Pseudepigrapha

In biblical studies, the term pseudepigrapha can refer to an assorted collection of Jewish religious works thought to be written c. 300 BCE to 300 CE.

[10] Scholars have identified seven levels of authenticity which they have organized in a hierarchy ranging from literal authorship, meaning written in the author's own hand, to outright forgery:[11] In biblical studies, pseudepigrapha refers particularly to works which purport to be written by noted authorities in either the Old and New Testaments or by persons involved in Jewish or Christian religious study or history.

Eusebius indicates this usage dates back at least to Serapion of Antioch, whom Eusebius records[12] as having said: "But those writings which are falsely inscribed with their name (ta pseudepigrapha), we as experienced persons reject...." Many such works were also referred to as Apocrypha, which originally connoted "private" or "non-public": those that were not endorsed for public reading in the liturgy.

In the fifth century the moralist Salvian published Contra avaritiam ("Against avarice") under the name of Timothy; the letter in which he explained to his former pupil, Bishop Salonius, his motives for so doing survives.

[14] The term pseudepigrapha is also commonly used to describe numerous works of Jewish religious literature written from about 300 BCE to 300 CE.

The book is an apocalypse wherein Daniel offers a series of predictions of the future, and is meant to reassure the Jews of the period that the tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes would soon be overthrown.

By backdating the book to the 6th century BCE and providing a series of correct prophecies as to the history of the past 400 years, the authorship claim of Daniel would have strengthened a later author's predictions of the coming fall of the Seleucid Empire.

The Catholic Encyclopedia notes, The first four historical books of the New Testament are supplied with titles, which however ancient, do not go back to the respective authors of those sacred texts.

The Canon of Muratori, Clement of Alexandria, and St. Irenaeus bear distinct witness to the existence of those headings in the latter part of the second century of our era.

III, xi, 7) employ them implies that, at that early date, our present titles to the gospels had been in current use for some considerable time.

Only as the springs of common recollection began to dwindle, and marked differences to appear between the well-informed and accurate Gospels and the untrustworthy ... become worth while for the Christian teacher or apologist to specify whether the given representation of the current tradition was 'according to' this or that special compiler, and to state his qualifications".

[22] The Gospel of Peter[23] and the attribution to Paul of the Epistle to the Laodiceans are both examples of pseudepigrapha that were excluded from the New Testament canon.

The earliest surviving manuscripts, composed in Latin, date to the 11th century CE, although textual peculiarities strongly suggest that the text was originally written in Greek.

[27] Lorenzo Valla, an Italian Catholic priest and Renaissance humanist, is credited with first exposing the forgery with solid philological arguments in 1439–1440,[28] although the document's authenticity had been repeatedly contested since 1001.

[27] In Russian history, in 1561 Muscovites supposedly received a letter from the Patriarch of Constantinople which asserted the right of Ivan the Terrible to claim the title of Tsar.

This was related to Russia's growing ambitions to become an Orthodox "Third Rome", after the Fall of Constantinople – for which the supposed approval by the Patriarch added weight.

De León ascribed the work to Shimon bar Yochai ("Rashbi"), a rabbi of the 2nd century during the Roman persecution[35] who, according to Jewish legend,[36][37] hid in a cave for thirteen years studying the Torah and was inspired by the Prophet Elijah to write the Zohar.

In a 1504 letter to the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius[38] Celtes claimed to have discovered the missing books of Ovid's Fasti.

However, it turned out that the purported Ovid verses had actually been composed by an 11th-century monk and were known to the Empire of Nicaea according to William of Rubruck.

Authors who have made notable use of this device include James Hogg (The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner), Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus), Jorge Luis Borges ("An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain"; "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"), Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire), Stanislaw Lem (A Perfect Vacuum; Imaginary Magnitude) Roberto Bolaño (Nazi Literature in the Americas) and Stefan Heym (The Lenz Papers).

Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings presents that story and The Hobbit as translated from the fictional Red Book of Westmarch written by characters within the novels.