THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK I HAVE focused on “literary” forgery, a deception in which the author of a literary text claims to be someone else. We all know of other, nonliterary kinds of forgeries as well: forgeries of documents (fake wills, marriage certificates, driver’s licenses; other forms of identification), works of art, money, and so on. In all of these cases the forger intends to deceive and mislead people for his or her own purposes.

There are many other ways to deceive people, of course. Sometimes deception comes from hiding the truth, for example, by distorting or not telling the whole truth, as our president did for months during the Monica Lewinsky fiasco; or by removing evidence that can reveal the truth, as when another, earlier president, or one of his lackeys, erased crucial portions of the Watergate tapes. Sometimes deception comes from doctoring the truth, as happened when the American and British people, and possibly their elected officials, were fed misinformation about the threat to the United States posed by Iraq’s stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. Sometimes deception comes when people make excessive claims about themselves or their work, as when James Frey stated that his book Million Little Pieces was autobiographical, when in fact it was fictional, arousing the ire not only of millions of potential readers, but also of the great Oprah herself. And sometimes deception occurs when someone claims as his or her own work the work of another, for example, in instances of plagiarism, which are reaching epidemic proportions on college campuses around the country thanks to that boon and bane of modern human existence, the Internet.

All of these alternate forms of deception were available in antiquity as well, of course (well, apart from the Internet). To round out my study of forgery, I would like to consider some of them in this chapter, restricting myself specifically to literary forms of misinformation. The first is not necessarily a form of deception; it is the other kind of pseudepigraphy that I mentioned at the outset of my discussion. Whereas some pseudepigrapha—writings under a “false name”—are forgeries, others involve “false attributions” in this case someone other than the author claims that an anonymous writing was written by a well-known person, when in fact it was not. Sometimes, to be sure, that can be a form of deception (though not by the author). Other times it is just a well-intentioned mistake.

False Attributions

IT WAS A LOT more common to write a book anonymously in antiquity than it is today. Just within the pages of the New Testament, nine of the books—fully one-third of the writings—were produced by authors who did not reveal their names. When church fathers were deciding which books to include in Scripture, however, it was necessary to “know” who wrote these books, since only writings with clear apostolic connections could be considered authoritative Scripture. So, for example, four early Gospels that were all anonymous began to be circulated under the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John about a century after they were written. The book of Acts was known to have been written by the author of the Third Gospel, so it too was assigned to Luke. The anonymous book of Hebrews was assigned to Paul, even though numbers of early Christian scholars realized that Paul did not write it, as scholars today agree. And three short anonymous writings with some similarities to the Fourth Gospel were assigned to the same author, and so were called 1, 2, and 3 John. None of these books claims to be written by the author to whom they were ultimately assigned. But since the real authors made no claims for themselves, the books are not forgeries. They are simply false attributions—assuming, for the moment, that the names attached to them are not those of the people who actually wrote them.

MISATTRIBUTIONS BY MISTAKE

Often in early Christianity anonymous writings were assigned to certain authors for fairly neutral reasons—readers simply wanted to know who wrote them. Just to give a simple example, in the third and fourth centuries there was a book in circulation called Against All Heresies. The book, which we still have today, gives a description of thirty-two individuals or groups who held beliefs that the anonymous author considered false. One of the great heresiologists—that is, heresy hunters—of the early Christian centuries was Tertullian, from the early third century. Some readers of Against All Heresies came to think that even though the book was anonymous, it must have been written by him. So scribes who copied the book identified Tertullian as the author, and the book was added to the collection of Tertullian’s writings, even though it never claims to be written by him.

Modern scholars are convinced on stylistic grounds that Tertullian did not write the book. Who then did? We do know of a book with this title written by the church writer Victorinus of Pettau, who was active around the year 270 CE, half a century after Tertullian. Some scholars have thought that this is the book we have.¹ Others have argued that it was written by an unknown author seventy years earlier, in Greek rather than in Tertullian’s Latin, so that the book we now have is a translation into Latin of an originally anonymous work. The reality is that we will never know for sure. The readers and scribes in the ancient world who thought that Tertullian wrote it were almost certainly wrong, but there may not have been any ulterior motive in their assigning it to him. They may simply have made a mistake.

ATTRIBUTIONS MADE TO INCREASE THE AUTHORITY OF A WRITING

In other instances the attribution of a writing to an author may have been made in order to add greater weight to its significance. For example, one of the earliest Christian writings from outside the New Testament is a letter sent from the church of Rome to the Christians of Corinth, urging them to reinstate a group of church elders who had been unceremoniously removed from office. Traditionally the book has been known as 1 Clement. This is a long letter—sixty-five chapters in modern editions—that uses numerous scriptural and rhetorical arguments to make its point, which is that leaders of the church have divine authority and are not to be replaced at the whim or on the vote of a local congregation. Anyone who acts against the leadership of the church is doing so out of profane jealousy. The church of Corinth is to restore its leaders to their rightful place.

