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

Author:Ehrman, Bart D. [Ehrman, Bart D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-11-15T23:00:00+00:00

When meantime Moses, that faithful and wise steward, perceived that the vice of sacrificing to idols had been deeply ingrained into the people from their association with the Egyptians, and that the root of this evil could not be extracted from them, he allowed them indeed to sacrifice, but permitted it to be done only to God, that by any means he might cut off one half of the deeply ingrained evil, leaving the other half to be corrected by another, and at a future time. (Rec. 1.36)

When Christ came as the prophet predicted by Moses in Deuteronomy 18, he fulfilled what Moses anticipated, by substituting baptism for sacrifice. As Annette Reed has argued, this attack on the practice of Jewish sacrifice would have been completely moot at the time of the writing, since the Temple had already been destroyed and no sacrifices were being performed in any event; moreover, the author is not maligning the religion of Moses but, as it were, affirming it. There is nothing “anti-Jewish” in the passage, to the extent that Jesus stands with Moses, not against him; Jews who have not accepted Christ are not condemned but are simply urged to change their minds: “the author’s Christian supercessionism looks a lot like Jewish messianism.”84 In any event, this understanding that Jesus has superseded Moses at all stands at some tension with the rest of the Recognitions and the Homilies, as Reed has shown. But since the Christology, and the relationship of “Jews” and “Christians,” is largely effected in nonpolemical terms through these two works, they are of less relevance to my present concerns.85 In a broader sense, however, one could see the whole of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies as having a subtle but comparable polemical agenda:

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