Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism Week 9: Apocalypses

March 29, 2015 by Tony

The TA and Sessionals strike at York continues but some classes taught by full-time faculty have resumed, including my Gnosticism course. The few weeks off led to some confusion for me on the organization of the course (see below) but I was happy to be back in class.

We continued our journey through Nicola Denzey Lewis’ textbook, covering several more of her thematic chapters. This week we read the two chapters on apocalypses. Chapter 18 of the textbook focuses on texts with “apocalypse” in their titles (the Apocalypse of Adam and the Apocalypse of Paul, but not the Apocalypse of Peter and the two apocalypses of James, which are examined in other chapters) and chapter 19 focuses on Platonic Sethian Apocalypses (Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Marsanes). I made only passing mention of the Sethian texts in the lecture, in part because I discussed them in a previous class on the development of Sethianism, but also because they are difficult texts to read due to the damage in the codices, and because they really do not fit well the definition of the apocalypse genre, which states (from the Semeia definition), “‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.” The Sethian texts are identified as apocalypses by Porphyry …

Finding Jesus Episode 4: The “Secret Brother of Jesus”

March 26, 2015 by Tony

The fourth episode of CNN’s Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery examines the contentious ossuary of James, the brother of Jesus, which David Gibson (author of the companion book to the series) calls the “first physical evidence that Jesus of Nazareth existed” (I guess they are already discounting the Shroud of Turin from episode 1). The episode was fair and balanced in its presentation of the evidence for the authenticity of the ossuary and, to my delight, mentioned several apocryphal texts in its piecing together of James’ biography. It was also nice to see them open the episode with shots of the Toronto skyline for their introduction to the ossuary—the artifact made its debut at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2002, the only time it has been on display.

The episode is entitled “The Secret Brother of Jesus.” While the existence of James may be news to some Christians who do not read the Bible, it is certainly no secret. James is mentioned as one of four brothers, and two sisters, in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55 and he features prominently in Acts and the letters of Paul, and of course is author of his own New Testament letter. But if Jesus’ mother Mary was a virgin, where did these siblings come from? Protestants have no issue with the idea that Mary had children with Joseph after the virginal birth of Jesus; but Roman Catholics do not take the Gospels’ mention of them as “brothers and sisters” literally and identify them …

Abstracts for 2015 CSBS/CSPS Christian Apocrypha Session

March 25, 2015 by Tony

The Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies will take place May 30 to June 1, 2015 at the University of Ottawa. For the past four years I have been leading a session at the CSBS on Christian Apocrypha. Last year we began a partnership with the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies for a joint session and once again this year the two societies have assembled a wide-ranging (and multi-lingual) group of papers for the session. Also of interest to scholars and readers of Christian Apocrypha is the session entitled “Later Christianity,” which includes several additional papers on Christian Apocrypha. For further information on the annual meeting visit the CSBS web site.

Saturday 8:30-11:45 Later Christianity
Presiding: Tony Burke (York)

8:30-9:00 Hélène Dallaire (Denver Seminary)
Evidence of Jewish Christianity in Church History: Textual Evidence
The presence of a believing Jewish community has, for the most part, passed unnoticed in much of the literature on church history. While the New Testament clearly places the birth of Christianity in a Jewish context and in the synagogue of the 1st century, the events that led to the separation of Jews and Gentiles pushed Jewish believers into the shadows of both the church and the rabbinic world for centuries. Christian and Jewish literature of the last two millennia, including that of the Church Fathers, Rabbinic literature, medieval Jewish writings, and the works of the Reformers, provides glimpses of a continued Messianic Jewish presence throughout the history of the Church.

9:00-9:30 Matthew …

Interview about Secret Mark on Talk Gnosis

March 23, 2015 by Tony

I will be a guest on the Talk Gnosis webcast Wednesday, March 25. They will be asking me about the Secret Gospel of Mark. The show will be live on Youtube (at https://youtu.be/uoIhzYmsiFc) beginning at 9 pm EST and a more in-depth podcast will follow. You can check out past interviews at https://www.youtube.com/user/GnosticNYC.

Finding Jesus Episode 3: The Gospel of Judas

March 18, 2015 by Tony

This week’s episode of CNN’s six-part documentary series Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery focused on a literary artifact: the Gospel of Judas. When the text was published in 2006 it caused quite a sensation. It’s initial editors declared that it portrayed Judas as a hero, not a villain. Scholars were cautious in their conclusions about the text, saying that it had no bearing on the historical Judas, but the media were not interested in what it revealed of second-century controversies—they wanted to know what it said about the life of Jesus.