Even though the letter claims to be written by the “church” that is in Rome, obviously someone wrote it, not hundreds of people serving on a letter-writing committee. Eventually the letter came to be attributed to a figure we have met before in our study, Clement of Rome, allegedly the fourth bishop of Rome, who had been appointed to that office by none other than Simon Peter, Jesus’s great disciple and apostle of the church. Once the name of Clement was associated with the letter, it obviously took on greater force and persuasive power. This is not simply a lengthy exhortation written by a group of unknown and unnamed individuals. It is a book written by one of the great authorities of the early Christian church. Largely as a result of this attribution, the letter enjoyed great success in the early church. Some Christians thought that it should be included among the writings of the New Testament.²

MISATTRIBUTIONS OF THE GOSPELS

Yet other anonymous writings were, of course, later deemed to be part of the Christian Scriptures. That never happened, however, unless it was known, or at least claimed, that the books had been written with apostolic authority. This is the case of the four New Testament Gospels, all of which were originally anonymous and then later connected with the names of apostles and apostolic companions.

It is always interesting to ask why an author chose to remain anonymous, and this is never more so than with the Gospels of the New Testament. In some instances an ancient author did not need to name himself, because his readers knew perfectly well who he was and did not need to be told. That is almost certainly the case with the letters of 2 and 3 John. These are private letters sent from someone who calls himself “the elder” to a church in another location. It is safe to assume that the recipients of the letters knew who he was.

Some have thought the Gospels were like that—written by leading persons in particular congregations who did not need to identify themselves, because everyone knew who they were. But then as the books were copied and circulated, names were still not attached to them. As a result the identities of the authors were soon lost. Then later readers, rightly or wrongly, associated the books with two of the disciples (Matthew and John) and with two companions of the apostles (Mark the companion of Peter and Luke the companion of Paul).

Another option is that the authors did not name themselves because they thought their narratives assumed greater authority if told anonymously. If the Gospel stories about Jesus are claimed by a particular author, then in some sense they seem to lose their universal appeal and applicability; they are seen as one person’s version of the story, rather than “the” version of the story.

There is one reason in particular for thinking that this is what the Gospel writers had in mind. It involves the way these narratives are written. In all four Gospels, the story of Jesus is presented as a continuation of the history of the people of God as narrated in the Jewish Bible. The portions of the Old Testament that relate the history of Israel after the death of Moses are found in the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. All of these books are written anonymously. These books take the story of God’s people from their conquest of the promised land (Joshua) to their ups and downs under charismatic rulers called judges (the book of Judges) and then under a series of kings (1 Samuel–2 Kings). This biblical history includes a promise to the first truly great king, David, that he would always have a descendant on the throne ruling Israel (2 Sam. 7:14). But the history concludes with disaster, when the Babylonian armies wipe out the nation and remove the king from power (end of 2 Kings).

Many Jews expected that in the future God would fulfill his promise to David and bring a new anointed one, a new “messiah,” to rule his people Israel. The Gospels are written to show that in fact this new messiah is none other than Jesus (see Mark 1:1; John 20:30–31). To be sure, Jesus was different from the kind of messiah that other Jews were expecting.³ Rather than coming as a great king, like David, he came as a prophet speaking of the future kingdom of God. He himself would bring this kingdom not by being installed as king in Jerusalem, but by dying on the cross to bring salvation. This was a salvation not from the enemies of Israel, the Romans, but from the ultimate enemies of God, the powers of sin and death. Jesus conquered these alien powers at his death and resurrection, and he is returning soon as king of the earth.

This is the message of the Gospels, and it is portrayed in these books as continuous with the anonymously written history of Israel as laid out in the Old Testament Scriptures. This can be seen, for example, in our earliest Gospel, Mark, which begins by quoting an Old Testament series of prophecies anticipating the coming of the messiah and then introducing Jesus as the one to whom these prophecies pointed. It can be seen in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which portray the birth of Jesus as a fulfillment of the predictions of Scripture, using imagery and language heavily dependent on Old Testament narratives to give their opening stories a “biblical” feel. It can even be seen in the Gospel of John, which begins with a powerful poem about Christ’s coming into the world here at the end of time in terms highly reminiscent of the stories of the creation in the book of Genesis (Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”).

The Gospel authors, each in his own way, seem to be portraying the story of Jesus as a continuation of the story of the people of God, Israel. He is the fulfillment of all that was anticipated by the authors and prophets of the Old Testament. So it makes sense for these Gospel writers to remain anonymous, as the writers of biblical history were almost always anonymous.

The anonymity of the Gospel writers was respected for decades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never entitled, never named. Even Justin Martyr, writing around 150–60 CE, quotes verses from the Gospels, but does not indicate what the Gospels were named. For Justin, these books are simply known, collectively, as the “Memoirs of the Apostles.” It was about a century after the Gospels had been originally put in circulation that they were definitively named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This comes, for the first time, in the writings of the church father and heresiologist Irenaeus, around 180–85 CE.

