Forged (33 page)

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

W
HAT 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. Some
times, 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.

W
HEN
I
GIVE PUBLIC TALKS
about the books that did not make it into the New Testament, people often ask me about apocryphal tales they have heard. What do we know about the “lost years” of Jesus, that gap of time between when he was twelve and thirty? Is it true that he went to India to study with the Brahmins? Was Jesus an Essene? Don't we have a death warrant from Pontius Pilate ordering Jesus's execution? And so on.

Very few of the apocryphal stories that people hear today come from the ancient forgeries I have been examining in this book. Instead, they come from modern forgeries that claim to represent historical facts kept from the public by scholars or “the Vatican.” The real facts, however, are that these mysterious accounts have uniformly been exposed as fabrications perpetrated by well-meaning or mischievous writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their exposure, however, has done little to stop laypeople from believing them.

Modern Forgeries, Lies, and Deceptions

I
DISCUSS FOUR MODERN
forgeries here, just to give you a taste of the kinds of things that have been widely read. All four, and many others, are discussed and demolished in two interesting books by bona fide scholars of Christian antiquity, Edgar Goodspeed, a prominent American New Testament scholar of the mid-twentieth century, and Per Beskow, a Swedish scholar of early Christianity writing in the 1970s.
¹

T
HE
U
NKNOWN
L
IFE OF
J
ESUS
C
HRIST

One of the most widely disseminated modern forgeries is called
The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ
.
²
From this account we learn that Jesus went to India during his formative teen years, the “lost years” before his public ministry, and there learned the secrets of the East. The book made a big splash when it appeared in English in 1926; but as it turns out, it had already been exposed as a fraud more than thirty years earlier. The reading public, it is safe to say, has a short attention span.

The book was first published in France in 1894 as
La vie inconnue de Jésus Christ,
by a Russian war correspondent named Nicolas Notovitch. Almost immediately it was widely disseminated and translated. In one year it appeared in eight editions in French, with translations into German, Spanish, and Italian. One edition was published in the United Kingdom, and three separate editions in the United States.

The book consisted of 244 paragraphs arranged in fourteen chapters. Notovitch starts the book by explaining how he “discovered” it. In 1887, he was allegedly traveling in India and Kashmir, where he heard from lamas of Tibet stories about a prophet named Issa, the Arabic form (roughly) of the name Jesus. His further travels took him to the district of Ladak, on the border between India and Tibet, to the famous Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Hemis. While there he heard additional stories and was told that written records of the life of Issa still survived.

Notovitch left the monastery without learning anything further. But after a couple of days he had a bad accident, falling off his horse and breaking his leg. He was carried back to the monastery to recuperate and, while there, came to be on friendly terms with the abbot. When Notovitch inquired about the stories of Issa, the abbot agreed to give him the full account. He produced two thick volumes, written in Tibetan, and began to read them out loud to Notovitch, in the presence of a translator who explained what the texts said, while Notovitch took notes.

The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ
is the published edition of the careful notes that Notovitch allegedly took. When Jesus was thirteen, according to the account, he joined a caravan of merchants to go to India to study their sacred laws. He spent six years with the Brahmins, learning their holy books, the Vedas. But Jesus was completely disenchanted with the Indian caste system and openly began to condemn it. This raised the ire of the Brahmins, who decided to put him to death.

Jesus fled to join a community of Buddhists, from whom he learned Pali, the language of Theraveda Buddhism, and mastered the Buddhist texts. He next visited Persia and preached to the Zoroastrians. Finally, as a twenty-nine-year-old, armed with all the sacred knowledge of the East, he returned to Palestine and began his public ministry. The narrative concludes by summarizing his words and deeds and giving a brief account of his death. The story of his life was then allegedly taken by Jewish merchants back to India, where those who had known Issa as a young man realized that it was the same person. They then wrote down the full account.

