Were Matthew and Luke plagiarists?  They copied word-for-word passages from Mark, without any indication that they were using someone else’s work.  Today that will get you fired (or, say, removed from the presidency of an Ivy League school).  But what about in the ancient world?

Here I continue here with my discussion of plagiarism in the antiquity, citing some sources that talk about the phenomenon only to condemn it, before considering whether Matthew and Luke can be considered culpable.

You may be surprised by my answer.

First, I give some more ancient  writings, starting with where I left off, with Vitruvius (a famous Roman architect; not a famous volcano)

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Elsewhere Vitruvius himself delivers a stringent judgment on those who engaged in the practice of plagiarism: “While, then, these men [viz. Those who left a written record of past events and philosophies] deserve our gratitude, on the other hand we must censure those who plunder their works and appropriate them to themselves” (Book 7, Preface 3).   This attitude coincides with other ancient discourse about the practice, as in Polybius’s  off-the-cuff comment on authors who discuss “genealogies, myths, the planting of colonies, the foundations of cities and their ties of kinship”; Polybius laments the fact that since so much has already been written about such things, a modern writer who discusses them either rehashes what others have said, or worse, “represents the work of others as being his own,” a procedure that he calls “a most disgraceful proceeding” (ὃ πάντων ἐστὶν αἴσχιστον). ^[1]

Equally harsh is Pliny the Elder, who in his Natural History discusses his own practices of citation in contrast to those who are “of a perverted mind and a bad disposition” and steal the work of others to pass off as their own (Natural History, Preface 20-23):

For I consider it to be courteous and to indicate an ingenuous modesty, to acknowledge the sources whence we have derived assistance, and not to act as most of those have done whom I have examined. For I must inform you, that in comparing various authors with each other, I have discovered, that some of the most grave and of the latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making any acknowledgement; …  For it is indeed the mark of a perverted mind and a bad disposition, to prefer being caught in a theft to returning what we have borrowed (obnoxii profecto animi et infelicis ingenii est deprehendi in furto malle quam mutuum redder).^[2]

It is a genuine question concerning how relevant the ancient discourse on plagiarism is to the “unacknowledged borrowings” found throughout the early Christian literature.   Assuming the two-source hypothesis, Matthew and Luke both acquired considerable amounts of their material, often verbatim, from Mark and Q, without acknowledgment.  But if plagiarism is defined as taking over the work of another and claiming it as one’s own, possibly the charge does not apply in these cases, as all the writings in question are anonymous.  That is to say, the later Synoptic authors are not claiming anything as their own, as they do not even name themselves.  The same would apply to the extensive and often verbatim reproduction of the Protevangelium Jakobi in such later texts as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, in that the later author does not claim the earlier work as his own, since he is, in fact, writing pseudonymously.

A comparable situation obtains in the wholesale incorporation of the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Didache, and the Apostolic Traditions in the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions.  But here the situation is somewhat more complex.  Two of these earlier works are anonymous, making it difficult to give credit where credit was due.  The Didascalia, on the other hand, was inherited as a forgery – it falsely claims to be written by the apostles – and is itself embedded in another work that is also a forgery, also allegedly written by the apostles.  Why would a forger need to credit an earlier work that he allegedly (but in fact did not) write himself?^[3]  Or consider the case of 2 Peter and Jude.  There is little doubt that the former borrowed a good deal of the latter in its polemic against nefarious but unidentifiable opponents.  But the source of the argument is a forgery, as is the text that uses the source.  Can a forger commit plagiarism?  In one sense he obviously has borrowed the work of another without acknowledgment, or as the ancient sources would put it, he has “stolen” his work.  But in another sense he has not claimed that work as his own, since he does not give his own name so as to take credit for what his stolen material says.  In all these instances we are dealing with complex literary relations that do not neatly line up in taxonomies of fraudulence, either ancient or modern.

 

[1] Histories, 9.2.1; quotation from the translation of W. R. Paton from Polybius: the Histories. LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University,1922-27).

[2] Translation of H. Rackham, Pliny: Natural History. LCL (Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1938).

[3] See pp. xxx.