WHEN I WAS A GOOD conservative evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute in my late teen years, I knew for a fact that there could not be any forgeries in the New Testament. My view of Scripture was deeply rooted in Scripture itself and above all in that classic statement of the Bible’s own inspiration, 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is inspired by God [literally, is God-breathed] and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” If Scripture is “breathed out,” or inspired, by God, then it obviously cannot have anything wrong in it, let alone anything approaching a lie. In no small measure that is because God himself, who breathed forth the text, does not lie.

For this, we knew all the key verses, including the following:

Scripture says that it is inspired or breathed out by God. God does not and cannot lie. Therefore Scripture does not and cannot contain lies. Forgery, on the other hand, involves lying. For that reason there can be no forgeries in the Bible.¹

This conservative evangelical view is still very much held by some scholars today, at least by conservative evangelical scholars. But I should emphasize it is a view that is built on theological premises of what has to be true, not on the grounds of what actually is true.² For conservative evangelicals, the Bible has to be without mistake, error, or lie. And if it has to be that way, well then, it is that way!

Can the Bible Contain Lies?

I OBVIOUSLY CHANGED MY view on the matter. Three years after I graduated from Moody, I was studying in a master’s program at Princeton Theological Seminary, a mainline Presbyterian school that stresses critical scholarship more than uncritical dogmatism. It was at Princeton Seminary that I came to think that I had previously been approaching the Bible in precisely the wrong way. As a conservative evangelical I had come to the Bible assuming certain things about it even before reading it. I claimed it couldn’t have mistakes. And if it couldn’t have mistakes, then it obviously didn’t have mistakes. Anything that looked like a mistake, therefore, couldn’t really be a mistake, because the Bible couldn’t have mistakes. And how did I know that the Bible couldn’t have mistakes? Not on the basis of any examination or investigation of the Bible, but simply on the basis of what other people had told me, backed up by a few proof texts. I brought the belief in an error-free text to the Bible, and so naturally I found no mistakes, because there couldn’t be any.

But why should I have believed this view was true? There were plenty of other Christians who believed other things, especially at a place like Princeton Theological Seminary. It was there that I realized that since the Bible is a book, it makes better sense to approach it the way one approaches books. There are certainly books in the world that don’t have any mistakes in them. But no one would insist that a particular phone book, chemistry textbook, or car instruction manual has absolutely no mistakes in it before reading it to see whether it does or not. Rather than thinking that the Bible cannot have mistakes, before looking to see if it does, why not see if it does, and only then decide whether it could?

I know that many evangelical Christians think that this is backwards and wrong, that questioning the Bible is questioning God. But I don’t see it that way. If God created an error-free book, then the book should be without errors. If what we have is not an error-free book, then it is not a book that God has delivered to us without errors.

Moreover, as I studied the Bible I began to see the errors, here and there. And then they started to multiply. And eventually they came to involve not just little details, but very big questions and issues of real importance. I came away convinced that the Bible, whatever else it might be, is a very human book.

Human books from the ancient world sometimes contained forgeries, writings that claim to be authored by someone who did not write them. This is certainly true of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. The book of Daniel claims to be written, in part, by the prophet Daniel during the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE. But there is no way it was written then. Scholars for over a hundred years have shown clear and compelling reasons for thinking that it was written four hundred years later, in the second century BCE, by someone falsely claiming to be Daniel. So too the book of Ecclesiastes. The author of this book does not come out and say his name is Solomon, but he does say that he is the son of David, who is the king in Jerusalem, and that he is fantastically rich and wise. In other words, he is claiming to be Solomon without using his name. But there is no way he was Solomon. This book could not have been written until six hundred years after Solomon’s death, as critical biblical scholars today agree.³

Whereas there are a couple of forgeries in the Old Testament, there are numerous instances in the New Testament. So far we have considered two books that falsely claim to have been written by Peter and six that falsely claim to have been written by Paul. It is a striking phenomenon that even though scholars far and wide agree that these books were not actually written by their alleged authors, many scholars are reluctant to call the books what they are: literary forgeries meant to deceive their readers. Sometimes I think it is a bit strange that when some scholars refer to books with false authorial claims outside the New Testament, they have no qualms calling them “forgeries,” but when they refer to such books within the New Testament, they call them “pseudepigrapha.” Maybe it is better to use the more antiseptic, technical term when dealing with the Bible? Or maybe, instead, it is better to call a spade a spade. We are dealing with precisely the same phenomenon whether a book came to be included in the canon or not.

In this chapter I deal with the ways some scholars have tried to get around the problem that the New Testament contains forgeries. Sometimes they do so with explanations that have become extremely common and widespread, so much so that they sound like common sense to some people. Among other things, it is widely claimed that the practice of making false authorial claims was acceptable in philosophical schools in antiquity and so was excusable for a follower of Peter or Paul. Or it is stated that allegedly pseudepigraphal letters can be explained by thinking that Peter and Paul used secretaries to produce these writings. As we will see, there is very little evidence to support either view.⁴ Before dealing with such explanations, I need to address another point of view often asserted by scholars, that ancient authors who assumed a false identity were not actually trying to be deceitful.

