Apocryphal fragment from the Passion of Christ
While poking around in some of the darker corners of Pinakes (the database of Greek manuscripts), I came across an untitled text listed only under the umbrella category of “Apocrypha Noui Testamenti.” It is a brief pericope found in the margin of a Vatican manuscript (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 875, fol. 286r; 13th cent.) at the end of the lexicon of John Zonaras, a twelfth-century chronicler and theologian from Constantinople. The Pinakes description is somewhat bare, but it is a little more detailed than the catalog of the collection by G. Cardinali: Inventari di manoscritti greci della Biblioteca Vaticana sotto il pontificato di Giulo II (1503–1513) (Studi e testi 491; Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolic Vaticana, 2015), p. 152. So there is little information about the pericope beyond what is found in the manuscript, as presented below.
A preliminary translation, based on the emendations above, is as follows:
The crowds <were> holding Christ in their midst. A certain youth came in secret behind Jesus and struck him. Then the others testing, asked him, “Tell us, then, who of the people secretly hit you since you do not know. Prophesy and say and show us from the crowd the one who hit you and we will know that you are a prophet and you know everything.
The pericope is a retelling of the following episode from the Synoptic Gospels:
The pericope is closer in form to the versions in Matthew and Luke, in which the crowds ask Jesus “Who is it …