Christian Apocrypha Books to Look for at SBL 2016

November 13, 2017 by Tony

One of the highlights of the SBL Annual Meeting is the publishers exhibition. As you make your way from one booth to another, keep an eye out for these new books.

J. N. Bremmer, T. R. Karmann, and T. Nicklas, eds. The Ascension of Isaiah. Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 11. Peeters.

Tony Burke and Brent Landau, eds. New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. Eerdmans.

April DeConick. The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today. Columbia University Press.

J.K. Elliott, ed. A Synopsis of the Apocryphal Nativity and Infancy Narratives. 2nd ed. Brill.

Alan Mugridge. Copying Early Christian Texts: A Study of Scribal Practice. WUNT 362. Mohr Siebeck.

Michael E. Stone. Armenian Apocrypha Relating to Angels and Biblical Heroes. SBL Press.

Johannes Tromp, ed. The Life of Adam and Eve in Greek. A Critical Edition. SBL Press.

Eric Vanden Eykel. But Their Faces Were All Looking Up. The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries 1. Bloomsbury.

Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver in The Veritas Deception

November 14, 2016 by Tony

About a year ago, an independent author named Lynne Constantine contacted me about a text I have worked on (and featured in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures) called the Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver (information on e-Clavis). Lynne wanted to use the coin relics as a plot device in her latest book and wanted some advice about the text and the veracity of “Judas penny” relics still existing today. Lynne’s book, The Veritas Deception, was released a few months ago, and I just finished reading it last night.

The novel is a thriller that involves a secret organization led by the psychopathically evil Damon Crosse intent on corrupting society by desensitizing people to murder, violence, and moral depravity through social media and television programming. Crosse is opposed by investigative journalist Jack Logan and his former fiancé Taylor Phillips, who has become Crosse’s target. Crosse is after the silver pieces, which according to legend, bestow upon their bearer their ultimate, evil desire.

The legend of the silver pieces is recounted on pp. 240-41 and 438-39. Logan and Philips read a portion of the text from a web site (is it mine?). The story of the coins’ journey from Abraham to Judas continues beyond the text when the characters reveal that the coins were given to the guards at Jesus’ tomb, and from them to Mary Magdalene, who entrusted ten each to Peter, Matthew, and John son of Zebedee, who passed them on to John of …

Available at Last! More New Testament Apocrypha vol. 1

November 11, 2016 by Tony

I was very happy to receive in the mail today (on my birthday) a box full of copies of my volume New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures Vol. 1, co-edited with Brent Landau. It was a long process seeing this project from conception to birth. Brent and I began soliciting contributions for it at the 2010 SBL. Brent and I will be doing some promotion for it over the next month, including a reception for contributors next week in San Antonio and a video interview for our publisher, Eerdmans. My thanks once again to everyone who worked on the volume and for putting their faith in a couple of junior scholars to see this thing through to publication.

Testimonials from the Book Jacket:

“This fine collection brings together thirty recently published or long known but often neglected Christian texts, variously inspired by or responding to characters or events presented in the books of the New Testament, together with one Jewish parody of the Life of Jesus. Editors and contributors alike are to be congratulated on their achievement, which paves the way for a wider appreciation and understanding of these varied, fascinating, and sometimes surprising texts, some of which may at times have been more popular than their biblical counterparts.” ~ Andrew Gregory, University College, Oxford

“In this masterful volume we find that greatest of rarities—a collection of ancient texts scarcely known (let alone studied) by scholars of Christian antiquity. With these fresh translations of some thirty apocryphal works, each with …

Lost and Found Items in Manuscripts of the Life of Mary

November 10, 2016 by Tony

I have spent much of the past ten years working on a project that has been mentioned on this blog several times (start HERE): a critical edition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in Syriac. The project is now virtually complete; right now it is in the hands of readers and I look forward to getting their feedback in the next few months. In the meantime I thought I would use some of the downtime to get back to blogging with more regularity. And what better to write about than, once again, the Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas?

In the course of my manuscript hunting and gathering, I came across some manuscripts that should be of interest to a wider audience of scholars than the few of us who work on Infancy Thomas. This is one of the joys of text-critical research: the serendipitous discovery of texts or versions of texts obscured, in many cases, by sloppy cataloguing—because the cataloger either missed or misidentified the material. Several of the West Syriac Life of Mary manuscripts included in my project contain additional texts on the Virgin Mary—e.g., Jacob of Serug’s memra On the Death and Burial of the Virgin, or the Miracle of the Theotokos in the City of Apamea. In a few cases, one of these texts—a memra On the Malice of the Jews against Mary and Joseph, sometimes attributed to Ephrem—is inserted between books one and two of the Life of Mary (book 1 …