Irenaeus wrote a five-volume work, typically known today as Against Heresies, directed against the false teachings rampant among Christians in his day. At one point in these writings he insists that “heretics” (i.e., false teachers) have gone astray either because they use Gospels that are not really Gospels or because they use only one or another of the four that are legitimately Gospels. Some heretical groups used only Matthew, some only Mark, and so on. For Irenaeus, just as the gospel of Christ has been spread by the four winds of heaven over the four corners of the earth, so there must be four and only four Gospels, and they are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.⁴

Modern readers may not find this kind of logic very compelling, but it is not difficult to see why orthodox writers like Irenaeus wanted to stress the point. Lots of Gospels were in circulation. Christians who wanted to appeal to the authority of the Gospels had to know which ones were legitimate. For Irenaeus and his fellow orthodox Christians, legitimate Gospels could only be those that had apostolic authority behind them. The authority of a Gospel resided in the person of its author. The author therefore had to be authoritative, either an apostle himself or a close companion of an apostle who could relate the stories of the Gospel under his authority. In the year 155, when Justin was writing, it may still have been perfectly acceptable to quote the Gospels without attributing them to particular authors. But soon there were so many other Gospels in circulation that the books being widely cited by orthodox Christians needed to be given apostolic credentials. So they began to be known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Why were these names chosen by the end of the second century? For some decades there had been rumors floating around that two important figures of the early church had written accounts of Jesus’s teachings and activities. We find these rumors already in the writings of the church father Papias, around 120–30 CE, nearly half a century before Irenaeus. Papias claimed, on the basis of good authority,⁵ that the disciple Matthew had written down the sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew language and that others had provided translations of them, presumably into Greek. He also said that Peter’s companion Mark had rearranged the preaching of Peter about Jesus into sensible order and created a book out of it.⁶

There is nothing to indicate that when Papias is referring to Matthew and Mark, he is referring to the Gospels that were later called Matthew and Mark. In fact, everything he says about these two books contradicts what we know about (our) Matthew and Mark: Matthew is not a collection of Jesus’s sayings, but of his deeds and experiences as well; it was not written in Hebrew, but in Greek; and it was not written—as Papias supposes—independently of Mark, but was based on our Gospel of Mark. As for Mark, there is nothing about our Mark that would make you think it was Peter’s version of the story, any more than it is the version of any other character in the account (e.g., John the son of Zebedee). In fact, there is nothing to suggest that Mark was based on the teachings of any one person at all, let alone Peter. Instead, it derives from the oral traditions about Jesus that “Mark” had heard after they had been in circulation for some decades.

Eventually, though, it came to be seen as necessary to assign authors’ names to the four Gospels that were being most widely used in orthodox circles, to differentiate them from the “false” Gospels used by heretics. The process is not hard to detect for the First and Fourth Gospels. Since it was thought that Matthew had written a Gospel (thus Papias), one of the Gospels was called by his name, the one thought to be most Jewish in its orientation, since Matthew was, after all, a Jew. The Fourth Gospel was thought to belong to a mysterious figure referred to in that book as “the Beloved Disciple” (see, e.g., John 20:20–24), who would have to have been one of Jesus’s closest followers. The three closest to Jesus, in our early traditions, were Peter, James, and John. Peter was already explicitly named in the Fourth Gospel, and so he could not be the Beloved Disciple; James was known to have been martyred early in the history of the church and so would not have been the author. That left John, the son of Zebedee. So he was assigned the authorship of the Fourth Gospel.

Some scholars have argued that it would not make sense to assign the Second and Third Gospels to Mark and Luke unless the books were actually written by people named Mark and Luke, since they were not earthly disciples of Jesus and were rather obscure figures in the early church. I’ve never found these arguments very persuasive. For one thing, just because figures may seem relatively obscure to us today doesn’t mean that they were obscure in Christian circles in the early centuries. Moreover, it should never be forgotten that there are lots and lots of books assigned to people about whom we know very little, to Philip, for example, Thomas, and Nicodemus. Furthermore, Mark was far from obscure; he was at one time Paul’s companion and was thought to be Peter’s right-hand man, so that what he wrote could be trusted to be Peter’s version of the Gospel. This connection is made not only in Papias, but eventually in the writings of Tertullian, who states explicitly: “That which Mark published may be affirmed to be Peter’s, whose interpreter Mark was.”⁷

With respect to the Third Gospel, it should be remembered that its author also wrote the book of Acts, and there he implicitly claims to have been a companion of Paul’s. Because Acts stresses that Christianity succeeded principally among Gentiles, the author himself may have been a Gentile. Since there was thought to be a Gentile named Luke among Paul’s companions, he was assigned the Third Gospel.

The authority of the Gospels was then secure: two of them were allegedly written by eyewitnesses to the events they narrate (Matthew and John), and the other two other were written from the perspectives of the two greatest apostles, Peter (the Gospel of Mark) and Paul (the Gospel of Luke). It does not appear, however, that any of these books was written by an eyewitness to the life of Jesus or by companions of his two great apostles.⁸ For my purposes here it is enough to reemphasize that the books do not claim to be written by these people and early on they were not assumed to be written by these people. The authors of these books never speak in the first person (the First Gospel never says, “One day, Jesus and I went to Jerusalem…”). They never claim to be personally connected with any of the events they narrate or the persons about whom they tell their stories. The books are thoroughly, ineluctably, and invariably anonymous. At the same time, later Christians had very good reasons to assign the books to people who had not written them.

