More Christian Apocrypha Updates 11: Acts of Titus

November 13, 2017 by Tony

[This is the latest in a series of posts on texts to be featured in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures edited by Brent Landau and I. The material here is incorporated also into the information on the texts provided on my More Christian Apocrypha page].

The Acts of Titus has three parts: his early life (chs. 1-3), his time as a companion of Paul, (chs. 4-6), and his time in office as bishop of Gortyna (chs. 7-12). The text is attributed to a certain “Zenas the lawyer” (from Titus 3:13). The author reveals that Titus grew up in a noble home in Crete (indeed, he is said to be of the lineage of Minos, king of Crete). At the age of 20, a voice tells him that his classical education is of no benefit to him, so he turns to reading Hebrew scripture. His uncle, the proconsul, sends Titus to Jerusalem to investigate the activity of Jesus. There he witnesses the miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus and becomes a believer. Titus receives ordination from the apostles and becomes Paul’s companion in his missionary endeavours. The two journey to Crete, where Titus encounters his brother-in-law Rustillus who tells Titus not to preach against the pagan gods but becomes a believer after Paul restores his deceased son to life. Together with Luke and Timothy, Titus remains with Paul until the apostle’s execution under Nero. Then Titus returns to Crete, where he destroys pagan temples and establishes churches. Titus dies …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 10: The Life and Martyrdom of John the Baptist

November 13, 2017 by Tony

[This is the latest in a series of posts on texts to be featured in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures edited by Brent Landau and I. The material here is incorporated also into the information on the texts provided on my More Christian Apocrypha page].

Life Mart. Bapt. draws heavily on the New Testament Gospel information about John but adds some details. No details are given of his birth and childhood; after a bare mention of his birth, the action moves right to his adulthood when Gabriel instructs him on his mission of baptism and particularly the baptism of Jesus. He goes to the Jordan and gains forty disciples. This draws the interest of Herod Antipas and he orders the prophet to be brought to him. John refuses to go with Herod’s envoy and indicts Herod for sleeping with his brother’s wife. Herod now seeks an opportunity to kill him. After baptizing Jesus, John appears before Herod and formally accuses him. He is imprisoned but John is able to bring in his disciples and leads them in prayer. He tells them of his coming death and tells them to keep to his commandments, which are reminiscent of some of Jesus’ teachings. Herod’s nobles want him to release John or behead him. Herod sends Julian to talk to him but John is unrepentant. The famous feast happens and John is beheaded. One of Herod’s guests is a secret disciple of John and asks for the head and he gives it …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 9: The Legend of the Thirty Silver Pieces

November 13, 2017 by Tony

LTPS exists in two main forms: an Eastern recension in Syriac, Garshuni, and Armenian, and a Western recension in Latin and European vernaculars. Both forms relate the origin and transmission of the silver pieces paid to Judas to betray Christ. The story begins with the minting of the coins by Terah, then they are passed on to Abraham, to Solomon, to Nebuchadnezzar, to the Magi, to Jesus, who deposits them in the temple, and then to Judas. The two recensions diverge in the passing of the coins from the Magi to Jesus. In the Eastern version the Magi lose the coins in Edessa, merchants find them and give them to King Abgar, and he sends them, along with the Seamless Robe, to Jesus as a reward for healing him. In the Western version the coins pass directly from the Magi to Mary (as part of the gifts to the newborn Messiah), who loses them while the Holy Family is in Egypt; they come into the hands of a shepherd and he gives them to Jesus. Some of the Western versions include an epilogue describing the Judas penny relics that remained in circulation and elaborate descriptions of the potters’ field purchased with the coins returned …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 8: The Qasr el-Wizz Codex

November 13, 2017 by Tony

The tenth/eleventh-century Coptic Qasr el-Wizz codex contains two texts: the Discourse of the Savior and the Dance of the Savior. The first of these is a post-resurrection dialogue between Jesus and the apostles set four days before his ascension. Peter begins the dialogue by asking Jesus about the "mystery of the cross." Jesus responds that he will bring the cross with him upon his return to judge the living and the dead. This is to "reveal the shame" of the "law-breaking Jews" who crucified him. The cross will stand beside him in the valley of Josaphat and all those who have performed acts of piety (e.g., feeding the hungry, and notably, writing books in praise of the cross) will stand under its shadow. After Jesus has judged everyone, the righteous will follow the cross as it rises into the heavens. Jesus then tells the apostles to proclaim the cross to the whole world.

The second text, the Dance of the Savior, also takes place on the Mount of Olives, but this time before the crucifixion (perhaps as an expansion of Mark 14:26//Matt 26:30). Jesus gathers the apostles around him and sings a hymn in four parts. The cross again takes center-stage, with …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 7: The Death of Judas

November 13, 2017 by Tony

The fourth book of Papias's lost Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord contains a tradition about the death of Judas that is different from what we find in both Matt 27:3-10 and Acts 1:18-20. This tradition, preserved in a long version and a short version in Greek catenae (collections of extracts from biblical commentators), states that Judas was punished for his betrayal of Jesus by becoming "inflamed in the flesh"—so large that he could not through narrow streets, his eyes swollen shut, his genitals enlarged and filled with pus and worms. Death came to him "in his own land" and no one can pass through there without holding their nose.

Papias's account of the death of Judas, prepared for us by Geoffrey Smith, is one of two contributions in the MNTA collection that derive from non-biblical traditions transmitted by patristic writers. This material blurs the definition of "apocrypha"—does the fact that Papias knows this story make it more valued, perhaps more historical, more "orthodox," than if it were contained in an apocryphal text? A similar situation exists with sayings of Jesus contained in the Apostolic Fathers—the presence of a saying in, say, 1 Clement makes the saying orthodox and many would count it …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 6: Dialogue of the Paralytic

November 13, 2017 by Tony

Dial. Paralytic is an elaboration of the story of Jesus and the paralytic from John 5:1–15, though here the encounter is situated after the resurrection, perhaps as late as the fourth century if the paralytic's mention of Arius (d. 336) is original to the text. Christ descends to earth and sees the paralytic. His situation is grave: “disabled and helpless, paralyzed and deprived of the use of all his limbs; he was indeed blind, without strength in his hands, disabled of the two feet and covered with wounds.” He asks Jesus who he is, but Jesus is evasive about his identity. He says, “I am a man who walks a lot, a traveler.” At one point he says he has traveled from India. The two begin to discuss Christ, who was famed as a healer. The paralytic had heard of Christ but no one could carry him to the healer to be cured. Jesus then questions why the man is afflicted: “Whereas you have hopes at this point in Christ, why did he not cure you? Would you not be unbelieving and guilty of very serious sins?” Then follows a series of exchanges recalling the protests of Job to his friends who sought some …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 5: On the Priesthood of Jesus

November 13, 2017 by Tony

On the Priesthood of Jesus (aka, Confession of Theodosius, Apology of Theodosius) is an example of an embedded apocryphon—meaning, the text comes with a framing story, in this case a dispute between Jews and Christians in the reign of the emperor Justinian I (527–565) during which an account is brought forward that is said to have come from an old codex in Tiberius saved from the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. It is unlikely, however, that this old account actually existed apart from the larger work. It reveals that, early in the career of Jesus, a position became vacant in the 22-member priesthood. Jesus is put forward as a candidate but the priests must establish that he is a descendant of one of the priestly families. Since Joseph is deceased, they summon his mother, who reveals that Joseph was not Jesus’ earthly father but Jesus is still a suitable candidate because she is descended from the families of Aaron and Judah. As proof of her claim, the priests summon midwives to see if she is still a virgin. Her post partum virginity is established and Jesus is considered worthy of the priesthood. This makes it possible for Jesus to be …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 4: The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (Syriac)

November 13, 2017 by Tony

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is well-known; it's sometimes shocking portrayal of the young Jesus cursing the townspeople of Nazareth has contributed to its popularity. The text is featured prominently also in the various Christian Apocrypha collections and commentaries. So why include it in MNTA? One of our guiding principles in selecting texts for inclusion is to consider texts that need significant updating due to new manuscript discoveries and new determinations of the text's original form. Inf. Gos. Thom. is seen most often in its Greek and Latin forms, both of which are relatively late. The Syriac form, on the other hand, has very early material evidence (two MSS are from the 5th/6th centuries) and is believed to reflect well the original form of the text—most notably, it lacks ch. 1, with the text's attribution to Thomas, and the beneficent miracles of chs. 10, 17, and 18; ch. six is also lengthier, with a dialogue between Jesus and his teacher that is absent in many of the Greek MSS. Despite the obvious value of the Syriac tradition, there has been little effort to update the text since its initial publication in 1865.

The Syriac tradition is divided into three forms: Sa (comprising the two …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 3: The Hospitality of Dysmas

November 13, 2017 by Tony

[This is the third in a series of posts on texts to be featured in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures edited by Brent Landau and I. The material here is incorporated also into the information on the texts provided on my More Christian Apocrypha page].

Some of the texts included in the MNTA volume are free-floating stories incorporated into variations of previously-published texts. The tales of the "Good Thief" are prime examples of this phenomenon. This "Good Thief" is the bandit promised salvation by Jesus on the cross in Luke 23:40-43. Christian imagination provided additional information about this bandit in a number of stories in which the bandit meets Jesus and his family during their sojourn in Egypt. The most well-known of these tales is found in the Birth of the Savior 111-25 (M.R. James's Latin Infancy Gospel), re-published recently in the Ehrman-Pleše Apocrypal Gospels collection (p. 146-55). The story included in MNTA vol. 1 is a variant of this tale incorporated in certain manuscripts of the Acts of Pilate.

The story takes place during the Holy Family's journey to Egypt. There they meet a bandit named Dysmas. Taken by Mary's beauty and proclaiming her the Mother of God, Dysmas brings the family to his home. The bandit leaves to hunt wild game. In the meantime, his wife draws a bath for Jesus. Dysmas's child, leprous and colicky, is cured by bathing in the same water. When Dysmas returns, the miracle is revealed to him and he …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 2: Revelation of the Magi

November 13, 2017 by Tony

[This is the second in a series of posts on texts to be featured in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures edited by Brent Landau and I. The material here is included also on my More Christian Apocrypha page].

The Revelation of the Magi has appeared recently in an English translation: Brent Landau, Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men’s Journey to Bethlehem (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2010), based on his dissertation (to be published in CCSA) “The Sages and the Star-Child: An Introduction to the Revelation of the Magi, An Ancient Christian Apocryphon” (Ph. D. diss.., Harvard Divinity School, 2008 [available HERE]). Brent and I did not feel it was necessary to include another translation of the text in the MNTA volume, but did want to expose a wider audience to the text. So, we decided to include an introduction and a summary. The same strategy was going to be employed for the Armenian Infancy Gospel (recently translated into English by Abraham Terian) and the apocryphal Apocalypses of John, but those contributions have not materialized.

The text is available in a single Syriac manuscript (Vatican, Biblioteca apostolica, syr. 162) of a larger text known as the Chronicle of Zuqnin. There are a number of apocryphal Jewish and Christian texts that have been preserved in such chronicles and compendia (e.g., Joseph and Aseneth, material in the Book of the Bee and the Cave of Treasures). The story is told from …

More Christian Apocrypha Updates 1: Legend of Aphroditianus

November 13, 2017 by Tony

Over the next few weeks I will be doing final edits of the contributions to the collection I am editing with Brent Landau called New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. At the same time, I have to prepare a bibliography on Christian Apocrypha for the Oxford Online Bibliographies project. I thought I could combine those efforts with updates to my More Christian Apocrypha page and, to top it all off, throw in some blog posts on the texts as a preview to the volume.

The first text in the collection is the Legend of Aphroditianus (aka “The Narrative of Events Happening in Persia on the Birth of Christ,” erroneously attributed to Julius Africanus) prepared for us by Katharina Heyden who has worked previously on the text for her monograph, Die “Erzählung des Aphroditian.” Thema und Variationen einer Legende im Spannungsfeld von Christentum und Heidentum (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 53; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). A previous English translation of the text is available in ANF 6:127-30 (online text).

The sources for the Legend are quite extensive. It is embedded in multiple Greek manuscripts of De gestis in Perside, an anonymous 5th/6th-century fictional account of a dispute between Pagans, Christians, and Jews set in Persia. In addition, it is incorporated in John Damascene’s Homily on the Incarnation of Christ (also Greek; 8th cent.), and available in two Slavonic recensions translated from Greek (one of these has been translated into Romanian), and an Armenian version (unedited).

The Legend …

More Christian Apocrypha vol. 1: Update

November 13, 2017 by Tony

As some of the readers of Apocryphicity are aware, Brent Landau (University of Texas) and I are working on assembling a new collection of Christian Apocrypha in English entitled New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. The project is a mirror of the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha volumes under preparation by Jim Davila and Richard Bauckham (University of St. Andrews). These volumes collect material that is not included in the edition of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha assembled by James Charlesworth in the 1980s. Where Charlesworth’s volumes focused on early texts of Jewish provenance, the MOTP project seeks to include also medieval and Christian works, as well as new texts and new sources for texts that have surfaced since Charlesworth’s day. The first volume of the MOTP was released just a few months ago; it is available for purchase from Eerdmans. To read more about the project, visit THIS PAGE and see this previous POST.

The MCA project (which has been initiated with Davila and Bauckham’s consent) similarly seeks to collect neglected apocryphal texts. Where MOTP is conceptualized as a supplement to Charlesworth, MCA is an enlargement of the most recent English-language CA collection (but now almost two decades old): J. K. Elliott’s The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford 1991). There is no need to duplicate Elliott’s work, nor is there utility in presenting texts that have been published in other collections (e.g., the Nag Hammadi Library) or recent editions (e.g., Abraham Terrian’s 2008 edition of the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy…

More Secret Scriptures 6: The Preaching of Simon Cephas in the City of Rome

November 13, 2017 by Tony

(The latest in a series of posts about little-known Christian Apocrypha that could not be included in my recent book, Secret Scriptures Revealed: A New Introduction to the the Christian Apocrypha, now available in Europe and to be released in North America in November, 2013.)

I have added to the More Christian Apocrypha page a little information on a seldom-read text known as the Preaching of Simon Cephas in the City of Rome. The text was published in 1864 by William Cureton from two manuscripts, but four more have become available since his day. Hopefully we will include the text in a future volume of the More Christian Apocrypha series. You can read the entire text HERE.

More Secret Scriptures 4: The Martyrdom of Pilate and the Lament of the Virgin

November 13, 2017 by Tony

Many readers of the Christian Apocrypha are aware of the large corpus of texts known as the Pilate Cycle—most prominent among these is the Acts of Pilate (also known as the Gospel of Nicodemus). There is one other text that describes Pilate's involvement in Jesus’ death, though this one is not discussed in connection to the Pilate Cycle, likely because so few scholars are aware of it. The text is the Martyrdom of Pilate, and it forms the second of two interrelated homilies ascribed to a certain Cyriacus, bishop of Behnesa (known earlier as Oxyrhynchus), though we have no other records of such a bishop.The two homilies—today available only in Ethiopic, Garshuni, Arabic, and Coptic fragments—seem to draw upon an apocryphal text in which Gamiliel, the first-century rabbi featured in Acts 5:34–40, is the narrator. Some scholars have called this source the Gospel of Gamiliel.

In the first homily, called the Lament of the Virgin, Jesus’ mother is stricken by grief at the suffering of her son. She weeps for him, first at the foot of the cross as in John 19:25–27, and then at the tomb, where she sees Jesus raised. The Virgin Mary thus replaces Mary Magdalene as …

More Secret Scriptures 3: The Apocryphal Apocalypses of John

November 13, 2017 by Tony

The earliest Christian apocalypse is the canonical Book of Revelation ascribed to John. The focus of this text is the end-time battle between cosmic powers of good and evil, with Jesus leading the heavenly host against the forces of Satan and the Beast. With the victory of Jesus, Satan and his minions are thrown into a lake of fire, and the faithful are raised from death to live forever in a new heaven and earth ruled by God. But the story does not end there for John; he is called on again to receive new visions in several other apocalypses in his name.

The Apocalypse of Saint John the Theologian (commonly known as 2 Apocalypse of John), available in Greek and Arabic and perhaps composed in Syria in the fourth century, is written as a supplement to the canonical text with John asking Jesus for additional information, such as a more detailed physical description of the Beast and details about the conditions of life after the second coming. The righteous dead, whether children or senior citizens, will “rise as thirty-year-olds” (10), Jesus says, and physical divisions will be no more: “Just as the bees do not differ one from another, but are all of the same appearance and size, so every …