Month: December 2018

Day two of the “Material of Christian Apocrypha” conference was all about the Great White North as the Canadians took over the podium. First up was Jean-Michel Roessli (Concordia University) with “The Tiburtine Sibyl and the Legend of the Aracoeli, aka the Vision of Augustus.” The Tirburtine Sibyl is not a widely known text, but, in Stephen Shoemaker’s words, for medieval Christians its “influence on Christian eschatology far outweighed that of the Apocalypse of John”  (MNTA 1:513). It is one of a number of texts—including the Legend of Aphroditianus and a few excerpts I am working on from the Syriac Sayings of Greek Philosophers—that demonstrate knowledge of Christ’s birth or death among people in the wider Greco-Roman world. The focus of Roessli’s paper is a tradition in which the Sibyl is asked by the emperor Augustus who will succeed him and he is told of a “Hebrew child, God ruling over the blessed.” John Malalas (491–578) may be the earliest witness to this tradition; his Chronography (X.5) features the same exchange but adds that Augustus set up an altar (the Ara coeli) in the bedchamber of his palace on the Capitoline on which is written “This is the altar of the first-born God.” Later a basilica was built on the site, known today as the Basilica di Santa Maria in Ara coeli al Campidoglio.

Other writers mention the oracle and the location of the altar, but most significant is a development made prior to the time of …

The “Material of Christian Apocrypha” conference took place at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville November 30 and December 1, 2018 (see the conference web site HERE). The event also doubled as the first meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL). It was organized by Janet Spittler (at the time Vice-President of NASSCAL) and her UVA colleague Fotini Kondyli. I have been asked by the editors of the journal Apocrypha to write a report on the conference. This blog post, and another to follow, are draft work towards completing that report but the posts will have a bit of a personal focus, highlighting what I found to be of interest to my own research and teaching interests. Many of the participants are active Twitter users, tweeting before, during, and after the event. Janet helpfully combined all of their efforts at this Wakelet compilation.

To start, I have to compliment Janet and Fotini on organizing a truly excellent and rewarding conference. I learned something from every paper. For past conferences (for SBL or the York Symposia), we have often considered visual topics—such as art, illuminations, and iconography—but have not been successful in attracting enough participants who work in the area. But the theme of this gathering was expansive enough to make it work and allowed for a broad range of approaches and conversation between scholars not only of Christian apocrypha, but also Medievalists, Byzantinists, scholars who work on Syriac and Coptic literature, and …