Category: SBL Christian Apocrypha Section

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 …

One of the highlights of the SBL Annual Meeting is the publishers exhibition. As you make your way from one booth to another, keep an eye out for these new books dealing with apocryphal texts and contexts. If there is a book missing in the lists, please pass along the details.

Additions to the list:

Bloomsbury

Chris Keith, Helen K. Bond, and Jens Schröter, eds. The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries. 3 vols.

SBL Press

Janet E. Spittler, ed. The Narrative Self in Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Judith Perkins. WGRWSup 15.

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Baylor

Philip Esler. Ethiopian Christianity: History, Theology, Practice.

Bloomsbury

Matthew Crawford and Nicola J. Zola, eds. The Gospel of Tatian: Exploring the Nature and Text of the Diatessaron. Bloomsbury, 2019.

Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Alexandros Tsakos, and Marta Camilla Wright. The Archangel Michael in Africa: History, Cult and Persona.

Brepols

E. Créghur, J. C. Dias Chaves, and S. Johnston, eds. Christianisme des Origines: Mélanges en l’honneur du Professeur Paul-Hubert Poirier.

Brill

David Bertaina, ed. Heirs of the Apostles: Studies on Arabic Christianity. Studies on Arabic Christianity in Honor of Sidney H. Griffith.

David Hamidovic, Claire Clivaz, and Sarah Bowen Savant, eds. Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture: Visualisation, Data Mining, Communication.

Edmondo F. Lupieri, ed. Mary Magdalene from the New Testament to the New Age and Beyond.

Einar Thomassen and Christoph Markschies, eds. Valentinianism: New Studies.

Lorne Zelyck. The Egerton Gospel (Egerton Papyrus 2 + Papyrus Köln VI 255): Introduction, Critical Edition, …

The 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature takes place November 23–26 in sunny San Diego, California. To help prepare for the event, I have compiled all of the presentations focusing on Christian Apocrypha, this time with abstracts (since they tend to vanish from the SBL site soon after the conclusion of the meeting). See you in San Diego.

1. Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S24-119 Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: The Christian Apocrypha in Material Culture and Art
Brent Landau, University of Texas at Austin, Presiding

Adeline Harrington, University of Texas at Austin: “Apocryphal Oxyrhynchus: The Literary Landscape of a Late Antique City”

Recent scholarship on Christian apocrypha has made a decisive turn away from dichotomous models that present a stark discontinuity between the diverse, often ‘heretical’, literary practices of the early church and the canonical, authoritarian late antique church. As we have seen, apocryphal writings continued to be widely produced, copied, and distributed across the Mediterranean throughout antiquity. It is significant, however, that a large number of our earliest apocryphal (and canonical) Christian texts come from a single city: Oxyrhynchus. Our manuscript evidence from this city is often isolated from its original Oxyrhynchite context, as has been long noted by scholars like Eldon Epp. This paper sits within a larger dissertation project on the Christian literary culture in Oxyrhynchus. Focusing on the apocryphal material within the city, I trace the local trends in apocryphal production diachronically, paying special attention to manuscripts dated from the …

A busy day 3 began with a NASSCAL executive breakfast in our swanky hotel lounge (we had to smuggle a few of the exec. in; this is what happens when you give the hoi polloi something nice—we just take advantage). The NASSCAL board was about to change over after the Material of Christian Apocrypha conference in Charlottesville, so I gave my final update as President on the status of our various projects—including e-Clavis (with over 80 entries now completed) and the Early Christian Apocrypha series (the first two books are now in the hands of their new publisher: Wipf & Stock)—and we discussed possibilities for a second NASSCAL conference in Austin in 2020.

The first panel on my schedule for the day was the joint session of the Christian Apocrypha and Religious Competition in Late Antiquity sections. Jacob A. Lollar (Florida State University) started things off with “What Has Ephesus to Do with Edessa? The Syriac History of John, the Cult of the Dea Syria, and Religious Competition in Fourth-Century Syria.” The History of John has received little interest in scholarship, in part because of its (likely) language of composition (there still aren’t enough of us able to work in Syriac) and because it is considered secondary to the earlier Acts of John in Greek. Nevertheless, the text has some interesting qualities, not least is the fact that its story is told in Ephesus (and the author seems to know the city well) yet, Lollar believes, it was composed in …

The second day of the annual meeting was significantly more relaxed. There were no Christian Apocrypha Section sessions scheduled, so I was “free” to go to anything that interested me. But before the sessions began, I attended the Journal of Biblical Literature editorial board breakfast meeting. I joined the board last year to review apocrypha-related submissions. It’s a surprisingly large group but run like clockwork by General Editor Adele Reinhartz, though she is stepping down now after many years in the role to be replaced by Mark Brett. I sat down next to Mark Goodacre (Duke University) and we talked about what we were presenting on. I began explaining my paper from day 1 by saying, “It’s an eighteenth-century manuscript containing apocryphal texts that no-one really knows anything about.” When I was finished, Mark said, “I thought you having me on for a second there.” I didn’t realize how much my description sounded like the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark, a text that both Mark and I are interested in but disagree completely about its authenticity (I do not believe the theory that it is a forgery, created by its discoverer, Morton Smith; Mark refuses to see reason).

