Forged (32 page)

Falsifications

I
N ADDITION TO FORGERY
, false attribution, and fabrication, there is another kind of deceptive literary activity that can be called “falsification.” This occurs whenever someone copies an author's text by hand, but alters it in some way, omitting something, adding something, or just changing the wording. If someone were to copy Paul's first letter to the Corinthians and add a few extra verses that he thought up himself, then the next person to read that manuscript would naturally assume that Paul himself had written the inserted words. That is very similar to what happens with forgery: someone writes his own words, but attributes them to someone else. In this case, however, rather than composing an entire document in someone else's name, a copyist has written a portion of a document and included it in the other person's book.

The practice of altering texts in the process of copying them happened all the time in antiquity.
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In a world without electronic means
of publication, photocopy machines, or even carbon paper, it was well-nigh impossible to ensure that any copy of a text would be 100 percent accurate, without changes of any kind. This is true for all books copied in the ancient world. That is why, when great kings wanted to start significant libraries in their cities, they were sometimes willing to pay sizable amounts of money for “originals” of the great classics. You could never be sure if copies would be completely true to the original.

All of the early Christian writings were, necessarily, susceptible to the vicissitudes of copying. We don't have any original copies of any books of the New Testament or of any other early Christian book. What we have are copies that have been made from copies of the copies of the copies. In most instances our earliest complete copies are from centuries after the originals.

Just about every copyist made mistakes in copying. As a result, if you were to copy a copy of an original, in most instances you would copy not just the words of the original, but also the mistakes your predecessor made in copying the original. And whoever came after you and copied your copy would reproduce both your mistakes and the mistakes of your predecessor as well as introduce some mistakes of her own. And so it goes, year after year, century after century. The only time mistakes are removed is when a copyist realizes that a predecessor had copied something incorrectly and then tries to correct the mistake. The problem is that there is no way to know whether the copyist corrects the mistake correctly or not. He may also correct it incorrectly, that is, change it to something that is different from both the copy he is copying and from the original that was first copied. The possibilities are endless.

We do not need to speculate that Christian scribes altered the texts they copied. You can take any book of early Christianity and compare the surviving copies, whether it is a book from the New Testament, say, one of the Gospels or Paul's letters, or a book from outside the New Testament, say, the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas
or the
Epistle of Barnabas
. The copies will all differ, often in lots of minor insignificant ways and sometimes in big ways.

In the vast majority of the cases, the changes that copyists made were simply an accident: the slip of a pen, the misspelling of a word, the accidental omission of a word or a line. Sometimes, though, scribes changed their texts because they wanted to do so, either because they thought their scribal predecessors made a mistake that needed to be corrected or because they wanted to add something to the text (or take away something or change something). As I've indicated, this kind of falsification is close to forgery; it is one author passing off his own words as the words of a respected authority.

I have talked about these kinds of changes in a couple of my earlier books and don't want to belabor the point here. Instead, I simply give a few examples of the kind of thing I mean from the pages of the New Testament. In Chapter 5 I talked about the famous story found in later manuscripts of the Gospel of John about the woman who was caught in the act of adultery and brought to Jesus for judgment. This is the account in which Jesus delivers one of his most famous sayings: “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” The story, however, is not found in the oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Moreover, the writing style (in the Greek) is significantly different from the writing style of the rest of the Gospel. In addition, the story breaks the flow of the narrative of John 7–8, where it is found. In other words, if you take the story out of John, the context makes much better sense, as the story immediately before the account flows better directly into the story immediately after it. For these and numerous other reasons there is virtually no debate among New Testament scholars that this story, as wonderful, powerful, and influential as it is, was not originally part of the New Testament. It was added by a scribe.

In this instance we are dealing with both a falsification of the text (making it say something different from what it originally said) and a fabrication (since it is a story that has been made up). There are many other instances of this kind of thing in the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. Another famous example occurs at the end of the Gospel of Mark. It is sometimes said by people who have not read the
concluding chapter of Mark's Gospel closely enough that it “lacks a resurrection narrative.” Strictly speaking, that is not true. In Mark's Gospel Jesus is certainly raised from the dead. The women go to the tomb three days after he was buried in order to give his body a proper burial, but the body is not there. Instead, there is a man in the tomb who informs them that Jesus has been raised from the dead. Mark, therefore, believes that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, and he tells his readers as much. But what is most astonishing is what happens next.

The man at the tomb instructs the women to go to the disciples and tell them that Jesus will go before them to Galilee and that they are to meet him there. But instead of telling the disciples, “the women fled from the tomb…and they did not say anything to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8). And that's where the Gospel ends. There is definitely a resurrection of Jesus here. But the disciples never learn of it, and there is no account of Jesus's meeting with any of them.

This ending is brilliant. It brings readers up short and makes them say, “
What???
How could the women not tell anyone? How could no one learn of Jesus's resurrection? How could Jesus not appear to anyone afterwards? That's
it
? That's the end? How could that be the end?”

