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The Donation of Constantine, 13th century, fresco, San Silvestro Chapel at Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome. Wikimedia Commons.
Scriptural Pseudepigrapha in Dei Verbum
Thomas M. Bolin
Italo Calvino’s novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, explores the tenuous relationship between authors and texts. One of the characters in the novel has dedicated himself to permanently and definitively severing the author-text connection. Here’s how Calvino describes him:
Ermes Marana dreamed of a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches. If this idea had succeeded in imposing itself, if a systematic uncertainty as to the identity of the writer had kept the reader from abandoning himself with trust—trust not so much in what was being told him as in the silent narrating voice—perhaps externally the edifice of literature would not have changed at all, but beneath, in the foundations, where the relationship between reader and text is established, something would have changed forever.
Calvino offers us an important insight into the dangers and attractions of pseudepigraphy that provide a fitting introduction to this paper, which will first briefly discuss the long history that pseudepigraphy has in Latin Christianity, then focus on a recent example of the struggle and partial resolution over pseudepigraphy in 20th century Roman Catholic teaching.
Let’s begin with the important observation that the term “pseudepigraphon” has almost always had a negative connotation that extends back into pre-Christian Greek and Latin writers. For example, Polybius uses the term to describe those who deceptively pretend to be something that they’re not, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus uses it to describe speeches wrongly attributed to the Athenian orator Dinarchus. The Greek prefix “pseudo” moves into Latin where it is widely used, and early Latin Christian literature is full of compounds formed with “pseudo,” all in a polemical context: pseudoepiscopus, pseudopastor, pseudopropheta, pseudoapostolus. Pseudepigraphon is no exception.
One cannot, of course, speak of early Christian polemics without mentioning Jerome. He himself uses “pseudepigraphon” to designate the Wisdom of Solomon as a text falsely attributed to the biblical figure. More important however, is Jerome’s fierce defense of the Book of Daniel against the correct claim of the non-Christian philosopher Porphyry that Daniel was a pseudepigraphon written in the Maccabean period. In regard to Jerome’s attacks on Porphyry, P.M. Casey calls the Doctor of the Church, “an experienced polemicist of the utmost hostility,” but also demonstrates that Porphyry’s claim about Daniel was not something he came up with himself, but rather drew on a pre-existing interpretation of the biblical book in the Syriac-speaking Christian tradition of which Porphyry, whose native language was Syriac, was already aware.
At this juncture I would be remiss if I failed to point out the delicious historical irony that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first occurrence of “pseudepigraphy” in English is in reference to books wrongly believed to have been written by—Jerome. It appears in a 1621 work by the Anglican divine Richard Crakanthorpe arguing for the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine, another significant western Christian pseudepigraphon. The Donation is a medieval text purporting to be a letter from Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester granting him and his successors temporal power over the western Roman empire and spiritual power over the entire empire. It was used by popes and canonists throughout the Middle Ages in dispute with European monarchs and the Holy Roman Emperor. While long believed to be a forgery, it was only the careful philological work of Lorenzo Valla in 1440, supported by the cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, that conclusively demonstrated that the Donation could not have been written in the 4th century. While Valla’s arguments were grounded in careful philological analysis, as Salvatore I. Camporeale makes clear, the main impetus for Valla’s investigation was his firm belief that the use of the Donation by the Roman Church constituted a betrayal of the Gospel. For Valla, the Church as the mediator of the kingdom of heaven could not also assume power in the kingdom of the world. The pope’s authority “had necessarily to conform with the Gospel of Christ and his Apostles,” and “could be legitimized and regulated solely in accordance with the Gospel's mandates.” Here we see once again the intersection of debate over pseudepigraphy with polemics, but with the important added feature that Valla’s work was driven by the larger aim to reform the Church and bring it back into line with the teaching of Jesus. Polemics in the service of reform flourishes in the writings of the Reformers, who in the following century took up Valla’s exposure of the Donation as a forgery and weaponized it for full rhetorical effect.
