Yesterday I began to discuss the one Christian forger who got caught red handed who then tried to get off the hook.  Well, bend over backwards to make himself look innocent.  We’ve been seeing a lot of that these days.  It goes way back.  Humans are humans.

Here is my assessment of the situation, highlighting my obscure little academic point: in the ancient world, readers simply did not like or approve of this kind of behavior, lying about who you as an author really were (they called these kinds of books, by the way “Pseudoi” — Greek for “Lies”).  On the contrary, they routinely condemned it.  That should be borne in mind when thinking of other instances of the phenomenon, such as those found in far more familiar books from the early Christian tradition.  (And this is the point the riles a number of my scholar friends, who just can’t *believe* ancient authors would do something deceitful — especially if their books were later included in the New Testament!).

At the end of the previous post I pointed out that when Salvian was detected as having forged a letter in the name of Paul’s companion Timothy, he argued

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