Apocryphicity

Reconstructing a Ninth-Century Arabic Apocrypha Manuscript from Mount Sinai

August 17, 2020 by Tony

Though I have a number of important projects in progress at the moment, sometimes I throw them aside for a day or two while I chase down some information about an apocryphal text or manuscript. Yesterday was one of those days. So I don’t lose track of what I’ve learned, I thought I would compile it all in a blog post—and since my last blog pose was in February, I can justify this diversion as necessary for maintaining my social media presence, right?

My morning began by posting the latest entry in NASSCAL’s e-Clavis: the Six-Books Dormition of the Virgin, compiled for us by Alley Kateusz. The 6 Bks. Dorm. is extant in Syriac (CANT 123 and 124), Arabic (140), and Ethiopic (150). The Arabic text was published from a manuscript in Bonn in 1854 by Maximilian Enger (Ionnis Apostoli de Transitu Beatae Mariae Virginis Liber). Enger’s edition includes also a Latin translation, which was translated into French a few years later in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Dictionnaire des Apocryphes. Enger’s text was reprinted in Pilar González Casado’s doctoral thesis (“Las relaciones linguisticas entre el siriaco y el arabe en textos religiosos arabes cristianos”; Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2013) along with a Spanish translation. So, what is the problem that I needed to solve? Casado states in her introduction that Enger’s source is a ninth-century manuscript from Bryn Mawr College Library (p. 6), but later correctly identifies the source as the manuscript from Bonn (p. 181).

What is …

More New Testament Apocrypha vol. 3

February 27, 2019 by Tony

In January I submitted the completed manuscript of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures volume 2 to the publisher, Eerdmans. I was soon informed that the volume was too large. The first volume is around 600 pages; the second is close to 700. Eerdmans want some uniformity to the series and asked to reduce the book by 100 pages. As a consolation, they promised that the excised material could appear in a third volume. Additional volumes were always a possibility but were contingent on the success of the first two. Eerdmans seems to be confident enough in the series for it to continue.

But what texts do I cut? Some of our contributors are in the early stages of their careers; it is far more important for their work to be published sooner rather than later. Several of us with multiple texts in the volume volunteered to hold off on some of our work and a few other contributors agreed to wait for volume 3. But I don’t want people to wait long, so I spent the past few weeks working with our past contributors to put together a preliminary list of texts to fill the third volume. This is what we came up with:

The Apocryphon of Jesus’ Baptism (Ostracon Aberdeen 25)
The Acts of Andrew and Paul
The Acts of Andrew and Philemon
The Acts of John by Prochorus
The Acts of John in the City of Rome
The Acts of Mark
The Acts of Peter in the …

Reflections on the Material of Christian Apocrypha Conference: Part II

December 22, 2018 by Tony

Day two of the “Material of Christian Apocrypha” conference was all about the Great White North as the Canadians took over the podium. First up was Jean-Michel Roessli (Concordia University) with “The Tiburtine Sibyl and the Legend of the Aracoeli, aka the Vision of Augustus.” The Tirburtine Sibyl is not a widely known text, but, in Stephen Shoemaker’s words, for medieval Christians its “influence on Christian eschatology far outweighed that of the Apocalypse of John” (MNTA 1:513). It is one of a number of texts—including the Legend of Aphroditianus and a few excerpts I am working on from the Syriac Sayings of Greek Philosophers—that demonstrate knowledge of Christ’s birth or death among people in the wider Greco-Roman world. The focus of Roessli’s paper is a tradition in which the Sibyl is asked by the emperor Augustus who will succeed him and he is told of a “Hebrew child, God ruling over the blessed.” John Malalas (491–578) may be the earliest witness to this tradition; his Chronography (X.5) features the same exchange but adds that Augustus set up an altar (the Ara coeli) in the bedchamber of his palace on the Capitoline on which is written “This is the altar of the first-born God.” Later a basilica was built on the site, known today as the Basilica di Santa Maria in Ara coeli al Campidoglio.