Is Forgery Deceitful?

A MISTAKEN SCHOLARLY COMMONPLACE

A surprising number of scholars have claimed that even though the Bible may contain forgeries, these forgeries were never meant to deceive anyone. According to this view, ancient authors who assumed a false name were not trying to lead their readers astray. They were not lying, they were not being deceitful, and they were not condemned.

It is hard to understand how anyone who has actually read any of the ancient discussions of forgery can make such claims. But this view is so widespread that it has become a complete commonplace in New Testament scholarship. Let me give several examples of scholars who make statements of this sort, along with some interspersed comments, before emphasizing just how wrong this view is.

One highly respected author of the 1920s, in a classical study of the pastoral letters, claimed that the author, who called himself Paul even though he was someone else, “was not conscious of misrepresenting the Apostle in any way; he was not consciously deceiving anybody; it is not, indeed, necessary to suppose that he did deceive anybody.”⁵ What evidence does this scholar provide for these claims? None at all. And what a remarkable statement! If the author did not want to deceive anyone and in fact did not deceive anybody, why is it that every known interpreter of these letters for over seventeen hundred years was deceived, as many continue to be today, when they assume that the author who claims to be Paul really was Paul?

Or consider the statement of an author from the 1970s who tells us: “Pseudonymity was a frequent feature in early literature. There was nothing immoral about it; it was simply the equivalent of modern anonymity. It was a mark of humility; the author, being too diffident to write under his own name, took shelter under a better-known name.”⁶ This author is at least right about one thing: forgery is frequent in ancient literature. But is it like “modern anonymity”? This is a rather odd thing to say about the practice. Why not say it is like “ancient” anonymity? Books were written anonymously in the ancient world as well as in the modern one, more often in fact. But this raises an enormous question that this scholar can’t answer. If an author who was writing out of humility did not want to mention his own name, why didn’t he simply write anonymously? Why did he attach a false name to his work, misrepresenting himself as someone else?

Or take this comment from a scholar writing in the 1990s about the pseudonymous authorship of 2 Thessalonians: “This kind of pseudonymity should not be labeled as ‘forgery.’ This latter qualification implies a negative moral judgment, and we shall see that in all probability the author of 2 Thessalonians, and the authors of comparable pseudonymous documents, did not consider their writings as products of fraud. We should try to assess such writings by the standards that were accepted in the environment in which they originated.”⁷ This sounds like a sensible approach indeed, to evaluate the writings by ancient rather than modern standards. But this scholar never does so. He never looks at what ancient people called this practice or considers what they had to say about it. It is important to remember what ancient people called “this kind of pseudonymity”—they called books like this “falsely inscribed writings,” “lies,” and “bastards”!

Representative of this same line of thought is the work of a recent scholar who is dealing with the fact that the author of Ephesians falsely claimed to be Paul. This scholar states that such a false claim “was a widespread and accepted literary practice in both Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures…. There is no reason to think of the device of pseudonymity in negative terms and to associate it necessarily with such notions as forgery and deception.”⁸ Once again, critical readers want to know what evidence the author cites that the practice was “accepted” and that it was not associated with “forgery and deception.” But he cites none. Why? Either because the author—even though he’s an otherwise reputable New Testament scholar—is not familiar with what ancient people actually said about forgery or because he doesn’t dare cite what they said, since what they said runs counter to what he says.

Other scholars have allowed their theological views to cloud their historical judgment. Consider one of the most recent commentators on Colossians, who sees the work as a forgery, but maintains it is an “honest forgery” (as opposed to a dishonest one):

In other words, if later, second-, third-, or fourth-century orthodox Christians agreed with the views found in the book of Colossians and decided that it should be included in the Bible, then its author was an honest forger. Other authors, however, who espoused views that later Christians rejected, were dishonest forgers. And how would the authors themselves know that centuries later their views would be accepted or not? Well, obviously, they’d have no way of knowing. So their honesty or dishonesty is rooted in circumstances completely outside of their own control.¹⁰

AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE

All of the scholars I have just quoted have three things in common. All of them maintain that what I’m calling forgery—the claim of an author to be someone other than who he really is—was not a deceptive practice; all of them base their views on statements to that effect by earlier scholars rather than on an examination of the ancient sources; and all of them choose not to provide a single stitch of evidence.

That these views are wrong should be clear even from my brief examination of the ancient evidence in Chapter 1. If forgery was never thought of as wrong, why is it that in every known instance of a person being caught he is either reprimanded, abused, or punished? And if the purpose was not to deceive readers, what exactly was the purpose?

