Pseudepigraphy

So we've been looking at some ancient texts outside of our bibles, such as 1 Enoch, in order to get a pulse on the culture surrounding the New Testament. In any introduction to the book of 1 Enoch one will note that Enoch of Genesis 5:24 did not write this book. Why would people write under a different name and why would a community of people accept such a writing? I have here some info about the whole 'writing under a different name thing' or pseudepigraphy ('pseude' - false, epigraph - writing/inscription). The Dictionary of New Testament Background gives eight reasons for why people would write under a false name. Keep in mind that writing under another person's name occured quite often back in the day. Also, the writings were not just restricted to 'religious' texts. Pseudepigraphy occured in other genres of literature as well. So here's the top eight motives of writers taken from DNTB, in no particular order:

(1) Sometimes literary forgeries have been crafted out of pure malice.
(2) More commonly, literary forgeries were prompted by promise of financial payment.
(3) Sometimes the pseudepigrapher used an ancient name to gain credence for his writing in order to support a position he knew to be false.
(4) Similarly the pseudepigrapher sometimes used an ancient name to gain credence for his writing in order to support a position he judged to be true.
(5) A more idiosyncratic case of the same thing has occasionally occurred when an individual has purposely hidden his or her own name out of modesty, using the name of another.
(6) A deep desire to get published and be widely read, for both personal and ideological reasons.
(7) A skill within a literary genre. In the post-Aristotle period, the rise of the great Attic orators generated high interest in rhetoric and oratory. Students were taught to compose speeches based on models left by the ancient orators. The most skillful of these were doubtless difficult to distinguish from the originals. This drifted over into the reconstruction, by historians, of speeches that their subjects probably would have made (in the view of the historians).
(8) Finally, several bodies of writings are ascribed to some philosophical-religious-mythical figure.

So any combination of the above could be at work in a pseudepigraphal writing. This explains motives for writing, but not necessarily why people in a certain community would have readily accepted such writings. That's a much more complicated issue because one would need to reconstruct a specific groups' worldview. In our case, studying the first century Jewish social climate, one could understand why writings which promote a certain worldview would be accepted on the basis of the writing's content not just the author's name. I think also at the heart of it is this (taken from DNTB): Did the community to/for whom the pseudepigraphal writing was written suspect that the writing was crafted with the intent to deceive? If not, then it would probably be well received.