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Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), Writer (L'ecrivain), drypoint, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Dei Verbum and a Catholic Theology of Pseudepigraphy
Julian Sieber
The practice of pseudepigraphy—writing under the guise of another author—was a common enough practice in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern context from which the Christian Bible emerged. As most biblical scholars consider a good number of the texts of the Bible to be either pseudepigrapha (particularly the various letters of the New Testament) or falsely attributed (in the case of the canonical Gospels), ethical and interpretative problems may face many a modern reader inclined to condemn such practices as forgery. What does Dei Verbum, a document produced during a time when Catholics were increasingly recognizing the benefits of biblical studies and while post-war literary critics were finding a voice for discussing concepts of authorship and meaning, have to say about the ethics of forged biblical texts? Well, Dei Verbum does not mention pseudepigraphy directly, nor does it discuss the moral implications of ‘forged’ biblical texts explicitly. It does, however, provide a theological framework for God’s self-revelation in the inspired books and authors of Scripture that provides a rich foundation upon which to assess these pseudepigrapha from a Catholic perspective. Yet
because pseudepigraphy is so little discussed in Catholic conversations around the Bible, this generative theological framework is seriously underdeveloped—and underutilized in the Catholic imagination.
If you Google “pseudepigraphy Catholic,” you may, as I did, have as your first result a 2014 National Catholic Register article simply entitled ‘Pseudepigrapha,’ a blog post by Catholic writer Mark Shea. With this minimalist title, immediately giving all the appearance of a kind of Catholic encyclopedia entry, Shea defines pseudepigrapha as “a three dollar word for ‘writings that claim to be written by some Famous Person but are really not.’” The sole emphasis upon the use of a pseudonym to claim the identity of a renowned figure is important for Shea, who states that almost all “early fake Christian (and Jewish) literature” claims to be “by some important Heavy Hitter in the early Christian community: Mary Magdalene, Philip, James, Peter, Thomas.” As he argues, “when you are trying to get your lie across, it helps to attribute your lie to Trusted Authority figure.” This not only confirms for Shea the heretical nature of so-called gnostic texts, but the inverse also apparently proves definitively the historical reliability of the canonical Gospels, even if not identical in all details. Because the Gospels came to be associated with ‘nobodies’ in the church, they must be reliable and worthy of canonization. Unfortunately this logic is not applied to the probably pseudepigraphic letters by ‘Paul,’ ‘Peter,’ ‘James’ and ‘John’ in the New Testament canon, nor does it factor in the ubiquity of the practice throughout the Hebrew Bible.
Shea expresses his amazement that there are even some scholars today who, “subjecting the canonical gospels to a searching and ridiculously skeptical scrutiny that no other ancient document comes close to receiving—then turn to the obvious fabrications of the gnostics with the credulity of a five year old and declare them real sources of information about the Historical Jesus that, as the saying goes, ‘challenge the claims of the Official Church.’ That’s a special kind of dumb, right there.” So biblical scholars who today take seriously the complexities of ancient pseudepigraphic conventions (like myself) can take comfort in knowing that they are a “special kind of dumb,” each with the “credulity of a five year old” for even considering the possibility that writers in antiquity who wrote in the name of another may have done so for any reason other than the obvious attempt to convince others of their ostensible lies.
It is not my intention to pick one easy target from the Catholic blogosphere in order to make the endeavor of biblical scholarship look better. But I do think this article is worth mentioning for several reasons, such as its ease of access and thus its potential to reinforce (incorrect) understandings of Catholic teaching on Scripture, and the unhelpful vitriol it injects into discussions over biblical authorship. Most importantly, it confirms that the reform of Dei Verbum continues to be imperfectly realized; we see here that a current of staunch Catholic resistance to historical- and literary-critical study of Scripture is alive and well.
How might we consider the ancient practice of pseudepigraphy today within and beyond Scripture as a site of imagination and living tradition, rather than as a source of theological anxiety, leading us to double down and retreat into ‘traditional’ ideas? How might Catholics who genuinely desire to inhabit Anselm of Canterbury’s ‘faith seeking understanding’ approach the topic of pseudepigraphy, navigating the necessary both/and of the Catholic intellect on the one hand and the Catholic imagination on the other? What I offer here is a Catholic theology of pseudepigraphy. I am interested in the ways Catholics might move beyond the inertia of a defensive stance towards pseudepigraphic texts in the Bible and toward the exploration of new dimensions of God’s revelation.
