Apocryphicity

The final day of the Symposium began with a session that was a bit of a grab-bag of papers. Early versions of the program were more cohesive, but with some presenters pulling out, new ones coming in, and the needs of some presenters to leave early or arrive late, we had to make adjustments. We titled the session “Reimagining the Past in Christian Apocrypha,” though, in hindsight, the title is really not very representative of the papers. We tried.

Gregory Fewster (University of Toronto) began the session with “Paul as Letter Writer and the Success of Pseudepigraphy: Constructing an Authorial Paul in the Corinthian Correspondence.” The paper is a response to Alberto D’Anna’s argument that discrepancies between 3 Corinthanians and other Pauline letters “reduces a lot … the possibility of success for the fiction.” But, as Fewster demonstrates, 3 Cor. was successful, so much that it was included in some NT canons, even the occasional Latin codex. It seems that constructing a believable Pauline pseudepigraphon was relatively easy, given that even in the second century Paul was known more for his letter-writing practice than for the contents of his letters. So, despite the discrepancies, Fewster says, “one could thus believe that Paul wrote this response letter because Paul is the type of person who would have written this letter.” One of the strengths of Fewster’s paper is in its attention to the various forms the Corinthian Correspondence takes, both as an independent writing and embedded in the Acts of Paul…

Part of the mandate of the Symposium series, from its start, is to respond to the widespread interest in the Christian Apocrypha and reach out to the wider public. Indeed, that’s why also we publish the proceedings with Cascade, so that we can keep the price of the volumes relatively low. And that’s why we began the series in 2011 with the Secret Gospel of Mark, a text somewhat well-known outside of scholarly publications. Our efforts to bring in non-scholars included scheduling an evening session featuring a panel of four Secret Mark scholars (Scott Brown, Craig Evans, Peter Jeffery, and Marvin Meyer) for an informal Q and A session. The session was promoted off-campus with flyers to local libraries and a media package sent to local radio and newspapers. Anticipating a strong response, we booked a large lecture hall; we were disheartened to see that perhaps only a handful of people attended the event (above and beyond those who were present also throughout the day). The low turnout can be attributed, to some extent, to York’s location—the campus is situated north of the city and can be intimidating to navigate for outsiders. Schedule an event downtown and the situation would be very different.

In 2013 we changed tactics somewhat and asked Annette Yoshiko Reed to deliver a keynote address. The tone of the 2013 Symposium was more scholarly (it was a “state-of-the-art” for CA research in North America), so we did not try to promote the event off-campus. But …

Day two of the Symposium began with a brief introduction in which Brent Landau and I discussed the history of the Symposium and the theme of this year’s gathering. Then our first session on the writing of early apocrypha kicked off with a paper by Stanley Porter (McMaster Divinity College) on “Lessons from the Papyri: What Apocryphal Gospel Fragments Reveal about the Textual Development of Early Christianity.” Porter’s expertise in NT text criticism generally and the editing of early fragments is widely acknowledged. Notable also is his recent work with Brent on a new introduction and translation of P.Oxy II 210 for the first volume of the More New Testament Apocrypha series. Porter mentioned that it is difficult to identify the precise nature of these “gospel fragments”—are they pieces of lengthy “gospel” texts? homilies? canonical gospel harmonies? or are they the remains of apotropaic texts (i.e., magical amulets)?

The answer may come closer to within our reach when the fragments are treated to complete critical editions based on new, in-person evaluation of the manuscripts, which Porter thinks is long overdue. Also still undetermined, Porter said, is how the texts were used by early Christian communities; “if these fragmentary Gospels were used in a liturgical fashion,” he writes in his paper, “they do not appear to have been used in the same way as scriptural readings of texts.” They were perhaps supplementary episodes, read for edification and further elaboration, but not as the scriptural text itself or as a substitute for …

It has become tradition to offer some postmortem comments about the York Christian Apocrypha Symposium here on Apocryphicity. It helps me gather my thoughts about the event while everything is still fresh. I present these comments in three separate posts.

The first day of the 2015 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium was the culmination of a year of planning that began with Brent Landau and I thinking up a theme for the event. Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery volume had recently been published and there was still plenty of buzz happening about the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. We thought these could act as pillars for a theme of composing Christian Apocrypha through the ages. I came up with the title “Fakes, Fictions, Forgeries,” cribbing it from a sentence in my book Secret Scriptures Revealed; Brent thought it a little negative toward the texts but we figured it would suffice through the planning stages and, as these things happen, it stuck. I feared that the ever-busy Ehrman would decline our invitation to give the symposium’s keynote address but, to our surprise, he accepted, even waiving his usual appearance fee (a considerable sum at $5000, which he donates to charity).

The course of debate about the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife at the time was leaning toward modern composition, though with a year to go before the symposium, anything could happen. It seemed safer to steer clear of questions of authenticity and look instead at how the text was being discussed in …