Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Pseudo-Apostolic Memoirs
My next bog publishing project (well, while continuing to edit volumes of More New Testament Apocrypha) is a comprehensive introduction to Christian Apocrypha for the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library series. While certainly a prestigious assignment, it’s pretty intimidating—so many texts, so little space, so little time! Initially I promised to submit a draft at the end of two years. But I ended up spending the first of those years just clearing my schedule of other writing projects. And though I said I would not take on anything new, I have been sidetracked by the occasional conference that was in far too interesting a place to pass up. I did start writing, but instead of beginning with an easy chapter on, say, infancy gospels, I decided to start with something far more challenging: pseudo-apostolic memoirs. My progress was made slower because I was compiling, at the same time, entries on each of the texts for e-Clavis (click on the titles of the texts below to see the entries). The memoirs are difficult because there is still so much work to be done on simply establishing the texts—either because the Coptic manuscripts are dispersed in libraries all over the world, or because the texts are now extant only in Ethiopic and/or Arabic and few people in our field work in these languages. But I find the memoirs really fascinating and one of my goals for this project is to integrate them more into the “canon” of Christian apocrypha. So I …