As a result, the authors of these books are not themselves making false authorial claims. Later readers are making these claims about them. They are therefore not forgeries, but false attributions.

OTHER FALSE ATTRIBUTIONS

Very much the same can be said about the remaining anonymous books of the New Testament. Scholars are highly unified in thinking that Paul did not write the book of Hebrews, even though it was included in the canon of the New Testament by church fathers who thought that it was.⁹ The letters 1, 2, and 3 John sound in many ways like the Gospel of John, but they are strikingly different as well, especially in the historical context they presuppose. They were probably not written by the same author, who was not John the son of Zebedee in any event, but by a later Christian living in the same community, which had begun to experience a different range of problems from those presupposed in the Fourth Gospel. Later Christian writers who accepted the books as sacred authorities needed to assign them to an apostle, however, and so it made sense to claim that they, like the Fourth Gospel, had been written by John the son of Zebedee.

Assigning anonymous books to known authorities did not stop with the writings of the New Testament. Just to give one additional example, I might mention one of the most interesting books not to make it into the canon of Scripture. For centuries there were Christians who thought the book should be included. I think we can all be glad that it was not. This book provides one of the most vitriolic attacks on Jews and Judaism from early Christianity. Had it been included in Scripture, Jewish-Christian relations may well have turned out even worse, if that can be imagined, than they did. This book was originally written anonymously, but it later came to be attributed to one of Paul’s closest companions and co-workers and so is known as the Epistle of Barnabas.¹⁰

This book is somewhat like a letter in that its author addresses a group of readers, but it is really more like an extended essay. The point of the book is to show the superiority of Christianity to the Jewish religion. The author makes this point by maligning Judaism as a religion that is and always has been false, all the way back to the time of Moses himself. That is because, according to this author, the ancient Israelites broke the covenant that God made with them at the very beginning, when Moses was given the Ten Commandments. When Moses descended from Mount Sinai with commandments in hand, he saw that the people had already committed idolatry. In anger he threw the two tablets of the law down, smashing them into bits. According to the author of Barnabas, this represented the breaking of the covenant (4.7–8; 14.1–4). And God never did renew the covenant with the Jews. They were lost from that day on.

The Jews, of course, were given more laws by Moses, including a new set of the Ten Commandments. But since they had alienated themselves from God, they never understood these laws and made the fatal mistake of assuming that God meant them to be taken literally instead of figuratively. As a result the Jews had always misinterpreted their own laws. When God orders the Jews not to eat swine, for example, he does not literally mean for them to avoid pork. He means that people should not behave like swine, grunting loudly when hungry, but being silent when full. People should turn to God with their prayers not only when they are in need, but also when things are good (10.1–3).

So too when God commands that the day of the Sabbath be observed, he does not mean that everyone should be lazy one day of the week. The seventh “day” needs to be understood symbolically, bearing in mind that “with the Lord a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day.” The Sabbath commandment means that the Sabbath day, the millennium, should be looked forward to and anticipated by God’s people. The creation will last for six days—six thousand years—after which there will be a thousand-year period on earth in which God and his people will rule supreme. Jews misunderstood this message and foolishly assumed that God meant for them not to work on Saturdays (15.1–9).

Barnabas goes through a number of the laws of the Old Testament to show that God never intended them to be followed literally, but to be understood figuratively. Since Jews never understood the point, they never were the true people of God. It is the followers of Jesus who have the true interpretation of Scripture. As a result, Jews are not God’s people; Christians are. And the Old Testament is not a Jewish book, but a Christian one.

This “letter” was originally published anonymously, possibly because the first readers knew full well who had written it. It could not have been written by one of Paul’s closest co-workers and companions, Barnabas, because it did not appear until many years after his death—it is usually dated to 130–35 CE. But why was it eventually attributed to him? No one knows for sure, but I think a good case can be made that some readers of the book wanted to make a particular point by the attribution, a point related to the arguments going on in Christianity in the second century, some fifty years or so after the book was written.

In the later second century one of the biggest threats facing “orthodox” Christianity was the worldwide church established by Marcion and his followers. If you’ll remember, Marcion had claimed Paul’s authority for his view that there were two Gods, the inferior wrathful God of the Old Testament and the superior loving God of Jesus. Paul was thought to be the true representative of Jesus’s message, the one who understood that salvation comes apart from the Jewish law. Marcion took Paul’s differentiation between the gospel of Christ and the law of the Jews to an extreme, so that there was in fact no connection between them. Christ represented a different God. The Old Testament God, the God of the Jews, the creation, and the law, was to be escaped by Christians, not worshiped by them.

Marcion therefore rejected the Old Testament entirely, claiming that it had nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus. The Epistle of Barnabas takes a different perspective. In fact, one could argue that it takes precisely the opposite perspective. Here, rather than having nothing to do with Christianity and the message of Jesus, the Old Testament has everything to do with them. It is the Christian book par excellence, because it proclaims the gospel of Christ—figuratively.

