New Bibliographical Resource: “e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha”

February 7, 2016 by Tony

The first collaborative project initiated by the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL) is a comprehensive clavis and bibliography on the Christian Apocrypha. The last attempt at creating such a resource, James H. Charlesworth’s print bibliography (The New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha: A Guide to Publications, with Excurses on Apocalypses. ATLA Bibliography Series 17. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1987), is now almost 30 years old. It is time to update and expand Charlesorth’s work, but this time as an electronic resource.

The process envisioned for the creation of e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha is to enlist members of NASSCAL to contribute entries on texts on which they have already completed, or are in the process of completing, a substantial body of work. Essentially, the contributors will be required to simply reformat and slightly augment bibliographies that are already largely complete and, presumably, being continually updated. Along with print resources, each entry includes also a detailed description (a summary, the various titles used in scholarship, clavis numbers, and identification of related literature), an inventory of manuscript sources (with online images where available), an extensive bibliography (including online resources), and information about the text’s use in iconography and popular culture.

For the complete (but certainly expandable) list of texts covered, visit the e-Clavis page at NASSCAL.com:

http://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/

At this moment, 12 entries have been completed, and another 42 are assigned and in progress. For examples of completed entries, see:

http://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/infancy-gospel-of-thomas/

http://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/dialogue-of-the-paralytic-with-christ/

http://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/hospitality-and-ointment-of-the-bandit/

One of the primary goals of

…

Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Edition in Progress (Part 4)

January 14, 2016 by Tony

Back in October and November I wrote a series of three posts (1, 2, and 3) detailing my efforts to construct a critical edition of the Syriac manuscripts of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The project is now about eight years (and counting) in the making but it may soon finally see publication because I’ve been working diligently on it over the past six months, to the neglect, unfortunately, of other tasks, such as Apocryphicity. Right now I’m taking a brief pause in the project, so I thought I’d use some of this time to reacquaint myself with the blog by posting a short update.

As previously mentioned, my critical edition will contain three separate recensions of the text:

Sa: based on five manuscripts, two of them from the 6th century; another three interrelated manuscripts from the 17th-18th centuries; and one more from the 15th/16th century that I recently came across that lies midpoint in development between the early and recent manuscripts.

Sw: based on 15 manuscripts (another seven exist in Garshuni, which I am justifiably ignoring) varying from the 15th to the 20th centuries; incorporates IGT into a West Syrian Life of Mary collection in six books (the Infancy of Mary and the Birth of Jesus, both taken from the Protevangelium of James; the Vision of Theophilus; IGT; and the Death of Mary and Departure of Mary from the Dormition of Mary)

Se: three manuscripts of an East Syrian Life of …

Apocrypha (Journal) Vol. 26

January 16, 2016 by Tony

The latest volume of the journal Apocrypha, published under the auspices of l’AELAC, is scheduled to be published in March. The contents are provided on the Brepols site (HERE), and excerpted below:

Charles D. Wright, “6 Ezra and The Apocalypse of Thomas with a previously unedited ‘interpolated’ text of Thomas”

Rossana Guglielmetti, “Deux témoins inédits de la Visio Pauli”

Emanuela Valeriani, “Simbolismo ed escatologia nell’Apocalisse apocrifa di Giovanni: un confronto con l’Apocalisse canonica”

Susan E. Myers, “Antecedents of the Feminine Imagery of Spirit in the Acts of Thomas”

Boris Paschke, “Speaking Names in the Apocryphal Acts of John”

Dan Batovici, “Apocalyptic and metanoia in the Shepherd of Hermas”

Christophe Guignard, “La tradition grecque de la liste d’apôtres ‘Anonyme?I’ (BHG 153C), avec un appendice sur la liste BHG 152N”

Alin Suciu, “The Book of Bartholomew: A Coptic Apostolic Memoir”

Alin Suciu, “The Recovery of the Lost Fragment preserving the Title of the Coptic Book of Bartholomew. Edition and translation of Cornell University Library, Misc. Bd. MS.?683”

Timo S. Paananen et Roger Viklund, “An Eighteenth-Century Manuscript: Control of the Scribal Hand in Clement’s Letter to Theodore”

