Addenda to the Syriac Tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas: A Neglected Edition of the Life of Mary and a Forgotten Palimpsest

November 27, 2018 by Tony

In the short time between when I submitted the manuscript of my new book, The Syriac Tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, to its publisher and when it was printed, two additional sources for the text came to my attention. This was to be expected, particularly for the rather robust Sw recension, in which Inf. Gos. Thom. appears as the fourth of six books in a sprawling Life of Mary collection. It was a big surprise, however, to discover a fifth/sixth-century manuscript belonging to the Sa recension (the best witness to the early form of the text), and that this manuscript had been mentioned in scholarship over a century ago! I promised in the preface to the book that I would publish updates (chiefly via the e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha entries for the three recensions), but I didn’t think I would be doing it so soon!

I will cover the Sw manuscript first. It is an uncatalogued and unnumbered manuscript belonging to the Monastery of St. Ephrem in Holland. It was published in a devotional edition prepared by Julius Y. Çiçek (Die heilige Meryem/Tad’itho d’yoldath aloho Maryam. Holland: Bar Hebraeus Verlag, 2001) that came to my attention via Grigory Kessel. These kind of editions are fairly common in places like Cairo and the monasteries of Greece and essentially entail a transcription of a single manuscript, sometimes with translation. Çiçek’s edition is significant not only for its use of a previously unknown manuscript but also because it is …

2017 International SBL Christian Apocrypha Sessions Report

November 13, 2017 by Tony

This year’s International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature took place August 7-11 at Humboldt University in Berlin, an auspicious location since Berlin is the hub of Christian Apocrypha Studies in German, and Humboldt in particular is where Christoph Markschies, co-editor of the “new Hennecke,” teaches. I was able to attend the first three of four Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha sessions and will provide here some comments on the papers and discussions; Bradley Rice graciously agreed to pass along some comments on the fourth.

The first session began with the paper I previewed on Apocryphicity co-written with Slavomír Céplö (Univerzita Karlova v Praze) entitled “‘Arabic’ Infancy Gospel No More: The Challenges of Reconstructing the Original Gospel of the Infancy.” The paper was an overview of the sources for the Gospel of the Infancy in both Syriac and Arabic and posed some questions about how to present that evidence in a new translation to be included in a future volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. One of the other presenters in the session, Mari Mamyan, was absent, leaving much time for discussion of how the growth of Digital Humanities impacts the construction of critical editions. Christoph Markschies, who was present at the session, remarked that the publisher of his multi-volume compendium Antike christliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung has stated that the current edition will be the last one they publish, because the audience has changed so much over the years—scholars interested in the material are increasingly working online and …

2017 ISBL Preview: “‘Arabic’ Infancy Gospel No More”

November 13, 2017 by Tony

I am about to depart for the 2017 International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Berlin. Slavomír Céplö and I will be presenting at the first of four Christian Apocrypha sessions; for a full listing of the Christian Apocrypha papers at this year’s ISBL see this post. The paper, entitled “‘Arabic’ Infancy Gospel No More: The Challenges of Reconstructing the Original Gospel of the Infancy,” has two aims: to present the current status of our work on the Arabic Infancy Gospel (aka Gospel of the Infancy), and to interact with the session’s theme of “Is this a ‘text’?” (questioning practices of how we title texts and if these titles capture the dynamic, fluid natures of verbal communication). Here is the abstract for the paper:

The Arabic Infancy Gospel (Arab. Gos. Inf.) was first published by Henry Sike in 1697, long before many of the apocryphal texts that now dominate the study of Christian Apocrypha. Only one other edition of the text has appeared in the intervening centuries: from a much-different and likely-superior manuscript at the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Additional manuscripts exist but no one, as yet, has evaluated these witnesses. Nor has there been much effort to integrate into the study of this text the East Syriac History of the Virgin, which shares a large portion of material with Arab. Gos. Inf. This paper presents the results of careful analysis of the manuscript sources for both texts and offers some preliminary observations about how best …