After breakfast, I hustled over to the Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship session, which focused on the Museum of the Bible. I have been following the steady stream of criticism about the museum that began even before it opened, and enjoyed Candida Moss’s and Joel Baden’s investigation of it in …

Another year, another SBL Annual Meeting. And now it’s time to compile my thoughts about the experience for my traditional roundup of the event—the sessions I attended and/or participated in, meetings I had with scholars and publishers, books I purchased, and receptions I crashed. I do this for those interested in Christian apocrypha who could not attend the meeting and also in lieu of tweets because Wi-fi access tends to be somewhat spotty (and generally a pain to do while trying to listen to papers).

Travel is always part of the experience. For me, the process of getting to Denver began on Friday at 8am with the drive to Pearson airport in Toronto for a noon flight. The previous day had made travel on the roads very difficult. I went to a concert (The Alarm, a kinda Welsh version of U2) in the city and the drive took four hours (it should have been 1.5). I mention the concert also because it damaged my hearing, so I really had to struggle to hear anything for the first few days of the conference. I need not have worried about getting to the airport on time; all was clear Friday morning, so I had a smooth, uneventful drive. Not everyone was so lucky; friends of mine from Sudbury and London had an extra day of travel due to delays in connecting flights. The only wrinkle for me was a 2.5 hour stopover in Detroit. Every time I book flights I pick the …

The 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature is fast approaching (Nov. 17–20). To help prepare for the event, I have compiled all of the presentations focusing on Christian Apocrypha. See you in Denver.

Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S17-116 Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: New and Neglected Christian Apocryphal Texts
Tobias Nicklas, Universität Regensburg, Presiding
Chance Bonar, Harvard University: “An Introduction to 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John”
Florentina Badalanova Geller, Freie Universität Berlin: “Apocryphal Gospels and the Folk Bible”
Tony Burke, York University: “Opera Evangelica: The Discovery of a Lost Collection of Christian Apocrypha”
Bradley Rice, McGill University: “The Suspension of Time in the Book of the Nativity of the Savior”
James E. Walters, Rochester College: “The (Syriac) Exhortation of Peter: A New Addition to the Petrine Apocryphal Tradition”
Business Meeting

S17-309 Christian Apocrypha (4:00 PM to 6:30 PM)
Theme: Connecting Gospels
Sandra Huebenthal, University of Passau, Presiding
Tobias Nicklas, Universität Regensburg: “Water into Beer! Transformations of Biblical Miracles in Late Antique and Early Medieval Traditions”
Janet Spittler, University of Virginia: “The Minor Acts of Thomas and John 20:24–29”
Francis Watson, University of Durham: “‘Inasmuch as Many Have Attempted…’: The Apocryphon of James and the Problem of Gospel Plurality”
J.R.C. (Rob) Cousland, University of British Columbia: “Rereading the Christology of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The Rewriting of Luke 2:41-52 in Paidika 17”
Julia Snyder, Universität Regensburg, Respondent

S19-138 Joint Session: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity; Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: Religious …

The 2018 SBL Annual Meeting will have four sessions from the Christian Apocrypha Section. Dates, times, and locations will be announced later.

Session 1 (in conjunction with the Religious Competition in Late Antiquity)
Religious Competition in the Christian Apocrypha
Arthur Urbano, Providence College (Rhode Island), Presiding
Jacob A. Lollar, Florida State University: “What Has Ephesus to do with Edessa?: The Syriac History of John, the Cult of the Dea Syria, and Religious Competition in Fourth-Century Syria”
Jung Choi, North Carolina Wesleyan College: “Two Bodily Practices in the Acts of Peter”
Shaily Shashikant Patel, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: “Magic and Polysemy: The Case of the Pseudo-Clementines”
Christopher A. Frilingos, Michigan State University: “Blood Into Stone: Violence, Sanctuary, and ‘Jewish Christianity’ in the Protevangelium Jacobi”
Lily Vuong, Central Washington University, Respondent

