Month: March 2018

Our second week looking at resurrection texts focused on apocalypses. We began with a short reading from the beginning of the Apocalypse of Paul with its claim to have been found, along with a dusty pair of shoes, in a chest in the home of Paul in Tarsus. We have seen such claims before in the Coptic Pseudo-apostolic memoirs. It’s a curious feature: for all orthodox Christianity’s bluster about apocryphal texts being fakes and forgeries, many orthodox writers had little hesitation in creating some of their own apocryphal texts to serve their own purposes. The look at this introduction served as a lead-in to the conventions of apocalyptic literature, including, as in Apoc. Paul, the motif of hiding a book away and rediscovering it centuries later when all of its prophecies appear to have come to pass.

After a brief discussion of the canonical Book of Revelation, we spent a short time looking at several apocryphal apocalypses of John. The first of these, usually called 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, continues the story in Revelation with John asking additional questions of Jesus, this time about the form that the dead will take when they rise from the grave: as thirty-year-olds and bodiless, without any distinguishing features (shape, size, colour). Another text, the Questions of James to John,  features James asking John questions about redemption. Simon Peter and Mary Magdalene are presented as examples of people who had committed grave sins yet they repented and achieved salvation. Mary, …