Month: February 2018

Our first of two classes on Passion and resurrection gospels began and ended with the Gospel of Mary. We read the conclusion to Gos. Mary as a group and I had the class consider who the Mary of the text is (the Marys tend to blur in apocryphal traditions), why the apostles doubt her vision (did the author anticipate resistance to the text’s “strange teachings”?), and what to make of the interplay between Peter and Mary (a microcosm of orthodox and “heretical” group conflicts?).

We carried this discussion of orthodoxy and heresy into our discussion of the next text examined this week: the Revelation of Peter. As a Nag Hammadi text, Rev. Peter is not usually discussed among Passion gospels, but it is set during the crucifixion of Jesus. Its docetic Christology—i.e., the divine Christ only “seemed” to be human, and departed the body of Jesus of Nazareth at the crucifixion—makes Rev. Peter one of the most controversial texts among the Christian Apocrypha and elicited much discussion from the class. We followed up Rev. Peter with a look at other texts that share the crucifixion-substitution motif, including Irenaeus’s description of the teaching of Basilides, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, the Acts of John, the Qur’an (Sura 4.157), and the Gospel of Barnabas. To supplement this survey of literature we looked also at a segment from the documentary Secret Lives of Jesus focusing on Basilides and Rev. Peter.

The Gospel of Barnabas’s

The second of our classes focusing on the ministry of Jesus (that is, the time between his childhood and his Passion) included two letters, two fragmentary texts, and two complete gospels.

We began by reading the Epistle of Lentulus, a letter attributed to a Roman official at the time of Jesus and which contains a detailed description of Jesus. I asked the students to consider as we read evidence from the text that indicates it is a medieval (not ancient) composition—e.g., Lentulus’s use of Jewish terminology he is unlikely to have known (“prophet,” “Nazarene,” the quotation from Psalm 45:2), and the Aryan (rather than Palestinian) looking Jesus he describes. I noted that many scholars of Christian Apocrypha would label this text “inauthentic” or a “forgery” and asked the class to consider why a later apocryphal text should be valued differently from ancient apocrypha. To my mind (and to the minds of several of the students who responded), there really is no difference—they are all fictional representations of figures from early Christianity and all worthy of study for what they can tell us about the interests of the writer and his/her time period.

We turned next to the Abgar Correspondence and a discussion of H.J.W. Drijvers’ theory that the letters were created to obscure the history of Manichean evangelization in Edessa (e.g., Mani’s apostle Addai preached in Syria, the Correspondence and its sequel the Doctrine of Addai replaces Mani’s disciple with a Christian missionary of the same name). We watched