Scribes felt the same way. And, different scribes added different endings to the Gospel. The ending that became the most popular throughout the Middle Ages was found in the manuscripts used by the translators of the King James Version in 1611, so that it became widely familiar to English Bible readers. In an additional twelve verses the women (or at least Mary Magdalene) do go tell the disciples, who do then see Jesus and become convinced he has been raised. It is in these verses that we find the famous words of Jesus that those who believe in him will be able to speak in foreign tongues, pick up serpents, and drink poison without suffering any harm.

But Jesus never said these words, and Mark never claimed he did. They were added to Mark by a later scribe and then recopied over the years.
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This is a fabricated story that has been put into the Bible by a copyist who falsified the text.

There are hundreds of significant changes in the manuscripts of the New Testament, but let me here just mention one other. In the previous examples one could argue that the falsifications were not exactly the same as forgeries, since both John from the first example and Mark from the second were written anonymously. Technically speaking, the scribes who changed the texts were not saying their words came from the pen of a known authority figure. I would dispute that claim, I think, because by the time scribes made these changes, it was widely thought that the Fourth Gospel was in fact by John and the Second by Mark. But there is no ambiguity about my final example, since it involves one of the undisputed letters of Paul.

One of the most hurtful passages for the cause of women who want to be active in the Christian church occurs in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. Here Paul is recorded as saying:

Women are to be silent and submissive to their husbands. They are not to speak at all in church. This obviously makes it impossible for a woman to utter a prophecy in church, pray publicly and openly in church, or teach in church. Women are not allowed even to ask a question in church.

These verses are very much like what one reads in one of the Pauline letters that is
not
authentic, 1 Timothy, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, also indicates that women are to be subject to men and not to exercise any authority over them (2:11–15). But just as 1 Timothy is forged, so too has this passage in 1 Corinthians been falsified. These verses in chapter 14 were not written by Paul. Someone added them to the passage later, after the letter had been placed in circulation.

Scholars have adduced many reasons for this view. For one thing,
the verses seem to intrude in the passage in which they are found. Immediately before these verses Paul is talking about prophecy in the church; immediately afterwards he is talking about prophecy. But this passage on women interrupts the flow of the argument. Take them out, and it flows much better.

Even more, it is hard to believe that Paul would tell women that they could not speak in church here in 1 Corinthians 14, when just three chapters earlier he indicated that they could indeed do so. In 1 Corinthians 11 Paul urges women who pray and prophesy in church to do so only with veils on their heads. If they were allowed to speak in chapter 11, how could they be told not to speak in chapter 14? It makes better sense that those scholars are right who think that the verses were not originally part of the text of 1 Corinthians. Someone has falsified the book by adding the verses to it, making the passage say what these copyists wanted it to say rather than allowing Paul to say what he meant to say.
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Plagiarism

P
LAGIARISM INVOLVES TAKING SOMEONE
else's writing and passing it off as your own. As I indicated at the outset of this chapter, it has become an increasingly serious problem on college campuses. Techniques of plagiarism have improved through the use of the Internet, and it is oh so easy to find lots of things written about lots of topics—if not complete essays of approximately the same length as your required term paper, at least chunks of writing that are easily copied into a paper at a critical point. Luckily, methods of detection of plagiarism have improved with advances in technology, as many professors now use sophisticated software designed to identify it. The penalties for being caught can be harsh. At my university, anyone detected and convicted of plagiarism is dismissed from school. Not for a day or two, but permanently.

It is sometimes claimed by scholars that plagiarism is a modern
phenomenon without ancient corollary. Some years ago, for example, there appeared an influential and popular book called
The Five Gospels,
put out by a team of scholars from the Jesus Seminar. This book represented the results of the labor of many years, in which scholars worked to decide which of the sayings in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Thomas actually go back to the historical Jesus. Sayings that Jesus really said, in the opinion of these scholars, were printed in red; sayings that were relatively close to something he said were printed in pink; sayings that were not really like something he said were in gray; sayings that he absolutely did not say were in black.

Most of the sayings in the Gospels were in gray and black. This incensed a lot of people. A number of scholars who were not involved in the project, however, were more concerned by
which
sayings were in black. In my opinion, the members of the Jesus Seminar typically got precisely wrong what Jesus actually said.

Apart from that, the volume contains at least one statement that scholars would call a “howler,” a mistake so outrageous that the scholars who produced it should have known better. This is in the Introduction to the book, where it states: “The concept of plagiarism was unknown in the ancient world.”
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I don't know how anyone who has actually gone to the trouble of reading the ancient sources could say such a thing. It is flat-out wrong. Ancient authors knew all about plagiarism, and they condemned it as a deceptive practice. For starters, consider the words of Vitruvius, a famous Roman architect and engineer of the first century
BCE
, in book 7 of his ten-volume work on architecture: “We are…bound to censure those, who, borrowing from others, publish as their own that of which they are not the authors.”
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Or take the comments of Polybius, one of the great historians of the ancient Greek world, writing a hundred years earlier, who reports that historians near his own time who have stolen the writings of ancient historians and passed them off as their own have behaved in a “most shameful” manner. Those who do so engage in “a most disgraceful proceeding.”
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Some authors were incensed when their own works were plagiarized. On several occasions the witty Roman poet Martial upbraided others for stealing his writings and copying them out under their own name, as if they had composed them: “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 roll. Applause is not acquired for six or ten sesterces.”
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