Apocryphicity

A Blog Devoted to the Study of Christian Apocrypha

Month: June 2009

Reidar Aasgaard’s The Childhood of Jesus

by Tony

I'd like to congratulate Reidar Aasgaard on the publication of his new book, The Childhood of Jesus: Decoding the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. Reidar has been working for several years now on this text; some of you may have seen him present his work at the meetings of the SBL or AELAC. This is the first book devoted solely to Infancy Thomas in quite some time (the most recent being Thomas Rosen's excellent study, The Slavonic Translation of the Apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas in 1997). Best of luck Reidar. For more information , download the promotional PDF here. 

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The Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver

by Tony

Way back in April 2008 I mentioned coming across a new Judas apocryphon (The Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver) in a Garshuni Ms. Turns out it was not that new after all, but it has been all-but-forgotten in scholarship for over a century. Slavomír ÄŒéplö of Comenius University in Slovakia and I decided to pursue the text and have put together a critical edition (or two) of the Syriac tradition of LTPS.

The Syriac version of the text was first seen in two previous editions of Solomon of Basra’s Book of the Bee, a collection of theological and historical texts covering events and figures from creation to the final day of resurrection. Our edition draws on the Bee Mss as well as eight additional unpublished Syriac Mss and two in Garshuni. The material is divided into two recensions: a Western recension found in five Serta Mss and the two in Garshuni, and an Eastern recension in the remaining three Madhnaya Mss and the Book of the Bee.

LTSP has been published also as part of the works of three Western writers: Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon (ca. 1185), Ludolph of Suchem’s De Itinere Terrae Sanctae (ca. 1350-1361), and John of Hildesheim’s Historia trium Regum (ca. 1364-1375). And the text is extant in additional unpublished Latin Mss and in Arabic, Armenian (discussed HERE), and several European languages including German, English, Italian, Spanish and Catalan. The Syriac version differs notably from the Western versions by its …

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