Category: Gospel Fragments

[This is the latest in a series of posts on texts to be featured in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures edited by Brent Landau and I. The material here is incorporated also into the information on the texts provided on my More Christian Apocrypha page].

Gospel fragments are an ubiquitous feature of Christian Apocrypha collections. These untitled, often mystifying fragmentary manuscripts tease the possibility of lost known or unknown gospels, but they can instead be extracts from harmonies or homilies, or evidence for the phenomenon of secondary orality (canonical gospel stories remembered from oral performance before secondarily attaining written form). The fragments included in MNTA rarely appear in Christian Apocrypha collections.

The first of these fragments is Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 210, a single leaf from a third-century papyrus codex. One side of the leaf contains what appears to be an infancy story in which Joseph receives instructions about Mary from an angel. The other side appears to contain at least two episodes, one with similarities to the saying of Jesus on good trees bearing good fruit and bad trees bad fruit (Matt 7:17-18//Luke 6:43-44), and the other has Jesus begin a Johannine “I am” statement with the declaration “I am an image [of his goodness].” A reconstruction and analysis of P. Oxy. 210 has been provided to us by Brent Landau and Stanley Porter. Porter previously wrote on the text for the Markschies-Schröter German collection. The fragment also appears, in Greek (without English translation) and in photographs, in Thomas A. …