New Blog Activity on Ps.-Cyril’s On the Passion

March 22, 2013 by Tony

Michael Heiser of PaleoBabble has posted a short entry criticizing the "sensational" coverage of the recently published apocryphon on the Passion of Christ attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem (discussed in this previous post). Frankly, I thought the article was relatively tame in its coverage and allowed the author/editor of the text, Roelof van den Broek, an excellent opportunity to promote his work (and Jim Davila at Paleojudaica appears to agree with me).

Van den Broek has also contributed a guest post to Alin Suciu's blog outlining the contents of the edition and providing a photograph of one of the manuscripts he used to reconstruct the text.

Christian Apocrypha at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies

April 3, 2013 by Tony

The 2013 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies will take place in Victora, BC June 1-4. For the first time, the society is including a session on the Christian Apocrypha. We hope that there will be sufficient interest in the session to continue it into future years. This will depend, of course, on the willingness of society members to contribute papers on the texts. One of my professional goals is to encourage and support scholarship on the Christian Apocrypha in North America (with a soft spot for Canada in particular). So, I would like to see this initiative succeed. Here are the papers for this year's session:

Sunday, June 2 / Dimanche, 2 Juin
8:30-11:45 (B211)
CHRISTIAN APOCRYPHA / CHRÉTIEN APOCRYPHES
Chair / Président: C. Callon (Toronto)

8:30-9:00 John Horman

“A literary relationship between Thomas and Q”

A literary relationship between Thomas and Q is plausible because of close verbal parallels. There are, however, also difficulties. First, the passages where a relationship could be defended are short, and could have been transmitted orally. Second, most of the text of Q, including some dominant themes in Matthew and Luke’s version of Q, is unrepresented in Thomas. Third, the Q sayings found in Thomas do not at first glance seem to suit any current literary stratification of Q. When, however, we take Thomas’ literary method into account, it is clear that Thomas has used a form of Q.

9:00-9:30 Tony Burke (York University)

“Expansions on the Acts …

Newly-Published Coptic Passion Apocryphon Features a Shape-Shifting Jesus

March 13, 2013 by Tony

The online magazine Live-Science features an article on Roelof van den Broek's new book Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem on the Life and the Passion of Christ (Brill, 2013). The text, based on two Coptic manuscripts, contains a number of interesting variations on the story of Jesus' arrest, trial, and crucifixion–including the placement of Jesus' arrest on Tuesday (rather than Thursday), the need for Judas to kiss Jesus because Jesus often changed his form, and mention of Jesus and Pilate sharing a meal on the night of his trial. The narrator claims to have found these details in a text "found written in the house of Mary." Read the complete article HERE (with thanks to Brent Landau for passing along the information).

A Review of Mark Goodacre’s “Thomas and the Gospels”

March 12, 2013 by Tony

Mark Goodacre, well-known in biblio-blogging circles as the voice behind the NTBlog and in Synoptic Problem circles as a vocal advocate of the Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis, forwarded to me a copy of his latest book Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas’s Familiarity with the Synoptics (Eerdmans/SPCK, 2012). Much like Goodacre’s The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (2010), Thomas and the Gospels addresses a complex topic in an economy of space (only 226 pages) and with highly readable and lively prose. No-one but Mark Goodacre could get away with slipping a Doctor Who reference into a scholarly work (see p. 122; note also his amusing mention of the Beatles on p. 194); his appeal to pseudonymous blogger N. T. Wrong is testament also to Goodacre’s lack of pretention (p. 140). I hope readers will forgive me for the length of this review, but Goodacre's arguments demand substantial discussion (and even this review is somewhat cursory in places). To learn more about the book from Goodacre himself, watch this video trailer at NTBlog.

Goodacre brings a different perspective to the question of Thomas’s dependence on (he prefers “familiarity with”) the Synoptics. For one, as a critic of the Two/Four Source Hypothesis, he does not believe in the existence of Q; without this other sayings gospel, Goodacre’s arguments about the genre, dating, and sources of Thomas are bound to be different. And second, though he joins North American apologetic scholars in arguing that Thomas is secondary to the Synoptics, …

Secret Scriptures Revealed: Thoughts on Writing for Non-Specialists, Part 4

March 4, 2013 by Tony

The final chapter of SSR is titled “Myths, Misconceptions, and Misinformation about the Christian Apocrypha.” It is a distillation of my previous work on the conflict between liberal scholarship on the Christian Apocrypha and its apologetic critics, a conflict occasioned by the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and news of several subsequent discoveries of apocryphal texts (the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, and the recent surge of interest in Secret Mark). But liberal scholars have propagated their own “myths, misconceptions, and misinformation,” and I spend time responding to these also. The discussion is arranged as responses to ten statements:

1. The Christian Apocrypha were all written after the texts of the New Testament, or

2. The Christian Apocrypha were all written before the texts of the New Testament.

3. The Christian Apocrypha are “forgeries,” written in the name of apostles.

4. The Christian Apocrypha were written by Gnostics.

5. The Christian Apocrypha claim that Jesus was not divine.

6. The Christian Apocrypha are bizarre and fanciful compared to the canonical gospels.

7. The Christian Apocrypha were written to undermine or replace the canonical texts.

8. The Christian Apocrypha were enormously popular before their suppression by a powerful minority in the Church.

9. The Christian Apocrypha are being used to rewrite Christian history.

10. Reading the Christian Apocrypha is harmful to one’s faith.

Many of these statements have been addressed in previous blog posts (begin HERE) from the time I was …