Why then assign the book to Paul’s closest companion? Because by doing so the book becomes the perspective of the real Paul, as opposed to the Paul of Marcion, who allegedly had nothing to do with the Old Testament and its laws. Now Paul, by association through Barnabas, proclaims the true message. The Old Testament in fact is Scripture. It is truth from God. It is a proclamation of the gospel of Christ. It is a fully Christian book.

By assigning this popular tractate to Barnabas, then, opponents of Marcion were able to claim Paul for their view and to show that the apostle stood for an understanding of Christianity that was very much at odds with the views set forth by the chief heretic of the second century, who had claimed Paul as his own.

Fabrications

AS I’VE INDICATED, A false attribution is not necessarily a deception; it may simply have been a mistake or someone’s “best guess” about the author of an anonymous work. My hunch is that most writers who claimed that a particular, famous person was the author of this or that writing probably believed it was true, whether or not they knew it to be true. The same thing decidedly cannot be said about forgers. Whoever wrote 1 Timothy knew full well that he wasn’t really the apostle Paul. He made that part up.

Other kinds of literature are “made up” as well. As with false attributions, however, it is not always clear that the person who writes this literature knows that it is made up. He may think that what he says is accurate. When this involves historical narratives, he may think that what he says is historically factual, even if his account is in fact legendary. But at some point, someone ultimately, always, comes up with a legendary account. Of course it is always possible that even in such cases the author who comes up with the story may think it really happened. And sometimes stories just seem to appear out of nowhere. But in many cases, surely the person who makes up the story knows what he is doing.

We have seen a number of made-up stories already in books that were forged. Whoever forged the Gospel of Peter wrote the account of Jesus emerging from the tomb so tall that his head reached above the skies, with a walking, talking cross emerging behind him. This is not a historical narrative; it is fiction. I would call it a “fabrication,” that is, a “made-up story that tries to pass itself off as historical.”

In many instances, fabrications are disseminated by anonymous authors who are not forgers. This was the case, for example, with the accounts found in the Acts of Peter, which tells stories of Peter’s miracle-working contests with Simon the Magician, in which he performs such astounding feats as raising a smoked tuna from the dead. These “historical” narratives are in fact fabrications. Whoever first came up with them—whether the author of the text or someone who told the story orally before the author heard it—was telling something that he possibly (likely? probably?) knew was not historically accurate. So too with the Acts of Paul (or the Acts of Paul and Thecla), where Paul is said to have preached a distinctive gospel of salvation that said a person is made right with God not through Jesus’s death and resurrection, but by living a chaste life, avoiding all sexual activity.

As with ancient myths (as mentioned in Chapter 2), it is often difficult to know whether readers of such stories took them as historical accounts, or simply as entertaining narratives, or as something else. But in many instances it is clear that some readers understood such stories to be “false” tales, since they were so vociferously opposed in some circles. One need think only of Serapion’s reaction to the Gospel of Peter (see Chapter 2) or Tertullian’s harsh words about the Acts of Paul (Chapter 3). In both cases the contents of the story were seen as objectionable and the account was charged with having been falsely fabricated in order to promote false understandings of the faith.

This shows that for some ancient readers, at least, such historical fabrications were not thought of simply as innocuous fictions, but either as false tales, in that they did not convey the “truth,” or as false histories, in that that they narrated events that did not actually happen. In either case, in the views of their opponents they were harmful fabrications. Whether harmful or not, numerous fabrications circulated in the early church about Jesus and those connected with him: his family, his disciples, and his other acquaintances. We have scores of such stories from the first four centuries of the church.

THE PROTO-GOSPEL OF JAMES

One of the most historically influential set of such tales comes in a book called the Proto-Gospel of James.¹¹ The Proto-Gospel was enormously popular among Christians throughout the Middle Ages—even more popular than many books of the Bible. It had a significant impact on the Christian imagination and on Christian art.¹² Readers have called it a proto-Gospel, because it mainly narrates events that transpired prior to the accounts of Jesus’s birth and life found in the New Testament Gospels. The book largely concerns Jesus’s mother, Mary, her birth and early life, her conception and giving birth to Jesus. I have said it is forged, because it falsely claims to have been written by Jesus’s half brother James, who in this account is the son of Joseph from a previous marriage. There are debates about when the book was first written, but since it appears to know the Gospels of Matthew and Luke from the end of the first century and appears to be referred to by the theologian Origen at the beginning of the third century, it is often dated sometime in the mid to late second century.

One of the chief questions driving this narrative concerns Mary’s suitability for her role as the mother of the Son of God. Surely Jesus’s mother was no ordinary person! And in this story, Mary is anything but ordinary. Her own birth is miraculous. Her mother, Anna, is barren, but miraculously conceives as a result of her prayers and the prayers of her husband, the wealthy aristocratic Jew Joiachim. As a young child Mary is inordinately special. Devoted to God from birth, she is taken by her parents to the holy Jewish Temple as a three-year-old and is raised there by the priests, who do not need even to feed her, since she receives her daily food from the hand of an angel.