I find it curious that two highly influential—yet very different—texts were published within two years of each other, both dealing with the issue of God as author. The French literary theorist Roland Barthes’ short essay Le mort de l’auteur, published first in English in 1967 as The Death of the Author, was by no means the first to call in to question the presumption in literary criticism that the ultimate meaning of a text resided in the genius and biography of the author. But Barthes did so forcefully and concisely, and notably on theological terms, arguing that “a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”
Fig. 1: Roland Barthes, as pictured in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, 1969. Wikimedia Commons.
For Barthes, meaning does not reside in the author but in the text the author gives to the world. Meaning is in the hands of the reader, yes, but it also belongs to language itself, to the uncountable threads of intertextuality the writing is woven out of and into. Barthes proclaims the author dead in the same way that ‘God is dead’—insofar as both author and God function as the Prime Meaner, that is, the invisible originator and perpetual guarantor of static meaning.
Catholics may disagree with Barthes’ claim that the Author-God is dead, but they may share his distaste for the particular characterization of theological meaning he stereotypes—namely, top-down, unchanging, objective, and inherently separate from human lived experience.
With this poor view of what theology is and can be, Barthes and Catholics can agree; in the wake of the death of the author and of Barthes’ God, both reading and theology become a ‘bottom-up’ liberating experience, driven by inexhaustible interpretations and synodal dialogue, and necessarily practiced through the varieties of lived individual and communal experience.
This brings us back to the second text, the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, promulgated less than two years before the Death of the Author. There are significant differences between the texts, to be sure, not least that Barthes addresses reading more broadly, while Dei Verbum is concerned with Scripture and God’s revelation. Yet I suggest that reading both texts together provides a generative avenue for considering a Catholic approach to reading Scripture generally, and a Catholic theology of pseudepigraphy in particular.
As mentioned above, Dei Verbum does not mention the problem of pseudepigraphy directly. This should not come as too much of a surprise, given the council of bishops’ greater concern with issues of the Pentateuch and the Gospels. Yet with permission from Pope Francis, who describes Dei Verbum as “a document that deserves to be read and appropriated ever anew,” let us see what we can appropriate to the study of pseudepigraphy. In DV 11, the Church teaches that the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.” In the same paragraph, the divine authorial intent for the content and the process of writing is affirmed, as the biblical texts
have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself. In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.
Particularly striking is the term used for the writers of the biblical texts—true authors—which I take to mean real, flesh and blood human authors with their own motivations and conventions for writing, but it also does rather nicely counterbalance the charge of biblical false writers, or pseudepigraphers. The pseudo-Pauline ‘forger,’ for instance, who takes Paul’s command to become an imitator of him (1 Cor 4:16) perhaps too literally/literarily for our tastes, is a true author, precisely because they have been chosen by God to write what they have written, which has been confirmed through the process of canonization by the Church. On a strictly theological level, Dei Verbum affirms that all scripture is, in a way, pseudepigraphic. As each text is ultimately authored by God through humans and by the Holy Spirit, the real author is not really—or at least not only—the historical figure it has been associated with, but the trinitarian Author-God. At the same time, all Scripture is true insofar as it reveals Christ, the “mediator and the fullness of all revelation” (DV 2), and so it is without error, regardless of human author.
At this point, we may be at risk of abandoning our scholarly pursuit of ancient contexts of pseudepigraphic conventions altogether by positing that because all scripture can be seen as flatly and equally pseudepigraphic, the act of forgery is never a problem. We might slip into the same relativistic escape made possible by Barthes’ complete detachment from the role of the author. After all, if the author forfeits all claim to meaning to the reader in the act of writing, does this not render the act and the moral ambiguity of ‘forgery’ irrelevant? On the contrary, Dei Verbum itself calls for the study of ancient literary genres and historically contextualized authorial intent. This means that a Catholic understanding of Scripture must include discussions of ancient pseudepigraphic writing conventions as they bear rather directly upon matters of the Bible’s historicity, authorship, and genre. Yet, this is must also be paired with the belief that God willed the false writing.
It is here, reflecting the Catholic both/and, that Dei Verbum offers a profound conception of Scripture. As the late Italian scholar Angelo Tosato put it, the Vatican views Scripture as having nothing less than a “theandric nature”—that is, fully divine and fully human—exactly as affirmed of the natures of Christ at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E. This incarnational view of Scripture is made clear: “For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men” (DV 13).
This incarnational and theandric thread has been picked up by several biblical scholars. Michael Peppard recently observed that, more than simply an abstract theological idea, Scripture as God’s Word in human language is experienced by Catholics the world over every day liturgically at Mass, perhaps unconsciously. His comment is worth quoting at length:
The first and second readings are introduced with reference to their human authors, thus situating them as “the words of men,” the words of real people in real-life contexts: “A reading from the prophet Isaiah” or “A reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans.” After each of these readings, the lector declares the divine sanctioning of the human words: “The word of the Lord.” To which the people respond, “Thanks be to God.” The Gospel reading adapts the format slightly, beginning with the human author and ending with “the Gospel of the Lord.” Through declarations, acclamations, and responses, biblical revelation is embodied as simultaneously “the Word of God” and “human words,” just as the Catholic mystery of the Incarnation presents “the Word of God” as becoming “human” in the person of Jesus.
Another example can be seen in the conclusion of Harold Attridge’s well-known address to the Society of Biblical Literature, “Genre Bending in the Fourth Gospel.” Attridge points to the ending of John’s Gospel not as identifying resolutely its author as the anonymous Beloved Disciple, a character who would come to be traditionally defined as John the son of Zebedee. By calling the Beloved Disciple a witness to the events of the gospel, the fourth evangelist is less interested in making a claim for authorization, but instead deploys a literary device that compels the reader to return again and again to the story “in an ultimately fruitless search for clues to the identity of the witness.” But the primary grappling John evokes is not simply with the insufficiency of data about the writer of its words, but is even more so a grappling with the insufficiency of all human words and storytelling conventions:
If something quite spectacular happens to flesh when the Words hits it, something equally wondrous happens to ordinary words when they try to convey the Word itself … [John’s] appropriation of a variety of words, of formal types of discourse, is not so much … a way of using a variety of forms to convey a message. Rather, the use of most of these forms suggests that none of them is adequate to speak of the Word incarnate. John’s genre bending is an effort to force its audience away from words to an encounter with the Word himself.
Considering the Bible from the theandric perspective is therefore reckoning with the interplay between human words and the divine Word, and contemplating the spectacular event of the Word becoming flesh. It is appreciating the divine entering and bending of our genres—the recognizable patterns, categories, and expectations—of human language and story.
From these two brief examples alone, it appears that there are generative avenues from within Dei Verbum for profound reflections on the theandric nature of Scripture. Dei Verbum demands that Catholics seek the two forms of biblical authorial intent that somehow, perhaps mystically, coexist: the authorial intent of its human authors, which requires the historical and literary study of those with expertise in ancient contexts, as well as the intent of God as Author, which requires the constant communal discernment and dialogue of the whole synodal Church. When we consider the innumerable cloud of witnesses acting before, during and after the act of writing these biblical texts—including amanuenses and scribes, tanners and binders, translators, patrons, and countless target audiences for the fragments of texts that come down to us—we can see the true humanity and synodality in the process of creating the Bible. But the collaborative nature of Scripture need not be restricted to the level of the human community. Especially if we consider that the constituent elements of our written Bibles are given by non-human creation—whether animals and trees for our parchment scrolls and paper books, or minerals of the earth for our digital Bibles—we might see the theandric nature of the Bible as a deeply co-operative process between God and creation (including humans), where we could say equally of the Bible: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.
In light of these views on the written Word of God, we might appreciate just how much the earthiness of Scripture and its human writers facilitate our very access to the Divine, even if imperfectly, as Attridge (and John) suggests. The challenge and invitation, then, is to hold together both the human and divine natures of Scripture, the limitations and vitalities inherent in biblical texts.
As a final thought, I’d like to return to one particular observation from Barthes’ Death of the Author. Barthes hazards a rather sweeping claim, but an important one, about the shifting history of conceptions of authorship: “the feeling about this phenomenon [writing] has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose ‘performance’ may be admired (that is, his mastery of narrative code), but not his ‘genius.’ The author is a modern figure.” What Barthes touches on here is profound. Most relevant is his demarcation of modern Western presuppositions of authorship as the work of a single genius—the distinction made in film studies between ‘director’ and ‘auteur,’ for instance—over and against ‘primitive’ societies who view the performed ‘text’ as channeling some kind of superhuman meaning.