Other writers mention the oracle and the location of the altar, but most significant is a development made prior to the time of …

Reflections on the Material of Christian Apocrypha Conference: Part I

December 22, 2018 by Tony

The “Material of Christian Apocrypha” conference took place at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville November 30 and December 1, 2018 (see the conference web site HERE). The event also doubled as the first meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL). It was organized by Janet Spittler (at the time Vice-President of NASSCAL) and her UVA colleague Fotini Kondyli. I have been asked by the editors of the journal Apocrypha to write a report on the conference. This blog post, and another to follow, are draft work towards completing that report but the posts will have a bit of a personal focus, highlighting what I found to be of interest to my own research and teaching interests. Many of the participants are active Twitter users, tweeting before, during, and after the event. Janet helpfully combined all of their efforts at this Wakelet compilation.

To start, I have to compliment Janet and Fotini on organizing a truly excellent and rewarding conference. I learned something from every paper. For past conferences (for SBL or the York Symposia), we have often considered visual topics—such as art, illuminations, and iconography—but have not been successful in attracting enough participants who work in the area. But the theme of this gathering was expansive enough to make it work and allowed for a broad range of approaches and conversation between scholars not only of Christian apocrypha, but also Medievalists, Byzantinists, scholars who work on Syriac and Coptic literature, and …

2018 SBL Diary: Day Three

December 21, 2018 by Tony

A busy day 3 began with a NASSCAL executive breakfast in our swanky hotel lounge (we had to smuggle a few of the exec. in; this is what happens when you give the hoi polloi something nice—we just take advantage). The NASSCAL board was about to change over after the Material of Christian Apocrypha conference in Charlottesville, so I gave my final update as President on the status of our various projects—including e-Clavis (with over 80 entries now completed) and the Early Christian Apocrypha series (the first two books are now in the hands of their new publisher: Wipf & Stock)—and we discussed possibilities for a second NASSCAL conference in Austin in 2020.

The first panel on my schedule for the day was the joint session of the Christian Apocrypha and Religious Competition in Late Antiquity sections. Jacob A. Lollar (Florida State University) started things off with “What Has Ephesus to Do with Edessa? The Syriac History of John, the Cult of the Dea Syria, and Religious Competition in Fourth-Century Syria.” The History of John has received little interest in scholarship, in part because of its (likely) language of composition (there still aren’t enough of us able to work in Syriac) and because it is considered secondary to the earlier Acts of John in Greek. Nevertheless, the text has some interesting qualities, not least is the fact that its story is told in Ephesus (and the author seems to know the city well) yet, Lollar believes, it was composed in …

2018 SBL Diary: Day Two

November 28, 2018 by Tony

The second day of the annual meeting was significantly more relaxed. There were no Christian Apocrypha Section sessions scheduled, so I was “free” to go to anything that interested me. But before the sessions began, I attended the Journal of Biblical Literature editorial board breakfast meeting. I joined the board last year to review apocrypha-related submissions. It’s a surprisingly large group but run like clockwork by General Editor Adele Reinhartz, though she is stepping down now after many years in the role to be replaced by Mark Brett. I sat down next to Mark Goodacre (Duke University) and we talked about what we were presenting on. I began explaining my paper from day 1 by saying, “It’s an eighteenth-century manuscript containing apocryphal texts that no-one really knows anything about.” When I was finished, Mark said, “I thought you having me on for a second there.” I didn’t realize how much my description sounded like the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark, a text that both Mark and I are interested in but disagree completely about its authenticity (I do not believe the theory that it is a forgery, created by its discoverer, Morton Smith; Mark refuses to see reason).

After breakfast, I hustled over to the Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship session, which focused on the Museum of the Bible. I have been following the steady stream of criticism about the museum that began even before it opened, and enjoyed Candida Moss’s and Joel Baden’s investigation of it in …

2018 SBL Diary: Day One

November 26, 2018 by Tony

Another year, another SBL Annual Meeting. And now it’s time to compile my thoughts about the experience for my traditional roundup of the event—the sessions I attended and/or participated in, meetings I had with scholars and publishers, books I purchased, and receptions I crashed. I do this for those interested in Christian apocrypha who could not attend the meeting and also in lieu of tweets because Wi-fi access tends to be somewhat spotty (and generally a pain to do while trying to listen to papers).