Although the narrative of
The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ
may sound like a rather second-rate novel, it was published as a historically factual account and was widely believed as providing the key to the questions that Christians had long asked about the lost years of Jesus. What was he doing then? And how had he acquired such extensive and compelling religious knowledge before beginning his public ministry?

It was not long, however, before scholars interested in historical fact began to question the account and to expose it as a complex hoax. The tale was taken on by no less eminent an authority than Max Müller, the greatest European scholar of Indian culture of the late nineteenth century, who showed that the tale of the “discovery” of the book and the stories it told were filled with insurmountable implausibilities. If this great book was a favorite at the monastery of Hemis, why is it not found in either of the comprehensive catalogues of Tibetan literature? How is it that the Jewish merchants who went to India with tales of Jesus happened to meet up with precisely the Brahmins who knew Issa as a young man—out of the millions of people in India? And how did Issa's former associates in India realize, exactly, that the crucified man was their former student?

In 1894 an English woman who had read the
Unknown Life
visited Hemis monastery. She made inquiries and learned that no Russian had ever been there, no one had been nursed back to health after breaking his leg, and they had no books describing the life of Issa. The next year a scholar, J. Archibald Douglas, went and interviewed the abbot himself, who informed him that there had been no European with a broken leg in the monastery during his fifteen years in charge of the community. Moreover, he had been a lama for forty-two years and was well acquainted with Buddhist literature. Not only did he never read aloud a book about Issa to a European or to anyone else; he was certain that no such book as
The Unknown Life
existed in Tibet.

Additional internal implausibilities and inaccuracies of the story are exposed by both Goodspeed and Beskow. Today there is not a single recognized scholar on the planet who has any doubts about the matter. The entire story was invented by Notovitch, who earned a good deal of money and a substantial amount of notoriety for his hoax.

T
HE
C
RUCIFIXION OF
J
ESUS, BY AN
E
YE
-W
ITNESS

An equally interesting modern apocryphon,
The Crucifixion of Jesus, by an Eye-Witness,
deals not with the beginning of Jesus's adult
life, before his ministry, but with its ending and aftermath.
³
The account comes in the form of a letter written, in Latin, seven years after Jesus's crucifixion, from a leader of the mysterious Jewish sect of the Essenes in Jerusalem to another Essene leader who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. All elements of the supernatural are completely stripped away from the account's description of Jesus's life and death. Jesus is shown to have led a completely human life and to have died a completely human death. But not on the cross. Jesus survived his own crucifixion and lived for another six months.

The account was first published in German, in Leipzig, in 1849. English editions, all claiming to be authentic, were published in 1907, 1919, and 1975. There were also translations into French and Swedish.

The Latin letter was allegedly discovered on a parchment scroll in an old Greek monastery in Alexandria by a missionary who thought that its message was dangerous and so tried to destroy it. It was saved, however, by a learned Frenchman, who translated the account into German. The narrative was then brought to Germany by the Freemasons, understood to be modern-day descendants of the Essenes.

According to the account, Jesus himself was an Essene. When he was crucified, according to this “eyewitness,” he did not expire. He was taken from the cross and restored to life by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, fellow Essenes, who knew the secret arts of healing preserved by the sect. When the women visiting the tomb thought they saw angels, these were Essene monks wearing their white robes. The women misunderstood that Jesus had been raised, when in fact he had never died. He did die, however, six months later, from the wounds he had sustained.

It has not been difficult for scholars to expose this Gospel as another fraud. The “eyewitness,” allegedly an Essene, has no understanding of what the Essenes were really like. Today we know a good deal about this Jewish group, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were unavailable to the forger, since they were discovered nearly a century after he produced his account. Nothing in the story corre
sponds to the historical realities of the group. For one thing, there is no way an Essene in Jerusalem would write his account in Latin, of all things.

There are other considerable problems. The account indicates that it was written seven years after the crucifixion, yet it explicitly mentions, by name, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which were not written until forty to sixty years after Jesus's death. Moreover, these books were not known as a
group
of writings (“the four Gospels”) until the end of the second century. Finally the exclusion of everything supernatural in the account is a thoroughly modern, post-Enlightenment concern, not an ancient one.

