2018 New Testament Apocrypha Course: Week 10

May 17, 2018 by Tony

My New Testament Apocrypha course finished up last week with a class focusing on two aims: a look at anti-gospels (i.e., texts written by non-Christians for non-Christians to either lampoon or criticize Christianity, or to recast Jesus for a new religious system) and modern apocrypha. We also participated in an online chat session discussing Philip Jenkins’ book The Many Faces of Christ, which the students had to read for their book review assignment. As mentioned in previous posts about the course, York University is currently embroiled in a labour dispute, so the course has been continuing as a combination of online video lectures (the latest can be seen HERE) and chat sessions.

I began the lecture on anti-gospels with a short discussion of Christian-Jewish conflict in the first few centuries. I covered Mark’s apocalyptic discourse warning of being “handed over to councils and beaten in the synagogues” (13:9-13), John’s parents of the blind man who worried about being cast out of the synagogue for confessing Jesus as the Christ (9:22-23), arrests and executions of apostles in Acts, Paul’s issues with Judaizers, and several sections of Matthew (his genealogy which seems to anticipate criticism of Jesus’ conception, the slander of the disciples stealing the body of Jesus [28:11-15], and the declaration “Let his blood be on us and on our children!” [27:25]). These led into a discussion of Celsus’ The True Word and of possible references to Jesus in the Talmud.

Finally I arrived at the Toledoth Yeshu (the …

2018 New Testament Apocrypha Course: Week 9

May 7, 2018 by Tony

This week marked our final look at ancient Christian-authored apocrypha; our final class, in two weeks, focuses on anti-Christian apocrypha (the Toledot Yeshu and the Gospel of Barnabas) and, newly added this year, modern apocrypha. But this week we looked at tales of Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist, and Jesus’ wife Mary Magdalene (just joking).

Again, as a result of York’s labour disruption, I created a video lecture for this week’s class (which you can view HERE, if you wish). I began with a discussion of references to the family of Jesus in patristic literature: the names of Jesus’ sisters according to Epiphanius, traditions about the death of James, and Hegesippus (via Eusebius) on the grandsons of Jude and Jesus’ cousin Symeon, who took over the office of bishop of Jerusalem after the death of James.

I turned next to the Marian apocrypha, beginning with a discussion of Stephen Shoemaker’s paper, “Rethinking the ‘Gnostic Mary’: Mary of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala in Early Christian Tradition” (JECS 9.4 [2001]: 555-95), in which he argues that there is much assimilation and confusion of the various Marys in apocryphal Christian traditions. Shoemaker focuses on two of these Marys, but I discussed also Mary of Bethany and the “other Mary” (=Mary, mother of James?) at the tomb, all of which are combined in various ways in the texts. This is demonstrated in the Life of Mary Magdalene, a late-antique text from an unpublished Greek manuscript and in a Latin

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