(Too Far) Beyond Canon: Has the Re-defining of “Christian Apocrypha” Lost Its Way?
The following is the text of my presentation at the GORE Workshop held at Beyond Canon (Universität Regensburg), 2–3 December 2024.
I have to confess that I’m not particularly comfortable talking about method, about definitions, and rebranding. A few years ago I caused offense at an online conference, at which I led off my response to Tom de Bruin’s work on apocrypha as fan fiction (recently published as Fan Fiction and Early Christian Writings: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Canon) by stating rather bluntly I was not a fan of the comparison (I was told a year later by a participant that my attitude was, shall we say, unwelcome). And I sweated through a semester of teaching the Methods in the Study of Religion course in my program at York University, barely keeping ahead of the students.
But none of us can completely ignore method; definitions are a necessity of studying anything I suppose, but particularly in a field like ours where we are plagued with terminology that has polemical origins and is still used pejoratively by modern theologians.
I’d like to focus today on the parameters of our field, on deciding what texts we study, whether we call them apocryphal, noncanonical, or parabiblical. That is an area in which I have experience, not from writing about the problem, but from having to make choices in several projects about what texts to include or not to include and provide justification for doing so. For the most part I have argued for …