Perjury 

It is very common for young people to imagine that all people who lived prior to, say, 1950 were very foolish and ignorant and can have nothing to contribute to our understanding of the world. This kind of arrogance and temporal parochialism seems to come very naturally to humanity. Thus we hear from the 'Jesus Seminar' that people in times gone by did not really understand the difference between a factual report and fantasy. These categories, it is alleged, were simply lacking from their minds. Fortunately this is a testable contention. Perjury is legal testimony in which metaphorical 'rightness' displaces correspondence to the facts. How did the ancients treat it? With respect, indifference, or as a capital crime?

Moses

The law of Moses is very negative on perjury, beginning with Exodus 20:16: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." Perjury could be a death penalty crime, depending upon the circumstances. If the false testimony was offered in a death penalty case, then the perjurer receives that penalty:

When the testimony is taken under oath, and the testimony is false, Philo prescribes death as penalty:

"Against those who call God as a witness in favor of assertions which are not true, the punishment of death is ordained in the law; and very properly, for even a man of moderate respectability will never endure to be cited as a witness, and to have his name registered in support of a lie. But it seems to me that he would look upon any one who proposed such a thing to him as a thoroughly faithless enemy; on which account we must say this, that him, who swears rashly and falsely, calling God to witness an unjust oath, God, although he is merciful by nature, will yet never release, inasmuch as he is thoroughly defiled and infamous from guilt, even though he may escape punishment at the hands of men. And such a man will never entirely escape, for there are innumerable beings looking on, zealots for and keepers of the national laws, of rigid justice, prompt to stone such a criminal, and visiting without pity all such as work wickedness, unless, indeed, we are prepared to say that a man who acts in such a way as to dishonor his father or his mother is worthy of death, but that he who behaves with impiety towards a name more glorious than even the respect due to one's parents, is to be borne with as but a moderate offender." (Philo Judaeus, A Treatise On the Honor Commanded To Be Paid to Parents, Chapter IX).

It is also true that some legal traditions have sought a way around Moses' stringency: "The anxiety to exalt the Law and to banish all opposition in the rival party was so great that upon one occasion Judah ben Tabbai had a witness executed who had been convicted of giving false testimony in a trial for a capital crime. He was, in this instance, desirous of practically refuting the Sadducaean views, forgetting that he was at the same time breaking a law of the Pharisees. That law required all the witnesses to be convicted of perjury before allowing punishment to be inflicted; and, as one witness alone could not establish an accusation, so one witness alone was not punishable." (History of the Jews, by Heinrich Graetz, Volume II, Chapter II, p. 53.) This Pharisaic 'reform' all but nullifies Moses' law, whose intent is clear enough.

Twelve Tables

It is difficult to give a single-word characterization of Moses' law as 'harsh' or 'lenient,' because it is both: harsh with regard to adultery, for instance, but lenient with regard to property crimes, certainly by comparison with how such crimes were treated in the English law of several centuries ago. There is no such difficulty, however, in classifying the pagan Roman law of the Twelve Tables; they are harsh, favoring capital punishment as a universal remedy. Perjury is punished with death, in the form of being flung down from the Tarpeian rock:

In later years tossing people off the Tarpeian rock began to seem harsh, and so other measures were adopted. The Roman censor would degrade a known perjurer in rank. For example, a knight known to have committed perjury would lose his horse (cease to be a knight):

"For I think that I ought not to pass over the instance of that most eminent and most illustrious man, Publius Africanus; who, when he was censor, and when Gaius Licinius Sacerdos had appeared on the register of the knights, said with a loud voice, so that the whole assembly could hear him, that he knew that he had committed deliberate perjury and that if anyone denied it, he would give him his own evidence in support of this assertion. But when no one ventured to deny it, he ordered him to give up his horse." (Cicero, Against Cluentius, XLVIII, Section 134).