Andrea Nicolotti, “Un cas particulier d’apologétique appliquée: l’utilisation des apocryphes pour authentifier le Mandylion d’Édesse et le suaire de Turin”

Bradley N. Rice, “Chronique: An Account of the York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series: ‘Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha’ (Held at Vanier College on September 24-26, 2015)”

SBL 2015 Diary: Days 3 and 4

November 13, 2017 by Tony

The morning of day 3 began with a meeting with some fine folks from Polebridge Press, the publishing wing of the Westar Institute. My friend and York colleague Phil Harland has recently become involved with Westar, best known (perhaps infamously) as the organization behind the Jesus Seminar. Our conversations led to discussions about the possibility of NASSCAL partnering with Polebridge for some publishing projects. Stay tuned for more on these projects, and if you haven’t joined NASSCAL yet, what’s keeping you? Sheesh.

The afternoon was spent at the third of four Christian Apocrypha sessions, this one on “‘Lived Contexts’ of Christian Apocrypha.” The session featured four papers and finished with a prepared response from me. Up first was Alexander Kocar with “Saints, Sinners, and Apostates: Moral, Salvific, and Anthropological Difference in the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocryphon of John.” Alex’s paper looked at two early Christian texts that construct “a salvific middle ground”—with saints at the top, the damned at the bottom, and repentant sinners in the middle. The question being addressed in the texts is whether one can sin after baptism and receive redemption and, perhaps by extension, retain a position within the community. The two texts are rarely discussed together, “due in large part, “ Alex said, “to the anachronistic, artificial, and misleading divide between orthodoxy and heresy.” And both have their own particular difficulties of interpretation: Hermas is incredibly long, repetitive, and relentless, and at times its discussion of repentance is contradictory in its details, …

2015 SBL Diary: Day 2

November 13, 2017 by Tony

Day two of the 2015 SBL annual meeting began for me with the “Blogger and Online Publication” panel, a welcome change from Christian Apocrypha (mostly because I don’t have to take any notes! I can sit back and just listen). Funny enough, the first paper, by Rick Brannan, did discuss Christian Apocrypha and even gave a shout out to the More New Testament Apocrypha Project; funny enough, I missed that one. I did catch Christian Brady (aka Targuman)’s “The Life of a Blog from Cradle to Maturity.” He discussed mixing personal and professional aspects of his life on the blog, mentioning in particular the account he posted of his son’s sudden death and the comments (some very cruel) that he received about it.

Brady was followed by a three-member panel—with Bart Ehrman, Wil Gafney, and Lawrence Schiffman—on the benefits and challenges, rewards and hardships, of academic blogging. Ehrman is a reluctant blogger; he doesn’t particularly like blogging but does it for charity—he raised $100,000 last year alone. His output is quite striking: he writes a 1000-word post three or four days a week and, because he is a fast writer, manages to whip out a post in twenty minutes (though in that time I think James McGrath can do three posts and one or two song parodies). Schiffman has a different approach: essentially, he writes a paper and then gets his daughter, a social media expert, to carve from it a series of posts. All three of the speakers …

2015 SBL Diary: Day 1

November 13, 2017 by Tony

[This account is a little late, but as a Canadian without a U.S. data plan, and given the poor Wifi capability in the conference hotels, it’s been difficult to do much of anything online over the past several days.]

I flew into Atlanta via Buffalo Friday afternoon. I have a habit of arriving at airports with little time to spare to get on my flight; so it was a bit touch-and-go whether I would make the plane. But one mad dash through the airport later, I was on my way. Upon arrival, I grabbed some dinner and met up with some members of the NASSCAL board (Brent Landau, Bradley Rice, Janet Spittler, and Stanley Jones) for an informal get-together.

The proper first day of the conference began Saturday morning with the joint session put together by Christian Apocrypha and Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds. There was much anticipation for this session, as the subject of the first paper, by Geoff Smith, had been featured in a New York Times article the previous day. Smith’s paper, “Preliminary Report on the ‘Willoughby Papyrus’ of the Gospel of John and an Unidentified Christian Text,” discussed a 3rd/4th-century papyrus fragment that appeared on eBay last year. Smith contacted the seller and urged him to hold on to it; Smith also convinced the owner to let him work on the text. It contains a portion of John on one side, and on the other an unknown Christian text, written upside down. The evidence indicates that …

Ten Books on Christian Apocrypha to Look For at SBL 2015

November 13, 2017 by Tony

In no particular order:
Vernon K. Robbins and Jonathan M. Potter (editors). Jesus and Mary Reimagined in Early Christian Literature. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2015. Excerpt.