Session 2
New and Neglected Christian Apocryphal Texts
Tobias Nicklas, Universität Regensburg, Presiding
Chance Bonar, Harvard University: “An Introduction to 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John”
Florentina Badalanova Geller, Freie Universität Berlin: “Apocryphal Gospels and the Folk Bible”
Tony Burke, York University: “Opera Evangelica: The Discovery of a Lost Collection of Christian Apocrypha”
Bradley Rice, McGill University: “The Suspension of Time in the Book of the Nativity of the Savior”
James E. Walters, Rochester College: “The (Syriac) Exhortation of Peter: A New Addition to the Petrine Apocryphal Tradition” (20 min)

Session 3
Sex and Violence in the Christian Apocrypha
Janet Spittler, University of Virginia, Presiding
Catherine Playoust, University of Divinity:
“‘And …

The third and (for me) final day of the annual meeting began with a breakfast with the NASSCAL executive. The annual meeting presents an opportunity for the executive to meet informally, with a loose gathering of whoever happens to be at SBL—which is usually most of us. I presented the group with an update of our various projects, including the e-Clavis (now at 64 texts completed and another 26 in progress), the Early Christian Apocrypha series (with Brandon Hawk’s Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew  translation at the press and Lily Vuong’s Protevangelium of James near completion), the Studies in Christian Apocrypha series (with one title in progress, one in the proposal stage, and another two possibilities discussed), and the first NASSCAL conference (planned for the University of Virginia in September of October 2018). NASSCAL is now two-and-a-half years old and looking back, we have accomplished an awful lot in that short time.

After breakfast Brent Landau and I headed over to the review session for our book New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. It featured an all-star panel: David Brakke (Ohio State University), Philip Jenkins (Baylor University), Valentina Calzolari Bouvier (University of Geneva), Julia Snyder (Universität Regensburg), Judith Hartenstein (Universität Koblenz – Landau), Christoph Markschies (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin – Humboldt University of Berlin), and for a student perspective, J. Gregory Given (Harvard University). Two of the respondents have already posted their comments online (Jenkins and Brakke). All of the reviewers were effusive in their compliments about the volume: Calzolari …

David Brakke appeared on the 2017 SBL review panel for New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. I really enjoyed his paper and asked him to allow me to publish it here.

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I have decided, after investigating everything carefully from the first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

So the author of the Gospel of Luke explained his decision to write a story that many had already written.  His account would be carefully investigated and orderly and so give the truth.

1900 years later José Saramago placed these words as the epitaph to his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and so signaled his own audacity and anxiety about telling a story that had been told countless times before.  Saramago’s specific challenge of rewriting what has already been written about Jesus becomes in the novel emblematic both of any human being’s inability to rewrite the story that has been written for him or her and also of the Western novelist’s predicament at the end of modernity: How can one write when so many words have gone before, or tell a new story when all the great stories have been …

My second day at the 2017 SBL began with my first Journal of Biblical Literature Editorial Board meeting. I was surprised to see so many people around the table (and so many people that I know). The large number of submissions to the journal means that a large number of manuscript referees are needed, especially if they want to process them in a reasonable amount of time. Apparently there are two Christian Apocrypha (or “other”) editors: me and Pierluigi Piovanelli. I’ve joked that I took this position because it’s the only way I’ll get my name in JBL; John Marshall (University of Toronto) pointed out that it will be in every issue for the next few years!

After the meeting, I went to my first session of the day: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti’s presentation of papers from the new Richard Pervo festschrift Delightful Acts. The session included a paper by NASSCAL Vice-President Janet Spittler (University of Virginia) entitled “Joking and Play in the Acts of John.” She opened with statement by John Chrysostom (Hom. Heb. xv) that Jesus never laughed. That may be true for the Jesus of the New Testament but he laughs plenty in apocryphal texts. Spittler looked at three case studies of Christian humor from the Acts of John: when John jokes with Lycomedes about John’s portrait (26–29), the obedient bed bugs (called by the writer “a certain comic act,” 60–61), and the episode when John sees Jesus in many forms, including …

Every year after the SBL Annual Meeting I take some time to compile a summary of my activities—the sessions I attended and/or participated in, meetings I had with scholars and publishers, books I purchased, and receptions I crashed. I do this for those interested in Christian Apocrypha who could not attend the meeting and also in lieu of tweets because Wi-fi access tends to be somewhat spotty. Since I write at a snail’s pace, this summary will be split into three separate posts that will appear over the next few days.