And, in fact, a modern scholar has shown where this concern, and indeed the entire story, came from. In 1936, a famous German scholar of the New Testament, Martin Dibelius, demonstrated that
The Crucifixion of Jesus
was virtually lifted, wholesale, from a now rather obscure work of historical fiction written by the German rationalist K. H. Venturini,
The Natural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth
(two volumes, 1800–1802). Here too Jesus was an Essene whose life had nothing supernatural about it and who did not actually die on the cross, but was revived by Joseph of Arimathea. The author of
The Crucifixion of Jesus
simply took Venturini's two-volume work, condensed it into a readable booklet, and tried to pass it off as a historical account, when in fact it was a modern fabrication.

T
HE
D
EATH
S
ENTENCE OF
J
ESUS
C
HRIST

One of the striking and, to many people, surprising facts about the first century is that we don't have any Roman records, of any kind, that attest to the existence of Jesus. We have no birth certificate, no references to his words or deeds, no accounts of his trial, no descriptions of his death—no reference to him whatsoever in any way, shape, or form. Jesus's name is not even mentioned in any Roman source of the first century.
⁴
This does not mean, as is now being claimed with alarming regularity, that Jesus never existed. He certainly existed,
as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees, based on clear and certain evidence. But as with the vast majority of all persons who lived and died in the first century, he does not appear in the records of the Roman people.

That is why the alleged discovery of an official copy of Pilate's
Death Sentence
made such an enormous impact in Europe and the United States when it was announced in the mid-nineteenth century.
⁵
The discovery was first mentioned in the French paper
Le Droit
in the spring of 1839. It was soon exposed as a fraud, but it resurfaced again in Germany ten years later and repeatedly elsewhere, including the United States, for many decades afterward.

The
Death Sentence
was allegedly found on a copper plate discovered in the southern Italian city of Aquila, near Naples, all the way back in 1280. A group of workers was said to have been excavating for Roman antiquities, when they uncovered an ancient marble vase. Inside the vase was a copper plate inscribed in Hebrew. When the text was translated, it was found to contain an official copy of Jesus's death warrant issued by Pontius Pilate. On the reverse side were directions for the warrant to be sent to all the tribes of Israel.

The plate allegedly came to be lost, but it was rediscovered during the French occupation of the Kingdom of Naples in 1806–15. When it was published a couple of decades later, it was touted as “the most impressive legal document in existence.” In it, “Pontius Pilate, the acting governor of lower Galilee” states that “Jesus of Nazareth shall suffer death on the cross.” This is said to have happened in the seventeenth year of the reign of the emperor Tiberius (31
CE
), on March 27, “in the most holy city of Jerusalem.”

The reason for the death sentence was that Jesus had committed six crimes. He was a seducer; he was seditious; he was an enemy of the law; he falsely called himself the Son of God; he called himself the king of Israel; and he entered the Temple followed by a multitude carrying palm branches. The death warrant is signed by four witnesses: Daniel Robani, Joannus Robani, Raphael Robani, and “Capet, a citizen.”
⁶

A top-flight scholar such as Edgar Goodspeed had no difficulty exposing the entire document as a hoax. It made no sense for a Roman official to try to justify his conviction of a criminal to the Jewish people or to send the justification to the “tribes of Israel,” which had not in fact existed for many centuries. Pilate, a Roman official, would not have written in Hebrew, a language he didn't know. Pilate was not the governor of lower Galilee, but of Judea. As a non-Jew, he never would have referred to Jerusalem as “the most holy city.” March 27 is a modern form of dating unknown to the ancient world. The term “Robani,” used for three of the witnesses, appears to be a mistaken form of “Rabban,” which means “teacher” the author probably made the mistake because in direct address, such as in John 20:16, the word is spelled “Rabbouni.” Joannus is not an ancient name in any of the relevant languages. Capet is a French name. And there is no Hebrew word for “citizen.”