Travel is always part of the experience. For me, the process of getting to Denver began on Friday at 8am with the drive to Pearson airport in Toronto for a noon flight. The previous day had made travel on the roads very difficult. I went to a concert (The Alarm, a kinda Welsh version of U2) in the city and the drive took four hours (it should have been 1.5). I mention the concert also because it damaged my hearing, so I really had to struggle to hear anything for the first few days of the conference. I need not have worried about getting to the airport on time; all was clear Friday morning, so I had a smooth, uneventful drive. Not everyone was so lucky; friends of mine from Sudbury and London had an extra day of travel due to delays in connecting flights. The only wrinkle for me was a 2.5 hour stopover in Detroit. Every time I book flights I pick the …

Christian Apocrypha at SBL 2018

October 31, 2018 by Tony

The 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature is fast approaching (Nov. 17–20). To help prepare for the event, I have compiled all of the presentations focusing on Christian Apocrypha. See you in Denver.

Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S17-116 Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: New and Neglected Christian Apocryphal Texts
Tobias Nicklas, Universität Regensburg, Presiding
Chance Bonar, Harvard University: “An Introduction to 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John”
Florentina Badalanova Geller, Freie Universität Berlin: “Apocryphal Gospels and the Folk Bible”
Tony Burke, York University: “Opera Evangelica: The Discovery of a Lost Collection of Christian Apocrypha”
Bradley Rice, McGill University: “The Suspension of Time in the Book of the Nativity of the Savior”
James E. Walters, Rochester College: “The (Syriac) Exhortation of Peter: A New Addition to the Petrine Apocryphal Tradition”
Business Meeting

S17-309 Christian Apocrypha (4:00 PM to 6:30 PM)
Theme: Connecting Gospels
Sandra Huebenthal, University of Passau, Presiding
Tobias Nicklas, Universität Regensburg: “Water into Beer! Transformations of Biblical Miracles in Late Antique and Early Medieval Traditions”
Janet Spittler, University of Virginia: “The Minor Acts of Thomas and John 20:24–29”
Francis Watson, University of Durham: “‘Inasmuch as Many Have Attempted…’: The Apocryphon of James and the Problem of Gospel Plurality”
J.R.C. (Rob) Cousland, University of British Columbia: “Rereading the Christology of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The Rewriting of Luke 2:41-52 in Paidika 17”
Julia Snyder, Universität Regensburg, Respondent

S19-138 Joint Session: Religious Competition in Late Antiquity; Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: Religious …

Editing More Christian Apocrypha, Part 3: It Takes a Village

February 28, 2019 by Tony

Years ago, way back in 2006, a group of North American Christian apocrypha scholars gathered in Ottawa to discuss, among other things, the creation of a collaborative project that would show the world that we (i.e., North Americans) had contributions to make to the field. We wanted to create something on the scale of the great European apocrypha collections, such as the two-volume Écrits apocryphes chrétiens or the highly-regarded Hennecke-Schneemelcher (now Markschies-Schröter) Neutestamentliche Apocryphen volumes. Nothing concrete came out of that discussion but it was the germ for the MNTA project that Brent Landau and I took on several years later, and the same desire to create opportunities for collaboration among North American scholars was behind the creation of the York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium Series (running from 2011 to 2015) and the creation of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL). It struck me recently, as I finished up (most of the) work on MNTA 2, how far we have come in realizing that ambition of bringing scholars together, not only for formal, co-authored projects but also for informal, behind-the scenes consultation to make each other’s work better, to mentor students and young scholars, and to advance the study of these fascinating texts.

One of the difficulties of working with apocryphal texts is that the texts come in numerous forms, in multiple languages. We are all trained in at least one ancient language (typically Greek), many of us two (add Latin, Coptic, or Syriac), …

Editing More Christian Apocrypha, Part 2: Advice for Young Scholars

October 13, 2018 by Tony

This past Spring I sat on a panel for students at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies annual meeting entitled “Review, Respond, Reflect.” I was asked to discuss my experiences editing the work of other scholars. I included some tales (many of which were cautionary) from my experience editing the two MNTA volumes, as well as from my other editing projects: the three York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium collections, and Rediscovering the Apocryphal Continent (co-edited with Pierluigi Piovanelli).I thought it might be useful to include the advice I gave to the students and young scholars in this short series of posts on editing MNTA vol. 2. My comments were somewhat candid, so I won’t repeat them all here (and even so I’m a little worried that what I do say could offend some).

