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

Gospels, placed invented speeches on the lips of their protagonists, they were doing what was widely done throughout antiquity. Some writers approved the practice and others demurred.
    Speeches and documents are not the only kinds of fabrications in historical writing. Often writers—historians, essayists, polemicists, or most anyone else—fabricated narratives of all sorts about real and fictitious characters: events, episodes, activities, controversies, practices, and on and on. We have seen a small sliver of this kind of fabricating narrative already with Epiphanius, who appears to have invented the ritual practices of the Phibionites, possibly based on his slight knowledge of their theological views, precisely in order to malign them. In generating such fabricated accounts, Epiphanius stood in a solid line of tradition that goes back as far as our earliest heresiologists. The harsh but undocumented invectives of the letter of Jude in the New Testament come to be fleshed out in its later ideological successors, such as Irenaeus, whose
Adversus Haereses
is the first proto-orthodox heresiological treatise to survive, and which is famous for its accusations against the shocking sexual practices of, for example, the Valentinians, Carpocratians, and Marcosians that I have already mentioned. As I suggested earlier, if one considers the rigorous ethic endorsed by the Gnostic sources themselves, it seems unlikely that any of the charges represent accurate representations; they are more likely fabricated.
    Not all early Christian fabrications were malicious, of course. Long before we have any written texts of any kind, stories about Jesus were not only altered in the course of oral transmission, but also generated then: stories about his birth, his activities, his teachings, his controversies, his last days, his death and resurrection. And the fabrications continued long after the New Testament period, as so abundantly and irrefutably attested in the noncanonical accounts of his birth, life, death, and resurrection. And of his afterlife, as in Tertullian’s claim that:
    So Tiberius, in whose reign the name of Christian entered the world, hearing from Palestine in Syria information which had revealed the truth of Christ’s divinity, brought the matter before the Senate, with previous indication of his own approval. The Senators, on the ground that they had not verified the facts, rejected it. Caesar maintained his opinion and threatened dire measures against those who brought accusations against the Christians. 70
    This fabricated account was easily believed by later Christians; it is reiterated by Eusebius (
H.E
. 2.2.2). Further examples could be effortlessly multiplied many times over, for instance, from virtually every detail in the letters and narratives of the so-called Pilate cycle. 71
    So too the preliterary accounts of the apostles eventually embedded in the canonical Acts have their analogues in the later apocryphal Acts, whether stories of Peter raising a smoked tuna from the dead and depriving the magician Simon of his powers of flight in midair, or of John resuscitating Drusiana and castigating pestiferous bed bugs, or of Paul preaching a message of sexual abstinence that leads to the conversion of his most famous female follower, Thecla.
    This final example is commonly cited in works dealing with forgery, by scholars who confuse Tertullian’s comments in De baptismo 17 as referring to a presbyter of Asia Minor who allegedly forged the account in Paul’s name. Thus, for example, the recent comment from an otherwise fine article by M. Frenschkowski : “This passage [in Tertullian] is significant not least of all because it once and for all disproves the myth of the unproblematic acceptance of pseudepigraphy in a Christian environment.” 72 In fact, Tertullian’s comments are not directly relevant to the question of whether or not forgery was widely seen as acceptable. The presbyter in question was charged not