“Acts” of John and Philip in the Miracle of St. Michael the Archangel at Chonae

September 6, 2019 by Tony

The Archangel Michael is one of the most important of the Christian saints—second only to the Virgin Mary in prominence in late antique and medieval Christianity, both in the East and the West. Holy sites dedicated to the saint are spread out all over the Christian world; one of the most prominent is the island of Mont St. Michel in Normandy, built in the eighth century. Pilgrims would come to these sites for healing, typically from contact with a spring or fountain—given that the saint was incorporeal, contact with relics was not an option. Such veneration of Michael is surprising given that the New Testament forbids angel worship (Col 2:18; Rev 22:8-9).

Michael rarely appears in canonical texts (see Dan 10:13, 21 and 12:1; Jude 9; Rev 12:7-9) but he is prominent in apocryphal texts, particularly tour-of-hell apocalypses, where he is depicted as interceding with God on behalf of humans. The most lengthy of the Michael apocrypha is the Coptic Investiture of the Archangel Michael, in which the risen Jesus tells his apostles about the creation of the angels and the fall of humanity, and the Encomium on the Archangel Michael, in which Prochorus, the disciple of John, relates Michael’s explaination to him about how he annually rescues sinners from damnation. Similar material is related in a Greek text known as the Homily of John Chrysostom on How Archangel Michael Defeated Satanail. But there is another Michael text that does not get included in discussions of apocrypha, …

Four Uncatalogued Apocrypha Manuscripts from Mount Sinai

September 6, 2019 by Tony

Update: the National Library of Israel responded to my query about the origins of their manuscript images. They were part of the same photographing initiative as the Library of Congress, though the library gave the date of this enterprise as 1968, not 1949–1950.

The St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai is well-known as a goldmine of manuscripts—almost 2300 of them in Greek alone, and another 1000 or so in other languages. Its library has yielded such treasures as the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Syriacus, along with a number of important manuscripts of apocryphal texts. And it seems to keep giving. In 1975 a number of new leaves and fragments—the so-called “New Finds”—were discovered during the renovation of the tower in the monastery’s north wall. And new technology is being used by the Sinai Palimpsests Project to read the underwriting of reused manuscripts. Recently I made some “new finds” of my own when looking for digitized manuscripts for the NASSCAL project Manuscripta apocryphorum.

The Sinai manuscripts were catalogued in piecemeal fashion in the late nineteenth century. A full list of all the manuscripts, prior to the New Finds, was completed by Murad Kamil in 1970. But this is not a catalogue with full descriptions of each item; Kamil gives only a few lines of information, often describing the manuscripts as simply “Theological Treatises” or “Lives of Saints.”

In 1949–1950 a group of organizations and private scholars joined together to perform a full-scale examination of the monastery’s holdings. The Library of …

Years in the Making: The Debut of NASSCAL’s Early Christian Apocrypha Series

July 12, 2019 by Tony

The North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL) is celebrating the release of the first two volumes in their Early Christian Apocrypha series: The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary, by Brandon W. Hawk, and The Protevangelium of James, by Lily C. Vuong. To be clear, the two books are numbered volumes 7 and 8 because NASSCAL is continuing a series that was begun by Julian V. Hills, who edited six volumes of texts for Polebridge Press.

The process of getting these two books to publication began in 2015. NASSCAL had been formed a year earlier and the directors were considering options for publishing projects that could be venues for the work of our members. The first volume of the More New Testament Apocrypha series was near completion, and though it is not explicitly a NASSCAL project, many of its contributors were NASSCAL members. MNTA focuses on texts that are not normally included in apocrypha collections, but we had members of the society interested in working on some of the “standard” apocryphal texts—such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Apocalypse of Peter. We looked at the work of the French and Swiss apocrypha group l’AELAC (Association pour l’Étude de la Littérature Apocryphe Chrétienne), who publish a series of pocket-size translations called La collection de poche apocryphes. But there already existed a North American pocketbook series of apocrypha in English.

Westar, the association behind the Jesus Seminar, have a number …