“Canonical Apocrypha” in the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes

November 1, 2021 by Tony

Maurice Geerard’s indispensable Clavis apocryphorum Novi Testamenti (CANT) includes mention of a number of works that are each described only as a “commentarius” (from the Greek hypomnema; on genres in hagiographical literature see Hinterberger 2014) by Symeon Metaphrastes. Little bibliographical information is provided for them—amounting, for the most part, to a reference from Migne’s Patrologia Graeca. The reason for this is simple: very little work has been done on the texts, many don’t even have proper critical editions, and only a few of them have been translated into a modern language. What are these texts? And what are their value for the study of Christian apocrypha?

Symeon Metaphrastes was a hagiographer of the late tenth century who was appointed by the emperor Basil II (976–1025) to construct a new, official menologion—that is, a collection of saints’ lives to be read on their designated feast days. Previous menologia existed but they varied from one another significantly, both in scope and selection of texts. But in Symeon’s time there was a movement toward standardization, begun a few centuries earlier with the creation of the Byzantine calendar of feast days and the subsequent destruction of all rival calendars. Some early scholars of hagiography accused Symeon of destroying earlier texts, but Symeon’s process was rather conservative. He took earlier texts, made stylistic improvements (a process called metaphrasis), and arranged them according to the new calendar date. Most of these earlier texts still exist and indeed, by comparing them to …

More New Testament Apocrypha 3 Near Completion

August 24, 2021 by Tony

I have spent much of the past month hunkered down, determined to finish up work on the third volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. At time of writing, I’m waiting for two more pieces, and final edits of the remaining chapters are coming back from the other contributors. Things are looking good for sending the complete manuscript off to the publisher (Eerdmans) in September.

The second volume of MNTA was published in the summer of 2020. Like other projects appearing in the middle of a pandemic, the book didn’t get as much exposure as normal. The Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature provides an opportunity for the main demographic of the book (biblical scholars) to pick up a discounted copy; but it’s hard to buy a book at a virtual conference. And a review panel scheduled for the meeting of the Canadian Society for Patristic Studies had to be delayed until 2022. Nevertheless, Benito Cereno and Chris Sims at the podcast Apocrypals devoted three episodes to discussing texts in the volume, Shirley Paulson interviewed me for the Early Christian Writings podcast, James McGrath for his Religion Prof podcast, Rick Brannan tweeted mini-summaries of each text (as he did for MNTA 1), and Ancient Jew Review turned a planned session for SBL into four articles from MNTA contributors. I’m grateful to everyone who helped promote the book, especially in a time when we all have far more pressing concerns.

It may seem surprising that volume 3 is …

Apocryphal Traditions in Gregory of Tours’ Glory of the Martyrs

May 18, 2021 by Tony

I’ve spent the better part of the past two months polishing up my paper for the published proceedings of the Material of Christian Apocrypha conference that took place at the University of Virginia back in December 2018 (summary HERE and HERE). The paper is called “What They Brought Back Home: Pilgrimage Souvenirs as Transmitters of Christian Apocrypha.” From late antiquity and through the medieval period, pilgrims journeyed to various sacred sites—some of which are based purely on apocryphal traditions—and would hear stories associated with the saint and/or the site, see and touch its architectural and decorative features, participate in some kind of veneration, purchase one or more souvenirs (a token, a medal, or an ampulla, perhaps even a copy of text), and return home. There they might tell (or boast) about their experience and even proudly display their souvenirs.

Some pilgrims wrote about their experiences, and plenty of these pilgrimage itineraries survive today, including Egeria and the Piacenza Pilgrim. One writer on pilgrimage who is frequently passed over in discussions of pilgrimage is Gregory of Tours (ca. 538–594 CE). Gregory is best known in our field as the (likely) author of an epitome of the Acts of Andrew, offering us vital information for what the original text, now mostly lost, contained. Gregory also wrote seven books relating stories of saints and miracles that they or their relics performed. One of these books is the Glory of the Martyrs (English trans. Raymond van Dan, Gregory of Tours: Glory of …

Apocryphal Acts in Syriac Manuscripts

May 7, 2021 by Tony

I would like to thank Jacob Lollar, J. Edward Walters, and Slavomir Céplö for looking over a draft of this post and making suggestions for improvement.