The first half of the episode focuses on dramatizing the relationship between Jesus and Judas. Certainly he was one of the Twelve, the inner circle of Jesus’ followers, but perhaps producers went a bit too far in portraying the two men as intimate friends. Ben Witherington says, “Judas may well have been one of the very first he recruited”—sure, but we have no evidence of that. Other contributors declare Jesus and Judas close friends and state that Jesus was an excellent judge of character (I think the writer of the Gospel of Mark would disagree); one dramatization shows Jesus saving Judas from a fall.

The scene changes to the story of the woman who anoints Jesus. The producers focuse on the version of the tale from the Gospel of John (12:1-11), where Mary, the sister of Lazarus, is identified as the woman with the jar and Judas objects to the wasting of the expensive perfume. The story …

Finding Jesus Episode 2: “Inventing” John the Baptist

March 13, 2015 by Tony

The latest episode of CNN’s Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery, a mini-series which aims to present “fascinating new insights into the historical Jesus, utilizing the latest scientific techniques and archaeological research,” focused on relics of John the Baptist. The episode was a sequel of sorts to a 2012 National Geographic documentary called The Head of John the Baptist, which examines claims that a set of bones found in Bulgaria belonged to John (details HERE). CNN followed the efforts of experts to authenticate another relic of John from Kansas City but derived some of its content for the episode from the NGS production and even included commentary by Candida Moss, who was featured prominently in the early documentary.

The Bulgarian bones were discovered in 2010 among the ruins of a fifth-century church on the island of Sveti Ivan (“Saint John” in Bulgarian). They were found mixed together with animal bones in a marble reliquary beneath the church altar. No name is on the box, but a portion of a smaller box found nearby in an older part of the church bears an inscription that reads, “Lord hep your servant Thomas…of Saint John…in the month of June 24th.” The date is significant as it is the traditional date of John the Baptist’s birthday. One theory has it that this Thomas brought the bones to Bulgaria in the small box and they were subsequently moved to the larger box. Unfortunately, the Finding Jesus episode mentions nothing about the smaller box, …

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism Week 8: Rituals and the Divine Feminine

March 13, 2015 by Tony

Classes at my university (York in Toronto) have been suspended for the past week due to a strike by the teaching assistants and part-time instructors. Undaunted, I put together a Youtube video of my lecture so that the class could continue with relatively little disruption. The assigned readings from the textbook covered three topics: rituals relating to the Five Seals and death, martyrdom, and the Divine Feminine.

Ritual practices can be difficult to retrieve from texts. Consider, for example, Christian practices. A typical liturgy today contains various readings, prayers, responsories, and credal formulas derived from the New Testament (and sometimes the OT) but they were not intended to be used liturgically, so we could read these texts and not expect them to necessarily reflect early Christian practices. The Lord’s Prayer and the Eucharist are exceptions; both of these show signs that they were used in liturgy; so they have a liturgical existence both before and after the texts. What do we have in Gnosticism?

The Gospel of the Egyptians may be a handbook to Gnostic liturgy, specifically to the Five Seals ceremony. We have two other witnesses to this ceremony: the Trimorphic Protennoia and Irenaeus’ description of Valentinian (Marcosian) practice. My original goal of the class was to re-enact these three descriptions of the ceremony. We weren’t able to do that, so my Youtube video guided the students through the texts and considered what they may or may not tell us about the ceremony.

A hypothetical reconstruction of the complete …

Finding Jesus Episode 1: Giving in to the Apocryphal Urge

March 5, 2015 by Tony

Last Sunday night, I tuned in, along with over a million other viewers, to the first episode of CNN’s six-part series Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery. The series seeks to answer questions about the life and death of Jesus using evidence from artifacts—some textual (the Gospel of Judas) some not (the bones of John the Baptist). This first episode focused on the Shroud of Turin as possible evidence for Jesus’ death—indeed perhaps also his resurrection, given the Shroud’s apparent miraculous qualities. My interest in the episode is in how it demonstrates the apocryphal urge—meaning, the temptation to retell stories from early Christian texts, thereby harmonizing disparate accounts and adding new details until a new account is created, sometimes even supplanting the original stories in the minds of readers (or viewers).

Of course, not all apocryphal texts work this way; some contain entirely new material. But some of the most well-known apocrypha do repurpose and enhance older works, such as the Protevangelium of James’ use of the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke or the Gospel of Peter’s combination of elements from all four canonical passion narratives. The example of the Gospel of Peter is particularly useful here because, in its dramatic re-enactments of the suffering and death of Jesus and its commentary by participating scholars, authors, and theologians, Finding Jesus has created, perhaps unwittingly, a new account of the Passion that undiscerning viewers may think is biblically accurate but instead contains numerous elements not found in …