Apocryphicity

A Blog Devoted to the Study of Christian Apocrypha

Month: April 2007

2007 Christian Apocrypha Workshop

by Tony
Blogging has been a rather low priority lately as I have been dealing with the joys and pains of applying to SSHRCC for funding to host this year's Christian Apocrypha Workshop. The first CA Workshop was hosted by Pierluigi Piovanelli at the University of Ottawa in September 2006 (you can read more about it HERE). It was a wonderful event. For those who did not attend, the proceedings should be published some time soon. Hoping to continue the work begun last year, I volunteered to put together a line-up for 2007 at York University. The details of the workshop will be revealed in time (i.e., if and when SSHRCC decides to fund it). Stay tuned.
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Gospel of Judas Roundup

by Tony
Elaine Pagels promoted her latest book Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (with Karen L. King) on the Colbert Report this past week. You can also read about a recent talk by the author from the Columbia Missourian.

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.

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John Dart on Secret Mark

by Tony

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.

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Just in Time for Easter: A New Book Featuring the Infancy Gospel of James

by Tony

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

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Vatican Targets Veronica in Anti-Apocrypha Campaign

by Tony

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 …

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Vatican Unhappy with Apocrypha in the Media

by Tony
A Reuters article in an Australian on-line news source reports that the Vatican is not happy with coverage of the church by the media. In an interview, a “top aide to Pope Benedict” registers an objection to how the CA are being used in books and films:

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.

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“The Funeral of Jesus”: A New Passion Gospel?

by Tony
Several weeks ago I posted the beginning and ending of a fragment of a text I referred to as the “Funeral of Jesus” which I recently came across in a manuscript catalogue entry. I have since obtained the manuscript and have begun the process of deciphering the text. This is no easy task. While the manuscript is well-preserved, the proliferation of abbreviations makes reading the text quite difficult. I offer this preliminary report on the text with the hope of generating some discussion on its contents. Though I believe the text has never been published, I am curious whether anyone in the field has encountered it before.

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 …

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