In my last post, back in December, I provided an overview of sources for the “Egyptian” collection of the apocryphal acts of the apostles—manuscripts in Coptic, Arabic, and Ge‘ez. A follow-up was promised, and I will get to that soon, but for now I am taking a detour with a discussion of apocryphal acts in Syriac. Both posts derive from ongoing work on my next major project: an introduction to Christian apocrypha for the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library.

The number of texts and manuscripts for the Syriac apocryphal acts is significantly smaller than for the Egyptian corpus. The path of transmission is somewhat simpler also: the Egyptian collection began in Coptic and after the decline of Coptic in Upper Egypt, the texts were translated into Arabic, then Ethiopic. Syriac apocrypha follows a simpler path, with Syriac remaining the liturgical language (and for a small group, the spoken language) of the East and West Syriac churches, and some translation occurring into Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, and Tamil. Apocryphal texts have been transmitted in Syriac throughout the history of Syriac Christianity and appear in manuscripts created as recently as the twentieth century.

But the apocryphal acts appear with less frequency than some other apocrypha, such as texts about the Virgin Mary. Of the Five Great Apocryphal Acts, only the Acts of Thomas is represented in …

The “Egyptian” Collection of Apocryphal Acts, Part 1: Coptic, Arabic, and Ge‘ez Sources

October 18, 2023 by Tony

This is the first of two posts based on work in preparation for my forthcoming volume on Christian apocrypha for the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. I would like to thank Ivan Miroshnikov and Jacob Lollar for looking over the draft and making suggestions for improvement.

Readers interested in the apocryphal exploits of the apostles gravitate first, naturally, to the earliest examples of the genre, the so-called Five Great Apocryphal Acts: Peter, Paul, John, Andrew, and Thomas. The pull of these texts is so great that they leave neglected an assortment of “later” acts that, arguably, had a far deeper impact on Christian piety, not only because the plentiful manuscript evidence testifies to their popularity, but also because a large number of them circulated as a collection intended for liturgical use in Coptic and Ethiopic churches. The collection includes a core of 28 texts (with some additions, omissions, and substitutions), arranged largely in pairs: the preaching of the apostle and then his martyrdom. All twelve of the apostles are represented (with Matthias replacing Judas) along with Paul, James the Righteous, Mark, and Luke. Stories from the texts also appear in the Arabo-Coptic and Ethiopic Synaxaria, testifying, again, to their importance in northeastern African Christianity. The lack of attention paid to these apocryphal acts is due, in part if not in whole, to their remoteness linguistically, geographically, and temporally from the Greek and Latin centres that are the focus of most biblical scholars’ work (and training). But lately they have attracted …

Christian Apocrypha at SBL 2020

November 23, 2020 by Tony

The 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, which runs from November 29 to December 10, will take place online. The form of delivery may be entirely new but take comfort, because Apocryphicity continues its tradition of aiding readers plan their SBL schedules by compiling a list of all the sessions and individual presentations that focus on Christian Apocrypha. See you on Zoom.

1. Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S30-102 Christian Apocrypha (10:00 AM to 12:00 PM)
Theme: Christian Apocrypha
Janet Spittler, University of Virginia, Presiding

Chance Bonar, Harvard University: “The Place of the Dialogue between Jesus and the Devil in the History of the Antichrist”

The Dialogue between Jesus and the Devil (Dial. Devil; BHG 813f-g; CANT 84) is a narrative dialogue that expands upon the temptation account of Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13. In its Greek and Slavonic recensions, the dialogue portrays Jesus and the devil debating the reason for Jesus’s descent to earth, who the devil’s accomplices are, what happens to repentant and unrepentant sinners in the afterlife, the death of John the Baptist, and the devil’s ultimate fate. Dial. Devil participates in a long history of elucidating why the devil hates humanity and attempts to mislead them, and yet goes further than many narrations about the devil by portraying the Antichrist as the devil incarnate. While the idea that the Antichrist is the devil incarnate is a common topic on evangelical Christian blogs today, this late ancient apocryphal text depicts this exact scenario and has …

“Lost Gospels” and Other Christian Apocrypha: New Discoveries and New Perspectives

October 9, 2020 by Tony

On Wednesday, October 7 I delivered a virtual lecture for BASONOVA (Biblical Archaeology Society of Northern Virginia). They have granted me permission to share the text of that lecture (with some minor changes) on Apocryphicity.

Discussions of the origin and transmission of apocryphal literature in popular media, and some scholarship, typically look something like this:

Christian apocrypha are texts about Jesus and his family, followers and friends that are not found in the New Testament. They were written in the first three centuries, some perhaps as early as the late first century. They contain heretical ideas and were systematically destroyed once the church of Rome solidified its power over other forms of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries; these repressive efforts culminated in the formation of the canon of the New Testament, established at the latest by the time of Athanasius of Alexandria. The scriptures were clearly established as the 27 books of the New Testament; nothing more should be written, copied, or read thereafter. Some apocryphal traditions survived, however, but heavily sanitized of heretical ideas and collected as writings of the saints—so-called hagiographical literature. Otherwise, Christian apocrypha were lost to history until scholars of the Renaissance found copies in Eastern monasteries and brought them home to the West to be published, and more recently from archaeologists and Bedouins who found texts in caves and ancient garbage dumps. Despite all of the efforts of the church to censure these texts, many of them are now available for everyone to …

Some Reflections on Ariel Sabar’s Veritas

September 1, 2020 by Tony

Scholars, or at least those scholars in my small corner of academia, have been gleefully reading (some hate-reading) and reviewing Ariel Sabar’s new book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. I’m a bit late to the party, but I seem to be among the few who did not get sent an advance copy (sheesh!) and was further delayed because there were no stores within 50 km of me that bothered to stock the book on the day of its release. To me (and my colleagues) this book is important—why isn’t it important to everyone? Sigh. Truth be told, academics seem to both delight in and dread when outsiders (Sabar is a journalist) look into our world; it’s very much how Canadians feel living in the shadow of the US: they noticed us! (But did they have to be so mean?).

As other reviewers have said, Veritas is an excellent book. If you read Sabar’s piece on GJW for The Atlantic, you know that Sabar is a gifted investigator and writer, though here Sabar has adjusted his style so that readers are treated to a page-turning thriller. But he is no less strong an investigator. At several points in the book I felt like he had followed the evidence as far as he could, but then he went deeper, and found more. Who would have thought the trail would lead him to wandering around Bad Wurzach looking for men who were altar …

Publicity Roundup for More New Testament Apocrypha 2

July 17, 2020 by Tony

New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 2 (which I edited) was released just a few weeks ago. It is a follow-up to the first volume, which appeared in 2017. My personal web site, tonyburke.ca, features pages for both volumes (vol. 1; vol. 2) providing tables of contents and previews of the introductions. For vol. 2, I have included also a link to an article on editing the volume (“Even More Christian Apocrypha”) published in the latest issue of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.

To help promote the volume, I appeared in an interview with Shirley Paulson on her podcast The Bible and Beyond. You can hear the episode by clicking on the image to the right. Our conversation covered the Book of Bartholomew, the Acts of Thomas and His Wonderworking Skin, the Healing of Tiberius, and the Homily on the Building of the First Church of the Virgin (attributed to Basil of Caesarea).

