Annette Reed: Afterlives of New Testament Apocrypha

June 15, 2015 by Tony

The latest issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature features an article by Annette Yoshiko Reed entitled “Afterlives of New Testament Apocrypha” (JBL 134.2 [2015]:401-25). Readers of Apocryphicity may remember that Annette presented this paper as the keynote address of the 2013 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium. Annette decided shortly after the event not to include the paper in the proceedings, in part because we would not be able to include all of the papers in the volume and also because it was not intended to be a formal paper. The publication of the proceedings have been somewhat delayed, so much that Annette has found the time in the interim to work up the keynote into publishable form. I’m glad to see that the paper will find a wider audience after all. As for the proceedings, they should be available by the time of the 2015 Symposium in September. Here is the abstract of Annette’s paper:

This essay explores the place of parabiblical literature in biblical studies through a focus on New Testament apocrypha. Countering the assumption that the significance of this literature pivots on its value for understanding the origins of Christianity, this essay calls for fresh attention to the afterlives of these writings. The first section traces the genealogy of the notion of the NT apocrypha as countercanon, as well as the history of the debate over whether “apocrypha” preserve secret or suppressed truths about Jesus and his earliest followers. It points to the influence of post-Reformation …

Book Note: Piovanelli and Burke, Rediscovering the Apocryphal Continent

June 6, 2015 by Tony

The long-in-development essay collection Rediscovering the Apocryphal Continent: New Perspectives on Early Christian and Late Antique Apocryphal Texts and Traditions (edited by Pierluigi Piovanelli, Tony Burke, with Timothy Pettipiece; WUNT 1/349; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015) is now available. The book collects essays from the 2004-2006 SBL Christian Apocrypha sessions and the 2006 Ottawa International workshop (“Christian Apocryphal Texts for the New Millennium: Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges”) hosted by Pierluigi Piovanelli. I was asked by Pierluigi back in September 2013 to help finish the editing of the materials and it is gratifying to see them in print at last. For more information, see the Mohr Siebeck catalog entry, much of which is excerpted below.

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This volume collects the contributions of a group of North American scholars who started rethinking, in 2004, the traditional category of New Testament Apocrypha, largely dominated by theological concerns, according to the new perspectives of a greater continuity not only between Second Temple Jewish and early Christian scriptural productions, but also between early Christian and late antique apocryphal literatures. This is the result of the confluence of two, so far, alternative approaches: on the one hand, the deconstruction of the customary categories, inherited from ancient heresiology, of “Jewish Christianity” and “Gnosticism,” and on the other hand, the new awareness that the production of new apocryphal texts did not cease at the end of the third century but continued well into late antiquity and beyond. These papers bring together for the first time the …