Just consider the motivations that drove authors to claim to be someone else. Some forgers did it to see if they could get away with it. Well, if no one was deceived, then how would they get away with it? Some did it to make money. But if no one was fooled, who would pay the money? Others used forgery to cast aspersions on the character of another, the person who allegedly wrote the text. But if readers knew that the alleged author wasn’t the real author, how could this tactic possibly work? Some authors forged documents for military or political ends, to convince people in the name of an authority to engage in some kind of violent action or coup. But what would be convincing if the authority turned out not to be the person he claimed to be? Other forgers, probably the majority among Christians, produced their work in the name of someone else in order to make sure that their views would get a wide circulation. But if it was known that the alleged author didn’t actually write the book—if it wasn’t really written by Plato or Peter or Paul—why would anyone bother to read the book?

You can go through all the motivations I have documented from the ancient sources. None of them makes sense if the forgery didn’t “work,” that is, if no one was fooled. And as I’ve said, the fact that people were fooled can explain the negative and sometimes violent reactions by readers who realized they had been fooled.

This is why there is another set of scholars who talk about forgery and call it what it is—an intentional deceit. These other scholars have actually read what ancient sources say about the practice. My own teacher, Bruce M. Metzger, who knew the ancient sources like the back of his hand, asked the rhetorical question of the first group of scholars I mentioned: “How can it be so confidently known that such productions ‘would deceive no one’? Indeed, if nobody was taken in by the device of pseudepigraphy, it is difficult to see why it was adopted at all.”¹¹

One of the finest German scholars to discuss forgery in the ancient world, Norbert Brox, after having surveyed all the ancient discussions, states explicitly: “Contemporary scholarship on forgery shows beyond any doubt that literary forgery even at that time raised the question of its own morality and was not at all tolerated as a common, purely routine and acceptable practice.”¹² And the leading authority of forgery in modern times, the Austrian scholar Wolfgang Speyer, indicates plainly at the very beginning of his massive study of the phenomenon: “Every kind of forgery misrepresents the facts of the case, and to that extent forgery belongs in the realm of lying and deception.”¹³

Pseudepigraphy as an Accepted Practice

OTHER SCHOLARS WHO DO not want their readers to think badly about forgeries (especially the ones in the Bible) do more than simply make blanket statements that forgers were not being deceitful. These other scholars, instead, give reasons and special circumstances under which the use of a false name was an acceptable practice in antiquity. Scholars who do so can be grouped into three major schools of thought.

PSEUDEPIGRAPHY IN THE SPIRIT

One view that was popular among scholars for years was that when an early Christian author wrote a book in someone else’s name, it was because he had been inspired to do so by the Spirit of God. When stated baldly, this sounds very much like a theological claim (and possibly not a very good one); but it is not necessarily that. You do not have to think that the Holy Spirit literally inspired a person to write this way; you could simply think that the person believed he was moved by the Spirit to write in the name of an early Christian authority. For this person who believed he was inspired, the words he wrote came from an impeccable authority (e.g., an apostle).

One of the chief proponents of this view was the German scholar Kurt Aland, who claimed that the earliest Christian “prophets” believed they were inspired by the Spirit and so spoke forth a kind of “prophetic word” whose authority was not themselves, but the Holy Spirit. Eventually Christian “authorities” began writing down these prophetic words. But an author could not write in his own name, as if his personal authority could back up an idea or words provided by the Spirit. The author, instead, was a kind of tool used by the Spirit (in the author’s belief) to convey its own message. Aland claimed:

As a result:

Despite the one-time popularity of this view among some scholars, it has never really caught on widely. For one thing, it doesn’t make sense to say that in the earliest Christian tradition authors refused to use their names, because it was the Spirit who was speaking through them. Our very first author was Paul, and he uses his own name.

Second, if authors wanted to claim that it was the Spirit speaking through them, that is, that they were not grounding their message on their own authority, why wouldn’t they simply say, “Thus says the Lord,” or “Thus says the Spirit”? Why would they claim to be some other human—Peter, or Paul, or James—knowing full well that was not who they were? That is to say, this view can explain early anonymous writings, but it doesn’t explain the one thing that it is trying to explain: early pseudonymous writings. In particular, it doesn’t explain why an author would falsely claim one name instead of another for himself. If it was the Spirit that inspired the writer, why would he call himself Peter? Why not John, or Paul, or James? Or, as I suggested, why not give no name at all? As a result, this explanation, although interesting, is simply not convincing.

REACTUALIZING THE TRADITION

The next explanation of how pseudepigraphal authorship could be seen as an acceptable practice is a bit more complicated. In a nutshell, it argues that if an author understood himself to be a later representative of points of view held by a famous earlier author (who since had died, for example), he could write a document in that person’s name. The purpose was not to claim that he really was that person, but to suggest that the views represented in the document were those of this older authority. Or at least they would be that authority’s views, if he were still living to deal with the new situation that had arisen since his death.

