Month: October 2017

I have been asked to contribute an essay to the T&T Clark Handbook to Children and Childhood in the Biblical World, edited by Sharon Betsworth and Julie Faith Parker. Initially the editors asked me to write something on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, given my previous work, but I feel that I have said everything I have to say (at least for the time being) on that text and its relationship to real or imagined children in antiquity. Instead I proposed a piece on “Travelling with Children: Flight Stories and Pilgrimage Routes in the Apocryphal Infancy Gospels.” I finished up the paper last week and thought I would share a portion of it here.

Scholars of Christian apocrypha have only begun to examine the intersection of pilgrimage and apocrypha. Tobias Nicklas’s recent essay (that fortuitously arrived just as I was writing this paper) “Beyond ‘Canon’: Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage” (pages 23–38 in The Other Side: Apocryphal Perspectives on Ancient Christian “Orthodoxies,” ed. Tobias Nicklas et al. [NTOA 117; Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2017) is the first wideranging look at the apocryphal traditions that appear in the early pilgrimage itineraries. These itineraries, composed between the fourth and the seventh centuries, all focus on Palestine, though a few of the pilgrims travel further afield to Sinai and Egypt. References in them to locations from noncanonical texts and traditions include the Piacenza Pilgrim’s mention of a synagogue in Nazareth where he saw “the book in which the Lord wrote his ABC” (an …