Month: October 2013

Day two of the symposium was intended as a look to the future. The first session featured several of the participants in the More Christian Apocrypha Project (MCAP), which is producing collections of apocryphal texts in English translation (some for the first time), primarily by North American scholars. These papers examined some little-known or under-appreciated texts and traditions. In the first presentation, F. Stanley Jones (California State University) examined “The Distinctive Sayings of Jesus Shared by Justin and the Pseudo-Clementines.” Jones is contributing two pieces for the first More Christian Apocrypha volume: the Syriac epitome of the Acts of Peter, and the Aramaic fragments of the Toledot Yeshu (which have not yet appeared in English translation). We have talked also of including some or all of the Ps.-Clementine corpus in a future volume, since the material has not appeared in English translation for almost 150 years. Jones noted in his talk that he has constructed a synopsis of the witnesses to the text but has not found a publisher for it; this is unfortunate because it would be an important resource for studying the text. As for Jones’s paper, it presents an argument against the view that the shared sayings derive from a gospel harmony; instead Ps. Clem. seems to have pulled them from Justin’s lost work Syntagma, which Justin wrote to refute Marcion. The sayings thus have a distinct Marcionite or anti-Marcionite flavour.

Jones was followed by Stephen Shoemaker (University of Oregon), presenting on “The Tiburtine Sibyl, …

In the first afternoon session, “New Frontiers in Christian Apocrypha Studies,” we looked to bridging gaps between CA and related disciplines. In “Jesus at School among Christians, Jews, and Muslims,” Cornelia Horn (Catholic University of America) built on her previous work on Christian and Muslim use of Jesus and Mary infancy traditions. This time her discussion featured the story of Jesus in school from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and looked at its transformations in the Armenian Infancy Gospel, the Toledot Yeshu, and the story of Imam al-Baquir in Umm al-kitab (an eighth-century Shi’ite text). In her conclusion, Horn asked us to consider the status of texts like Umm al-kitab—does its connection to apocryphal Jesus stories make it a Christian apocryphal text, or an Islamic apocryphal text, or something else?

Nicola Denzey Lewis (Brown University) followed with dynamic presentation, “Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, Apocrypha: Bridging Disciplinary Divides.” The paper points out how scholars have divided Gnostic texts from other apocrypha—“high” vs. “low” literature, the CA are folkloric but Gnostic texts are “the ugly, wicked stepsisters in the fairytale of NT studies.” The divide is most apparent at conferences like the SBL Annual Meeting, which separates Nag Hammadi or Gnostic Studies from Christian Apocrypha, despite the fact that some Nag Hammadi texts are not Gnostic (e.g., the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles) and some Gnostic texts are not from Nag Hammadi (e.g., the Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Mary); one text in particular, the …

This year’s York Christian Apocrypha Symposium is now fading into memory. I have stopped waking at night thinking that David Eastman is stranded in an airport, or Jean-Michel Roessli is endlessly circling Toronto Island on a boat. Other bloggers (Sarah Veale and Mark Bilby) have offered their thoughts on the event. So, I think it’s time I presented by own post mortem analysis. 

(Front row, left to right: Lily Vuong, Stephen Shoemaker, Charles Hedrick, Mary Dzon, Stanley Jones, Mark Bilby. Second row: Pierluigi Piovanelli, Lee Martin McDonald, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jean-Michel Roessli, Cornelia Horn, Stephen Patterson, Tony Burke, David Eastman. Back: Kristian Heal, Mark Goodacre, Glenn Snyder, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Brent Landau, Nicola Denzey Lewis, John Kloppenborg)

The York Christian Apocrypha Symposium series began in 2011 with a one-day event focusing on a single text: the Secret Gospel of Mark. We gathered together eight North American scholars and one editor of Biblical Archeology Review to discuss the text in front of an audience of about 60 people. The papers were published in early 2013 as Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate. The budget for this first Symposium was small but it was a seminal event, a beginning to the forming of an association (if informal) of North American scholars of the Christian Apocrypha.

The success of the first Symposium enabled us to aim higher for the second. This time we gathered 19 scholars for presentations taking place over two days. Everything …

My net-savvy student assistant, Sarah Veale, has posted some comments on the 2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium on her blog Invocatio. Sarah was of great help during the planning and the execution of the event. She humbly minimizes her contributions in her blog post.

Mark Bilby, administrator of the Voces anticae blog, offers his thoughts on the 2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium. Mark attended the event and contributed an excellent paper (“Backstories of the Bandits: The Emergence, Submersion and Re-emergence of the Cult of Dysmas”) on apocryphal traditions of the bandits crucified with Jesus. I hope to provide my own summary of the symposium some time in the next week.