Fragments, Agrapha, and Secret Mark
(I recently moved into a new house and have been without an internet connection at home for two weeks. So, I am a little behind on posting my usual post mortem of my New Testament Apocrypha class. Here is last week’s post; this week’s will follow shortly).
This week’s New Testament Apocrypha class covered the agrapha and fragmentary gospels. The course is structured so that we review an orthodox/canonical text and then discuss related heretical/non-canonical texts. This week the orthodox text was Mark. The point of the structure is to have the students see how the apocrypha expand upon or react to other texts (the assumption is that the apocrypha are later than the canonical material, though my lectures note the theories of Koester, Crossan, et al who claim otherwise). This structure also allows us to look at the orthodox material for heretical ideas, or ideas that heretics will read into them, such as Mark’s adoptionist Christology.
In our discussion of agrapha I was struck by the methodology employed to delimit the 270-or-so known agrapha. It makes sense to eliminate some material from the corpus, such as material now identified as apocryphal texts (Gospel of Thomas) or fragmentary texts typically featured separately in editions (Papyrus Egerton). But otherwise the goal appears to be to find which agrapha could go back to the historical Jesus. Therefore, anti-Christian polemical sayings are eliminated, as are agrapha from Muslim sources (indeed many of these are transformations of narratives from …