Apocryphicity
A Blog Devoted to the Study of Christian Apocrypha
Philip Tite's study of the Epistle to the Laodiceans, published by Brill, will soon be available. The book is now up on googlebooks with a limited preview. It can be accessed HERE.
The second chapter of Secret Scriptures Revealed covers additional introductory matter intended to form the basis for contextualizing the discussions of individual Christian Apocrypha texts that follow. The challenge here was to determine what new readers of these texts need to know to fully understand the texts, but again to do so in an economy of words. I considered what was confusing to me when I began my interest in the texts. Some of the scholarship on the CA assumes readers are knowledgeable in certain areas (the content of biblical texts, the lives of various Christian figures and writers, etc.), but that is not always the case. And since this is a book for non-specialists, I can assume nothing about their background. So I begin the chapter with a description of the various languages of the texts (focusing on Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Slavonic) and how these languages relate to one another. With this information readers can understand how a text can move from, say, Greek …
Jim Davila provided a link on his blog Paleojudaica to images from the 6-9th century Greek manuscript containing fragments of the Gospel of Peter and Apocalypse of Peter. The images can be viewed HERE.
The second in the York Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series will take place May 8-10, 2013 at (of course) York University in Toronto. The programme is still being finalized but confirmed presenters include Stephen Patterson, Nicola Denzey, Lee Martin McDonald, Cornelia Horn, Stephen Shoemaker, F. Stanley Jones, and Annette Yoshiko Reed. The theme this year is the study of the Christian Apocrypha in North America.
The first Christian Apocrypha Symposium took place in 2011 and focused on the Secret Gospel of Mark. The proceedings from the event will be published some time this year by Cascade. The 2013 Symposium will be a little more ambitious than the first, with more presenters spread out over two days. And there will be more danishes.
Look for a more formal announcement in the next few weeks.
A special issue of the journal Studies in Religion/ Sciences Religieuses focused on children in early Christianity includes my brief article “Depictions of Children in the Apocryphal Infancy Gospels” (p. 388-400). The abstract is below.
The apocryphal infancy gospels (such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Protoevangelium of James) seem at first look to be ideal sources for the study of children and childhood in early Christianity. They all feature depictions of Jesus as an infant and/or a child; some tell similar tales of other eminent Christian figures, such as Mary of Nazareth and John the Baptist. Few of these texts, however, can be considered “early” texts (i.e., 2-3rd centuries) and even those texts we can confidently date to this period are of limited value for the study of children. One text remains useful for this endeavour: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. And in recent years, several scholars have looked seriously at this gospel for what it can tell us about the experiences of children in antiquity. Yet, even this text must be approached with caution for it has more to say about how adults of the time wanted children to be than what they truly were.