Month: October 2019

The 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature takes place November 23–26 in sunny San Diego, California. To help prepare for the event, I have compiled all of the presentations focusing on Christian Apocrypha, this time with abstracts (since they tend to vanish from the SBL site soon after the conclusion of the meeting). See you in San Diego.

1. Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S24-119 Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: The Christian Apocrypha in Material Culture and Art
Brent Landau, University of Texas at Austin, Presiding

Adeline Harrington, University of Texas at Austin: “Apocryphal Oxyrhynchus: The Literary Landscape of a Late Antique City”

Recent scholarship on Christian apocrypha has made a decisive turn away from dichotomous models that present a stark discontinuity between the diverse, often ‘heretical’, literary practices of the early church and the canonical, authoritarian late antique church. As we have seen, apocryphal writings continued to be widely produced, copied, and distributed across the Mediterranean throughout antiquity. It is significant, however, that a large number of our earliest apocryphal (and canonical) Christian texts come from a single city: Oxyrhynchus. Our manuscript evidence from this city is often isolated from its original Oxyrhynchite context, as has been long noted by scholars like Eldon Epp. This paper sits within a larger dissertation project on the Christian literary culture in Oxyrhynchus. Focusing on the apocryphal material within the city, I trace the local trends in apocryphal production diachronically, paying special attention to manuscripts dated from the …