Apocryphicity
A Blog Devoted to the Study of Christian Apocrypha
Chris Zeichmann over at Thoughts on Antiquity (HERE) has posted a summary of a panel discussion of Secret Mark that took place at Claremont Graduate School last week (February 28). Among the panelists were Marvin Meyer, John Dart, Birger Pearson, and Dennis MacDonald.
Several months ago I posted an item here on the start of my investigation into the Syriac tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (available HERE). Since then I have made significant progress in obtaining manuscripts and have begun collating them against previously published editions. Inspired by Roger Pearse’s posts on Thoughts on Antiquity (the latest is available HERE) relating to his work on the Onomasticon by Eusebius (edit: the text he is studying is actually Quaestiones ad Stephanum et Marinum or “Gospel problems and solutions”), I thought I would offer this progress report on the project.
I began the project, as many do, with lists of unpublished manuscripts. These were provided long ago by Anton Baumstark (Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluss der christlich-palästinensischen Texte. Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webers Verlag, 1922, p. 69 n. 12 and 99 n. 4) and more recently by S. C. Mimouni (“Les Vies de la Vierge; État de la question,” Apocrypha 5 [1994]: 239-243). The two lists were subsequently reproduced (and thus came to my attention) by Cornelia Horn in a paper she delivered at the Ottawa Apocrypha Conference in 2006 (“From Model Virgin to Maternal Intercessor: Mary, Children, and Family Problems in Late Antique Infancy Gospel Traditions”). Such lists are provisional; they are based on the bare information provided in catalogues, and some items come from word-of-mouth reports by colleagues. So, it is to be expected that the lists will contain some errors, which can …
Despite my interest in Gnosticism and all things apocryphal, I must confess that I find reading one Gnostic cosmogogical myth after another rather tedious. I have speculated before that perhaps other young religious systems went through a similar process of crafting such myths before an official one (or two) became standard. For Christian and non-Christian Gnosticism we get to see mythmaking in process—in all its joys and pains.
So, I struggled a little this week to find something in our discussion of Valentinianism that would excite me, and therefore excite the class. We ambled through the lecture material—an overview of sources, a tour of Ptolemy’s myth, a catalogue of sacraments, and a peak here-and-there into some of the texts (including the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, and the extant fragments of Valentinus’ works). Then we were left with an hour to do…something.
I decided to try our hand at Valentinian exegesis. I selected three pericopae from the gospels to examine: the Parable of the Sower, the Parable of the Unjust Judge, and the Woman with a Hemorrhage. The selection was somewhat random; I figured that we’d get more out of the endeavour if they were not obvious (the Johannine Prologue, for example, invites Gnostic exegesis and would be too easy). So the class was broken into groups and asked to do an allegorical reading of the pericopae—put more specifically, they were to read Valentinian cosmology and anthropology into (or is that out of?) the texts.
The …
The first assignment due in my current Gnosticism course is a translation comparison. The goal of the assignment is for students to see how much work is involved in putting together an edition of a text and how the editor’s decisions can greatly affect how one reads or understand the text. This is particularly so with fragmentary texts. In previous years I have used the translations of the Apocalypse of Adam in Layton’s Gnostic Scriptures and Robinson’s Nag Hammadi Library.
This year I opted for the Gospel of Judas by Marvin Meyer (The Nag Hammadi Scriptures) and April DeConick (The Thirteenth Apostle). I chose this text for three reasons: it is well-known to (though not well-read by) the wider public, the assignment would force the students to read the gospel very carefully and thus lead (hopefully) to a rewarding discussion of the text, and the interpretation of the text is highly contentious.
Meyer and DeConick have been in conflict over their particular interpretations of the text; their positions are available for all to read in an article on Meyer’s site (see HERE) and a series of responses on DeConick’s blog (see HERE). But I hoped the students would not see this exchange before writing the paper; it is preferred that they find the major contentious passages themselves and thereby avoid trying to understand why each scholar arrived at his/her position but focus purely on the general issue of the choices involved in the …
A story is making the rounds of the blogging world of a manuscript discovery from the Deir al-Surian monastery in Egypt. The story (found HERE) focuses on the recovery of a missing page of a codex housed at the British Library. The missing page, a list of Christian martyrs from Edessa in 411, was recently found beneath a floor in the monastery. But what is most interesting about the story (to me, at least) is the following:
The fragments were among hundreds discovered beneath a floor in the Deir al-Surian, which is itself a treasure trove of ancient books. Dr Brock and his colleague, Dr Lucas Van Rompay of Duke University in North Carolina, are now working on the first catalogue of the many manuscripts that are more than 1,000 years old.
Let’s hope some apocryphal texts will be found among the manuscripts.
In 2007 I used the Apocryphicity blog as a host for some musings on the weekly classes of my course on the New Testament Apocrypha. I am now teaching the counterpart to that course: Gnosticism. Though a little late into the semester now, there’s no reason to let that prevent me from posting some thoughts on the course to date. We’ll begin with a discussion of the course syllabus (available HERE).