Lincoln H. Blumell and Thomas A. Wayment (editors). Christian Oxyrhynchus: Texts, Documents, and Sources. Baylor University Press, 2015.

David E. Wilhite. The Gospel according to Heretics. Discovering Orthodoxy through Early Christological Conflicts. Baker Publishing Group, 2015.

Paul Hartog (editor). Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christian Contexts: Reconsidering the Bauer Thesis. Wipf & Stock, 2015.

Richard Pervo. The Acts of John. Early Christian Apocrypha 6. Polebridge Press, 2015.

Tony Burke (editor). Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: The Christian Apocrypha in North American Perspectives. Wipf & Stock, 2015.

Pierluigi Piovanelli and Tony Burke (editors). Rediscovering the Apocryphal Continent: New Perspectives on Early Christian and Late Antique Apocryphal Texts and Traditions. WUNT 349. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015.

Philip Jenkins. The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. Basic Books, 2015.

Geoffrey S. Smith. Guilt by Association: Heresy Catalogues in Early Christianity. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett (editors). The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha. Oxford University Press, 2015.

And don’t forget to drop by the Eerdmans booth to get a preview of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1.

New Book Series: Inventing Christianity

November 17, 2015 by Tony

Logo for Inventing Christianity

Penn State University Press is pleased to announce Inventing Christianity, a new book series edited by L. Stephanie Cobb and David L. Eastman. All books in the series will focus on the second and third centuries, a time when insiders and outsiders alike were grappling with what it meant to be Christian. This period saw shifting notions of clerical and textual authority, group boundaries, interpretive strategies, and ritual practices. The series will examine the numerous ways in which early Christianity was “invented” by different authors in different times to different ends.

The series editors seek innovative work that examines the broad theme of “inventing”—i.e., how early Christianity developed and how it was perceived to have developed—and contributes to the study of second- and third-century Christianity in its multiple forms and cultural interactions. In addition to studies of Christian texts, communities, and issues, the editors invite books that cross religious boundaries and chronological periods. How, for instance, is Christianity “invented” by non-Christians? How is early Christianity “invented” in later eras? The editors welcome original work from a variety of disciplines and scholarly perspectives.

Questions or submissions should be directed to Penn State University Press:
Kathryn B. Yahner, Acquisitions Editor
kby3@psu.edu

or to the series editors:
L. Stephanie Cobb
scobb@richmond.edu

David L. Eastman
dleastma@owu.edu

Initial inquiries should take the form of a 3–5 page proposal outlining the intent of the project, its scope, its relation to other work on the topic, and the audience(s) you have in mind. Please include a current …

Christian Apocrypha at the 2015 SBL

November 13, 2017 by Tony

Here is a quick rundown of the sessions and papers at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature focusing on Christian Apocrypha. I hope I found them all. See you in Atlanta.

Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S21-114 Christian Apocrypha; Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Joint Session With: Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds, Christian Apocrypha
11/21/2015 ~ 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: International 4 (International Level) – Marriott
Theme: Papyrus Fragments of Apocryphal Writings: How Were They Used?
Malcolm Choat, Macquarie University, Presiding
Geoff S. Smith, University of Texas at Austin: “Preliminary Report on the ‘Willoughby Papyrus’ of the Gospel of John and an Unidentified Christian Text”
Kelley Coblentz Bautch, St. Edward’s University: “The Textual History of the Greek Book of the Watchers: Contextual Clues from Translation and the Value of Variant Readings”
Ross P. Ponder, “University of Texas at Austin: A New Transcription of P. Oxy. 5072: Observations from a Recent Autopsy Analysis”
Thomas A. Wayment, Brigham Young University: “The Interaction between Apocrypha and Canon: A Case Study of Oxyrhynchus”
AnneMarie Luijendijk, Princeton University, Respondent

