Apocryphicity

A Blog Devoted to the Study of Christian Apocrypha

New Apocrypha Collection from Oxford

by Tony

Oxford University Press is releasing in June a new collection of Christian Apocrypha, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, compiled by Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Plese. It is touted as a multi-lingual collection–i.e., it features the texts in their original languages as well as in English. The table of contents shows that it features the typical texts one finds in such collections, though the Acts of Pilate material is unusually extensive. The contents also lists the curious item of "Infancy Gospel of Thomas C." You can read more about it HERE.

More Christian Apocrypha

by Tony

I mentioned in a previous post several texts that tend to be omitted from "New Testament Apocrypha" collections and thus have been neglected in scholarship. Typically this is because they are relatively late texts and thus fall outside of the temporal parameters of the formation of the New Testament. As a means of attracting attention to these texts I have added a new page (More Christian Apocrypha) to my site focusing on the texts. At the moment it is little more than a list of the material but I will add more information to the page when time permits. Any suggestions for additions and general improvement would be appreciated.

Christian Apocrypha at 2010 SBL

by Tony

[Since I was not able to attend this year's SBL in New Orleans, I asked Harvard alum and CA scholar Brent Landau to provide this summary for us. Thanks Brent.]

I was only able to attend two of the three Christian Apocrypha sessions at the SBL this year, having missed the session that focused on “Animals as Symbols and Metaphors in Apocryphal Texts.” But the sections I attended had a range of very interesting topics.

The first session (22-210, Sunday 1:00-3:30) was an open session, with papers on the Pseudo-Clementines, the figure of Joseph, and the Protevangelium of James.

Dominique Côté from the University of Ottawa presented a paper entitled “Prophecy in the Pseudo-Clementines.” His basic argument was that the Ps-C are engaged in a conflict with Neoplatonic philosophy, its conception of “the True Prophet” being set over against Greek philosophical thought. Specifically, Côté contends that the Ps-C are responding to Porphyry of Tyre, the student of Plotinus who may also have advised Diocletian during his early fourth-century persecution of Christians. Nicole Kelley of Florida State University was Côté’s respondent, and was generally persuaded by his thesis. She observed that Côté’s work was part of a recent trend in Ps-C scholarship that attempts to understand the Ps-C as late antique (3rd-4th c.) documents rather than seeking after a 1st or 2nd c. primitive core (the so-called Grundschrift or “Basic Writing”).

Reidar Aasgaard from the University of Oslo, with a copy in hand of his …

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A Debate on Secret Mark?

by Tony

Peter Jeffery, author of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled, added a comment to my post from a few weeks ago on the Secret Mark articles in Biblical Archeological Review. He wrote:

I did not write for BAR because I was never asked to. I didn't know there would be a special issue on the Secret Gospel until it was actually out. If I had been asked and given a reasonable deadline I would have written something. Koester was not on the 2008 SBL panel but spoke from the floor. I was not on that panel either because I wasn't asked to be. Nor was I permitted to publish a response to Brown's RBL review. "When is a real scholarly debate about Secret Mark going to happen?" you ask. When people start including me.

First, my mistake, Koester was not on the panel; he’s just such a big presence, I guess, that my memory elevated him to featured speaker (heh). More to the point, Jeffery’s comment has led me to thinking about what would be an appropriate forum for a full debate on the text. One of the problems with the SBL panel is that the panelists did not adequately respond to one another’s evidence for forgery/hoax—Brown and Pantuck did respond to points previously made by Carlson, but Carlson and the other panelists did not respond to Brown and Pantuck. But to be fair, Carlson et al should be granted opportunity to prepare a cogent rebuttal. Another problem …

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Christian Apocrypha Site of the Week 3

by Tony

I have been thinking this past week about the typical contents of CA collections and what texts tend to be included and what get left out. The parameters are usually temporal—i.e., most collections include only material that is pre-Constantinian (the Pleiades collection is an exception)—though earlier studies of CA did include some later texts because there were not that many texts yet available. This led me on a search for some of these forgotten texts; many of which are found on the Church Fathers page of the New Advent site (scroll down to “Apocrypha”).

