Forgeries of Desire: The Erotics of Authenticity in New Testament Historiography

Abstract

Situated at the intersection of the study of the New Testament, the theorizing of Christian origins, and queer historiography, this dissertation examines the ways in which biblical scholarship’s pursuit of historical authenticity normalizes some epistemic desires while stigmatizing others. I focus specifically on a set of New Testament and early Christian texts whose authenticity is disputed—texts characterized by some rubrics as pseudepigraphical and by others as forged—and the arguments that arose over the course of those texts’ receptions. Rather than making a case for or against the authenticity of any of the texts read here, this project analyzes how discourses of authenticity and forgery, as two terms in a binary constructed to distinguish the normative from the deviant, inflected as both terms are by the forces of canon and orthodoxy, designate acceptable and unacceptable—perverse, even—forms of contact across texts and times. The deployment of forgery discourses in New Testament scholarship can be read, I propose, as enabling or curtailing certain kinds of readerly and writerly relations—relations that speak to a kind of historical desire and disavowed eroticism that structure biblical scholarship’s historicizing truth claims generally, especially when its traditional historiographical commitments constrain certain desires and modes of identification by marking them as intelligible and properly historical, while rendering others as historically illegible. Thus, this project also investigates how historical-critical biblical scholarship negotiates its unease regarding the relational nature of interpretation and the place of the historian’s desire. I entertain the question of whether a paradox—that biblical studies is passionately attached to and structured by its notions of objective history—is what undermines the recovery of the intimate politics and affective disavowals that discourses of authenticity perform in disputes on “falsely” authored texts. Ultimately, I suggest that biblical history poses its own forms of “queer” history, queer in the sense of disrupted, broken open, by diverse—and perverse, by many of its own dominant and regularly enforced standards—lines of desire and imagination. Engaging resources offered by queer theoretical and affective engagements with historiography that are particularly helpful for parsing relations between the erotic, relational, and theological negotiations in forgery scholarship in biblical studies specifically, I ultimately wonder if we might need to grapple with the epistemological implications of the fact that all our histories are forgeries of desire.