Segnalo con piacere il nuovo libro di Bart Ehrman destinato (a quanto dice) agli addetti ai lavori (A differenza di Forged, il suo libro precedente per il grande pubblico).
http://ehrmanblog.org/forgery-and-counterforgery/Immagino che a qualcuno possa interessare, se qualcuno lo prenderà mi potrebbe dare un parere sulla sua leggibilità anche per un non-esperto come me?
Questi sono i "punti salienti":
This is the first comprehensive study of literary forgery in the early Christian tradition ever produced in English.
It establishes once and for all that ancient critics considered the use of false authorial names to be a form of literary deceit, lying.
It evaluates every major aspect of the phenomenon in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, including ancient Judaism: the extent of the phenomenon, ancient attitudes towards it, intentions of forgers, their motivations, the techniques they used to avoid detection, the methods critics used to expose them, and the reactions to forgers and their work once they were exposed.
It considers every instance of Christian forgery produced for polemical purposes from the time of the New Testament (nearly half of the New Testament books make false authorial claims) through the second and third centuries, and up to the end of the fourth century, with the Pseudo-Ignatian letters and the pseudonymous Apostolic Constitutions.
For works whose authorship is hotly debated among scholars (for example, 1 Peter; 2 Timothy), establishes decisive grounds for understanding the work as a forgery; in instances where there is now little debate (for example, 2 Peter, the Pseudo-Ignatians), summarizes the arguments that are widely deemed compelling.
Establishes the polemical use of every forgery he considers, whether in Christians' conflicts with Jews and Judaism, with pagans and paganism, or with one another in the heated debates over early Christian doctrine and practice.
Highlights in particular the phenomenon that he labels "counter-forgery," in which a forger directs his work against another work that is a forgery, seeing instances of the phenomenon from our earliest surviving traditions (2 Thessalonians) on up through the Fourth Century (the Acts of Pilate and the Apostolic Constitutions).
Shows that some well-known works not generally considered to be forged do in fact make clear false authorial claims, including the New Testament books of Acts and 1 John.
Set within the context of other related phenomena: the false attribution of otherwise anonymous writings (the Gospels of the New Testament), the fabrication of legendary narratives (the apocryphal acts of the Apostles, early Christian gospel traditions), the falsification of texts through scribal activities, and plagiarism - themselves maligned literary practices in antiquity.
Concludes with a detailed discussion of ancient Christian discourses on "lying," showing that widely disparate views of the practice were held by such well-known authors as Augustine, who argued that the Christian should never lie, under any circumstances whatsoever, and John Cassian, who, with the majority of Christians, maintained that there were situations in which it was, in fact, the right thing to do to deceive another. It is within these discourses of lying and deception that the forgers' self-justifications are probably to be situated.
Ecco una parte dell'introduzione dal libro:
CITAZIONE
Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature is the degree to which it was forged. Even though the early Christians were devoted to the truth– or so their writings consistently claimed – and even though “authoritative” literature played a virtually unparalleled role in their individual and communal lives, the orthonymous output of the early Christians was remarkably, even astonishingly, meager. From the period of the New Testament, from which some thirty writings survive intact or in part, only eight go under the name of their actual author, and seven of these derive from the pen of one man. To express the matter differently, only two authors named themselves correctly in the surviving literature of the first Christian century. All other Christian writings are either anonymous, falsely ascribed (based on an original anonymity or homonymity), or forged.
Matters begin to change with the second Christian century, even though orthonymity continues to be the exception rather than the rule. It is worth considering, for example, what Pre-Enlightenment scholars accepted as the writings of apostolic and subapostolic times. There were the Homilies and Recognitions of Clement, now known not to be works of the one who was reputedly the fourth bishop of Rome, but to be forged in his name. There were the writings of the early Pauline convert Dionysius the Areopagite, also forged. There were the letters of Paul himself to and from Seneca, likewise forged. And there were the thirteen letters of Ignatius of Antioch, six of them forged and the others falsely and severely interpolated. When we move deeper into the second century and on into the third and fourth, we see a heightened interest in the production of “apostolic” works — Gospels by Peter, Thomas, Philip, all forged; Paul’s letters to the Alexandrians and Laodiceans, forged; Jesus’ correspondence with Abgar, forged; Apocalypses of Peter and Paul, forged. We can move backwards into writings forged in the names of the greats from antiquity, Isaiah or the Sybil, or forward into the writings forged in the names of orthodox church fathers – Basil, Augustine, Jerome. The list goes a very long way.
Matching the abundant materials for the study of early Christian forgery is the remarkably sparse attention paid to it – as a broader phenomenon – in modern scholarship. Apart from studies of individual instances, which do indeed abound, and discussions of the relationship of pseudepigrapha to issues of canon, there is no full length study of the phenomenon in the English language, and only one reasonably comprehensive study in German. There is none in any other language of scholarship.
The study of individual cases is, of course, crucial for the understanding of the broader phenomenon and so need continually to be carried out with rigor and focus. But somewhat ironically, these examinations are often conducted precisely apart from a knowledge or appreciation of the wider phenomenon of early Christian forgery. Surely an individual instantiation of the practice cannot be studied in isolation, apart from its wider historical and cultural context.
The studies of forgery and canon are also vital in many ways, especially in assisting in the evaluation of the practices of and attitudes toward forgery in the early Christian tradition. Inevitably such studies draw on materials taken from the wider Jewish and pagan environments, often, though not always, with broad coverage and clarity of insight. But a focus on issues of canon can skew the discussion in certain ways, and there are other important questions that need to be addressed.
What are needed are fuller studies of the historical phenomenon, not only in relation to a set of theological concerns and not only with eyes focused on the early Christian forgeries that were eventually deemed to be Scripture. The canonical forgeries participated both in the broader stream of literary practices of antiquity and, more narrowly, in the literary practices of the early Christian communities. These broader practices should not be seen merely as background to the object of ultimate (theological) concern (the question of canon), but should be explored as a matter of intellectual inquiry in their own right. That is the intent and goal of the present study.
The focus of my concern will be the Christian literary forgeries of roughly the first four centuries CE. Later texts will be discussed only when they are in some way compelling, relevant, and especially noteworthy. In particular, for the purposes of this study, I am interested in forgeries that were engendered in the context of early Christian polemics. One could easily argue that these comprise the majority of the relevant texts, but that statistical question is of no concern to me here. I am interested in polemics because they played such a major role in the history and development of the early Christian tradition and, as a consequence, in the production of early Christian forgeries. We know of numerous polemical contexts from the early Christian centuries, of course, and I am not restricting my vision to just one of them….
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), ma solo perchè è la migliore citazione che trovo dall'introduzione del primo libro su Gesù di Nazareth e riassume bene:
