Forged (14 page)

Or take a completely different idea, marriage. In 1 Corinthians 7 Paul is insistent that people who are single should try to remain single, just as he is. His reason is that the end of all things is near, and people should devote themselves to spreading the word, not to establishing their social lives. But how does that square with the view in
the Pastorals? Here the author
insists
that the leaders of the church be married. In Paul's letters it is better not to be married; in the Pastorals it is required that people (at least church leaders) be married.

Or think about the basic issue of how a person is “saved.” For Paul himself, only through the death and resurrection of Jesus can a person be saved. And for the Pastorals? For women, at least, we're told in 1 Timothy 2 that they will “be saved” by bearing children. It is hard to know what that means, exactly, but it certainly doesn't mean what Paul meant!

Probably the biggest problem with accepting the Pastorals as having come from Paul involves the historical situation that they seem to presuppose. Paul, like Jesus before him, thought he was living at the very end of time. When Jesus was raised from the dead, that was the sign that the end had already started and that the future resurrection of the dead was about to take place. According to Jewish thinking the resurrection was to arrive when this age had come to an end. That's why Paul called Jesus the “first fruits of the resurrection” in 1 Corinthians 15:20. This is an agricultural metaphor. The farmhands celebrate the first day of harvest by throwing a party that night; this commemorates the “first fruits” of the harvest. And when do they go out to get the rest of the harvest? The next day—not twenty or two thousand years later. Jesus is the first fruits, because with him the resurrection has started, and very soon everyone—all the dead—will be raised for judgment. That is why Paul thinks he himself will be alive when Jesus returns from heaven (see 1 Thess. 4:14–18).

In the meantime, though, the church has to grow and survive in the world. Paul thought that in this short interim period between the resurrection of Jesus and the end of time, the Spirit of God had been given to the church and to each individual making up the church. When a person was baptized, he or she received the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13), and the Spirit gave the person a spiritual “gift.” Some of the baptized were given the gift of teaching, others of prophecy, others of healing, others of speaking in angelic tongues, others of interpreting those tongues. All of these gifts were meant to help the
Christian community function together as a unit (1 Cor. 12–14). None of the gifts was paltry or insignificant. They all mattered. Everyone in the church was equally endowed with a gift, so that in the church all were equals. Slaves were on the same level as masters, women were equal with men. That's why Paul could say, “In Christ there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). There was equality.

When problems arose in one of Paul's churches—for example, the church of Corinth, for which we have the best documentation—he wrote to deal with them. It is interesting to read his correspondence with the Corinthians. The church was in a mess. There were divisions and episodes of infighting, some members were taking others to civil court, the worship services were chaos, and there were harsh disagreements over major ethical issues, such as whether it was right to eat meat that had been sacrificed to pagan idols. Some people denied that there was to be a future resurrection, and there was gross immorality—some men were visiting prostitutes and bragging about it in church, and one fellow was sleeping with his stepmother.

To address these severe problems, Paul appeals to the church as a whole and to the individuals in it. He urges them to use their spiritual gifts for the mutual good. He appeals to them to act as a unit. He exhorts them to begin behaving in an ethical fashion. He chastises them for not accepting the proper teaching, for example, about the future resurrection.

The one thing Paul does not do is write to the leaders of the church in Corinth and tell them to get their parishioners in order. Why is that? Because there
were
no leaders of the church in Corinth. There were no bishops or deacons. There were no pastors. There was a group of individuals, each of whom had a gift of the Spirit, in this brief time before the end came.

Contrast that with what you have in the Pastorals. Here you do not have individuals endowed by the Spirit working together to form the community. Here you have the pastors Timothy and Titus. You have the church leaders: bishops and deacons. You have hierarchy,
structure, organization. That is to say, you have a different historical situation than you had in the days of Paul.