I want to underscore in this brief historical overview the presence of both polemics and reform in Christian discussions of pseudepigraphy. These two aims will continue to go hand in hand, as evidenced by a look at the journey of pseudepigraphy as a concept through 20th century Catholicism, particularly in the Church’s polemics directed at modern critical scholarship on the Bible at the beginning of the century, polemics which are then partially retracted in the reforming efforts of the Second Vatican Council. The beginnings of historical criticism lie in Renaissance humanism, particularly careful study of original biblical languages, but this soon moved into analysis of authorship and composition. In 1670, Baruch Spinoza argued that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses and in 1678, the French Catholic priest Richard Simon demonstrated that the presence of multiple versions of the same story in the Pentateuch was proof that it was composed of earlier written sources. Simon was expelled from his religious congregation after publishing his work. By the end of the 19th century, many Protestant biblical scholars acknowledged that the Pentateuch was comprised of four earlier “documents” written by four anonymous authors. Soon added to this tally were the myriad number of equally unknown redactors or compilers believed to be responsible for the final form of the Books of Moses. Work on the Gospels and the quest for the historical Jesus in the 1800’s established that the canonical Gospels were not eyewitness accounts written by the four figures tradition claimed were the texts’ authors. Rather, it became clear that the Gospels were products of early Christian faith communities in the decades following the death of Jesus.
The Vatican doesn’t enter these debates until the turn of the 20th century, but when it does, it comes down forcefully on the side of traditional views of biblical authorship. Pope Leo XIII’s 1893 encyclical on biblical studies forbade any inquiry that went beyond the opinions of the Church Fathers, and that same pope’s establishment of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) in 1902 was meant to ensure that Catholic scholars—who at this time were all clerics—obeyed the encyclical’s directives.
Between 1905 and 1915, the Commission issued fourteen responsa to disputed exegetical questions, eight of which dealt with questions of authorship, specifically of the Pentateuch, the Four Gospels, Isaiah, the Psalms, the Pauline corpus, and Hebrews. In every instance, the Commission ruled that no Catholic could deny the traditional authorship of these biblical texts—in other words, that pseudepigraphy in the canon could not be affirmed.
These responsa were given greater authority by Pius X’s 1907 decree which ordered all to submit to them and any others that were forthcoming. And Pius’s anti-Modernist encyclical, Pascendi, gave even greater force to the Church’s campaign against pseudepigraphy. The encyclical decries the “dismembering of the Sacred Books,” which results in the fact that “the Scriptures can no longer be attributed to the authors whose names they bear … especially the Pentateuch and the first three Gospels.”
There is much yet to learn and ponder about the history of the Catholic Church’s developing attitude toward modern biblical criticism in the early 20th century, but for now I want to underscore that the focus of the Magisterium during this period was centered on defending the historical nature of the biblical texts and of the texts’ traditional authors, with particular and repeated attention on the Pentateuch and the Gospels. The only approved Catholic view was that there were no pseudepigraphical writings in the Bible. By way of example, in examination areas from the Gregorian University dating from the 1920’s we find that among the theses to be defended by the student are claims that the author of the Fourth Gospel is the Apostle John, son of Zebedee, that all four gospels are to be attributed to their traditional authors, and that the last twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel—which scholars had already determined were written by later Christian scribes—are in fact the work of Mark the evangelist.
Moving forward to the eve of Vatican II, these struggles over acknowledging the presence of pseudepigraphy in the Bible come to a head and reach a resolution of sorts. Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical praising the value of historical-critical study had put to rest the Church’s defense of Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, but the question of who wrote the Gospels remained open and feelings ran high on all sides. On June 20, 1961, as preparations for the Council were in full swing, the Holy Office published a warning against the prevalence of opinions that cast doubts upon the “authentic historical and objective truth” (germanam veritatem historicam et obiectivam) of the New Testament.