I also sent a copy of the book to Benito Cereno and Chris Sims, who host the podcast Apocrypals, described as “A podcast where two non-believers read through the Bible but aren’t, you know, jerks about it.” They dedicated three episodes to discussing texts from the volume. They can be accessed at the links below (or wherever you go for podcasts).

Episode 66: JeSuS With Two Cool Ses (The Acts of Thomas and his Wonderworking Skin)

Episode 67: Bad Things to Call …

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas as Pilgrimage Guidebook

May 25, 2020 by Tony

Last summer I was invited to a conference at the Universität Regensburg on the topic of “Extracanonical Traditions and the Holy Land” (July 2–5, 2019); you can read a summary of the conference by Jan Bremmer HERE and the papers will be published next year. Tobias Nicklas, who convened the conference, knew of my work on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and asked me to contribute something on the text. I have to confess, it seemed a bit of a stretch. What can Infancy Thomas possibly have to say about Palestine? As it happens, a few scholars have actually tried to make connections between the text and Jewish Christianity as well as arguing for Palestine as a place of composition. But their work, or at least these aspects of their work, has not been taken very seriously by other scholars. Still, as I revisited the paper to prepare it for publication I was struck by how the text connects to certain pilgrimage locations in late antique or Medieval Nazareth. I can see now how the text COULD have been used as a sort of pilgrimage guide to the city (though I’m not so sure it was).

There are several pilgrimage accounts that mention sites in Nazareth. The earliest of these is the anonymous pilgrim of Placentia, who traveled the Holy Land around 560–570. The pilgrim mentions three locations in Palestine that have some connection to stories in Infancy Thomas. The first portion of the account mentions a synagogue …

Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Pseudo-Apostolic Memoirs

April 29, 2020 by Tony

My next bog publishing project (well, while continuing to edit volumes of More New Testament Apocrypha) is a comprehensive introduction to Christian Apocrypha for the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library series. While certainly a prestigious assignment, it’s pretty intimidating—so many texts, so little space, so little time! Initially I promised to submit a draft at the end of two years. But I ended up spending the first of those years just clearing my schedule of other writing projects. And though I said I would not take on anything new, I have been sidetracked by the occasional conference that was in far too interesting a place to pass up. I did start writing, but instead of beginning with an easy chapter on, say, infancy gospels, I decided to start with something far more challenging: pseudo-apostolic memoirs. My progress was made slower because I was compiling, at the same time, entries on each of the texts for e-Clavis (click on the titles of the texts below to see the entries). The memoirs are difficult because there is still so much work to be done on simply establishing the texts—either because the Coptic manuscripts are dispersed in libraries all over the world, or because the texts are now extant only in Ethiopic and/or Arabic and few people in our field work in these languages. But I find the memoirs really fascinating and one of my goals for this project is to integrate them more into the “canon” of Christian apocrypha. So I …

2019 SBL Diary: Day 3

December 11, 2019 by Tony

My final full day in San Diego began with a meeting of the NASSCAL board—or at least those of us who made it to SBL (Janet Spittler, Lily Vuong, Lorne Zelyck, and Jonathan Henry)—to discuss plans for the next NASSCAL conference. These events take place, ideally, every two years; the last one was at the University of Virginia in 2018. Next year’s gathering will be at the University of Texas at Austin under the guidance of Brent Landau. For a theme we want something that is focused enough to give the conference an identity but open enough to encourage contributions from a wide range of specialties. So far we are looking at the theme of transformation—how apocryphal texts change over time through translation, expansion, contraction, adaptation, etc. We also quickly discussed planned volumes in the Early Christian Apocrypha series and the success of the e-Clavis (as Janet remarked, “I can’t believe how much we have done in just four years”).