If you expect Jesus to come back soon—say, sometime this month—there is no real need for a hierarchical system of organization and leadership. You simply need to get along for the short term. But if Jesus does not return, and you need to settle in for the long haul, things will be different. You have to get organized. You have to have leadership. You have to have someone run the show. You have to have teachers who can root out the false teaching in your midst. You have to specify how people should relate to one another socially: masters to slaves, husbands to wives, parents to children. In a hierarchical system there is no equality; there is leadership. That's what you find in the pastoral letters—churches settling in for the long haul. But that's not what you find in the historical Paul. For the historical Paul, there was not going to
be
a long haul. The end was coming soon.

As I said at the outset of this discussion, some scholars have been willing to concede that 1 Timothy and Titus, which is closely tied to 1 Timothy, are pseudepigraphal, but that 2 Timothy may stem from Paul. I've tried to show that this view can't work, because whoever wrote 1 Timothy also wrote 2 Timothy. If the one is forged, so too is the other. That doesn't mean the two letters are addressing the same concerns or were written for the same purpose; it just means the same author wrote them. But one point sometimes raised is that there is so much personal information in 2 Timothy, it is hard to see how it could be forged. Why, for example, would a forger tell his alleged reader (who was not actually his reader!) to be sure to bring his cloak to him when he comes and also the books he left behind (2 Tim. 4:13)?

This objection has been convincingly answered by one of the great scholars of ancient forgery, Norbert Brox, who gives compelling evidence that this kind of “verisimilitude” (as I called it in Chapter 1) is
typical
for forgeries. Making the letter sound “homey” removes the suspicion that it's forged. The personal notices in 2 Timothy (there
are fewer in Titus and fewer still in 1 Timothy) serve, then, to convince readers that this really is written by Paul, even though it is not.
¹⁵
But why does an author forge letters like this?

Why Were the Pastoral Letters Forged?

The most obvious answer is that the author is someone facing new problems in a generation after Paul, problems that Paul himself never addressed, and he wants to deal with them in the name of an authority who will be listened to. And who in Paul's churches has greater authority than Paul himself? So the author dealt with the problem of false teachings, for example, of those propounding “myths and genealogies” in 1 Timothy and of other false teachers who claimed that the resurrection “had already happened” in 2 Timothy. He also dealt with problems involving church leadership and with problems over with the roles of women in the church. He did all this by pretending to be Paul.

Some scholars have thought that something even more precise may have occasioned these forgeries. In a very interesting and influential study, the American scholar Dennis MacDonald argues that the pastoral letters were written to oppose the views that were in circulation in the stories connected with Thecla.
¹⁶
It is true that the
Acts of Paul,
where the Thecla stories are now found, were probably written later than the Pastorals by as much as seventy to eighty years. But the stories recorded in the
Acts of Paul
had been circulating for a very long time before the presbyter in Asia Minor fabricated his account. And in remarkable ways, the views found in the Thecla stories contrast with the views advocated in the Pastorals. Could one of them have been written to authorize a contrary view under the authority of Paul?

In the
Acts of Paul,
marriage is disparaged. In the Pastorals marriage is encouraged; church leaders in fact are
required
to be married. In the
Acts of Paul
sexual activity is condemned; only by remaining chaste can you enter the kingdom of heaven. In the Pastorals sexual activity is urged; women will be saved only by having babies. In the
Acts of Paul
women—specifically Thecla—are allowed to teach and exercise authority. In the Pastorals women are to be silent and submissive; they are not allowed to teach or exercise authority. Since the pastoral letters are directly opposing the views found in the stories incorporated into the
Acts of Paul,
MacDonald argues that the letters were forged by someone who had heard the stories about Thecla and wanted to set the record straight from Paul's “true” point of view.

This is a very appealing argument, and it may be right. But for many scholars the biggest problem with it has to do with the dates of the materials. The
Acts of Paul
was probably written by the presbyter of Asia Minor some decades after the Pastorals were produced. The stories the presbyter used may have been much older, but without corroborating evidence, it is hard to say. So a different historical reconstruction may be more plausible.