The fascinating story of Dei Verbum’s path through Vatican II has enjoyed sustained scholarly attention. The Roman Curia’s draft on revelation was introduced in the first session of the Council in 1962 and was rejected by the bishops. The final draft would not receive approval until the Council’s final session at the end of 1965. The first draft was entitled “On Revelation,” and offered simply a reiteration of the Vatican’s condemnations of historical-critical biblical scholarship and a reaffirmation of traditional views on biblical authorship. Paragraph 19 of the draft addresses the authorship of the Gospels:
Always and everywhere, and without any doubt, the Church of God has believed and still believes that the four Gospels had an apostolic origin; and it has constantly held and still holds that their human authors were those men whose names are in the canon: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the one whom Jesus loved. (Paragraph 19)
The draft was met with strong opposition by the bishops on the Council floor, so much so that Pope John XXIII withdrew it from deliberation, acknowledging the reality that many bishops and Catholic scholars around the world were open to critical biblical studies. Consequently, Pope John asked the PBC to produce a document on the historical nature of the Gospels. By the time of the Council, the Commission had several members who themselves were not content to simply dismiss advances in academic biblical studies in favor of continuing the anti-Modernist stance of the Church toward them. Working unnoticed as attention was fixed on the Council, the death of John XXIII, and the election of his successor, Paul VI, the PBC published its work on April 21, 1964, under the title, On the Historical Truth of the Gospels. This important text deserves careful reading and more analysis than I can give it here. Suffice to say that the document lands squarely on the side of those Catholic exegetes who saw in historical-critical methods helpful ways of understanding how the Gospels developed in the life of the earliest Christian communities. It describes the development of the Gospels as occurring in three distinct phases: the teaching of Jesus, the preaching of the apostles, and the writing of the evangelists, who are never named in the document nor equated with the traditional authors of the Gospels. This separation of the apostles from the evangelists makes clear that the Gospels, while having a strong historical link to Jesus through the apostles, were themselves the products of the early, post-apostolic Church.
When a first draft of what would become Dei Verbum was introduced on the Council floor in 1964, a summary of the PBC’s document was included as paragraph 19, which began with the same three Latin words as the Commission’s document: Sancta mater ecclesia. Here is paragraph 19 in full, with my italics added to highlight key phrases in this discussion:
Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven. Indeed, after the Ascension of the Lord the Apostles handed on to their hearers what He had said and done. This they did with that clearer understanding which they enjoyed after they had been instructed by the glorious events of Christ's life and taught by the light of the Spirit of truth. The sacred authors wrote the four Gospels, selecting some things from the many which had been handed on by word of mouth or in writing, reducing some of them to a synthesis, explaining some things in view of the situation of their churches and preserving the form of proclamation but always in such fashion that they told us the honest truth about Jesus. For their intention in writing was that either from their own memory and recollections, or from the witness of those who “themselves from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word” we might know “the truth” concerning those matters about which we have been instructed (see Luke 1:2-4).
Note that Dei Verbum adopts the Biblical Commission’s separation of the apostles from the evangelists and the depicts the apostles as handing on Jesus’ teaching orally (“the Apostles handed on to their hearers”) while the next generation of Christians are clearly described as “the sacred authors” of “the four Gospels.” This articulation of the two-generation span between Jesus and the written Gospels is balanced by the reiteration of the historical nature of the Gospels, affirming that, despite their temporal distance from Jesus, they convey reliable historical information. This compromise was hard won. Documents at Vatican II were voted on by the bishops one paragraph at a time, and paragraph 19 received the most written requests for revision of any in Dei Verbum, with hundreds of these requests demanding that stronger language be used to demonstrate the historicity of the Gospels. In the end, Pope Paul VI intervened, requiring that language strengthening the historical nature of the Gospels be added before he would approve the document, and the final version was approved at the Council’s last session in 1965.
Once again, we see the intense struggles over the acknowledgement or denial of pseudepigraphical texts being played out in the larger context of church reform. Jerome is, naturally, a pivotal figure in that he could both acknowledge pseudepigraphy, as in the case of the Wisdom of Solomon, and fiercely fight against those claims regarding the Book of Daniel. With the Donation of Constantine we see the dispute over this text’s authorship set against the backdrop of the Church’s longstanding claims of temporal power and whether those claims are consistent with the Gospel. Our brief look at the question in contemporary Catholic magisterial teaching shows again the larger issue of reform at work: does the Church acknowledge the insights of humanistic scholarship and use them to deepen understanding of the biblical texts, or should it view such academic work as a secular threat to an embattled Barque of Peter? Vatican II was an attempt by the Church to, as the famous phrase puts it, “turn towards the world,” and we can catch of glimpse of that in paragraph 19 of Dei Verbum.