S23-211 Christian Apocrypha
11/23/2015 ~ 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Room: 313 (Level 3) – Hilton
Theme: “Lived Contexts” of Christian Apocrypha
Eric Vanden Eykel, Ferrum College, Presiding
Alexander Kocar, Princeton University: “Saints, Sinners, and Apostates: Moral, Salvific, and Anthropological Difference in the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocryphon of John”
Meghan Henning, University of Dayton: “Substitutes in Hell: Schemes of Atonement in the Ezra Apocalypses”
Andrew Mark Henry, Boston University: …

Call for Papers: 2016 CSBS/CSPS Apocrypha Session

November 8, 2015 by Tony

The Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, in partnership with the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies, offers a joint session at their annual meetings devoted to Christian Apocrypha. For 2016, we will be mounting two sessions: one is a book review panel, the other is an open session.

Proposed titles, an abstract of approximately 100 words, and an indication of audio-visual requirements and accessibility requirements should be submitted by 15 January 2016 by email to the CSPS programme coordinator, Anne Moore (amoore@ucalgary.ca). Please write “CSPS Proposal” in the subject line of your email. Proposals may also be sent to the CSBS programme coordinator, Zeba Crook (zeba_crook@carleton.ca).

The annual meeting will be held at the University of Calgary, May 28-30, 2016, under the auspices of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences

For further information on the session, contact Tim Pettipiece (tpettipi@gmail.com) or Tony Burke (tburke@yorku.ca).

Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Edition in Progress (Part 3)

October 30, 2015 by Tony

Between 2012 and 2014 I picked away at the edition while working on other projects. Brent Landau and I had begun the More New Testament Apocrypha project (a series of volumes collecting neglected Christian Apocrypha in new translations) and that took a considerable amount of time to co-ordinate. But I contributed a translation of the Syriac Infancy Thomas to the first volume and this translation integrated for the first time all previously-published manuscripts on the text, including provisional work on the three editions (Sa, Sw, and Sw) I was compiling for the Gorgias volume. We included Syriac Infancy Thomas in the MNTA project because this branch of the tradition, universally believed to be important for establishing the text’s original form, had not appeared in previous Christian Apocrypha collections—typically these compendia contain Greek A, sometimes with Greek B and a portion of the late Latin text.

The MNTA vol. 1 manuscript went to the publisher’s in January 2015, thus allowing me finally to devote most of my energy to the edition. In May and June I compiled a glossary for the three translations, thus ensuring that the texts were translated consistently. It was a very time-consuming project, but very valuable and, of course, will be included in the finished volume.

I took a new look also at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, thinking perhaps that other manuscripts of the text had become available. Those of us who do text-critical work on apocryphal texts know that catalogers can be somewhat …

2016 St. Andrews Symposium for Biblical and Early Christian Studies

October 24, 2015 by Tony

The St Andrews Symposium for Biblical and Early Christian Studies is pleased to announce its conference for the summer of 2016: Son of God: Divine Sonship in Jewish and Christian Antiquity. The conference will be held 6-8 June 2016 at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The conference is organized as an exploration of diverse aspects of divine sonship within the following corpora: Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, Pseudepigrapha, New Testament, Rabbinic Judaism, and early Christianity. In June 2016, biblical scholars and theologians from around the world will gather to consider Divine Sonship, engaging with ancient texts to bring history, exegesis, and theology into conversation. The School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews is delighted to invite you to join the conversation.

Invited speakers at this conference will be: Menahem Kister (Hebrew University); Reinhard Kratz (Göttingen); Jan Joosten (University of Oxford); Philip Alexander (University of Manchester); George Brooke (University of Manchester); Richard Bauckham (University of Cambridge); Michael Peppard (Fordham University); Matthew Novenson (University of Edinburgh); N.T. Wright (University of St Andrews); William Tooman (University of St Andrews); Madhavi Nevader (University of St Andrews); David Moffitt (University of St Andrews)

Call for Papers is now open. We invite proposals (from postgraduates and faculty) for short papers that engage notions of Son of God/Divine Sonship in the following areas:

• Ancient Israelite religion
• Angelology and heavenly mediators
• Kingship and royal ideologies
• Political ideologies in the Second Temple period
• Corporate sonship and the people of God…

