AtheistGamer

Hey there. I've been reading Mack's book "Who wrote the New Testament? (or via: amazon.co.uk)"

He says two things in his book which he never really gets around to backing up.

The first is that there was a tradition of writing pseudonymous pieces in someone else's name, in order to give the writer the authority behind the name. This was apparently considered legit back in the day (roflol! If this is truly the environment that the gospels were written under then that is more than enough to cast doubt on the whole New Testament.)

The second (which is closely related to the first) is that back then historians were given "freedom of expression" when it came to filling in the gaps in the stories. In other words historians would gather up rumors and then embellish the whole thing in order to fill up space within their histories.

Anyway can anybody present clear cut cases where these things are known to have happened. Mack doesn't bother to do it, sadly.

spamandham

Of the 13 epistles originally attributed to Paul, 6 are now widely accepted by scholars as pseudepigrapha, for very good reasons (such as computer analysis of writing styles). Further, 3 of the canonical gospels are widely accepted by scholars as reworks of something else (which might be one of the 3). As a minimum, 2 of the 4 are then reworks of a pre-existing text.

I'd say this alone is enough to conclude this point.

In regard to this one, I've seen the same claim made by at least one other author in "What is a Gospel", C.H. Talbert. IIRC, he presents several examples of authors clearly inventing their histories to back up the claim, but it's been a year or so now since I read it, and may be getting myself confused between what he demonstrated vs. what he simply asserted.

mountainman

The place to start for this second category is the fourth century "history" known as the Historia Augusta. Here is what Momigliano says about it:

Toto

I have my doubts about this. Clearly there were pseudonymous letters - half of the letters attributed to Paul and all of the letters attributed to Peter and James and Jude are generally accepted to be written by someone else. But it's not clear that it was considered to be legit.

This looks like it might be how Josephus worked. But again, it's not clear if this was really considered legitimate.

The best commentary on historiography in this area is on Neil Godfrey's blog, Vridar.

Roger Pearse

These are both good questions. Indeed I see a great deal of loose talk along these lines, but never anything evidentiary to back it up. But if so, which ancient authors talk about this? If none... how do we know?

I'll give you what I have.

Now Cicero in his letters talks about composing the Tusculan Disputations, in which various now dead people like Scipio give speeches and a dialogue takes place. What follows is from memory: he explicitly discusses how he is doing this, for artistic effect, and who to choose as the person most associated with this quality or that. But he also suggests that all the people concerned must be dead. Unfortunately I don't have these in electronic form so cannot give you the proper reference or a quotation.

Presumably Cicero is relying on the fact that he is a well-known figure and all the people dead in order to convey that this is symbolic.

I'm not sure whether this is so. What IS the case is that historians were allowed to compose the speeches embedded in their histories, e.g. by generals before battles and so on. We know this because Pompeius Trogus criticised Livy for doing it too much. Trogus is lost, but the core of his work survives in an epitome of the second century by Justinus, plus a set of summaries of the book contents of the full work. This is online, so you should be able to locate the passage with a bit of effort.

We have to remember that books were not read silently and in private as we do now, but aloud and to a circle of friends. Since the speeches probably never survived, this convention allowed the author to break the story up a bit and do a bit of rhetoric (which the ancients loved). No doubt this is how the custom arose.

We must also remember that history was not the same kind of thing then as now. It was just a branch of literature.

I see from the responses that people have given you what they think are examples. But of course what we really need is statements by the ancients giving us the system by which they worked. I bet there's all sorts of stuff in the largely untranslated commentaries of ancient authors on each other, such as Servius on Virgil.

The questions are interesting ones; I think some comments by other people with some specific knowledge would also be of interest.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Justinus, book 38, chapter 3:

DCHindley

A.G.,

With regard to a tradition to write pseudonymous (falsely attributed) books, I am certain Mack was thinking not of NT criticism (that would be circular), but examples such as the books of Enoch, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, etc, all of which we can be fairly certain were not written by Enoch the 7th from Adam, or Baruch the associate of Jeremiah, or Ezra the scribe. There are also pagan examples galore.

Critics have reasoned that the writers of these works, who explicitly state or imply that they were those ancient and revered figures from the past, wanted to take advantage of the popular "goodwill" those names carried in order to lend credence to the peculiar ideas the authors expressed in the books.

If you'd like, find a copy of volume 2 of R. H. Charles' Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk) (1913, about $38, volume 2 covers the Pseudepigrapha) as I recall he provides a pretty comprehensive survey of Pseudepigraphical literature and how critics were seeing it as a genre. This was published, I think, in 1913, but includes very detailed critical translations of the main ones known at that time.

There is also likely something along this line in the introduction to the first volume of Charlesworth's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (or via: amazon.co.uk) (1983, about $30 per volume), which is the most recent comprehensive volume on the subject (including English translations of most of them, far more than in Charles' volume).