However, lest the reader think this paper is merely an uplifting story in which the Catholic Church learned to openly acknowledge the presence of pseudepigrapha at the heart of the biblical tradition, think again. As mentioned briefly above regarding the end of Mark’s Gospel, since at least the 19th century, scholars have known that the oldest copies of Mark do not contain the last twelve verses found in the canonical version—among these copies is a fourth century codex now in the Vatican. These manuscripts end awkwardly and abruptly at Mark 16:8, with the women fleeing from the empty tomb and telling no one of the resurrection. The last twelve verses of the canonical version of Mark are the attempts of at least two different early Christian scribes to supply a satisfactory conclusion—what are now labelled in Catholic Bibles as the Shorter and Longer Endings, respectively. Alongside the liturgical reforms of Vatican II that reintroduced the vernacular in place of Latin at Mass was the revision of the lectionary, with an eye to having the faithful at Mass hear more of the Bible. In the revised Roman Lectionary put together after the Council, April 25 is the feast of Mark the Evangelist, and the Gospel reading for Mass that day is Mark 16:15-20, a passage taken from the very twelve verses at the end of the Gospel that we are certain the evangelist didn’t write. My hunch, and I think it’s a good one, is that this might not be an unintentional coincidence but rather the result of curial officials who worked on the Revised Lectionary which was promulgated in 1970. We might interpret this choice as a reminder that, while the Gospels are products of early Christian communities, it is also the Christian community that gave us those extra twelve, “non-Markan” verses. What this brief story also shows is that, despite the Council’s best efforts, and because of a lack of collective will among many biblical scholars to make their work accessible to a general readership, most lay Catholics remain unaware of the rich and fascinating history of the biblical texts in both their composition and afterlives. Pseudepigraphy is a pleasure—to nod toward the title of this conference—because it asks us to think about the complexity that exists among the creation of texts, how they’re read, and the resulting interpretive traditions, all of which add to our understanding and appreciation of these writings. It is a pity this pleasure is enjoyed by so few.
Thomas M. Bolin
Thomas M. Bolin is Scholar-in-Residence in Jewish Studies and Jewish-Christian Relations at Providence College. He is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism whose work focuses on the creation of early Jewish texts and their subsequent interpretation by Jewish and Christian readers. He has also written on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council on the Bible, and the history of the Jewish community of Rome. He is currently a consultor to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the translation of scriptural texts. His most recent book, A Word in Season: Reading the Bible Responsibly in a Polarized World (2025) seeks to clarify the way the Bible is used in fraught social and political issues in the hope of encouraging greater understanding among readers on opposite sides of these debates.
39. Italo Calvino, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1982), 159.
40. To clarify terminology: pseudepigraphy is the practice or presence of written works attributed to someone other than their actual authors. Such a work is called a pseudepigraphon. The plural, pseudepigrapha, refers to a group of such works.
41. Polybius, Histories, 23.5; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De Dinarcho, 11. Cicero refers to a fellow Roman senator as a “pseudo-Cato” (Letter 14).
42. “Another false writing (pseudepigraphos) is titled The Wisdom of Solomon” (Praefatio in Libros Salomonis [PL 28.1242a]). Cassiodorus, Inst. Litt. 5: “Father Jerome also claimed that the Book of Wisdom is not by Solomon as is commonly believed but was written by a certain learned Jew named Philo. He designates this book as a pseudepigraph because it usurps the name of another” (Cassiodorus: Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and on the Soul; trans. James Halporn and Mark Vessey [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004], 122-123).
43. P.M. Casey, “Porphyry and the Origin of the Book of Daniel,” Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1976):15-33, 15.
44. Crakanthorpe states that Erasmus, “cals those Epistles Pseudepigrapha, Bookes falsely ascribed vnto Saint Hierome.” Richard Crakanthorpe, The defence of Constantine vvith a treatise of the Popes temporall monarchie. Wherein, besides diuers passages, touching other counsels, both generall and prouinciall, the second Roman Synod, vnder Siluester, is declared to be a meere fiction and forgery [London: Bernard Alsop, 1621], 203)
45. The textual history of the Donation of Constantine is complex and fascinating. See the detailed discussion in Johannes Fried, The Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007).
46. Valla’s work “sought to demonstrate that a betrayal of apostolic proto-Christianity had taken place in the fourth century, when the Roman papacy began its pretensions to ‘imperial’ power over both the western church and the entire Christian Empire” (Salvatore I. Camporeale, “Lorenzo Valla's Oratio on the Pseudo-Donation of Constantine: Dissent and Innovation in Early Renaissance Humanism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 [1996]: 9-26, 12).
