicine that will be good for her. Plato taught that some lies can be useful, such as those doctors might tell patients for their own good or those rulers of a country might tell their people in order to ensure the healthy functioning of society. As one ancient writer, Heliodorus, put it: “A lie is good when it benefits the one who speaks it without doing harm to the one who hears.”³⁹

But what about Christians? Weren’t they taught always to tell the truth? That is certainly what the great fifth-century church theologian Augustine taught in his two treatises devoted to “lying.” It is never, ever, under any circumstances permissible to lie. This view of Augustine’s was not based on a simplistic sense that it is always good to tell the truth, but on deep theological understandings about what it means to be truly human in relationship to the God of truth, who himself became fully human.⁴⁰

But lots of other Christian thinkers, both before and after Augustine, thought otherwise. Some, such as the important Christian thinker Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century, as well as his Alexandrian compatriot at the beginning of the third, Origen—arguably the most important theologian of the church before Augustine—agreed with Plato about the “medicinal lie”: if a doctor’s lie will impel a patient to take her medicine, it is ethically justified.⁴¹ Both of them also pointed out that in the Old Testament, God himself appears to use deception at times. When God told Jonah to proclaim to the city of Nineveh that in forty days it would be overthrown, he obviously knew full well that the people would repent and that he would stay his hand of judgment. God never did plan, then, to overthrow the city, even though that’s what he told his prophet to proclaim. Sometimes a deceptive statement can do a world of good.

There are plenty of other examples in Scripture in which the lies of God’s chosen ones lead to good ends. If Abraham had not lied about his wife Sarah (“she’s my sister”), he would have been killed, and the nation of Israel would never have come into existence (Gen. 12). Or if Rahab the prostitute had not lied about where the Israelite spies were hiding, they may have been killed and the children of Israel may never have been able to conquer the promised land (Josh. 2). Examples could be multiplied. Sometimes lying is the right thing to do.

Is that what forgers thought? That lying about who they were was worth it? That the good effects of their deception outweighed the bad? That the ends justified the means?

I’m afraid we may never know what drove these people to do what they did. We simply can’t peer into their hearts and minds to see what they were thinking, deep down, when they decided to hide their own identity and to claim, deceitfully, that they were someone else. Their readers, had they known, would probably have called them liars and condemned what they did. But in their own eyes, their conscience may have been free from blame, and their motives may have been as pure as the driven snow. They had a truth to convey, and they were happy to lie in order to proclaim it.