A technical term for this kind of procedure is “reactualizing the tradition.” A “tradition” is any point of view, teaching, or story that is passed down in writing or by word of mouth. A tradition is “reactualized” when it is made actively relevant (reactuated) to a new situation.

Suppose a highly influential author in 1917 condemned Christians who drank alcohol, on the grounds that doing so made them leave their senses and behave irresponsibly. Fifty years later, a different problem has arisen—people have started using hallucinogenic drugs. A new author wants to tell Christians that they are not to do any such thing. The new author, living in 1967, writes an essay claiming to be the famous and respected author from 1917, condemning not just alcohol consumption, but also the use of drugs. This new author stands in the tradition of the older author and makes the tradition applicable to the “actual” situation he is addressing. In other words, he has “reactualized” the tradition. By claiming the name of the author from 1917, he is not so much claiming to be that person as to be continuing the tradition of that person.

That at least is the theory, and it has been applied by some scholars to the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy in the New Testament. As one British scholar has argued, pseudonymity was “an acceptable practice, not intended to deceive,” because a pseudepigraphal author continuing an older author’s tradition “could present his message as the message of the originator of that stream of tradition, because in his eyes that is what it was…. There was no intention to deceive, and almost certainly the final readers were not in fact deceived.”¹⁵

You can probably see one of the key problems with this view. If the people who forged the New Testament letters of, say, Peter and Paul had no “intention to deceive” and did “not in fact” deceive anyone, we again are left with the problem of why everyone (for many, many centuries) was in fact deceived. For seventeen hundred years, everyone who read these letters thought that Peter and Paul wrote them. And here again we’re left with the question: What is the evidence that “reactualizing the tradition” by assuming a false name was a widely followed and acceptable practice?

The chief proponent of this view is the American scholar David Meade, who published his Ph.D. dissertation on the topic.¹⁶ Meade argues that the evidence for this practice comes from the Hebrew Bible. It was customary, he says, for writings of various authors to be passed along under the name of the person who started the tradition that they saw themselves belonging to. For example, Hebrew Bible scholars for over a century have maintained that the book of Isaiah was not composed completely by the famous Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE. Chapters 40–55, for example, were almost certainly written by someone else living a hundred and fifty years later, during the time when the nation of Judah was in captivity in Babylon.

As Meade notes, Isaiah 40–55 was transmitted as part of the book of Isaiah. But, in Meade’s view, the author of these chapters was not trying to deceive anyone into thinking he was really Isaiah of Jerusalem, from a century and a half earlier. Meade argues that he was simply claiming to belong to the same prophetic tradition as Isaiah of Jerusalem. So too the final eleven chapters of Isaiah, which were written by yet a third author, living even later. As Meade puts it, by calling these later authors “Isaiah” Jews were not making a claim about the “literary origins” of their writing (i.e., about who originally penned their books), but about their “authoritative tradition” (i.e., about which tradition—Isaiah’s—they were continuing on for the new day.)

Meade finds this kind of tradition in other parts of the Hebrew Bible as well and so concludes that, when it comes to the New Testament, authors are doing something very similar. The author of 2 Peter, who was not really Peter, claims to be Peter not because he wants people to think he is Peter. He is not meaning to lie about it. He is indicating which tradition—Peter’s—he sees himself belonging to.

A number of scholars have been attracted to this theory, since it can explain how authors could make false claims about themselves without lying about it, and it seems to fit into the ancient Jewish tradition of authorship. But there are very big problems with the theory.

For one thing, most of the evidence doesn’t actually work. We’re not sure who wrote Isaiah 40–55, other than to say that, first, it was not Isaiah of Jerusalem and, second, it was probably an Israelite living during the Babylonian captivity. We don’t know if he himself physically added his own writings to the writings of Isaiah of Jerusalem (e.g., on the same scroll) or if he simply wrote his book using many of the ideas of his predecessor. That is to say, it may be that it was someone else who put the two bits of writing together, so that the author of what is now Isaiah 40–55 wasn’t making any authorial claim at all, but was simply writing anonymously. Moreover, nowhere does the author of Isaiah 40–55 ever claim to be Isaiah. This is in stark contrast with, say, the author of 2 Peter, who claims to be Peter, or with the author of Ephesians, who claims to be Paul.

But even more problematic is the fact that writers of the first century, when the New Testament books were being written, did not know that Isaiah 40–55 was not written by Isaiah of Jerusalem. Quite the contrary, it was widely assumed that Isaiah wrote all of Isaiah! This notion that later authors were reactualizing the tradition is based on twentieth-century views of authorship of the Hebrew Bible that no one in the ancient world knew about. There is no record of anyone from the ancient world ever acknowledging this view, speaking about this view, reflecting on this view, embracing this view, supporting this view, or promoting this view. No ancient author even mentions this view. How would a first-century person such as the author of Colossians have any idea what had happened with the writings of Isaiah five hundred years earlier? He was living in a different country and speaking a different language; he was not a Jew himself; he read Isaiah in Greek rather than Hebrew; and for him all of Isaiah was written by Isaiah.