After the meeting I went back to the book display for a meeting with my editor at Yale University Press. I am working on a comprehensive overview of Christian apocrypha for the Anchor Bible series. The plan was to have it finished in two years—that was two years ago. Who would have thought a 600-page volume discussing over 300 texts would take longer? So, we negotiated a new deadline and I made promises to send some material along for review soon. Then I grabbed the last of my book purchases: …

2019 SBL Diary: Day Two

December 5, 2019 by Tony

My second day at the 2019 SBL Annual Meeting began with the Journal of Biblical Literature editorial board breakfast meeting. If you ever submit a paper to the journal on the subject of Christian apocrypha, there’s a good chance I’m Reviewer 2. The discussion at the meeting focused on reducing the backload of submissions to the journal. But the really interesting talk was happening at my table. One person (who will not be named) mentioned to me that a certain scholar (who will not be named) was working on a complete version of an otherwise fragmentary apocryphal text (which will be named): the Gospel of Mary. The text is presently extant in an incomplete Coptic manuscript (the Berlin Codex) and two small Greek fragments. A complete text certainly would be a major contribution to work on this text, but some things about the rumor did not sound right. It is not out of the question that someone is working on this new manuscript, but probably not the person who was mentioned to me. Let’s hope there is some truth to the rumor.

Filled up on tea and pastries, I headed off to the first session of the Christian Apocrypha Section. The open session featured four papers on a variety of topics. Up first was Adeline Harrington (University of Texas at Austin) with “Apocryphal Oxyrhynchus: The Literary Landscape of a Late Antique City.” Harrington began with the statement by a late antique writer on Oxyrhynchus (I wish I could remember …

2019 SBL Diary: Day One

December 15, 2019 by Tony

Every year I sit down between grading papers to compile my thoughts and experiences from the SBL Annual Meeting. This process takes several days, so bear with me as I sift through my notes and memories and try to put together a useful and mildly entertaining overview of the event. The highlights include NASSCAL’s celebration of the debut of the Early Christian Apocrypha series, the night I was abandoned by a grad student on a boat, and the day another grad student stopped me on the street to give me edibles. One of those students can look forward to a lifetime of glowing reference letters and offers to collaborate, the other is dead to me.

My SBL experience began with travel, which can be fraught—flight delays, cancellations, encounters with customs and security. This year, travel went without much trouble. I chose a six am flight out of Hamilton, Ontario—closer to me and easier to navigate than Toronto’s Pearson airport. The early flight time was chosen for cost (it included a stop-over in Calgary) and because I wanted to arrive in plenty of time to set up for a NASSCAL reception celebrating the release of our premier volumes in the Early Christian Apocrypha series. As it happens, the executive later decided to move the reception to Saturday night. Ah well, it can’t hurt to get there early.

The plane touched down around 1 pm. I managed to find the bus to downtown (I swear they hide the affordable transit option so …

Apocryphal fragment from the Passion of Christ

November 19, 2019 by Tony

While poking around in some of the darker corners of Pinakes (the database of Greek manuscripts), I came across an untitled text listed only under the umbrella category of “Apocrypha Noui Testamenti.” It is a brief pericope found in the margin of a Vatican manuscript (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 875, fol. 286r; 13th cent.) at the end of the lexicon of John Zonaras, a twelfth-century chronicler and theologian from Constantinople. The Pinakes description is somewhat bare, but it is a little more detailed than the catalog of the collection by G. Cardinali: Inventari di manoscritti greci della Biblioteca Vaticana sotto il pontificato di Giulo II (1503–1513) (Studi e testi 491; Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolic Vaticana, 2015), p. 152. So there is little information about the pericope beyond what is found in the manuscript, as presented below.

A preliminary translation, based on the emendations above, is as follows:

The crowds <were> holding Christ in their midst. A certain youth came in secret behind Jesus and struck him. Then the others testing, asked him, “Tell us, then, who of the people secretly hit you since you do not know. Prophesy and say and show us from the crowd the one who hit you and we will know that you are a prophet and you know everything.

The pericope is a retelling of the following episode from the Synoptic Gospels:

The pericope is closer in form to the versions in Matthew and Luke, in which the crowds ask Jesus “Who is it …