No one thought perjury a matter of indifference. Livy also mentions a case in which the censors degraded those who sought too diligently for a 'loop-hole' in evading an oath: "After them were cited those persons who showed too much ingenuity in inventing a method of discharging the obligation of their oath, namely, such of the prisoners as concluded that the oath which they had sworn to return, would be fulfilled by their going back privately to Hannibal's camp, after setting out on their journey. Such of these and of the above-mentioned as had horses at the public expense were deprived of them, and all were degraded from their tribes and disfranchised." (Livy, Roman History, Book XXIV, Chapter 18). These men lost their citizenship rights, because they were thought less than honest.

A similar thing happened to Athenians who committed perjury, though they had to do it three times before they were disenfranchised:

"Such was one form of disenfranchisement. According to a second, delinquents lost all personal rights, but retained possession of their property. This class included all persons convicted of theft or of accepting bribes — it was laid down that both they and their descendants should lose their personal rights. Similarly, all who deserted on the field of battle, who were found guilty of evasion of military service, of cowardice, or of withholding a ship from action, all who threw away their shields, or were thrice convicted of giving perjured evidence or of falsely endorsing a summons, or who were found guilty of maltreating their parents, were deprived of their personal rights, while retaining possession of their property." (Andocides, On the Mysteries, Chapter 74).

To lose the right to vote and to attend the assembly is a serious penalty. If the ancients thought making up stories was either trivial misbehavior or did not even understand the accusation, examining the legal standing of the perjurer in antiquity cannot confirm this recently made-up 'fact.' The man lying still at the foot of the Tarpeian rock, might, in his fleeting final thoughts, for all anyone knows, have realized, 'gosh, this is not something you should do.'

Untangling the Threads

Several different issues intersect here: false testimony before a tribunal, false testimony under oath, false swearing, blasphemy, and lying in general. As should be clear to any Bible reader, all are morally wrong, though under most legal codes the bar-room story-teller need not listen for the foot-fall of the police:

Plato, in his 'Laws,' advocated a scheduled series of punishments for perjury, beginning with disqualification from serving as a witness to capital punishment:

"And either of the parties in a cause may bring an accusation of perjury against witnesses, touching their evidence in whole or in part, if he asserts that such evidence has been given; but the accusation must be brought previous to the final decision of the cause. The magistrates shall preserve the accusations of false witness, and have them kept under the seal of both parties, and produce them on the day when the trial for false witness takes place. If a man be twice convicted of false witness, he shall not be required, and if thrice, he shall not be allowed to bear witness; and if he dare to witness after he has been convicted three times, let any one who pleases inform against him to the magistrates, and let the magistrates hand him over to the court, and if he be convicted he shall be punished with death."
(Plato, The Laws, Book XI).

Taken all in all, it is impossible to reconcile the ancient legal understanding of perjury with what the 'Jesus Seminar' is telling us about the ancient mind. According to these modern scholars, the ancients had no mental categories by which one could differentiate between what is factual and what is imaginary. But if they had no such categories, then how did they prosecute and convict anyone of perjury, which they certainly did, and throw him off the Tarpeian rock, which they also did? This is precisely what perjury is: an account which substitutes metaphor or 'what feels right' for what actually occurred. These modern fantasies can only be described as wishful thinking, indulged in by people who are too busy forging a new religion to attend to the details of what they are overturning as they go crashing by.

Fact-Checking

No doubt readers of classical literature find to hard to escape the perception that the entire fact-checking department was on extended vacation during the entire phase of classical antiquity. Why else, in a book on natural history, not mythology, do we read, "He speaks also of another race of men, who are known as Monocoli, who have only one leg, but are able to leap with surprising agility." (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book VII, Chapter 2). Those men with one leg are still hopping along lonesomely out there, never yet having been discovered. But the resolution to the difficulty these men propose: 'of course we do not believe the gospel, but that's OK, because neither did the gospel authors,' is simply absurd.