1. Course Texts. This is the third incarnation of the Gnosticism course. The first two versions were constructed around Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis. I found Rudolph’s book useful but occasionally had to teach against it as some of his assertions about the origins of Gnosticism and of Mandaeism are now out-of-date. So I thought I’d try out Birger Pearson’s new book, Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. So far I am not very happy with it. While I like how he divides his discussion into the various groups (Sethianism, Valentinianism, etc.), much of what Pearson does is summarize the material. He also makes numerous assertions about the origins of the texts without offering support (leaving the reader somewhat bewildered at how he arrives at the dates he provides). I will play out the year with the book but I do not think I will use it again. This is the first year also for Meyer et al’s new Nag Hammadi Library volume. In previous years I used Bentley Layton’s Gnostic Scriptures, which, alas is currently out-of-print. But …
The deadline is fast approaching for proposals for the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The meeting takes place in Boston, November 21-25. Anyone interested in submitting a proposal to the Christian Apocrypha Section (really, the only section that truly matters) can find details at THIS LINK. Proposals must be in by March 1. I will be there once again this year, this time presenting on my ongoing work on the Syriac Jacobite tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
As promised in my last post, here are some brief comments about this year’s Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Keep an eye out also for Jim Davila’s roundup on Paleojudaica (he may even have some good photos) and April DeConick’s comments on Forbidden Gospels.
The meeting took place in sunny San Diego, California—a wonderful location. Usually I try to take some time at conferences to check out the city a little but most of my wanderings were relegated to the boardwalk behind the hotels and a trip to the nearest mall for gifts for loved ones. One night was dedicated to a death-defying trip south of the border to Tijuana. After polling about 1000 other academics, I could find only one other brave soul willing to join me on this “spiritual quest” (the “spirit” in this case was a bottle of Tequila); in retrospect, they are far wiser for it.
On day two I took in the papers of the Early Christian Families Group and an AAR session on “The Holy Child: Traditions of the Infant and Child Jesus”. In the evening I squeezed in at the end of the crowded session on “Books of the Gospel of Judas: An Evening with the Authors” and stayed around long enough to introduce myself to April DeConick (of Forbidden Gospels fame).
Day three was spent at two Christian Apocrypha sessions. The highlight of these sessions for me was the presentation by Abraham Terian on his forthcoming edition of …
April DeConick at The Forbidden Gospels mentions a forthcoming book by Marvin Meyer on the full range of Judas traditions from early Christian writers. The book is due in November and is titled Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends About the Infamous Apostle of Jesus. This is a welcome resource as these traditions, though not all contained in gospels, are nevertheless apocryphal traditions and deserve greater exposure and discussion.
Ben C. Smith has a brief post on the Letter of Lentulus over on Thoughts on Antiquity.
(I recently moved into a new house and have been without an internet connection at home for two weeks. So, I am a little behind on posting my usual post mortem of my New Testament Apocrypha class. Here is last week’s post; this week’s will follow shortly).
This week’s New Testament Apocrypha class covered the agrapha and fragmentary gospels. The course is structured so that we review an orthodox/canonical text and then discuss related heretical/non-canonical texts. This week the orthodox text was Mark. The point of the structure is to have the students see how the apocrypha expand upon or react to other texts (the assumption is that the apocrypha are later than the canonical material, though my lectures note the theories of Koester, Crossan, et al who claim otherwise). This structure also allows us to look at the orthodox material for heretical ideas, or ideas that heretics will read into them, such as Mark’s adoptionist Christology.
In our discussion of agrapha I was struck by the methodology employed to delimit the 270-or-so known agrapha. It makes sense to eliminate some material from the corpus, such as material now identified as apocryphal texts (Gospel of Thomas) or fragmentary texts typically featured separately in editions (Papyrus Egerton). But otherwise the goal appears to be to find which agrapha could go back to the historical Jesus. Therefore, anti-Christian polemical sayings are eliminated, as are agrapha from Muslim sources (indeed many of these are transformations of narratives from …
Roger Pearse at Thoughts on Antiquity drew my attention to recent additions of on-line manuscript catalogues to the Syriac Studies Reference Library. This information is very useful to those of us who study Syriac apocryph–myself included, as I continue my work on a critical edition of the Syriac version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
Ben Smith at Thoughts on Antiquity pointed out the site Paracalypsis which features several Greek editions (some old) of CA texts (P. Oxy. 840, P. Egerton, Protevangelium of James, Gospel of the Ebionites, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas (in Coptic), Acts of Paul, Acts of John, and two non-CA texts The Didache and The Epistle of Barnabas.
I discussed a few weeks ago the topic of palimpsests in CA studies. Anyone interested in the topic may want to see the recent publication J. Gippert, Palimpsest Codex Vindobonensis georgicus 2 (Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi: Series Ibero et Caucasia. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). This Old Georgian codex contains a number of biblical, hagiographical, and homiletic texts, but the text of interest to us is a version of the Protevangelium of James from the fifth to the eighth century. More than 95 % of the codex has been deciphered.
The latest Review of BIblical Literature features a review of Craig Evans's apologetic work Fabricating Jesus (previously discussed HERE) by Stephen Patterson. Patterson has pubished widely on the Gospel of Thomas; but, unlike my own review of the book, Patterson's review devotes little space to Evans's approach to the CA. It focuses instead on Evans's approach to the canonical gospels and to the scholars wth which Evans's takes issue. Here is an excerpt from the review:
After spending an unpleasant week with this book, it is all too tempting to let Evans’s own words come back to haunt him: “I am appalled at much of this work. Some of it, frankly, is embarrassing.” But this would not do. My real difference with Evans is that I do not share his evangelical stipulations about the text. This is a divide that we must increasingly deal with in biblical studies. Competently trained scholars now operate on both sides of this great divide. How we handle that difference honestly and respectfully is our unique challenge. On that score this book fails miserably and can best serve as a counterexample of how not to engage one’s colleagues in discussion and debate.