Payloads

Considering James and Hegesippus, I am now considering in what form a pseudepigraphon might circulate. We'll start with stuff nobody accepts today.

Looking around: The Acts of John bears a Johannine "Hymn of Jesus". The Acts of Peter and Paul contains a "Letter of Pilate to Claudius". The Acts of Paul (alone - and swiftly disgraced) contains "3 Corinthians". Note that Tertullian objected only to the Acts' Thecla lore (as we'd expect); not to the epistle therein which he simply ignored.

Of these "3 Corinthians" survives independently of its (Pauline) Acts most-notably in the papyrus Bodmer X. Wikipedia understands this epistle to have existed before the Acts which Acts have incorporated it (clumsily). That provides a precedent, at least, for scholars to conjecture that the "Hymn of Jesus" likewise preceded its own Acts here Johannine.

I gather that where some community had inherited an unprovenanced scrap of hymnody or some pseudepigraphon under attack from skeptics, one way of preserving the sus-amogus text would be to include such in a fictional narrative. Those who would like to keep reading this stuff, can keep reading it; to those who don't well er um we were only kidding!

... but then there's that penchant of ancient historians simply to cook up the dialog. Luke is (today) notorious for this, casting Pauline propaganda as if Peter uttered them.

Now I wonder if an "Acts of James" was circulating, with that letter as payload. Hegesippus' copious Jacobine lore would paraphrase the narrative; other communities kept the letter.