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 …

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 …

“Acts” of John and Philip in the Miracle of St. Michael the Archangel at Chonae

September 6, 2019 by Tony

The Archangel Michael is one of the most important of the Christian saints—second only to the Virgin Mary in prominence in late antique and medieval Christianity, both in the East and the West. Holy sites dedicated to the saint are spread out all over the Christian world; one of the most prominent is the island of Mont St. Michel in Normandy, built in the eighth century. Pilgrims would come to these sites for healing, typically from contact with a spring or fountain—given that the saint was incorporeal, contact with relics was not an option. Such veneration of Michael is surprising given that the New Testament forbids angel worship (Col 2:18; Rev 22:8-9).

Michael rarely appears in canonical texts (see Dan 10:13, 21 and 12:1; Jude 9; Rev 12:7-9) but he is prominent in apocryphal texts, particularly tour-of-hell apocalypses, where he is depicted as interceding with God on behalf of humans. The most lengthy of the Michael apocrypha is the Coptic Investiture of the Archangel Michael, in which the risen Jesus tells his apostles about the creation of the angels and the fall of humanity, and the Encomium on the Archangel Michael, in which Prochorus, the disciple of John, relates Michael’s explaination to him about how he annually rescues sinners from damnation. Similar material is related in a Greek text known as the Homily of John Chrysostom on How Archangel Michael Defeated Satanail. But there is another Michael text that does not get included in discussions of apocrypha, …

Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage, Part 3

November 9, 2017 by Tony

In the first post in this series I discussed the visits of pilgrims to locations mentioned only in apocryphal texts, in the second I provided an overview of the texts that expand on the Flight to Egypt to create a fictional pilgrimage map for those who want to follow in the Holy Family’s footsteps, now I turn to some aspects of the intersection of apocrypha pilgrimage that remain largely unexplored by scholars.

The first of these is the connection between the production of apocryphal texts and the pilgrimage locations associated with them. Egeria mentions reading copies of the works of Thomas at the apostle’s tomb in Edessa (Itin. Eger. 19.2) and while in the city she received a copy of the Abgar Correspondence (Itin. Eger. 19.19). When visiting the martyrium of Thecla in Isaurian Seleucia, Egeria read tales of the saint (Itin. Eger. 23.5), likely from the Life and Miracles of Thecla—a retelling of Thecla’s story from the Acts of Paul along with an account of the end of her life in Seleucia followed by a series of posthumous miracles performed on behalf of pilgrims at the site. The account of Thecla’s final days in Seleucia includes a trip to and from Daphne, which functioned as an itinerary for fifth-century pilgrims on their way to Thecla’s sanctuary.

Several late antique apocryphal acts also establish a connection between characters in the narratives and particular shrines. The Acts of Barnabas, for example, documents the travels of Barnabas …

Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage, Part 2

November 7, 2017 by Tony

The earliest Christian pilgrimage itineraries, discussed in the part 1 of this series post, say little about sites in Egypt, despite the fact that the canonical Gospel of Matthew (2:13–15, 19–21) narrates a visit to Egypt by the Holy Family early in Jesus’ life. Matthew does not say what happened to the Holy Family in Egypt nor how long they resided there, but other Christian writers filled the gap with tales of the family visiting various locations in Egypt, each one a site of miraculous proofs of Jesus’ divinity and superiority over native deities. As time went on, these flight narratives became more and more elaborate, with the most detailed accounts serving as pilgrimage maps for those who want to follow Jesus’ footsteps and visit the sites where Jesus performed his wonders, either in person or vicariously through reading the texts.

The apocryphal flight narratives range in origin from East to West and from roughly the fifth to eighth centuries, with further expansion in the manuscript tradition and in other literature inspired by these tales for centuries thereafter. The earliest developed narrative of the flight story is likely the tales collected in the Gospel of the Infancy, extant today in Syriac and Arabic (for more information visit the e-Clavis pages for the Arabic Infancy Gospel and the East Syriac History of the Virgin). The flight narrative comprises the middle portion of this text (corresponding to Arab. Gos. Inf. 10–24). The section begins with a retelling of Matthew 2:13–15 …

Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage, Part 1

October 31, 2017 by Tony

I have been asked to contribute an essay to the T&T Clark Handbook to Children and Childhood in the Biblical World, edited by Sharon Betsworth and Julie Faith Parker. Initially the editors asked me to write something on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, given my previous work, but I feel that I have said everything I have to say (at least for the time being) on that text and its relationship to real or imagined children in antiquity. Instead I proposed a piece on “Travelling with Children: Flight Stories and Pilgrimage Routes in the Apocryphal Infancy Gospels.” I finished up the paper last week and thought I would share a portion of it here.

Scholars of Christian apocrypha have only begun to examine the intersection of pilgrimage and apocrypha. Tobias Nicklas’s recent essay (that fortuitously arrived just as I was writing this paper) “Beyond ‘Canon’: Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage” (pages 23–38 in The Other Side: Apocryphal Perspectives on Ancient Christian “Orthodoxies,” ed. Tobias Nicklas et al. [NTOA 117; Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2017) is the first wideranging look at the apocryphal traditions that appear in the early pilgrimage itineraries. These itineraries, composed between the fourth and the seventh centuries, all focus on Palestine, though a few of the pilgrims travel further afield to Sinai and Egypt. References in them to locations from noncanonical texts and traditions include the Piacenza Pilgrim’s mention of a synagogue in Nazareth where he saw “the book in which the Lord wrote his ABC” (an …