In the hothouse of New Testament epistolary forgery, flowers bloom in all kinds of pots. In addition to the ever-flourishing field of New Testament pseudepigraphs written by Christians from the time of the apostles onwards, still other biblical apologists were keen to recruit external witnesses to the “truth” of the Christian revelations, enlisting the approbation of even ancient pagan and medieval Jewish voices.

This small quarto speaks to the power of such epistolary devices. It recounts the spurious correspondence between two eleventh-century learned Moroccan Jews, “Rabbi Samuel ibn Nasr ibn Abbas of Fez” and “Rabbi Isaac of Sibiulmeta.” Writing as a Christian convert, Samuel criticizes the Jews for their stubborn insistence on still awaiting the Messiah when the Christian world had long concluded that he had already come, in first-century CE, in the form of Jesus Christ. Effectively “preaching to the choir” of a Christian readership under the pretense of originally having written for a Jewish audience, Samuel presents his case by employing the rich fund of Old Testament prophetic texts that predicted what subsequently transpired in Christ’s own lifetime. The resulting text is hardly intended to convert Jews so much as to condemn them through the supposedly distinguished witness of one of their own.

Early forgeries often obsessed over their own provenance in efforts to lend their impostures an air of preemptive verisimilitude, and the Rabbi Samuel letter was no different. Professing originally to have been written in Arabic in 1072, the work had all but disappeared through the machinations of Jews desperate to suppress a work so perilous to their own confessional interests. It was only to resurface some 250 years later in 1339, when the text was finally liberated from obscurity by its Latin translator Alphonsus Boni Hominis (or Alonso Buenhombre), a Dominican missionary. It is of course generally suspected that the text was in fact the invention of Buenhombre, designed rhetorically to serve his own latter-day anti-Semitic purposes, which may have included Roman Catholic confessional consolidation during the irenic Avignon papacy of Benedict XII and the suppression of the Cathar heresy in the south of France.

The Rabbi Samuel forgery proved its usefulness for many centuries to come, its true heyday corresponding with the advent of print and helped along by Sebastiano Salvini’s finer vernacular translation of Buenhombre’s “barbarous” medieval Latin into the Tuscan dialect in 1479. The Hopkins copy constitutes what we believe to be the extremely rare second edition, but one of twenty-four to appear during the incunabular period alone (ca. 1474–1500). A breathtaking three hundred plus editions appeared throughout the sixteenth century in subsequent Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and even Polish translations, and later still in English (printed in 1648), Portuguese, Slovak, Romanian, modern Greek, and Russian translations and variations.

The Rabbi Samuel forgery was first printed by Leonardus Achates de Basilia (Leonhard Agtstein) in Sant’Orso, a small town in the northern Veneto, in an undated but undoubtedly 1474 edition, to which he also appended the first printed appearance of another spurious text: a pseudepigraph ostensibly written by Pontius Pilate to the Roman emperor Tiberius. There Pilate emerges, not as a malevolent pagan set upon the rigid enforcement of Roman imperial fiat, but rather as one endowed with benevolence and mercy, and keen to spare Christ’s life.

Here, in this far earlier circa fourth-century forgery, the strategy was likely intended to rehabilitate Christians in the eyes of Romans during and after the emperor Constantine’s legalization of the Christian religion. The portrayal of Pilate, who knew of Christ firsthand, as a proclaimer of Jesus’s innocence, might persuade pagan Roman citizens that Christian religious beliefs and practices were, at worst, innocuous, peaceful, and even acceptable. Pilate’s failure to save Christ was not due to his own weaknesses, as the letter suggests, but rather was owing to the scheming of merciless Jewish authorities who wanted Jesus crucified at any cost, thus also echoing the anti-Semitic implications of the Rabbi Samuel letter with which the Pilate letter appears in the Hopkins volume. Some later readers of the Pilate forgery may even have been convinced that Pilate himself was a kind of proto-Christian blessed by God with some small measure of the Christian revelation.

It ought to be noted, too, that there is considerable confusion and variations between these early versions of Pilate’s spurious letter, not least because of the appearance of a subsequent version addressed by Pilate to the later emperor Claudius. Some of these are fairly concise—always a useful strategy when presenting posterity with patently fake information—while other exemplars may extend to minor novellas of as many as five thousand words. Not all incunabular editions of the Rabbi Samuel appear with the Pilate letter either. The Bibliotheca Fictiva also includes the rare Roman incunabulum also printed with the Pilate letter by Eucharius Silber, ca. 1480, and a later Venetian edition of 1517, both also in Latin.

—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens