2018 New Testament Apocrypha Course: Week 8
Classes at York University are mostly suspended as a result of a rather lengthy strike of our sessional, contract, and graduate student instructors. In order for my students to finish up the course, I resumed classes this past week in an online form, with weekly video lectures and chat room discussions. It is not an ideal way to conduct my courses, but it allows me to honor the strikers by not crossing the picket lines, and honor the students by helping them complete their courses. If you are interested in watching the video lecture, you can see it on Youtube (it’s nothing fancy, but gets the job done).
This week we covered the apocryphal acts, a corpus of material that typically does not excite students. Jesus appears very little in the texts and, let’s face it, the apocryphal acts are rather long and tedious. That said, our sourcebook for the course (Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures) reduces the texts well to their more interesting components. And hey, who can resist tales of necrophilia and severed genitals?
I started by providing a little context to the texts with a discussion of the canonical Acts, noting, among other things, the text’s depiction of Simon Magus and its abrupt ending with Paul in Rome. This led to a brief look at two modern apocrypha: the 29th Chapter of Acts and the Long-lost Second Book of Acts. Both continue Paul’s missionary work, either in Britain or in Palestine, and give the authors’ opportunity to …