Apocryphicity
A Blog Devoted to the Study of Christian Apocrypha
I have added to my homepage Collating for Dummies, a tongue-in-cheek guide to manuscript research that I created back in 2000 for a presentation on my graduate work (which involved preparing a critial edition of the Greek manuscripts of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). It is aimed specifically at acquiring and editing manuscripts of Christian Apocrypha, though it can be useful to novices in any area of text criticism. The guide is a little out-of-date now (I no longer even have the software I used to create it) but I'm in no hurry to revise it. I have dragged it out a few times in the intervening years to pass on to students the lessons I learned preparing the critical edition. Enjoy. As part of my efforts to unravel the complexities of the transmission history of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, I have begun the process of collecting and collating the various Syriac manuscripts of the text. The Syriac tradition of IGT is very important—it is among the earliest evidence we have for the text (two manuscripts are from the 5/6th century) and it is the best witness for the “short” version of the text, a version that is likely to be closer to the original than the longer versions we have in the Greek manuscripts.
The evidence for Syriac IGT comes in three forms:
1. Two manuscripts featuring a compilation of the Protevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and the Assumption of the Virgin. One of these (London, British Library, Add. 14484 of the sixth century; =SyrW) was published in 1865. The second (Göttingen, Universitätsbibliothek, Syr. 10 of the fifth or sixth century; =SyrG) was collated against the first in 1993/1994. I have obtained copies of both manuscripts and confirmed their contents. Both contain apparent omissions (that is, when compared with what is known about the short version from other witnesses): SyrW is missing sections of chs. 6, 7 and 15; SyrG is missing sections of chs. 4, 5, 7, 19 and all of chs. 14 and 15.
One of my on-going research projects involves tracing how the CA are received by scholars and the general public. I have posted here before on some anti-CA apologetic books (including Craig Evans’ Fabricating Jesus, discussed HERE). I have just completed reading Ben Witherington III’s What Have They Done With Jesus: Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History—Why We Can Trust the Bible (San Francisco: Harper, 2006) and thought I’d post some initial observations about it here.
First, the book’s title is somewhat misleading. It has less to do with explicitly countering other scholars’ claims as it is about a summary of Witherington’s past work on the Historical Jesus. Though several recent books by liberal scholars (Pagels, Ehrman, et al) are discussed early in the book and James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty is singled out for criticism in the epilogue, on-the-whole the book interacts little with the “strange theories and bad history” mentioned in its title.
The book is structured similarly (and perhaps not accidentally) to Bart Ehrman’s recent Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, offering chapters on various figures in Jesus’ life. Witherington believes this the best method to learn about Jesus—by examining the “impact crater” he left behind. Of course this method necessitates determining whether certain sources were or were not written by their putative authors. And, as can be expected, Witherington believes virtually the entire corpus of the NT is not pseudonymous. As a result, these texts are most reliable for recovering the historical Jesus and early …
A new section has been added to my home page on Tabloid Apocrypha. These are articles from the Sun that I have collected over the years that deal with real and not-so-real lost gospels. If anyone has others to share, please pass them along.
April DeConick of the Forbidden Gospels blog has posted several articles lately on her work on the Gospel of Judas including this one about the forthcoming critical edition.
John Dart, a writer for the Christian Century and author of several CA-related books (Decoding Mark, Unearthing the Lost Words of Jesus, and The Jesus of Heresy and History), posted on the publication’s “Theolog” a response to the recent NY Times article on Secret Mark (mentioned previously HERE). You can read it HERE. Thanks to Scott Brown for passing this along.
The Infancy Gospel of James is featured prominently in a new book by Frederica Mathewes-Green, The Lost Gospel of Mary: The Mother of Jesus in Three Ancient Texts from Paraclete Press. An interview with the author is available here. The title is somewhat misleading (Infancy James has never really been “lost,” and calling it the Gospel of Mary leads to confusion with the Gnostic text of the same name). The following excerpt from the interview reveals which texts Mathewes-Green examines:
…The first text, the “Gospel of Mary,” shows us Mary as an adorable little girl, and then as a teenager coping with a “crisis pregnancy” that could cause her execution as a suspected adultress. This was an extremely popular work among Eastern Christians (that is, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern) in the second century. Many of the stories here made it to Europe, but the intact text did not. A 16th-century scholar who translated it into Latin named it “the Protevangelium of James;” this is how scholars know it today, but it’s not the original title (no one title stuck, actually). In this work, Mary is steadfast under this trial, and teaches us much about courage.The other two texts illuminate other aspects of Mary’s role. The second is a very short prayer that was found on a scrap of papyrus in Egypt in 1917, and dated 250 AD; it is the earliest prayer to Mary. It begins, “Under your compassion we take refuge…”, and it’s
The Times On-line reports that the scene in which Veronica wipes the face of Jesus has been removed from the Via Dolorosa. The move is a response to the popularity of apocryphal gospels (see a previous post on the Vatican and the CA here). Here is an excerpt:
The Pope will risk upsetting many of the Roman Catholic faithful tonight after recasting a central ritual of the Easter ceremonies.
Benedict XVI has revised radically the traditional Good Friday Stations of the Cross procession that marks Christ’s progress from prison to the Crucifixion. A reference to St Veronica, who wiped Christ’s face with a veil, has been dropped and Judas and Pontius Pilate have been introduced.
The new itinerary for the route, also known as the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Sorrows, has been drawn up to give more weight to authentic Gospels, Vatican officials said.
Veronica was an apocryphal figure and the Vatican is conducting a campaign against the trend in popular literature, such as The Da Vinci Code, and among some theologians, to bring apocryphal writings into the mainstream.
What’s next? Will Mary’s parents Anna and Joachim (first named in the Infancy Gospel of James) be written out of Catholic dogma? What about traditions of Jesus’ descent into Hell from the Gospel of Nicodemus? And the lives of the Saints which are principally drawn from the Apocryphal Acts? Perhaps the Vatican should stop before they realize how many of their cherished traditions are based on …
The apocryphal gospels used as sources for popular books and films were not new discoveries but well-known books written a century or two after the original gospels, he said.
Authors who try to sow confusion between these two different sources profit from religious ignorance," he said.
April DeConick’s The Forbidden Gospels blog features a preview of her new book The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says.
The text occupies two pages in a 15th-century manuscript of miscellaneous texts. It has no title and in its current form appears fragmentary—i.e., the beginning and perhaps the ending are missing. The story essentially is as follows:
Joseph of Arimathea is given the body of Jesus for burial. Nicodemus hears of this and comes to Joseph and offers his assistance in the burial. The two bring a burial cloth and ointments and take the body down from the cross. Joseph tells Nicodemus that Jesus appeared to him (the following few sentences are unclear). Joseph reports that the priests of the temple commented on how strange that Jesus’ kin had not come to prepare Jesus for burial. Nicodemus goes to the temple to request Jesus’ body (next several sentences unclear). Nicodemus comes from the temple and places the body of Jesus in the tomb …