Forged (24 page)

The two prongs of the Christian counterattack were, as we have seen, closely related. By attacking Jews for rejecting their own messiah, Christians were able simultaneously to declare the innocence of Jesus and his followers to governmental officials and other interested pagan observers. By claiming to be the true representatives of the ancient Jewish religion, Christians not only attempted to displace the Jews, but also to provide a sense of antiquity for their own religious claims; they were as old as Moses, who was older by far than any pagan lawgivers or philosophers. By painting the Jews as immoral haters of God, Christians were able to pass themselves off as superior moral beings of no threat to the social order.

Into this maelstrom of attack and counterattack, some Christian authors introduced the weapons of literary forgery. The ultimate goal of the church was to establish itself as true and, of course, to show
that all other religions were, as a consequence, false. So once more we have one of the great ironies of the early Christian religion: some of its leading spokespersons appear to have had no qualms about lying in order to promote the faith, to practice deception in order to establish the truth.

I'
VE ALWAYS ENJOYED A GOOD
, reasoned debate on a controversial issue. In high school I was on the debate team and loved it. My debate colleagues and I were good at it already as sixteen-year-olds, able to take either side of a hot topic and argue for it, then turn around and argue the opposing side in the next debate. I still do public debates around the country today, almost always with evangelical Christian scholars, on topics of importance, especially to evangelical Christians. “Can Historians Prove That Jesus Was Raised from the Dead?” (I always argue that, no, no one can
prove
it.) “Are the Gospel Accounts of Jesus Reliable?” (No, not completely.) “Does the Bible Provide an Adequate Answer to Why There Is Suffering?” (No, not really.) And so on.

I also think debates can be useful pedagogically in the classroom; they help undergraduate students learn how to mount arguments, assess evidence, and see the strengths of a position they personally reject. So I have my students debate controversial topics in my course on the New Testament. “Did Paul and Jesus Represent Fundamentally Different Religions?” “Were the Apostle Paul's Views of Women Oppressive?” “Does the New Testament Condemn Modern Practices of Homosexuality?”

Sometimes in setting up these debates I find out in advance which
side students want to take (affirmative or negative) and then assign them to the
opposite
side, forcing them to argue for a position they personally reject. It's a great exercise. Politicians should try it sometime, to see that their opponents may actually have something important and persuasive to say.

In my many years of formal debate and in my many more years of informal discussion, I've come to realize something very significant. We tend to get in the hottest arguments about topics that we really care about and with people we are closest to. Only rarely do we get intense and bothered about something that doesn't matter to us. And our most heated arguments are almost always with friends and loved ones rather than absolute strangers.

Debates Among Early Christians

T
HE SAME WAS TRUE
with the arguments carried out by the early Christians. As we saw in the previous chapter, Christians were in conflict with Jews and pagans over the validity of their religion. These debates were sometimes heated. They were, after all, about issues that mattered deeply to Christians. But the hottest early Christian debates were with other Christians, as they argued over the right things to believe and the right ways to live. These internal Christian debates were often filled with vitriol and hatred. Christians called one another nasty names, said ugly things about one another, and pulled out all stops to make their Christian opponents look reprehensible and stupid, denying, in many instances, that the opponents even had the right to call themselves Christian. Anyone perceived as a false teacher was subject to verbal lashing; outsiders to the faith—pagans and Jews—were treated with kid gloves by comparison.

Christian arguments with false teachers in their midst happened a lot, as far back as we have records. Our earliest Christian author was Paul, and in virtually every one of his letters it is clear that he had opponents on all sides. Many Christian readers over the years
have failed to see the significance of Paul's constant attacks on false teachers. One thing that these attacks show, beyond dispute, is that virtually everywhere Paul went, even within his own churches, he and his views were under steady assault by Christians who thought and believed differently. It is easy to miss this rather obvious historical fact, because the writings of Paul's opponents have not survived the ravages of time, whereas his writings became part of the New Testament. But if we could transport ourselves back to the 50s
CE
, we would find that everywhere Paul went, he confronted Christian teachers who thought he preached a false gospel. This was true even in the churches that he himself founded. And these opponents were not the same in every place; different locations produced different opponents, with different views.

