Category: Book Reviews

With the “Beyond Canon” conference at the Universität Regensburg approaching in a few weeks (July 2–5; details HERE), I thought this might be a good time to finally write my review of the essay collection, The Other Side: Apocryphal Perspectives on Ancient Christian “Orthodoxies” (edited by Tobias Nicklas, Candida R. Moss, Christopher Tuckett, and Joseph Verheyden; NTOA 117; Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2017; publisher details HERE). The conference is organized by The Other Side editor and contributor Tobias Nicklas and some of the papers take up themes from the collection. The review has been on my to-do list for a long time, delayed in part due to my initial notes on the book going missing. But I went back to it this week and can now present my thoughts on it.

Most of the essays were originally presented at a conference in London, under the auspices of the University of Notre Dame, 3–5 July 2014. The exception is a paper by John Carey (“The Reception of Apocryphal texts in Medieval Ireland,” pp. 251–69) that originated as a plenary lecture at the “International Symposium on Christian Apocryphal Literature: Ancient Christian literature and Christian Apocrypha” in Thessaloniki, 27 June 2014. No explanation is given in the introduction for this outlier; indeed, very little information is provided in the introduction at all, and the few pages that are here seem to be repurposed from a publishing proposal for the book (at one point it states “the proposed volume…”). Nevertheless, some context …

Bockmuehl, Markus. Ancient Apocryphal Gospels. Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2017.

I am typically leery of studies of Christian apocrypha that come from conservative or Evangelical perspectives (I have written about such works in SBL Forum and her eon this blog). Scholars with faith commitments typically do not treat the texts objectively and sympathetically as expressions of Christian belief that are equally as valid as canonical texts; they frequently disparage the contents of apocryphal texts and spend much of their time lauding and defending the canonical texts against some perceived liberal-scholar pro-apocrypha bogeyman. But I was pleasantly surprised by Bockmuehl’s introduction. Granted, it is not empty of conservative rhetoric (the series is subtitled “Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church” after all), but the book is nevertheless a worthy and up-to-the-minute survey of the texts that draws upon and points readers toward a deep base of Christian apocrypha scholarship.

Bockmuehl confesses that he when asked to write Ancient Apocryphal Gospels back in 2008, he was not receptive to the request. “While this seemed a fine objective in its own right,” he writes, “its intellectual impetus was not mine—nor could I pretend to either passion or expertise in the subject matter” (p. ix). Bockmuehl is perhaps too modest here, as he does have experience with some of the literature, particularly the Protevangelium of James and the Gospel of Peter. Still, I wonder why the series editors did not …