My Regensburg Year Part 5: December 2024

January 7, 2025 by Tony

December was heavy with work (three presentations) and somewhat light on travelling (only one trip out of the city). Mind you, that’s all because we were in Regensburg for only a couple of weeks before heading home to Canada for the holidays. We also stopped in Lisbon on the way back to Germany.

First, the travelling. Ever since our doomed trip to Vienna in October (where we were “punched in the face,” as my wife likes to say, by torrential rain), we vowed to return to the city in better weather. On that first trip we had tickets to see the Vienna Boys Choir perform at the Theatre im Park but the concert was cancelled (they wear sailor suits, FFS; can’t they take a little rain?). So we booked new tickets for an indoor venue (the Hofburg Chapel). What could go wrong? Well, if my faculties were not ravaged by age, I would have suspected that a Sunday morning concert in a chapel would have meant we were going to mass. Religious rituals give this atheist the heebie-jeebies. Catholic mass in particular triggers my recovered-Catholic PTSD. But worst of all I felt cheated. I thought we would hear heavenly voices singing the songs of the season: “Carol of the Bells” or “All I Want for Christmas is You” or “Fairy Tale of New York” (imagine: 30 pre-pubescent boys belting out “You scumbag, you maggot…”). Instead we got hymns and antiphons. And we didn’t even see the choir. The chapel was …

(Too Far) Beyond Canon: Has the Re-defining of “Christian Apocrypha” Lost Its Way?

January 6, 2025 by Tony

The following is the text of my presentation at the GORE Workshop held at Beyond Canon (Universität Regensburg), 2–3 December 2024.

I have to confess that I’m not particularly comfortable talking about method, about definitions, and rebranding. A few years ago I caused offense at an online conference, at which I led off my response to Tom de Bruin’s work on apocrypha as fan fiction (recently published as Fan Fiction and Early Christian Writings: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Canon) by stating rather bluntly I was not a fan of the comparison (I was told a year later by a participant that my attitude was, shall we say, unwelcome). And I sweated through a semester of teaching the Methods in the Study of Religion course in my program at York University, barely keeping ahead of the students.

But none of us can completely ignore method; definitions are a necessity of studying anything I suppose, but particularly in a field like ours where we are plagued with terminology that has polemical origins and is still used pejoratively by modern theologians.

I’d like to focus today on the parameters of our field, on deciding what texts we study, whether we call them apocryphal, noncanonical, or parabiblical. That is an area in which I have experience, not from writing about the problem, but from having to make choices in several projects about what texts to include or not to include and provide justification for doing so. For the most part I have argued for …