Just as key examples, in the churches of Galatia, Paul's Christian opponents claimed that he had perverted the true gospel message of Jesus and his apostles when he insisted that Gentiles did not have to be circumcised and become Jewish to be followers of Jesus. Nonsense, replied his opponents. Jesus was a Jew, his followers were Jews, he taught the Jewish law, he was the Jewish messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people—following Jesus of course meant being Jewish. This view lost out in the ensuing debates, but it certainly had extensive and avid supporters in its day.

In the church of Corinth Paul's opponents insisted that he was a weak and pathetic speaker who showed no evidence of being empowered by God. They, on the other hand, had superior divine gifts demonstrating the supremacy of their message that true believers had already been raised with Christ to experience the power and joy of the heavenly existence in the here and now.

In the city of Rome Paul was maligned by Christian leaders who claimed he was not a true apostle. These Christians attacked Paul both for thinking that Gentiles were superior to Jews in the church and for advocating a gospel that led to an immoral lifestyle.

And so it goes—at every turn Paul had opponents. We should not write these opponents off as fringe minority groups of no importance.
They were everywhere, and Paul saw them as dangerous. His views eventually won out, but in his own day the differences of opinion were widespread and highly threatening. And Paul was not the only apostle under fire. In every early Christian community believers attacked other believers for their false beliefs.

This was a problem for a religion that claimed to stand for “the” truth. If the followers of Jesus represented the single, unified truth of God, why was it that the Christian church was not single and unified? In fact, it was anything but that, not just in the days of Paul, but throughout the entire first four centuries. Just in the second and third centuries, for example, we know of powerful and influential Christian teachers like Marcion who maintained that there is not just one God, but two Gods. Some Gnostics said there were 30 divine beings, or 365. These Christians claimed that they were right, and that everyone else was wrong. Had one of these other groups won the debates, the world would be a very different place today.

In the second and third centuries some Christians said that Jesus was the most righteous man who had ever lived and was chosen by God to be his messiah. But he was not at all divine. A human being can't be divine. Other Christians, again like Marcion, insisted that Christ was completely divine and not at all human. Still other Christians, including the Gnostics whom I've already mentioned, maintained that Jesus Christ was two beings: a man Jesus and a divine Christ who came into Jesus to empower him for his ministry and who then left him prior to his death, since the Christ cannot suffer. Yet other Christians said that Jesus was God the Father himself come to earth.

At this same time there were Christians who denied that God had created the world. Or had called Israel to be his people. Or had authored the Jewish Scriptures. There were other Christians who insisted that the Jewish Scriptures were sacred, but were not to be interpreted literally. Yet other Christians said that they had to be interpreted literally and followed literally, as do some even today.

Early Christians were nothing if not radically diverse. Yet all of these Christian groups claimed not only to be right, but also to be
uniquely right—their view, and their view alone, represented the one and only divine truth. As a corollary, they each claimed that their view of the truth was the view taught by Jesus himself and through him to the apostles. And all of these groups had books to prove it, books allegedly written by apostles that supported their points of view.

Christians today may wonder why these various groups didn't simply read their New Testaments to see that their views were wrong. The answer, of course, is that there was no New Testament. The New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, as one of the Christian groups won the arguments and decided which books would be included in Scripture. Other books representing other points of view and also attributed to the apostles of Jesus were not only left out of Scripture; they were destroyed and forgotten. As a result, today, when we think of early Christianity, we tend to think of it only as it has come down to us in the writings of the victorious party. Only slowly, in modern times, have ancient books come to light that support alternative views, as they have turned up in archaeological digs and by pure serendipity, for example, in the sands of Egypt.