The English translations of the texts offered here are quite old and often unacknowledged. But they do offer the reader a glimpse at the texts as they were known to scholars at the end of the nineteenth century (or thereabouts). For some, more work has been done in the interim, but many have yet to be examined in sufficient detail. Here are a few of the more interesting texts:

Avenging of the Saviour

Narrative of Joseph of Arimathaea

Apocalypse of the Virgin

Acts of Barnabas

Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena

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On-Line Books on the Christian Apocrypha

by Tony

I have just added a new page to the "New Testament Apocrypha" section of my web site. It is a list, with links, of On-line Books Related to the Study of the Christian Apocrypha. The list is fairly extensive, though covers only up to the turn of the twentieth century. Included are such CA classics as Tischendorf's Evangelia Apocrypha and M. R. James' The Apocryphal New Testament, and also some lesser-known early studies of the CA by Variot, Nicholas, and others. I will add additional texts when I become aware of them; suggestions are welcome.

The Sisters of Sinai

by Tony

I have just finished reading Janet Soskice’s popularization of the discovery of the famous Sinai palimpsest by Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Smith Gibson (The Sisters of Sinai: How Two lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). The “Hidden Gospels” alluded to in the title refers not to non-canonical texts (as it often does) but to a fourth-century Syriac translation of the canonical gospels hidden under a seventh-century collection of tales of women saints. The palimpsest represents our earliest complete witness to the gospels, albeit in translation, and caused quite a stir upon its publication in the late nineteenth-century.

The Smith twins found the manuscript on a trip to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Soskice documents the struggles of their various trips to the monastery to work on this and other manuscripts, and their struggles to be taken seriously as scholars in nineteenth-century England, a time when women were not allowed to obtain university degrees. Along for one of the trips to the Sinai were other famous scholars from Cambridge: Rendel Harris, Francis Burkitt, and Robert Bensly. One of the book’s most interesting stories is the infighting that took place among the expedition over the division of labour transcribing the palimpsest and over who would take the glory for the find.

Soskice also discusses the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus by Constantin von Tischendorf, who preceded the twins in his own well-known trip to Sinai and whose suspicious activities in securing Sinaiticus made …

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CA Web Site of the Week 2

by Tony

The Christian Apocrypha Web Site of this week is the home page of the Association pour l’étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne (AELAC). AELAC is an academic association based in Switzerland and France dedicated to the publication of finely-crafted critical editions of Old and New Testament Apocrypha in a series called Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum. To date, editions have appeared on various Apocryphal Acts, the Ascension of Isaiah, Irish Apocrypha, and most recently the Kerygma Petri; the next volume to be published will likely be my edition of the Greek tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

The site contains an overview of all of the society’s publications, including the CCSA volumes, their related Instrumenta (concordances), the popular-market translations of the Collection de poche, the journal Apocrypha, the yearly Bulletin de l’AELAC, and the wonderful two-volume CA collection Écrits apocryphes chrétiens published in the Pléiades series. You can also find here information on the annual Réunion that takes place in Dole, France.

Another useful feature of the site is a bibliography of work by the members of the association. It is arranged both by author’s names and by text. The only shortcoming of the site is that it is woefully out of date (the last Bulletin posted is from 2007, and the last table of contents of Apocrypha is vol. 16 from 2004).

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Secret Mark in Biblical Archeology Review

by Tony

The latest issue of Biblical Archeological Review (Nov/Dec 2009) features a series of articles on Secret Mark. This is the second time in recent memory (Scott Brown contributed a piece back in 2005) that BAR has looked at the text. Presumably the topic is attractive to BAR editor Hershel Shanks, who is a vociferous supporter of the authenticity of certain artifacts such as the James Ossuary. Several other bloggers have commented on the articles (including James Tabor at Taborblog, and Timo Paananen at Salainen evankelista; note also Mark Goodacre at NTblog has recently posted a clip of an interview by Morton Smith from 1984); I’d like to offer a few comments on them also.

The first article, available for free on the BAR web site, is an overview written by Charles Hedrick of the discovery of the manuscript. Hedrick has been one of the most vocal supporters of the manuscript’s authenticity but his task here was to provide a neutral discussion of the basic facts of the discovery, Smith’s early work on the text, the scholarly reaction to this work, and the three recent monographs on Secret Mark written by Scott Brown, Stephen Carlson, and Peter Jeffery.