I flew into town Friday around 2:30 pm—far earlier than normal—and thought I could spend the rest of the afternoon leisurely wandering around the book display. That way I wouldn’t have to squeeze the tour in between papers or skip a session. Unfortunately, the display was not yet open, so I had to find something else to do (and who am I kidding? it’s not like I would only go once anyway). So I went back to my room to iron my balled-up suit and do a little work before meeting up with Brent Landau. Over dinner we discussed, among other things, the progress on the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, which has been a bit sluggish due to some contributors having to withdraw because of other commitments or changes in their careers. The first volume contains a provisional list of texts to be included in vol. 2, and that list is looking less …

One of the highlights of the SBL Annual Meeting is the publishers exhibition. As you make your way from one booth to another, keep an eye out for these new books.

Baylor

Dirk Rohmann. Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity: Studies in Text Transmission.

Bloomsbury

Alessandro Falcetta. A Biography of James Rendel Harris 1852-1941. The Daily Discovers of a Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter.

Lee Martin McDonald. The Formation of the Biblical Canon. 2 vols.

Brill

Robert W. Thomson. Ners?s of Lambron: Commentary on the Dormition of Saint John. Armenian Text and Annotated Translation. ARTS 1.

De Gruyter

Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug, eds. Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology. TUGAL 175.

Gorgias Press

János M. Bak. Introduction to Working with Manuscripts for Medievalists.

Tony Burke. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas in the Syriac Tradition: A Critical Edition and English Translation. Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 48.

Amir Harrack, ed. and trans. The Chronicle of Zuqnin: Parts I and II. From the Creation to the Year 506/7 AD.

Mohr Siebeck

Jan N. Bremmer. Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity. Collected Essays I. WUNT 379.

David Creech. The Use of Scripture in the Apocryphon of John. A Diachronic Analysis of the Variant Versions. WUNT II/447.

Patricia A. Duncan. Novel Hermeneutics in the Greek Pseudo-Clementine Romance. WUNT.

Jörg Frey et al., eds. Between Canonical and Apocryphal Texts: Processes of Reception, Rewriting, and Interpretation in Early Judaism and Early Christianity…

The program for the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature is now available. Here, as usual, is my rundown of presentations focusing on Christian Apocrypha. Among the highlights this year are the book review panel for New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, and the mysterious new text being announced by Brent Landau and Geoffrey Smith in the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism session. See you in Boston.

Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S18-118 Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: Apocryphal Letters, Legends, and Sayings
Brent Landau, University of Texas at Austin, Presiding
Kimberly Bauser, Boston College: “Put on Your James Face: Pseudonymous Prosopopoeia and Epistolary Fiction in the Apocryphon of James”
Phillip Fackler, University of Pennsylvania: “Survival of the Most Banal: Paul’s Letter to the Laodiceans and the Correspondence with Seneca”
David P. Griffin, University of Virginia: “Psalm-Quotations in the Epistle of the Apostles and the state of Christian Psalmody in the Second Century”
Adam Carter McCollum, Notre Dame: “East of the Magi: An Old Uyghur (Turkic) Text on their Visit to the Young Jesus”
Jeremiah Bailey, Baylor University: “Male Angels, Resurrection Marriage, and Manly Mary: A Possible Connection Between GTh114 and the Synoptics”
Rick Brannan, Faithlife: “Sounding Biblical: The Use of Stock Phrases in Christian Apocrypha”

S19-330 Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism; Christian Apocrypha (Joint Session; 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM)
Theme: Coptic Apocrypha at Nag Hammadi and Beyond
Adeline Harrington, University of Texas at Austin, Presiding
Sarah Parkhouse, University of Durham: “Why …

This year’s International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature took place August 7-11 at Humboldt University in Berlin, an auspicious location since Berlin is the hub of Christian Apocrypha Studies in German, and Humboldt in particular is where Christoph Markschies, co-editor of the “new Hennecke,” teaches. I was able to attend the first three of four Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha sessions and will provide here some comments on the papers and discussions; Bradley Rice graciously agreed to pass along some comments on the fourth.

The first session began with the paper I previewed on Apocryphicity co-written with Slavomír Céplö (Univerzita Karlova v Praze) entitled “‘Arabic’ Infancy Gospel No More: The Challenges of Reconstructing the Original Gospel of the Infancy.” The paper was an overview of the sources for the Gospel of the Infancy in both Syriac and Arabic and posed some questions about how to present that evidence in a new translation to be included in a future volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. One of the other presenters in the session, Mari Mamyan, was absent, leaving much time for discussion of how the growth of Digital Humanities impacts the construction of critical editions. Christoph Markschies, who was present at the session, remarked that the publisher of his multi-volume compendium Antike christliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung has stated that the current edition will be the last one they publish, because the audience has changed so much over the years—scholars interested in the material are increasingly working online and …