I don't have Mack's Who Wrote the NT, but I'm willing to bet the NT works he might call pseudepigraphical were the Pastoral epistles and maybe a few of the church letters of Paul, maybe Hebrews, certainly James, Jude and maybe Revelation, which since the 18th-19th century scholars have suspected of being written after the supposed authors time and attributed to them simply to legitimize them. He may also be thinking of the names Matthew, Mark, Luke & John becoming associated with the various canonical gospels, and Paul's name with Hebrews, although these works do not explicitely state who the authors were. Technically the latter are not pseudepigrapha, just misattributions of anonymous works. Hebrews straddles the line, as it doesn't state it is by Paul, but does appear to be implying it in the way the end of it imitates the salutations he always gives. Later books usually called "Christian Apocrypha," such as apocryphal acts and gospels, do expressly claim to be written by this or that apostle, disciple, Pilate, etc, and would correctly be called pseudepigrapha (except that critics generally avoid this term like the plague when the work is Christian).

As for the second question, Roger is correct that ancient historians liked to create speeches that they felt captured the essence of the man to whom it is attributed. This sort of creative license goes back at least to Thucydides accounts of the Greek wars. The various ancient historians also had different approaches, and some were more particular about accuracy of detail than others. Some openly stated what they used as sources and how they treated them, while others did not. Some included legendary materials along with the hard facts, others did not.

For this issue, I'd suggest taking a look at Donald Kelley's Faces of History: From Herodotus to Herder (or via: amazon.co.uk) (1998, about $25).

Have fun ...

DCH

PS: As with all multi-volume, technically-oriented books that are out in hardcover as well as paperback, Amazon and Barnes & Noble and the other booksellers may and probably do completely and totally confuse them, so make sure you have found the paperback edition and/or got the cheapest price available, unless you intend to show it off to your friends on a fine mahogany bookshelf but never actually break the spine and read it.

Doug Shaver

I'm not sure what is meant by "considered legit," but so far as I am aware, two things are not disputed by any competent historian: (1) pseudonymous writing did happen; (2) it happened often enough to undermine any claim for a default assumption that whoever's name appears on a document was in fact the actual author.

Nobody was in a position to give them anything. They wrote whatever they wanted to. Some historians wanted to be as accurate as they knew how and some didn't care so much about accuracy. Again, the apparently undisputed evidence, such as it is, cannot justify any default assumption that they all wrote the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so far as they knew what the truth was.

I cannot cite any particular cases from memory. What I'm doing here is summarizing some impressions I've gotten from a lifetime of reading about history, and my sources have been, I think, a fair mix of credulous and skeptical.

DCHindley

Isn't the Justin under consideration Justin Martyr?

The Justin referred to below is not the same man:

The epitome that Justin made of the large work of Trogus, has often been supposed the cause that the original was lost.

Who or what JUSTIN was, we are left in ignorance; we know not even what name he had besides Justinus, for though one manuscript entitles him Justinus Frontinus, and another M. Junianus Justinus, the other manuscripts give him only one name.

From the words Imperator Antonine, which occur in the preface in the editions of Aldus and others, he has been often said to have lived in the reign of that emperor; but those words are now generally thought to have been interpolated by some, who, like Isidore and Jornandes, confounded him with Justin Martyr. From an expression in the eighth book, where Greece is said to be etiam nunc et viribus et dignitate orbis terrarum princeps, it has been conjectured that he flourished under the Eastern emperors; but such conjecture is groundless, for the words merely refer to the period of which the author is writing, and may be, indeed, not Justin's, but Trogus's.

His style, however, in which occur the words adunare, impossibilis, praesumtio, opinio for "report," and other words and phrases of inferior Latinity, show that he must have lived some considerable time after the Augustan age. Such phraseology could not have been found in the pages of Trogus. But Justin could not have been later than the beginning of the fifth century, as he is mentioned by St. Jerome.

That he was not a Christian, is proved, as Vossius remarks, by the ignorance which he manifests of the Jewish Scriptures; for he could not, assuredly, have copied Trogus's vagaries without bestowing some correction upon them. He has been censured for not making a more regular abridgment |viii of his author's work, but without justice; for he intended only to extract or abbreviate such portions as he thought more likely than others to please the general reader.
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/justinus_02_intro.htm

DCH

Roger Pearse

In the first class we might think of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. In the latter, the Hermetic literature. But ... this doesn't help us, as far as I can see? We are sure these are not authentic. But this does not give us any information on the question of whether there was a literary tradition of placing works in the mouths of the ancients, or how it worked, etc. I'm not at all sure that the Hermetic literature was understood to be pseudepigraphic, for instance.

We need ancient sources.

All the best,

Roger Pearse