47. Camporeale, “Lorenzo Valla’s Oratio,” 22.
48. Fried, Donation of Constantine, 30-32.
49. Responsum 3, June 27, 1906 on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, responsum 4, May 29, 1907 on the authorship of the Four Gospels, responsum 5, June 28, 1908 on the authorship of Isaiah, responsum 7, May 1, 1910 on the authorship of the Psalms, responsum 8, June 19, 1911 on the authorship of Matthew, responsum 9, June 26, 1912, on the authorship of Mark and Luke, responsum 11, June 12, 1913 on the authorship of Acts, responsum 12, June 12, 1913 on the authorship of the Pauline letters, responsum 13, June 24, 1914 on the authorship of Hebrews.
50. “All are bound in conscience to submit to the decisions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission that have already been issued or any that may yet be issued.” Motu proprio de sententiis pontificalis Consilii rei biblicae provehendae [18 November 1907]). More discussion in Thomas M. Bolin, “The Biblical Commission’s Instruction, On the Historical Truth of the Gospels (Sancta Mater Ecclesia) and Present Magisterial Attitudes Toward Biblical Exegesis,” Gregorianum 93 (2012): 765-85, 767-68.
51. Pius X, Pascendi: On the Teachings of the Modernists (September 8, 1907), Paragraph 34.
52. “Quarti Evangelii auctor est Ioannes Apostolus Zebedaei filius; Quatuor Evangelia canonica vere auctores illas habent quod traditio semper testificata est; Finalis Evangelii Marci non solum tamquam canonica et inspirata sed et ab Marco evangelista exarata retinenda est” (Examen ad Baccalaurei Gradum 1921; Theses ad Lauream Theologiae, 1924; Theses ad Lauream Theologiae 1926, from the personal papers of Benjamin Wambacq, O. Praem., who graduated with a laureate from the Gregorian in 1932 (Archief Abdij van Tongerlo, 19.148.8-10).
53. Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu: On the Promotion of Biblical Studies (September 30, 1943).
54. De germana veritate historica et obiectiva s. Scripturae (June 20, 1961). See discussion in Gerald P. Fogarty, American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History From the Early Republic to Vatican II (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989), pp. 295-96.
55. Hanjo Sauer, Erfahrung und Glaube: Die Begründung des pastoralen Prinzipe durch die Offenbarungskonstitution des II. Vatikanischen Konzils (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993); Riccardo Burigana, La Bibbia nel Concilio La redazione della costituzione «Dei verbum» del Vaticano II (Bologna: Il Mulino,1998); Bolin Ronald D. Witherup, Scripture: Dei Verbum (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2006); John O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010), 127-59, 247-89.
56. Translation by Joseph A. Komonchak, https://jakomonchak.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/de-fontibus-1-5.pdf. Detailed discussion of this document in Sauer, Erfahrung und Glaube; Burigana, La Bibbia nel Concilio; Karim Schelkens, Catholic Theology of Revelation on the Eve of Vatican II A Redaction History of the Schema De fontibus revelationis (1960-1962) (Leiden: Brill, 2010); and Bolin, “The Biblical Commission’s Instruction,” 774-781.
57. See a much more detailed analysis in Bolin, “The Biblical Commission’s Instruction.”
58. J. Caba, S.J., “Historicity of the Gospels (Dei Verbum 19): Genesis and Fruits of the Conciliar Text,” in Vatican II Assessments and Perspectives: Twenty-Five Years After (1962-1987), ed. R. Latourelle; 2 vols. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1988) vol. 1, 301-3.
59. “Holy Mother Church, ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth’ …” (“On the Historical Truth of the Gospels,” paragraph 1); “Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held …” (Dei Verbum: Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, paragraph 19).
60. Paragraph 19 was enhanced and strengthened by the first chapter of Dei Verbum which articulated a rich and nuanced discussion of what tradition is and how it functions. See the discussion in Thomas M. Bolin, An Inspired Word in Season: Reading the Bible Responsibly in a Polarized World (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2025), 137-40.
61. Bolin, An Inspired Word in Season, 130-33.