More New Testament Apocrypha Vol. 1 Due August 2016

October 21, 2015 by Tony

The first volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, edited by me and Brent Landau is listed in the Eerdmans catalog with a release date of August, 2016. The cover, pictured here, is probably still preliminary, but features an image of P. Oxy. 5072, edited and translated for the collection by Ross P. Ponder. The full list of texts featured in the volume are as follows:

1. Gospels and Related Traditions of New Testament Figures
The Legend of Aphroditianus (Katharina Heyden)
The Revelation of the Magi (Brent Landau)
The Hospitality of Dysmas (Mark Bilby)
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Syriac) (Tony Burke
On the Priesthood of Jesus (Bill Adler)
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 210 (Brent Landau
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 5072 (Ross P. Ponder
The Dialogue of the Paralytic with Christ (Bradley N. Rice)
The Toledot Yeshu(Stanley Jones)
The Berlin-Strasbourg Apocryphon (Alin Suciu)
The Discourse of the Savior and the Dance of the Savior (Paul C. Dilley)
An Encomium on Mary Magdalene (Christine Luckritz Marquis)
An Encomium on John the Baptist (Philip L. Tite)
The Life of John the Baptist by Serapion (Slavomír Céplö)
Life and Martyrdom of John the Baptist (Andrew Bernhard)
The Legend of the Thirty Silver Pieces (Tony Burke and Slavomír Céplö)
The Death of Judas according to Papias (Geoffrey S. Smith)

2. Apocryphal Acts and Related Traditions
The Acts of Barnabas (Glenn E. Snyder)
The Acts of Cornelius the Centurion (Tony Burke and Witold Witakowski)
John and the Robber (Rick Brannan)
The History of …

2015 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium: A Postmortem (Part 4)

October 16, 2015 by Tony

The final day of the Symposium began with a session that was a bit of a grab-bag of papers. Early versions of the program were more cohesive, but with some presenters pulling out, new ones coming in, and the needs of some presenters to leave early or arrive late, we had to make adjustments. We titled the session “Reimagining the Past in Christian Apocrypha,” though, in hindsight, the title is really not very representative of the papers. We tried.

Gregory Fewster (University of Toronto) began the session with “Paul as Letter Writer and the Success of Pseudepigraphy: Constructing an Authorial Paul in the Corinthian Correspondence.” The paper is a response to Alberto D’Anna’s argument that discrepancies between 3 Corinthanians and other Pauline letters “reduces a lot … the possibility of success for the fiction.” But, as Fewster demonstrates, 3 Cor. was successful, so much that it was included in some NT canons, even the occasional Latin codex. It seems that constructing a believable Pauline pseudepigraphon was relatively easy, given that even in the second century Paul was known more for his letter-writing practice than for the contents of his letters. So, despite the discrepancies, Fewster says, “one could thus believe that Paul wrote this response letter because Paul is the type of person who would have written this letter.” One of the strengths of Fewster’s paper is in its attention to the various forms the Corinthian Correspondence takes, both as an independent writing and embedded in the Acts of Paul…

Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Edition in Progress (Part 2)

October 12, 2015 by Tony

When I returned to examining the Syriac Infancy Thomas tradition in 2008 I began with the Vatican manuscript translated in part (chs. 5-8 only) by Paul Peeters in 1914. He stated at the time that the manuscript was superior to William Wright’s sixth-century manuscript, despite its much more recent date of composition (17th century), because it contains portions missing in Wright. It was simple to obtain a microfilm copy of the Vatican manuscript and, being recent, it was quite easy to read. I could only wonder why it had taken so long for anyone to follow up on Peeters’ “superior” source.

I debuted the new text and translation at the 2008 Réunion de l’AELAC to largely positive response. However, Sever Voicu, well-known as a leading voice on Infancy Thomas, commented that the manuscript was so recent that it could hardly be important for reconstructing the text. Voicu’s resistance may stem from his belief that the Ethiopic tradition of the text is the best witness to its original form. After some revision, I submitted the paper to l’AELAC’s journal Apocrypha in September 2009 and waited for a response.

In the meantime I began investigating unpublished manuscripts of the text. Back in 1994, Simon Mimouni had prepared a study of Life of Mary traditions for Apocrypha (“Vies de la Vierge. État de la question,” Apocrypha 5 [1994]: 211-48) that I had somehow missed when preparing my dissertation. He had combed the manuscript catalogs and divided the Life of Mary sources into …