There is a yet another problem with this view. Even if it were true that the author of 2 Peter understood himself to be continuing the tradition of Peter, would that justify his claim to be Peter? What is the logic of claiming actually to be the person whose views you accept? One of the reasons this logic is faulty is that there were lots of Christians representing lots of points of view, many of which were at odds with one another. How would proponents of a tradition have reacted toward others who claimed to be from that same tradition, yet had something different to say? Just think of the author of the Pastorals, who claimed to be Paul even though he wasn’t, and the author of the Acts of Paul, who claimed to be representing Paul’s proclamation even though he wasn’t. They have just the opposite views of women and their roles in the church. Should we think, then, that early Christians who accepted the view of the Pastorals would find it acceptable for the author of the Acts of Paul to put words into Paul’s mouth that he didn’t speak? Of course not. Would the author of the Acts of Paul find it acceptable for the author of the Pastorals actually to claim to be Paul, when he wasn’t? Absolutely not. What would each of these authors have called the other? They would have called the other author a liar. And they would have labeled the other author’s books pseuda (falsehoods, lies) and notha (bastards).

PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS

One other reason Meade’s explanation of forgery fails is that most of the authors of the New Testament were not part of the Jewish tradition. They were Gentiles. So other scholars have tried to find grounds for legitimizing pseudepigraphal writings in the pagan tradition, where these authors have their roots. Such scholars sometimes claim that it was common for disciples of a philosopher to write treatises and not sign their own name, but the name of their teacher. This, it is alleged, was done as an act of humility, that authors felt that their ideas were not actually theirs, but had been given to them by the leader of their philosophical school. So, to give credit where credit was due, they attached their master’s name to their own writings.

New Testament scholars often claim that this can explain why someone claimed to be Paul when writing Colossians, Ephesians, or the pastoral letters. In one of the standard commentaries on Colossians, for example, we read the following: “Pseudonymous documents, especially letters with philosophical content, were set in circulation because disciples of a great man intended to express, by imitation, their adoration of their revered master and to secure or to promote his influence upon a later generation under changed circumstances.”¹⁷ A more recent commentator on Colossians and Ephesians states something similar: “Viewing Colossians (or Ephesians) as deutero-Pauline should not be mistakenly understood as meaning that these documents are simply examples of forgery. For example, to write in the name of a philosopher who was one’s patron could be seen as a sign of honor bestowed upon that person.”¹⁸

I should point out that, as happens so often, neither of these commentators actually provides any evidence that this was a common practice in philosophical schools. They state it as a fact. And why do they think it’s a fact? For most New Testament scholars it is thought to be a fact because, well, so many New Testament scholars have said so! But ask someone who makes this claim what her ancient source of information is or what ancient philosopher actually states that this was a common practice. More often than not you’ll be met with a blank stare.

The scholars who do mention ancient evidence for this alleged practice typically point to two major sources.¹⁹ But one of the two says no such thing. This is the third-century Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, who is alleged to have said that in the school of the ancient philosopher Pythagoras (who lived eight hundred years earlier) it was a common practice for disciples to write books and sign their master’s name to them.²⁰ This statement by Porphyry is a little hard to track down, because it is not in his surviving Greek writings; it is only in an Arabic translation of one of his works from the thirteenth century.²¹

I doubt if any of the New Testament scholars who refer to this statement of Porphyry’s has actually read it, since it is, after all, in Arabic, and most New Testament scholars don’t read Arabic. I don’t either. But I have a colleague who does, Carl Ernst, an expert in medieval Islam. I asked Professor Ernst to translate the passage for me. As it turns out, Porphyry doesn’t say anything about followers of Pythagoras writing books and then signing his name to them. Instead, he says that Pythagoras himself wrote eighty books, two hundred books were written by his followers, and twelve books were “forged” in the name of Pythagoras. The twelve books are condemned for using Pythagoras’s name when he didn’t write them. The forgers are called “shameless people” who “fabricated” “false books.” The two hundred books are not said to have been written by Pythagoras’s followers in his name; they were simply books written by Pythagoras’s followers.

This, then, is one of the two ancient references sometimes cited by scholars to indicate that the practice of writing in a master’s name was “common.” I should point out that, in Porphyry’s other writings as well as in this passage, he shows a keen interest in knowing which books are authentic and which are forged, and he condemns the forgeries, including the Old Testament book of Daniel, which he thinks could not have been written by an Israelite in the sixth century BCE.