When she is about to reach puberty, Mary can no longer remain in the Temple, presumably because menstruation was thought to bring ritual impurity. So the priests gather to decide how to find her a husband. Instructed by God, they have all the unmarried men of Israel come together, each of them bringing a wooden rod. The high priest gathers all the rods and takes them into the sanctuary. The next day he redistributes them to each man, and a great sign appears. A dove emerges from Joseph’s rod, flies around, and lands on Joseph’s head. He is thus the one chosen to take the young Mary as wife.

But Joseph is highly reluctant, since he is an old man who already has grown sons, and surely he will become a laughingstock among his fellow Israelites if he marries such a young girl. The high priest convinces Joseph that he has no choice, and so he takes Mary in marriage.

The stories about Mary and Joseph continue, often amplifying the accounts found in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke (the only two New Testament Gospels that speak about the birth of Jesus), sometimes giving completely new stories. None is as odd or memorable as the account of what happens immediately after Mary gives birth to Jesus outside of Bethlehem. Joseph is said to have gone off to find a midwife who can assist at the birth. He finds one, but they arrive too late. Coming to the cave where Mary had been left, they see a bright light and then an infant appearing out of nowhere. The midwife is immediately convinced that this has been a miraculous birth and runs off to find a companion, Salome, who refuses to believe that a virgin has given birth. She comes to the cave and decides to give Mary a postpartum inspection to see if her hymen has remained intact. It has indeed, to no surprise to readers. But Salome’s hand begins to burn as if it has caught fire. This is her punishment for refusing to believe in the power of God at the birth of Jesus. When she prays to God and asks for forgiveness, she is told to pick up the child. When she does so, her hand is healed.

Numerous other tales of the miraculous are found in the account, all of them, of course, originating in the pious imaginations of later storytellers or the author of the account rather than in historical events. These are not accurate accounts of events that actually transpired, but later stories put in the guise of historical narrative. Were they read as historical accounts or simply as entertaining narratives? A case can be made that they were read both ways. Some Christians based serious theological claims on them, such as the doctrine of the “perpetual virginity of Mary,” that is, the view that Mary remained a virgin even after giving birth to Jesus. Such Christians certainly thought these accounts were “true,” and surely many (most?) of them believed the events that they narrate really happened.

THE GOSPEL OF PSEUDO-MATTHEW

The same can be said of the stories found in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. It is called this because it was thought in the Middle Ages to have been written by Matthew himself. Originally, however, the book was a heavily reworked version of the Proto-Gospel. It too claimed to have been written by Jesus’s half brother James.¹³

Among the more interesting accounts of this narrative are the miracles Jesus performs when the Holy Family flees to Egypt after his birth. We learn, for example, that en route they stop to rest outside a cave. To the terror of Joseph and Mary, out of the cave come a troop of dragons. The two-year-old Jesus, however, is not the least bit afraid. He waddles and stands before the fearsome beasts. When they see who he is, they bow down in worship before him. The author tells us that this fulfilled the predictions of Scripture: “Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet in the Psalms, who said, ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, O dragons and all the places of the abyss,’” a reference to the Greek version of Psalm 148:7.

Later on their journey, the family stops to rest under a palm tree, and Jesus’s mother, Mary, looks wistfully at the fruit in the high, upper branches, wishing there were a way to get some to eat. Joseph upbraids her, since there is obviously no way to climb the tree. But the young Jesus intervenes and orders the tree to bend down to give its precious fruit to his mother. And it does so. Mary eats to her heart’s content, and Jesus blesses the tree for its obedience, telling it that as a reward one of its branches will be carried to heaven and planted in paradise. Straightaway an angel descends and removes a branch to take it to its new heavenly home.

Once the family arrives in Egypt they have no place to stay, and so they go for shelter into a pagan temple. Inside this temple are 365 idols representing the gods who are to be worshiped, one for each day of the year. But when Jesus enters, the idols all fall over on their faces in obeisance to the true divinity in their midst. Once the local ruler learns what has happened, he comes himself and worships the child, telling all his friends and his entire army that now the Lord of all the gods has come into their midst.

THE INFANCY GOSPEL OF THOMAS

At roughly the time the Proto-Gospel of James was starting to circulate, another fabricated account of Jesus appeared, today known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.¹⁴ Driving this narrative is a question that has been asked by numerous Christian throughout the ages: If Jesus was the miracle-working Son of God as an adult, what was he like as a child? The Infancy Gospel contains stories about Jesus between the ages of five and twelve.

The account begins with Jesus as a five-year-old playing by a stream near his home in Nazareth. The young Jesus gathers some of the water of the stream into a pool and orders it to become pure. And it does so, by his word alone. Jesus then stoops down and forms twelve birds out of the mud. A Jewish man who is walking by becomes upset, because it is the Sabbath and Jesus has violated the law by “working.” The man heads off to tell Joseph what his son has done, and Joseph rushes to the stream to upbraid the boy for breaking the Sabbath. In response, Jesus claps his hands and cries out to the birds to come to life and fly away, and they do so. Here Jesus is shown to be above the law and to be the lord of life. Beyond that, he has gotten off the hook with his father by destroying, in effect, any incriminating evidence. Mud birds? What birds?