It goes like this. Paul's churches were split in lots of ways, as we have seen. One of the splits involved issues of sex, sexuality, and gender. Some Pauline Christians thought that women should be treated as equals and given equal status and authority with men, since Paul did say that “in Christ there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). Other Pauline Christians thought that women were equal with men only “in Christ,” by which they meant “in theory,” not in social reality. These Christians were keen to tone down Paul's own emphasis on women, and one of them decided to write a set of letters, the Pastorals, that authorized his view in Paul's name. He had other issues he wanted to address as well: the nature of the leadership in the church, the need to suppress false teaching, the relations of slaves and masters, parents and children, and so on. He packaged all of these sundry issues in a set of letters and wrote them in the name of Paul, forging them to provide them with the authoritative voice they needed.

But not everyone was convinced and not everyone accepted these letters as coming from Paul. Remember that Marcion, for example, did not have them (it is hard to know if he was aware of them). Moreover, the other side of the split over the role of women was not destroyed by the appearance of the pastoral letters. It lived on, seeing
Paul as an opponent of marriage and of sex, but as a proponent of women. This other side told stories about Paul that supported their views, and these stories eventually came to center on one of Paul's key converts, Thecla. At one time in the second century both sets of documents were in wide circulation, the fabricated stories about Paul and Thecla and the forged letters of Paul that eventually came to be included in the New Testament.

2 T
HESSALONIANS

When I was a conservative evangelical Christian in my late teens and early twenties, there were few things I was more certain of, religiously, than the fact that Jesus was soon to return from heaven to take me and my fellow believers out of the world, at the “rapture” before the final tribulation came. We read all sorts of books that supported our view. Few people today realize that
the
bestselling book in English in the 1970s, apart from the Bible, was
The Late, Great Planet Earth,
written by the fundamentalist Christian Hal Lindsey. Based on a careful (or careless, depending on your perspective) study of the book of Revelation and other biblical books of prophecy, Lindsey wrote with assurance about what was about to transpire in the Middle East as the superpowers of the Soviet Union, China, the European Union, and finally the United States converged in a massive confrontation leading to an all-out nuclear holocaust, right before Jesus returned. All of this, we were told, had to happen before the end of the 1980s, as Scripture itself taught.

It obviously never happened. And now there
is
no Soviet Union. But that hasn't stopped people from writing about how the end will come very soon now, in our own day, at any time. On the recent book-selling front, dwarfing the sales of the Harry Potter books has been the multivolume
Left Behind
series, about those who will not be taken in the imminent rapture. These books were coauthored by Jerry Jenkins and Timothy LaHaye, the latter of whom previously enjoyed a career writing books with his wife, Beverly, about sex for Christians.

What most of the millions of people who believe that Jesus is coming back soon, in our lifetime, don't realize is that there have always been Christians who thought this about their own lifetimes. This was a prominent view among conservative Christians in the early twentieth century, in the late nineteenth century, in the eighteenth century, in the twelfth century, in the second century, in the first century—in fact, in just about every century. The one thing that all those who have ever thought this have had in common is that every one of them has been demonstrably and irrefutably wrong.

Paul himself thought the end was coming in his lifetime. Nowhere is this more clear than in one of the letters we are sure he wrote, 1 Thessalonians. Paul wrote the Christians in Thessalonica, because some of them had become disturbed over the death of a number of their fellow believers. When he converted these people, Paul had taught them that the end of the age was imminent, that they were soon to enter the kingdom when Jesus returned. But members of the congregation had died before it happened. Had they lost out on their heavenly reward? Paul writes to assure the survivors that, no, even those who have died will be brought into the kingdom. In fact, when Jesus returns in glory on the clouds of heaven, “the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who remain, will be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). Read the verse carefully: Paul expects to be one of the ones who will still be alive when it happens.