The Catholic view of Scripture professed in Dei Verbum complicates this historical metanarrative. The Church teaches that all biblical writers are individual authors with intentions, while each are simultaneously mediators of the divine message. The reality is that the Catholic view on Scripture fits both the ‘primitive’ and the ‘modern’ of Barthes’ framework. So Catholics may reclaim all that is generative in what Barthes calls the ‘primitive’ view—the communal and liturgical experience of reading scripture, the belief of its message as truly transcendent and a point of connection with the divine, and the idea of revelation/meaning as never fully exhausted in a text or in the life of the Church. As opposed to this view of Scripture’s inexhaustibility, or vitality,
what may be the real backward-looking instinct is the flattening of the actualities and vibrancies of the ancient world for apologetic purposes. Catholics need not maintain a stance of apprehensive acceptance of scholarly consensus on biblical pseudepigraphy but can instead enjoy a thoroughgoing celebration of it.
After all, if one of the central motifs in the Bible is the surprising human character with questionable morals or past actions being nonetheless chosen by God to voice God’s words (Abraham, Ruth, and David, or Peter, Paul, and the Samaritan woman, to name but a few), then why not also the pseudepigraphers who, unbeknownst to them, would make it into the canonical Bible?
The recognition of imperfect contributors to the canon may indeed enhance the appreciation of Catholic teaching on Scripture, emphasizing just how human the divine Word has become, with all scandal of particularity. Scripture is, as Dei Verbum puts it, the act of God speaking through human beings “in human fashion” (DV 12). The phenomenon of ancient pseudepigraphy, with both its potentialities and ambiguities, is essential to reckoning with what exactly speaking in ‘human fashion’ entails. Study of the pseudepigraphic imagination invites Catholics to converse more deeply with texts considered both the very words of God and “in every way” like human language and discourse (DV 13), which is to say, inescapably connected to the imperfectly relational and political worlds within which humans live.
Julian Sieber
Julian Sieber is a Theology Ph.D. candidate at Loyola University Chicago specializing in New Testament and Early Christianity, and the Graduate Research Assistant at the Hank Center. He holds an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and a B.A. in Film & Television from Curtin University in Western Australia. His current research examines the politics and poetics of land in the Acts of the Apostles through the lenses of decolonial studies and ecocriticism.
62. This essay was first delivered at the “Pleasures of Pseudepigraphy” conference, hosted by the Hank Center at Loyola University Chicago in March 2025.
63. Mark Shea, “Pseudepigrapha,” National Catholic Register, April 28, 2014, https://www.ncregister.com/blog/pseudepigrapha.
64. Or, to borrow David Brakke’s memorable tongue-in-cheek epithet for these texts/writers, ‘Early Christian Lies and the Lying Liars Who Wrote Them.’
65. What some American theorists within New Criticism had already called the ‘intentional fallacy’; See William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Sewanee Review 54.3 (1946): 468–88.
66. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 5–6, trans. Richard Howard (1967), here par. 5.
67. See Patricia Ahearn-Kroll, “The History of the Study of Pseudepigrapha” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Fifty Years of the Pseudepigrapha Session at the SBL, eds. Matthias Henze and Liv Ingeborg Lied, EJL 50 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019): 103–131. Indeed, Dei Verbum draws frequently and deeply upon letters of disputed authorship—Ephesians, 1–2 Peter, Colossians, 1–2 Timothy, Titus, 2 Thessalonians—without comment.
68. Pope Francis, Aperuit Illis 2; and “Foreword,” in John J. Collins et al., eds., The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century, Third Fully Revised Edition (London: t&t clark, 2022), vii–viii.
69. See DV 12.
70. Angelo Tosato, The Catholic Statute of Biblical Interpretation, ed. and trans. Monica Lugato (Gregorian University Press, 2021), 14–17, originally published as Lo statuto cattolico dell'interpretazione della Bibbia (Padova: Casa Editrice Dott. Antonio Milani, 1999). Tosato also offers the formulation that, “as Jesus Christ was in all ways like human beings, except for sin, so too the sacred Scripture is in all ways like human books except for sin” (17 n.16).
71. Michael Peppard, How Catholics Encounter the Bible (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024), 37. I would only add that the Catholic priest manifests an additional layer of embodiment of the Word of God in his performance of the selected Gospel passage in persona Christi, in the person of Christ.
72. Harold W. Attridge, “Genre Bending in the Fourth Gospel,” JBL 121 (2002): 3–21, here 20.
73. Attridge, “Genre Bending in the Fourth Gospel,” 21.
74. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” par. 2.
75. Hindy Najman, “The Vitality of Scripture Within and Beyond the ‘Canon,’” JSJ 43 (2012): 497–518.