Apocryphicity

Christian Apocrypha at SBL 2020

November 23, 2020 by Tony

The 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, which runs from November 29 to December 10, will take place online. The form of delivery may be entirely new but take comfort, because Apocryphicity continues its tradition of aiding readers plan their SBL schedules by compiling a list of all the sessions and individual presentations that focus on Christian Apocrypha. See you on Zoom.

1. Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S30-102 Christian Apocrypha (10:00 AM to 12:00 PM)
Theme: Christian Apocrypha
Janet Spittler, University of Virginia, Presiding

Chance Bonar, Harvard University: “The Place of the Dialogue between Jesus and the Devil in the History of the Antichrist”

The Dialogue between Jesus and the Devil (Dial. Devil; BHG 813f-g; CANT 84) is a narrative dialogue that expands upon the temptation account of Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13. In its Greek and Slavonic recensions, the dialogue portrays Jesus and the devil debating the reason for Jesus’s descent to earth, who the devil’s accomplices are, what happens to repentant and unrepentant sinners in the afterlife, the death of John the Baptist, and the devil’s ultimate fate. Dial. Devil participates in a long history of elucidating why the devil hates humanity and attempts to mislead them, and yet goes further than many narrations about the devil by portraying the Antichrist as the devil incarnate. While the idea that the Antichrist is the devil incarnate is a common topic on evangelical Christian blogs today, this late ancient apocryphal text depicts this exact scenario and has …

“Lost Gospels” and Other Christian Apocrypha: New Discoveries and New Perspectives

October 9, 2020 by Tony

On Wednesday, October 7 I delivered a virtual lecture for BASONOVA (Biblical Archaeology Society of Northern Virginia). They have granted me permission to share the text of that lecture (with some minor changes) on Apocryphicity.

Discussions of the origin and transmission of apocryphal literature in popular media, and some scholarship, typically look something like this:

Christian apocrypha are texts about Jesus and his family, followers and friends that are not found in the New Testament. They were written in the first three centuries, some perhaps as early as the late first century. They contain heretical ideas and were systematically destroyed once the church of Rome solidified its power over other forms of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries; these repressive efforts culminated in the formation of the canon of the New Testament, established at the latest by the time of Athanasius of Alexandria. The scriptures were clearly established as the 27 books of the New Testament; nothing more should be written, copied, or read thereafter. Some apocryphal traditions survived, however, but heavily sanitized of heretical ideas and collected as writings of the saints—so-called hagiographical literature. Otherwise, Christian apocrypha were lost to history until scholars of the Renaissance found copies in Eastern monasteries and brought them home to the West to be published, and more recently from archaeologists and Bedouins who found texts in caves and ancient garbage dumps. Despite all of the efforts of the church to censure these texts, many of them are now available for everyone to …

Some Reflections on Ariel Sabar’s Veritas

September 1, 2020 by Tony

Scholars, or at least those scholars in my small corner of academia, have been gleefully reading (some hate-reading) and reviewing Ariel Sabar’s new book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. I’m a bit late to the party, but I seem to be among the few who did not get sent an advance copy (sheesh!) and was further delayed because there were no stores within 50 km of me that bothered to stock the book on the day of its release. To me (and my colleagues) this book is important—why isn’t it important to everyone? Sigh. Truth be told, academics seem to both delight in and dread when outsiders (Sabar is a journalist) look into our world; it’s very much how Canadians feel living in the shadow of the US: they noticed us! (But did they have to be so mean?).

As other reviewers have said, Veritas is an excellent book. If you read Sabar’s piece on GJW for The Atlantic, you know that Sabar is a gifted investigator and writer, though here Sabar has adjusted his style so that readers are treated to a page-turning thriller. But he is no less strong an investigator. At several points in the book I felt like he had followed the evidence as far as he could, but then he went deeper, and found more. Who would have thought the trail would lead him to wandering around Bad Wurzach looking for men who were altar …

Publicity Roundup for More New Testament Apocrypha 2

July 17, 2020 by Tony

New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 2 (which I edited) was released just a few weeks ago. It is a follow-up to the first volume, which appeared in 2017. My personal web site, tonyburke.ca, features pages for both volumes (vol. 1; vol. 2) providing tables of contents and previews of the introductions. For vol. 2, I have included also a link to an article on editing the volume (“Even More Christian Apocrypha”) published in the latest issue of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.