The other reference to a tradition in the philosophical schools does say what scholars have said it says. This one is in the writings of Iamblichus, another Neoplatonic philosopher from about the same time as Porphyry. In his account of Pythagoras’s life, Iamblichus says the following: “This also is a beautiful circumstance, that they [i.e., Pythagoras’s followers] referred everything to Pythagoras, and called it by his name, and that they did not ascribe to themselves the glory of their own inventions, except very rarely. For there are very few whose works are acknowledged to be their own.”²²

There are lots of problems with taking this one statement as an indication of what “typically” happened in the philosophical schools of antiquity as a model for what the Christian authors did when claiming to be Peter, Paul, James, Thomas, Philip, and others:

As a result, the brief and casual comment by Iamblichus (who, it must be remembered, lived more than two hundred years after Paul and Peter) cannot at all be taken as evidence of what happened in the days of Pythagoras and his students (six hundred years before Paul and Peter), let alone what happened commonly in the philosophical schools, let alone what probably happened in early Christianity.²⁵

For these reasons, New Testament scholars need to revise their views about philosophical schools and their impact on the forgery practices of early Christians. There is almost nothing to suggest that there was a tradition in these schools to practice pseudepigraphy as an act of humility. I would suggest that scholars have latched onto this idea simply because it gives them a way of talking about what happened in the literary tradition of early Christianity without saying that early Christian authors were guilty of forgery.

The Secretary Hypothesis

THE THREE GROUPS OF scholars I have mentioned all think that under certain conditions pseudepigraphy was an acceptable practice in antiquity. For that reason, in these scholars’ opinion, the authors of early Christian writings should not be thought of as lying when they claimed to be someone other than who they were. There is one other school of thought to consider, one that says that in a number of cases what appears to be forgery in fact is not. The scholars who argue this are not claiming, on theological grounds, that there could be no such thing as forgery in early Christianity. They are claiming, on historical grounds, that some books that appear to be pseudonymous in fact are not. That is because the real author, who actually was who he claimed to be, used a secretary, and the secretary wrote in a different style from the author himself. Sometimes the real author may have dictated a letter word for word to a secretary. But other times he may have asked his secretary to rework his letter to improve the style. At still other times an author may have simply told a secretary to write a letter for him, so that both the contents and the style of the letter are the secretary’s, even if the ultimate “authority” for the letter is the author who is named.

This is a very popular theory; you will find it expressed everywhere in biblical commentaries on the deutero-Pauline and Petrine letters. It explains why 1 Peter seems to have a different writing style from 2 Peter. It explains why the views of the disputed “Pauline” letter of Ephesians seem to differ so radically from the views of the undisputed letter to the Romans. Virtually all of the problems with what I’ve been calling forgeries can be solved if secretaries were heavily involved in the composition of the early Christian writings. Despite the popularity of this theory, I am going to argue, once again, that it simply does not have credible evidence to back it up.

Whole books have been devoted to the question in recent years. The fullest and most exhaustive is by E. Randolph Richards, called The Secretary in the Letters of Paul.²⁶ Richards looks at all the evidence for secretaries in the ancient world. He diligently peruses the letters of the most famous letter writer of Rome, the statesman and philosopher Cicero. For most of these letters Cicero used secretaries. Richards considers all the other great figures of the empire known to have used secretaries (Brutus, Pompey, and Marcus Aurelius, for example). He looks at every reference to secretaries he can find in the ancient letters that still survive on papyrus, most of which have been discovered in Egypt over the course of the past century. And he considers what early Christian sources themselves have to say about letters and secretaries. It is a full and very useful study.

There is no doubt that the apostle Paul used a secretary on occasion. One of his secretaries tells us that he has written the letter! In Romans 16:22 we read, “I Tertius, the one who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord.” Tertius does not mean to say that he was the “author” of the letter. He was the scribe who wrote what Paul told him to write. Paul also used a scribe for his letter to the Galatians, since at the very end he tells his readers, “See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand” (6:11). Commentators are widely agreed that Paul had dictated the letter to a secretary, but here at the end he was writing the final bit himself. He used larger handwriting either because he wasn’t as skilled at writing as the secretary, because he had problems with his eyesight and so wrote larger letters, or for some other reason.

Did Paul use a secretary for all of his letters? It is impossible to say. Did the secretaries contribute to the contents of the letter? This is easier to say. Despite what scholars often claim, all of the evidence we have suggests that the answer is no. The same evidence applies to the authors of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and in fact to all the other early Christian writers.

In his study Richards argues that secretaries were used in four distinct ways for the writing of letters. Most of the time a secretary simply recorded what the author dictated to him, either slowly, syllable by syllable; in some kind of shorthand while the author spoke at natural speed; or something in between. Other times a secretary was asked by an author to correct the grammar and improve the style of what the author either wrote or dictated. On occasion, Richards claims, a secretary was a kind of coauthor who contributed his own thoughts and ideas to a letter. And sometimes, Richards states, a secretary actually composed an entire letter on behalf of the author, so that all the words and thoughts were actually the secretary’s, even if the author signed off on what he had written.

