Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics by Bart D. Ehrman Read Free Book Online

verisimilitudes were part of the exercise, as these letters speak about the mechanics of writing, sending, sealing, receiving, and so on, for one major reason: “The more realistic the epistolary moment appears, both in terms of the occasion and the specific letter, the more convincing it will be to its readers, who seek the literary thrill of reading someone else’s private messages.” 32 This sounds like a concession to the idea that the writers wanted to convince their readers, and it is difficult to draw a very clear line between that attempt and pure literary deception.
    One might consider, for example, the two sets of Socratic epistles, one connected with Antisthenes, which urges a rigorous lifestyle, and the other with Aristippus, which supports hedonism. Both advocate their own perspective and inveigh against the other. And why is that? It is because, in Rosenmeyer’s own words, “a treatise on the subject would be rejected as just another (mis)interpretation of the philosopher; but a letter in the voice of the great man himself, or in that of his most highly regarded disciple, would be hard to refute.” 33 That is exactly right; but it is also the reason that some of these fictions may be seen as going a step further in wanting their readers really to believe them to be actual letters written by the philosopher himself. It is at least possible, that is, that some of these works were produced not simply as rhetorical exercises but in order to perpetrate a literary deceit. However one judges that issue, fictions of this kind were difficult to keep in check. As Martina Janssen observes, there was no way to control their reception history, as later readers in another context may have taken an authorial fiction to be a bona fide authorial claim, so that an original rhetorical exercise came to function as a forgery, apart from any authorial intent. 34
    In any event, with only one or two possible exceptions—possibly the letters of Paul and Seneca? 35 —there are probably no literary fictions among the early Christian writings, produced simply as rhetorical exercises.
Pen Names
    Pen names—or pseudonymity in the traditional, German, sense—were not common in antiquity, but were not unheard of either. This use of a pen name differs from a literary fiction of the first type described above in that the composition in question is not a rhetorical exercise in ethopoeia, but an actual writing with a purpose that extends beyond itself.
    In some instances a pen name may have been relatively innocent, the opportunity to write a work anonymously under a name chosen at random. This appears to be the case with the work produced by the six purported authors of the Historia Augusta. Ronald Syme in particular has shown that the solitary author of this collection of imperial biographies was a learned but somewhat mischievous scholar from around 400 CE, who fabricated a good deal of information, much of it for his personal enjoyment. 36 He was remarkably successful in his endeavor to hide his identity: up to the end of the nineteenth century the work was held to be authentic and basically reliable. Though not everyone realized it at the time,the death knell was struck in 1899 by Herman Dessau in a paper showing that the entire composition was the work of a single author writing centuries after the alleged authors. Dessau’s argument: some of the characters mentioned in the work are fictitious and show signs of having been invented near the end of the fourth century.
    In his chapter on “The Bogus Names,” Syme categorizes all the cited names and authorities of the Historia Augusta, in ten categories, including the most significant: “fictitious characters who by their names reflect families eminent in the Roman aristocracy in the second half of the fourth century.” He concludes that the author of the work was extremely erudite, but that he included a “profusion of details about food and drink and sex” which “were not