To help promote the volume, I appeared in an interview with Shirley Paulson on her podcast The Bible and Beyond. You can hear the episode by clicking on the image to the right. Our conversation covered the Book of Bartholomew, the Acts of Thomas and His Wonderworking Skin, the Healing of Tiberius, and the Homily on the Building of the First Church of the Virgin (attributed to Basil of Caesarea).

I also sent a copy of the book to Benito Cereno and Chris Sims, who host the podcast Apocrypals, described as “A podcast where two non-believers read through the Bible but aren’t, you know, jerks about it.” They dedicated three episodes to discussing texts from the volume. They can be accessed at the links below (or wherever you go for podcasts).

Episode 66: JeSuS With Two Cool Ses (The Acts of Thomas and his Wonderworking Skin)

Episode 67: Bad Things to Call …

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 …

Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Pseudo-Apostolic Memoirs

April 29, 2020 by Tony

My next bog publishing project (well, while continuing to edit volumes of More New Testament Apocrypha) is a comprehensive introduction to Christian Apocrypha for the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library series. While certainly a prestigious assignment, it’s pretty intimidating—so many texts, so little space, so little time! Initially I promised to submit a draft at the end of two years. But I ended up spending the first of those years just clearing my schedule of other writing projects. And though I said I would not take on anything new, I have been sidetracked by the occasional conference that was in far too interesting a place to pass up. I did start writing, but instead of beginning with an easy chapter on, say, infancy gospels, I decided to start with something far more challenging: pseudo-apostolic memoirs. My progress was made slower because I was compiling, at the same time, entries on each of the texts for e-Clavis (click on the titles of the texts below to see the entries). The memoirs are difficult because there is still so much work to be done on simply establishing the texts—either because the Coptic manuscripts are dispersed in libraries all over the world, or because the texts are now extant only in Ethiopic and/or Arabic and few people in our field work in these languages. But I find the memoirs really fascinating and one of my goals for this project is to integrate them more into the “canon” of Christian apocrypha. So I …

2019 SBL Diary: Day 3

December 11, 2019 by Tony

My final full day in San Diego began with a meeting of the NASSCAL board—or at least those of us who made it to SBL (Janet Spittler, Lily Vuong, Lorne Zelyck, and Jonathan Henry)—to discuss plans for the next NASSCAL conference. These events take place, ideally, every two years; the last one was at the University of Virginia in 2018. Next year’s gathering will be at the University of Texas at Austin under the guidance of Brent Landau. For a theme we want something that is focused enough to give the conference an identity but open enough to encourage contributions from a wide range of specialties. So far we are looking at the theme of transformation—how apocryphal texts change over time through translation, expansion, contraction, adaptation, etc. We also quickly discussed planned volumes in the Early Christian Apocrypha series and the success of the e-Clavis (as Janet remarked, “I can’t believe how much we have done in just four years”).

After the meeting I went back to the book display for a meeting with my editor at Yale University Press. I am working on a comprehensive overview of Christian apocrypha for the Anchor Bible series. The plan was to have it finished in two years—that was two years ago. Who would have thought a 600-page volume discussing over 300 texts would take longer? So, we negotiated a new deadline and I made promises to send some material along for review soon. Then I grabbed the last of my book purchases: …

2019 SBL Diary: Day Two

December 5, 2019 by Tony

My second day at the 2019 SBL Annual Meeting began with the Journal of Biblical Literature editorial board breakfast meeting. If you ever submit a paper to the journal on the subject of Christian apocrypha, there’s a good chance I’m Reviewer 2. The discussion at the meeting focused on reducing the backload of submissions to the journal. But the really interesting talk was happening at my table. One person (who will not be named) mentioned to me that a certain scholar (who will not be named) was working on a complete version of an otherwise fragmentary apocryphal text (which will be named): the Gospel of Mary. The text is presently extant in an incomplete Coptic manuscript (the Berlin Codex) and two small Greek fragments. A complete text certainly would be a major contribution to work on this text, but some things about the rumor did not sound right. It is not out of the question that someone is working on this new manuscript, but probably not the person who was mentioned to me. Let’s hope there is some truth to the rumor.