Another child who is playing beside Jesus takes a branch and scatters the water he has carefully gathered together. This angers the young Jesus, who tells the boy, “You unrighteous, irreverent idiot! What did the pools of water do to harm you? See, now you also will be withered like a tree, and you will never bear leaves or root or fruit.” The child immediately withers on the spot.

In the next story Jesus is said to be walking through his village when another child runs up to him and accidentally bumps him on the shoulder. Jesus is irritated and says to the boy, “You’ll go no farther on your way.” And the child falls down dead. The parents of the boy carry him off with some harsh words for Joseph: “Since you have such a child, you cannot live with us in the village. Or teach him to bless and not to curse—for he is killing our children!”

Eventually Joseph decides that Jesus needs to receive an education, and on three occasions he sends him off to teachers who try to instruct him, but to no effect. In one instance the teacher tries to teach Jesus the alphabet, in Greek, and practices reciting with him. But Jesus will not respond, until finally he says to the teacher, “If you are really a teacher and know the letters well, tell me the power of the Alpha [i.e., the first letter of the alphabet], and I will tell you the power of the Beta [the second letter].” The teacher gets angry and smacks Jesus upside the head. Big mistake. Jesus curses him, and he dies on the spot. Joseph takes Jesus back home with instructions to Mary: “Do not let him out the door; for those who anger him die.”

Eventually, however, Jesus starts using his power not to harm, but to help: raising children from the dead, curing his brother James of a deadly snakebite, and proving to be remarkably handy with his miraculous skills around his father’s carpenter shop. The account ends with Jesus as a twelve-year-old in the Temple in Jerusalem, showing his intelligence and spiritual superiority in his discussions with the teachers of the law, a story otherwise known from the Gospel of Luke.

It is hard to know what to make of these stories of Jesus the wunderkind.¹⁵ Some modern readers have thought that they portray Jesus in a very negative light indeed. But it is not clear that early Christian readers would have seen them that way. The stories may have been designed simply as good Christian entertainment. Or they may have been serious attempts to show how the miracle-working Son of God was active and filled with divine power even in the early years, long before his public ministry.

FABRICATIONS WITHIN THE CANON

It should not be thought that Christians started fabricating stories about Jesus only after the New Testament was completed. In fact, there can be little doubt that some accounts were manufactured in the early years of the Christian movement. Some of these fabrications made their way into the New Testament.

We could go to great lengths to talk about New Testament narratives that purport to present historical events, but are in fact invented stories. Such narratives can be found among the stories about Jesus’s birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection as well as in stories about his followers, such as Peter and Paul, after his death in the book of Acts.

With regard to the stories of Jesus’s birth, one does not need to wait for the later Gospels, mentioned above, to begin seeing the fabricated accounts; they are already there in the familiar versions of Matthew and Luke. There never was a census under Caesar Augustus that compelled Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem just before Jesus was born; there never was a star that mysteriously guided wise men from the East to Jesus; Herod the Great never did slaughter all the baby boys in Bethlehem; Jesus and his family never did spend several years in Egypt. These may sound like bold and provocative statements, but scholars have known the reasons and evidence behind them for many years. Since I devote considerable attention to them—and to other fabricated accounts of the Gospels—in another recent book, however, I will not go into the details here.¹⁶

It is almost impossible to say whether the people who made up and passed along these stories were comparable to forgers, who knew full well that they were engaged in a kind of deception, or whether they, instead, were like those who falsely attributed anonymous books to known authors without knowing they were wrong. My guess is that most of the people who told these stories genuinely believed they happened. Even so, we should not say that these storytellers were not involved in deception. They may not have meant to deceive others (or they may have!), but they certainly did deceive others. In fact, they deceived others spectacularly well. For many, many centuries it was simply assumed that the narratives about Jesus and the apostles—narratives both within and outside the New Testament—described events that actually happened. Most readers still read the canonical accounts that way. But many of these stories are not historical narratives. They are, instead, fabricated accounts, whether made up intentionally in order to prove a point or simply brought into being, somehow, when Christians passed along “information” about Jesus and those connected to him.

Falsifications

IN 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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ 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.¹⁹

Plagiarism

PLAGIARISM 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.”²⁰

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.”²¹ 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.”²²

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.”²³

In a number of places the historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius speaks of philosophers and literary authors who tried to pass off the works of others as their own, “stealing” them and publishing them as if they themselves had written them. This was true, he indicates, of a disciple of Socrates named Aeschines, who took several of Socrates’s dialogues from his widow and claimed that they were his own compositions. It was also true of Heraclides, whom we met in Chapter 1, who “stole” an essay from another scholar about the ancient Homer and Hesiod and published it as his own. And it was true of the philosopher Empedocles, who was excluded from attending the lectures of the famous sixth-century BCE Pythagoras, because he was “convicted at that time of stealing his discourses.”²⁴

Like forgery, plagiarism is deceptive, because it intends to lead readers astray. But in another sense plagiarism can be seen as the flip side of forgery. Forgers write their own words and claim they are the words of another; plagiarists take the words of another and claim they are their own.