What were Christian teachers to do when they were convinced that their particular understanding of Jesus and of the faith was true, but they didn't have any apostolic writings to back it up? One thing they sometimes did—or, arguably, often did—was to invent apostolic writings. Nothing generated more literary forgeries in the names of the apostles than the internal conflicts among competing Christian groups. These forgeries established apostolic authority for a group's own views and attacked the views of other groups. Many of the forgeries that we have already considered do so at great length, and there are others that are yet to be considered here.

Forgeries Directed Against Unknown Opponents

W
HEN READING EARLY
C
HRISTIAN
attacks on false teachers, it is often difficult to know what exactly the opponents believed. That is
because in most instances we don't have any of the opponents' own writings, and so we have to reconstruct their views from what their enemies say about them. That often doesn't give one much to go on. Try to imagine reconstructing one presidential candidate's (real) views from what the other candidate says in order to attack him. This kind of reconstruction is much easier to do today, when we have mass media and extensive reporting on both sides of any issue, so that it is harder to flat-out lie about the other person's view. Politicians today, as a rule, have to be relatively sneaky. In the ancient world there was virtually nothing to stop flagrant distortion and misrepresentation. How would anyone know, without a newspaper or magazine article stating the opponents' real views?

In other instances the arguments against opponents are made for readers who have the opponents right there among them, so that both the writer and the readers know perfectly well what the opponents' views are. As a consequence, the writer feels no need to spell them out. That is fine for ancient readers who know what the author is talking about. But for those of us living two thousand years later it can be very frustrating. We get only hints at the character of the false teaching and have to do our best to stitch it together from what little we're told.

In yet other instances an author may attack false views that he himself has made up simply as a foil for his own thoughts. This is especially the case with forged writings in which the author pretends to be living in an earlier age. The false teachings attacked are not necessarily views that anyone held. They are simply an alternative perspective that the author maligns in order to set out the “truth” of his point of view.

We have to contend with all such cases when dealing with the forged writings of early Christianity, including those of the New Testament. Several writings attack false teachings, but it is well nigh impossible to say what the opponents actually believed, if in fact they really existed at all.

C
OLOSSIANS

This is the case with the letter to the Colossians, written in Paul's name but almost certainly pseudonymous, as we saw in Chapter 3. The author, whoever he was, urges his readers not to be led astray by false teaching: “See that no one makes you prey through philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the cosmos and not according to Christ” (2:8). He goes on to charge his readers with what they should and should not believe and with what religious practices they should and should not engage in. But whom is he arguing against?

This is a classic case of scholars having almost no way to know. Not that that has stopped anyone from trying. One scholar writing in 1973 pointed out that there were forty-four different scholarly opinions about what the false teachers under attack stood for.
¹
In a five-year stretch in the early 1990s there were four major books written on the subject by expert scholars; they each represented a different view.
²
My view is that we'll never know for sure.

What we can say is that the author portrays these false teachers, whether they really existed or not, as urging their Christian readers in the worship of angels, basing their views on divine visions they had had. They also allegedly urged their followers to lead an ascetic lifestyle, avoiding certain foods and drinks, and observing, probably, Jewish Sabbaths and festivals (thus 2:16–18, 21–23). The author, claiming to be Paul, is opposed to all this. He thinks Christ alone is to be worshiped, for in Christ (not in angels) can be found the complete embodiment of the divine. Moreover, those who are “in Christ” have already experienced the benefits of the resurrection; there is no need for them to engage in ascetic practices.

Why would an author claim to be Paul in order to attack these unknown opponents? Evidently because doing so allowed the author to malign people he disagreed with while setting out his own point of view, even though his view is, in fact, different from Paul's, as we saw in Chapter 3.

J
UDE

Consider next the New Testament book of Jude. This short book is even more obviously directed against false teachers in the Christian community. After greeting his readers, the author explains the reason for his letter: