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

with forging an account but with fabricating it.
    But if the writings which wrongly go under Paul’s name, claim Thecla’s example as a licence for women’s teaching and baptizing, let them know that, in Asia, the presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul’s fame from his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from his office (sciant in asia presbyterum qui eam scripturam construxit quasi titulo pauli de suo cumulans conuictum atque confessum id se amore pauli fecisse loco decessisse). 73
    The reconstruction of Tertullian’s text is debated, 74 but the question of the presbyter’s crime need not be. The “writings that wrongly go under Paul’s name” were not accounts that Paul was alleged to have written. He was the subject of these writings, not the reputed author. At least as they have been handed down to us—assuming that what we have is what Tertullian is referring to 75 —the Acts are anonymous. The presbyter was being faulted, then, for making up stories about Paul that were not historically accurate.
    In other instances the narrative fabrications of the early Christians served polemical purposes, although at times more subtly. As already pointed out, for example, stories of Jesus as a miracle-working wunderkind from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas functioned to discount an adoptionistic Christology that claimed that Jesus received his divine sonship—and so his divine power—only at his baptism. The story of Jesus emerging from his tomb as tall as a mountain from the Gospel of Peter functioned to show that his resurrection was decidedly bodily, in the face of claims that his afterlife was purely in the spirit, while his body experienced corruption. Stories of Peter besting Simon Magus in a series of miracle-working contests from the Acts of Peter illustrated the superiority of the proto-orthodox lineage of the Roman episcopacy over against various groups of Gnostic contenders. Stories of Pilate, Tiberius, and other Roman officials recognizing the clear divinity of Jesus from the Pilate Cycle functioned to counter the polemical charges of the cultured despisers of the new faith among the pagans, such as Celsus and Porphyry.
    Christian fabrications served other purposes as well. Some satisfied early Christian curiosity about unknown aspects of the lives of Jesus and his followers (where was Jesus, exactly, during the time between his death and resurrection? Thus the Gospel of Nicodemus); others provided edificatory tales (God was on the side of the apostles in the face of horrible Roman opposition, as in the Apocryphal Acts); yet others were no doubt entertaining (Jesus’ miraculous deeds as the mischievous five-year-old son of God in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas); some more directly supported one theological or ideological view or another (Paul’s preaching of continence for eternal life, in the Acts of Thecla); and others performed apologetic service (the stories of the Protevangelium as answers to the charges against Mary, Joseph, and Jesus on the pen of Celsus).
    Given their wide functionality, were such invented narratives generally seen as acceptable by the early Christians? On one hand, most Christians who heard such stories almost certainly did not consider them as anything but historical, and so were in no position to pass judgment on their character as fabrications. What would they have said if they were shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that suchstories were made up? At the end of the day, it is impossible to say. But it does seem likely that Christians who approved of the stories and the lessons they conveyed would not have been particularly disturbed, taking, possibly, a Thucydidian attitude toward them. Christians with alternative perspectives, on the other hand, or non-Christians of all stripes would doubtless have considered such fabrications worthy of attack, more along the lines of a