2018 New Testament Apocrypha Course: Reflections on Week 5
The second of our classes focusing on the ministry of Jesus (that is, the time between his childhood and his Passion) included two letters, two fragmentary texts, and two complete gospels.
We began by reading the Epistle of Lentulus, a letter attributed to a Roman official at the time of Jesus and which contains a detailed description of Jesus. I asked the students to consider as we read evidence from the text that indicates it is a medieval (not ancient) composition—e.g., Lentulus’s use of Jewish terminology he is unlikely to have known (“prophet,” “Nazarene,” the quotation from Psalm 45:2), and the Aryan (rather than Palestinian) looking Jesus he describes. I noted that many scholars of Christian Apocrypha would label this text “inauthentic” or a “forgery” and asked the class to consider why a later apocryphal text should be valued differently from ancient apocrypha. To my mind (and to the minds of several of the students who responded), there really is no difference—they are all fictional representations of figures from early Christianity and all worthy of study for what they can tell us about the interests of the writer and his/her time period.
We turned next to the Abgar Correspondence and a discussion of H.J.W. Drijvers’ theory that the letters were created to obscure the history of Manichean evangelization in Edessa (e.g., Mani’s apostle Addai preached in Syria, the Correspondence and its sequel the Doctrine of Addai replaces Mani’s disciple with a Christian missionary of the same name). We watched