It is an interesting question whether ancient scholars would have accused some of the early Christian writers of plagiarism. The issues tend to be complicated by the fact that possible instances of plagiarism involve borrowed texts that are anonymous; moreover, the plagiarists themselves often do not actually identify themselves by name, but are either anonymous or claim to be someone else. Can a forger plagiarize? Maybe so.

If so, what are we to say of the book of 2 Peter? Scholars have long recognized that chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3 sound very much like the book of Jude, in its vitriolic attack on false and highly immoral persons who have infiltrated the Christian church. Very close similarities exist between Jude 4–13, 16–18 and 2 Peter 2:1–18; 3:1–3. There are not many extensive exact verbal repetitions, but they share many of the same ideas, thoughts, and often words. If a modern student simply rewrote a text by changing many of the words but keeping all the ideas, without acknowledging her source, she could well be considered to have plagiarized. But perhaps the issue is not so clear-cut in this case.

What, then, about the Gospels? Scholars since the nineteenth century have argued that the reason Matthew, Mark, and Luke are so much alike—telling many of the same stories, usually in the same sequence, often in precisely the same words—is that they used the same sources. In fact, it is everywhere recognized today that one of them was a source for the other two. Almost all scholars think that Mark was used by Matthew and Luke. Some scholars continue to hold to the view that Matthew was the source for Mark and Luke, but that is very much a minority position. In either case, we have one document that is taken over by others, frequently verbatim. It is true that none of the authors names himself. To that extent the later authors are not, strictly speaking, plagiarizing, in that they are not publishing someone else’s work under their own name. But they are taking over someone else’s work and publishing it as their own. Ancient scholars who spoke about this phenomenon would have called this “stealing.” In modern parlance it is perhaps best to call it a kind of plagiarism.

There are other instances of the phenomenon from outside the New Testament. I mentioned earlier in this chapter, for example, that the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew takes over the narrative of the Proto-Gospel of James, publishing it in an edited form (sometimes heavily edited, but in other places hardly edited at all), without acknowledging where the story came from. This is comparable in many ways to what the authors of the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke did with Mark. Another book I mentioned in Chapter 1, the Apostolic Constitutions, is even more flagrant, taking over virtually wholesale three documents from earlier times, the Didache, from around the year 100, the Apostolic Tradition, from the late second century, and the Didascalia, from the third, combining them together into one large document, and publishing it as if it had been information handed down directly from the apostles. But it was not; it was taken over—stolen, to use the ancient parlance—from earlier writings of the Christian tradition.

Conclusion

WHAT CAN WE SAY in conclusion about the forms of deception we have considered in this chapter? False attributions, fabrications, falsifications, plagiarism—they all, indeed, involve deceptive practices. Readers who read books that had been wrongly ascribed to apostles or their companions, or that contained stories that were made up, or that presented texts that had been altered by scribes, or that contained passages or entire accounts that were “stolen” from the writings of earlier authors without acknowledgment—readers of all such materials were deceived in one way or another. Some were deceived into thinking that what they read was really composed by the people claimed as their authors; others were misled to think that the historical events that were narrated were actual historical occurrences. In every case they were wrong. They had been deceived. Just as people continue to be deceived, when they think, for example, that the tax collector Matthew wrote the First Gospel, that Paul told women that they had to be silent in church, or that the author of 2 Peter came up with the ideas and phrases found in his second chapter himself.

One key aspect of forgery, however, does not appear to be involved in every instance of these other forms of deception. Forgery almost always involves a flat-out lie. Forgers claim to be someone else, knowing full well their own real identity. That is not always the case with the comparable phenomena I have been discussing here. Sometimes anonymous works were simply attributed to people who were thought to have written them, and it was all a mistake. Sometimes, possibly, stories were innocently fabricated, just as historically inaccurate stories are made up all the time, without any intention to deceive. Sometimes scribes altered the texts they were copying by accident without meaning to do so.

But other instances probably involved a good deal of intentionality. A theologian who wanted to convince his opponents that his views were those of the apostles may well have claimed that the Fourth Gospel was written by John, without knowing if that was true or not. A storyteller who made up an account about Jesus in order to prove a point may well have known that he was passing off a fiction as a historical event. A scribe who wanted a text to say something other than what it did may well have changed the text for just that reason. In some cases it is hard to imagine how else the resultant deception could have come about. Whoever added the final twelve verses of Mark did not do so by a mere slip of the pen.

In sum, there were numerous ways to lie in and through literature in antiquity, and some Christians took advantage of the full panoply in their efforts to promote their view of the faith. It may seem odd to modern readers, or even counterintuitive, that a religion that built its reputation on possessing the truth had members who attempted to disseminate their understanding of the truth through deceptive means. But it is precisely what happened. The use of deception to promote the truth may well be considered one of the most unsettling ironies of the early Christian tradition.