Seth Speaks

Some of the 'main-line' churches were suckered into adopting 'liberal' Bible criticism by the assertion, often made in the literature, that people in ancient times were just not troubled by forgery at all:

"That writings should be pseudonymous, be put forth under another name, was then not so uncommon as it is to-day, and was by no means infrequent. In the time just subsequent to the New Testament we find, for example, a "Revelation of Peter" "a Gospel of Peter," "a Discourse of Peter" all of them pseudonymous works. We have the same phenomenon in the domain of Judaism. All the numerous apocalypses, that is, revelations which there were written in this time, do not appear under the name of their actual author, but under a name famous of yore: Enoch, Moses, Isaiah, Ezra, Daniel. But also in the sphere of the heathen educated world there are analogous facts. For example, under the name of Pythagoras dozens of treatises were published in those centuries. These facts show us that that time in this respect had different ideas from our own. The large number of such pseudonymous works would otherwise not be intelligible. A correct judgment of a period is only then possible if we measure it by its own moral standard. This whole literary procedure, therefore, means something different from what it would mean today. And consequently it is not right to brand such pseudonymous works, apart from special cases, with the moral stigma of forgeries. Plainly the authors of the many Jewish apocalypses did not regard themselves as literary forgers. Nay, the teaching which was put into the mouth of a revered teacher of past time is traced back to him by a kind of pious devotion. It was considered that his thoughts agreed with the author's, and by this means he sought to increase their weight, and so he put them forth under such authority. " (Wrede, William (1909-01-01). The origin of the New Testament (Kindle Locations 379-391). Kindle Edition.)

As we've seen, this is far from the truth. Like the ancients, as a rule twentieth century Americans did not accept forged works with equanimity. There were, however, exceptions:

"In 1888 The Secret Doctrine, the major work of Theosophy, purporting to be derived from a spiritual hierarchy of masters in contact with Madame Blavatsky, appeared. The Secret Doctrine set the stage for other Theosophists to produce documents received from the masters. . .In 1970 the first volume of The Seth Material appeared. Seth was an entity who spoke through Jane Roberts, a house-wife who lived quietly in upstate New York. The unexpected response to her first volume led to a sequel, Seth Speaks (1972), and more than ten others."
(Perspectives on the New Age, by James R. Lewis, p. 22)

Though it might strike young people today as bizarre that people back then were so gullible, I remember talking with friends who thought the 'Seth' material legit. Though I never actually bothered to read it, to the best of my recollection 'Seth' propounded a set of maxims of the 'Be wise, my child' variety. The house-wife who produced this material was, in her own mind at least, 'channelling' the communications of a personage by the name of 'Seth,' by a process of automatic writing. For people who believe in the legitimacy of this method of communication, which include not only the 'New Age'ers of the present day but also the gnostics of old, Jane Roberts was not 'forging' the 'Seth' materials, she was 'transmitting' them. It wasn't, of course, William Wrede's "pious devotion" which led Jane Roberts to mouth 'Seth's' words; rather, she believed this type of communication was not, in the end, really all that different from any other type of dictation. Some people did believe like this in antiquity: the gnostics. The orthodox, meanwhile, were aware that Moses had criminalized communication with the dead:

How did Christian folk react when presented with pseudonymous works,— not the 'Orphic' hymns written centuries after the semi-mythical Orpheus, nor 'Pythagorean' treatises written centuries after his death,— the pagan authors may have sincerely believed they were 'channelling' these voices. But what did the Christian say when presented with 'Christian' treatises under false authorship? Punish the blackguards:

"But if the writings which wrongly go under Paul’s name, claim Thecla’s example as a license for women’s teaching and baptizing, let them know that, in Asia, the presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul’s fame from his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from his office." (Tertullian, 'On Baptism,' Chapter 17).

Tertullian speaks disapprovingly of apocryphal writings:

"But why need we care, since these philosophers have also made their attacks upon those writings which are condemned by us under the title of apocryphal, certain as we are that nothing ought to be received which does not agree with the true system of prophecy, which has arisen in this present age; because we do not forget that there have been false prophets, and long previous to them fallen spirits, which have instructed the entire tone and aspect of the world with cunning knowledge of this (philosophic) cast?" (Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, Chapter 2, p. 325 ECF)

It was not, amongst Christian folk, an accepted convention of authorship for writers to pretend to be who they were not.