If secretaries actually did commonly, or at least occasionally, work in these latter ways, then it would make sense that different letters by the same “author” might read very differently from one another not just in writing style, but in content. So what is the evidence that it worked this way?

There is no doubt about Richards’s first category. There is abundant evidence—you can read it all in Richards’s study—that authors often dictated letters instead of writing them out themselves. When that happened, the author was really the author. He didn’t himself put pen to papyrus, but the thoughts are his thoughts, the words are his words, the grammar is his grammar. No problems there.

It is with the other three categories that we begin to have problems. One very severe problem is the nature of our evidence. Virtually all of it comes from authors who were very, very wealthy and powerful and inordinately well educated. These were the very upper class, the highest tier of the cultured elite: emperors, consuls, and senators. It is a genuine question how relevant that evidence is for people who were of the lower classes, who may have been moderately well educated, which would put them way ahead of most people of course, but far below a Cicero or a Marcus Aurelius. The papyri—that is, the surviving private letters that were written by regular folk instead of the elite of society—do not give us any help in knowing about these other three categories.

Another problem has to do with the nature of the “letters” involved. Most letters in the Greco-Roman world were very short and to the point. They were one page or less. They had very limited content. Most commonly the author would say who he was, indicate to whom he was writing, offer a brief thanks to the gods for the recipient, indicate his information or his request, and then sign off. Bam-bam-bam and done.

The reason this is a “problem” is that the letters of early Christianity that we are concerned about—the letter to the Ephesians, for example, or 1 Peter—are not like that at all. They are lengthy treatises that deal with large and complex issues in the form of a letter. They do have the stylistic features of ancient letters: the names of the author and the recipient, a thanksgiving, the body of the letter, and the closing. But they are so much more extensive than typical letters, for example, in their theological expositions, ethical exhortations, and quotation of and interpretation of Scripture. These New Testament “letters” are really more like essays put in letter form. So evidence that derives from the brief, stereotyped letters typically found in Greek and Roman circles is not necessarily germane to the “letters” of the early Christians.

With these caveats in mind, what can we say about the three other categories that Richards lays out, secretaries who improve an author’s style, who coauthor a letter, or who compose a letter? There is some evidence, though it is very limited, that secretaries occasionally were asked to improve the author’s style. The evidence is all from the very top echelons of the upper class of ancient Rome, a letter from the military commander Brutus and another from the emperor Marcus Aurelius, for example. It is difficult to know whether this procedure was used widely, or at all, outside of the circles of the ultrarich landed aristocracy.

The evidence of the other types of letters—at least as cited by Richards—is virtually nonexistent, as he himself says. When talking about the possibility that some letters were coauthored by both the author and his secretary, Richards points to one possible example, letters written by Cicero and his secretary Tiro. But Richards then discounts the suggestion that Tiro coauthored the letters with Cicero and shows why the suggestion is probably wrong. Remarkably this is the one and only example that Richards mentions before concluding, “Evidently then…secretaries were used as coauthors”! It is hard to see what makes this “evident” when he hasn’t cited a single instance of it. Maybe other scholars (or Richards himself) will eventually be able to find some evidence.

There is a similar problem with the idea that secretaries sometimes composed letters themselves for someone else. It is true that illiterate persons sometimes required the services of a scribal secretary to draw up a land deed, marriage certificate, sales receipt, or some other document, and that they occasionally (but rarely) used scribal secretaries to write brief stereotyped letters. Even the upper classes would sometimes instruct a secretary to spin off a quick stereotyped letter for them to someone, as is evidenced on several occasions by Cicero. So far as Richards’s evidence goes, it is only Cicero who did this, no one else. But drafting a brief stereotyped letter is completely different from composing a long, detailed, finely argued, carefully reasoned, and nuanced letter like 1 Peter or Ephesians. What evidence is there that essay-letters of that sort were ever handed over to a secretary to be composed? There is absolutely no evidence that I know of.

Richards hasn’t seen any evidence of it either. When Cicero asked a secretary to compose a quick stereotyped letter for him and make it look as if it came from him, Cicero, he was doing what no other person is known to have done in antiquity. As Richards himself says: “It is tempting to conclude that an author-initiated request for deception was rare indeed, perhaps singularly restricted to Cicero and to this time in his life” (i.e., when he was old, tired, and unwilling to write a letter himself).²⁷

What about other secretaries who may have composed a letter (not even a letter-essay) for another author? Again, according to Richards: “Nowhere was there any indication that an ordinary secretary was asked, much less presumed, to compose a letter for the author.” On the contrary, “without an explicit reference to the use of a secretary as a composer of a letter, this secretarial method probably should not even be considered a valid option.”²⁸ There is certainly no such explicit reference in the deutero-Pauline or Petrine letters.

I don’t know of a single piece of evidence or a single analogy to suggest that Peter or Paul used a secretary who significantly—or insignificantly, for that matter—added to the contents of the letter. That is why it is important to consider not only the style of writing, but also the contents when considering whether Paul did or did not write, say, Ephesians or 1 Timothy, or that Peter did or did not write 1 or 2 Peter. When a person claimed to write a letter, he was owning up to the contents. Sometimes a letter attributed to Paul is at odds with what Paul says elsewhere, as when Ephesians differs from Paul’s view of the resurrection of believers as found in his letter to the Romans. Since secretaries did not produce the contents of letters (at least letter-essays of this sort), a secretary could not be responsible for the difference. So Paul is probably in no way responsible for the disputed letter. Other times what one finds in a letter cannot be plausibly explained as coming from the reputed author. Whoever wrote 1 Peter, for example, was a highly educated Greek-speaking Christian who understood how to use Greek rhetorical devices and could cite the Greek Old Testament with flair and nuance. That does not apply to the uneducated, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking fisherman from rural Galilee, and it does not appear to have been produced by a secretary acting on his behalf.

As I pointed out in Chapter 2, it also helps to think concretely about how the secretary hypothesis might explain how Peter himself could have written 1 Peter. He could not have dictated the letter to a secretary, because he was not trained in Greek compositional and rhetorical techniques. Nor could he have dictated the letter in Aramaic and asked the secretary to translate it into Greek, because the letter contains sophisticated forms of argumentation and presentation that work only in Greek and presupposes knowledge of the Greek Old Testament, not the Hebrew version, which Peter himself would have been familiar with. And it does not seem possible that Peter gave the general gist of what he wanted to say and that a secretary then created the letter for him in his name, since, first, then the secretary rather than Peter would be the real author of the letter, and second, and even more important, we don’t seem to have any analogy for a procedure like this from the ancient world.

Historians have to decide what probably happened in the past. Which is more probable—a scenario that does not have any known analogy (Peter asking someone else to write the treatise in his name) or a scenario that has lots and lots of analogies, since it happened all the time? Forgeries happened all the time. Surely that’s the best explanation for what is going on here.

The same applies to the letters bearing Paul’s name that he did not write, in which the contents, not just the style, differ significantly from the views of Paul himself. These letters were not produced by secretaries. They were produced by later Christian authors claiming to be Paul. As a result, the secretary hypothesis, as promising as it looks at first glance, simply can’t explain away the forgeries of the New Testament.

Conclusion

I CAN WRAP UP these first four chapters by making a series of summary statements. There were a large number of literary forgeries in early Christianity, some of which may be found in the New Testament. These really are forgeries, books whose authors claim to be well-known authority figures, even though they were someone else. Some scholars today avoid the term “forgery” and call these writings pseudonymous or pseudepigraphal; technically speaking, these other terms are correct, but they are imprecise. Pseudonymous writings include writings produced under a pen name, and none of the writings we have been considering fall into that category. Pseudepigraphal writings include originally anonymous writings that were later wrongly attributed to well-known figures. The books we are talking about are by authors who lied about their identity in order to deceive their readers into thinking that they were someone they were not. The technical term for this kind of activity is forgery.

Forgery in antiquity was different from forgery today in some important respects, and these differences need to be constantly borne in mind. Most important, in the modern day, forgery connotes an illegal activity that can land a person in jail. In the ancient world there were no laws against such things, and so the practice should not be thought of as illegal. But this difference is not significant enough to require us to use a different term for the practice. “Books” in the ancient world, for example, were quite different from books today. They were written on scrolls and were not mass produced. Still, that doesn’t stop anyone from calling them books. Forgeries in the ancient world were different in some ways from forgeries today, but they were still forgeries.

The negative connotations of the term are appropriate to the ancient phenomenon. Ancient authors called such works falsely inscribed writings, lies, and “illegitimate children.” Multiple attempts by modern scholars to see the practice in a more positive light simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. The most common claims found widely, both among scholars and laypeople, are that this practice was widely accepted in philosophical schools or that the phenomenon can be explained by assuming that an author made use of a secretary who composed the writing himself. Neither explanation has adequate support in the ancient sources.

It is important to recall that ancient writers who mention the practice of forgery consistently condemn it and indicate that it is deceitful, inappropriate, and wrong. If we are to do so as well probably depends on a number of factors. Modern readers who are religiously committed to the teachings of the New Testament may want to excuse the authors who deceived their readers about their identity, on the grounds, for example, that they were lying in order to achieve a greater good. Other readers may be inclined to acknowledge that the authors violated ancient ethical standards and are best described as I have done so here—as forgers.