Filled up on tea and pastries, I headed off to the first session of the Christian Apocrypha Section. The open session featured four papers on a variety of topics. Up first was Adeline Harrington (University of Texas at Austin) with “Apocryphal Oxyrhynchus: The Literary Landscape of a Late Antique City.” Harrington began with the statement by a late antique writer on Oxyrhynchus (I wish I could remember …

2019 SBL Diary: Day One

December 15, 2019 by Tony

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 …

Apocryphal fragment from the Passion of Christ

November 19, 2019 by Tony

While poking around in some of the darker corners of Pinakes (the database of Greek manuscripts), I came across an untitled text listed only under the umbrella category of “Apocrypha Noui Testamenti.” It is a brief pericope found in the margin of a Vatican manuscript (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 875, fol. 286r; 13th cent.) at the end of the lexicon of John Zonaras, a twelfth-century chronicler and theologian from Constantinople. The Pinakes description is somewhat bare, but it is a little more detailed than the catalog of the collection by G. Cardinali: Inventari di manoscritti greci della Biblioteca Vaticana sotto il pontificato di Giulo II (1503–1513) (Studi e testi 491; Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolic Vaticana, 2015), p. 152. So there is little information about the pericope beyond what is found in the manuscript, as presented below.

A preliminary translation, based on the emendations above, is as follows:

The crowds <were> holding Christ in their midst. A certain youth came in secret behind Jesus and struck him. Then the others testing, asked him, “Tell us, then, who of the people secretly hit you since you do not know. Prophesy and say and show us from the crowd the one who hit you and we will know that you are a prophet and you know everything.

The pericope is a retelling of the following episode from the Synoptic Gospels:

The pericope is closer in form to the versions in Matthew and Luke, in which the crowds ask Jesus “Who is it …

Christian Apocrypha Books to Look for at 2019 SBL

November 19, 2019 by Tony

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, …

Christian Apocrypha at SBL 2019

October 27, 2019 by Tony

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 …

“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, …

Four Uncatalogued Apocrypha Manuscripts from Mount Sinai

September 6, 2019 by Tony

Update: the National Library of Israel responded to my query about the origins of their manuscript images. They were part of the same photographing initiative as the Library of Congress, though the library gave the date of this enterprise as 1968, not 1949–1950.

The St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai is well-known as a goldmine of manuscripts—almost 2300 of them in Greek alone, and another 1000 or so in other languages. Its library has yielded such treasures as the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Syriacus, along with a number of important manuscripts of apocryphal texts. And it seems to keep giving. In 1975 a number of new leaves and fragments—the so-called “New Finds”—were discovered during the renovation of the tower in the monastery’s north wall. And new technology is being used by the Sinai Palimpsests Project to read the underwriting of reused manuscripts. Recently I made some “new finds” of my own when looking for digitized manuscripts for the NASSCAL project Manuscripta apocryphorum.

The Sinai manuscripts were catalogued in piecemeal fashion in the late nineteenth century. A full list of all the manuscripts, prior to the New Finds, was completed by Murad Kamil in 1970. But this is not a catalogue with full descriptions of each item; Kamil gives only a few lines of information, often describing the manuscripts as simply “Theological Treatises” or “Lives of Saints.”

In 1949–1950 a group of organizations and private scholars joined together to perform a full-scale examination of the monastery’s holdings. The Library of …

Years in the Making: The Debut of NASSCAL’s Early Christian Apocrypha Series

July 12, 2019 by Tony

The North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL) is celebrating the release of the first two volumes in their Early Christian Apocrypha series: The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary, by Brandon W. Hawk, and The Protevangelium of James, by Lily C. Vuong. To be clear, the two books are numbered volumes 7 and 8 because NASSCAL is continuing a series that was begun by Julian V. Hills, who edited six volumes of texts for Polebridge Press.

The process of getting these two books to publication began in 2015. NASSCAL had been formed a year earlier and the directors were considering options for publishing projects that could be venues for the work of our members. The first volume of the More New Testament Apocrypha series was near completion, and though it is not explicitly a NASSCAL project, many of its contributors were NASSCAL members. MNTA focuses on texts that are not normally included in apocrypha collections, but we had members of the society interested in working on some of the “standard” apocryphal texts—such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Apocalypse of Peter. We looked at the work of the French and Swiss apocrypha group l’AELAC (Association pour l’Étude de la Littérature Apocryphe Chrétienne), who publish a series of pocket-size translations called La collection de poche apocryphes. But there already existed a North American pocketbook series of apocrypha in English.

Westar, the association behind the Jesus Seminar, have a number …