The second article presents the case for the forgery of the text. It is written not by Carlson nor by Jeffery nor by any other supporter of the forgery hypothesis (such as Birger Pearson or Bart Ehrman) but by Hershel Shanks. Shanks’ requests to such scholars were turned down for …

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CA Web Site of the Week

by Tony

As I work through my web site (tonyburke.ca) and update various materials (including my links to sites focusing on the Christian Apocrypha), I thought it would be useful to offer more expansive descriptions of sites of interest in a series of “CA Web Site[s] of the Week” (cue applause). The first is Andrew Bernhard’s gospels.net.

Bernhard, an Oxford Graduate, is the author of Other Early Christian Gospels (London: T & T Clark, 2006) a study of the CA texts preserved in early papyri (e.g., P.Oxy. 840, The Egerton Gospel, the Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Thomas, and others). These particular texts were the focus of the previous incarnation of this site, Jesus of Nazareth in Early Christian Gospels.

The current site contains resources for the study of twelve texts: the Gospels of Thomas (which receives the most attention), Judas, Mary, Peter, Egerton, P. Oxy. 840, the Jewish-Christian gospels, Secret Mark, and the Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas. For each gospel, Bernhard provides a list (and sometimes images) of the extant manuscripts, a select bibliography, scans of secondary sources (where available), and links to on-line resources.  The site features also a blog (which has been quite active of late with discussions of Secret Mark and the Gospel of Thomas) and a page of supplementary resources (e.g., links to texts from the Church Fathers, lexicons, etc.).

Gospels.net’s greatest contribution is the images of the manuscripts …

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Work in Progress

by Tony

Apocryphicity has suffered from considerable neglect lately. There are several reasons for this. For one, I am under review for Tenure, and the file preparation has taken some of my time. Also, I have a heavy course load this semester. And, there has been an illness (and subsequent death) in the family, leading to the abandonment of my SBL paper (see further below) and a curtailing of other projects.

Nevertheless, it’s probably time to put some work into my languishing Blog. I thought I’d begin with some updates on a variety of projects.

1.  I look forward very soon to seeing the proofs for my critical edition of the Greek tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.  The edition is based on my 2001 doctoral dissertation (available HERE) and is to be published in the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum. The editing process has taken a considerable amount of time, but the end product will be much superior to the dissertation. We should see the edition some time in 2010 (hopefully by the l’AELAC Réunion in June).

2. I am following up my Greek edition of IGT with work on the Syriac tradition of the text (for more information see HERE). This was the focus of

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Reidar Aasgaard’s The Childhood of Jesus

by Tony

I'd like to congratulate Reidar Aasgaard on the publication of his new book, The Childhood of Jesus: Decoding the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. Reidar has been working for several years now on this text; some of you may have seen him present his work at the meetings of the SBL or AELAC. This is the first book devoted solely to Infancy Thomas in quite some time (the most recent being Thomas Rosen's excellent study, The Slavonic Translation of the Apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas in 1997). Best of luck Reidar. For more information , download the promotional PDF here. 

The Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver

by Tony

Way back in April 2008 I mentioned coming across a new Judas apocryphon (The Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver) in a Garshuni Ms. Turns out it was not that new after all, but it has been all-but-forgotten in scholarship for over a century. Slavomír ÄŒéplö of Comenius University in Slovakia and I decided to pursue the text and have put together a critical edition (or two) of the Syriac tradition of LTPS.

The Syriac version of the text was first seen in two previous editions of Solomon of Basra’s Book of the Bee, a collection of theological and historical texts covering events and figures from creation to the final day of resurrection. Our edition draws on the Bee Mss as well as eight additional unpublished Syriac Mss and two in Garshuni. The material is divided into two recensions: a Western recension found in five Serta Mss and the two in Garshuni, and an Eastern recension in the remaining three Madhnaya Mss and the Book of the Bee.

LTSP has been published also as part of the works of three Western writers: Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon (ca. 1185), Ludolph of Suchem’s De Itinere Terrae Sanctae (ca. 1350-1361), and John of Hildesheim’s Historia trium Regum (ca. 1364-1375). And the text is extant in additional unpublished Latin Mss and in Arabic, Armenian (discussed HERE), and several European languages including German, English, Italian, Spanish and Catalan. The Syriac version differs notably from the Western versions by its …

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