1. To edit or not to edit

When my colleagues ask me what I’m working on and I tell them about editing projects, they respond with pity and some statement along the lines of “better you than me.” Edited volumes are universally (throughout the scholarly world, not just in Religious Studies and related disciplines) considered unpleasant and extremely frustrating experiences that come with little reward, because most universities don’t count assign them much weight in their calculations for tenure and promotion. I contend, however, that they do have value.

For grad students or junior scholars the first exposure to editing likely would come from working with an advisor or colleague on indexing a volume. This is considered …

Editing More New Testament Apocrypha, Part 1: Choosing the Texts

December 26, 2018 by Tony

Yesterday I sent off the last chapter of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures vol. 2 (=MNTA 2) to its authors for revisions. The project is not over by a longshot, but it is the end of a major stage in the process of getting this volume, now over three years in the making, to publication. Of the 36 texts included in the volume, 29 are complete, four are in the authors’ hands waiting for final revisions, and the last three are contributions by the editors (Brent Landau and I)—these always get delayed until the very end. This seems to me a good time to pause and look back at how the project came together.

The planning for this volume began when we submitted the manuscript of vol. 1 to the publisher back in January 2015 (yes, that long ago). The introduction included a provisional list of texts to be included in vol. 2. As you can see below, that list was provisional indeed.

Why so many changes? Well, some are not that dramatic at all and are merely changes in titles. But some texts are absent from the final contents because these projects were just too big and our contributors simply realized at some point that they could not finish it in time for our deadline. This was certainly the case for the Infancy of the Savior and the Vision of Theophilus (both of which I promised to contribute), and the other major work was the Pseudo-Clementines, …

Johannine Apocalyptica in Church Slavonic

September 27, 2018 by Tony

For the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures I decided to include as much information as possible on what we call “versions”—a term designating translations of the texts into other languages. Such attention is a given if the text is not available in its original language, but far too often in Christian apocrypha scholarship there is a neglect of those languages outside of Greek and Latin, and perhaps Coptic and Syriac, that few of us can claim some proficiency. One of these neglected language groups is Church Slavonic (CS). There are plenty of experts in Slavistics, and some work on Jewish and Christian apocrypha, but there seems to be little interaction between the two groups of scholars. Unfortunately, I have no training in the language nor its history but I am working on some texts for MNTA that are plentiful in CS manuscripts. So this past weekend I went to work with my frequent research partner Slavomír Céplö (whose language knowledge is enviable) to fill in the details about the CS tradition of four apocryphal Johannine apocalypses. The work was fruitful but frequently frustrating.

First, a little background on the texts. I described many of them in a previous post on erotapokriseis (question-and-answer) literature, but I will give some brief details here also. 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, the most well-known of the texts, is a sequel of sorts to the canonical Revelation. Jesus appears to John on Mount Tabor and John asks him a …

The Stoning of the Devil (Ramy al-Jamarat) in Coptic Christian Apocrypha

August 17, 2018 by Tony

Two Coptic Christian texts to be included in the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (edited by me and Brent Landau) allude, perhaps, to the Ramy al-Jamarat, a ritual performed by Muslims during the Hajj pilgrimage that involves throwing stones at the devil. If indeed the writers of these Christian apocrypha are aware of the ritual, then these texts illustrate Muslim-Christian interaction in Egypt and perhaps open up questions about pre-Islamic origins of the ritual.

The longest version of the account appears in a fragmentary text sometimes referred to as the Homily on the Life of Jesus and His Love for the Apostles. Some scholars believe the lost beginning includes an attribution to Evodius, the successor of Peter as bishop of Antioch, but in Coptic Christianity he is considered the second bishop of Rome. The text has been reconstructed on the basis of three manuscripts, all dated to the tenth century and deriving from the White Monastery. Today the pages of these manuscripts are dispersed among various European collections. Timothy Pettipiece has prepared a translation for MNTA 2, the first complete translation of the text in English. The text retells certain stories from the Gospels—the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the raising of Lazarus, and Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi—but with significant expansions. Between these stories are weaved three new episodes: an effort to make Jesus king of Judea (inspired by John 6:15), the apostles’ encounter with the devil and his demons disguised as fishermen, …

A full-text edition of Tischendorf’s Evangelia Apocrypha

August 6, 2018 by Tony

Tischendorf’s Evangelia Apocrypha is a text that virtually everyone who works in Christian Apocrypha has dealt with at one point or another. It isn’t overly difficult to find in print, most decent academic libraries will have a copy, and several different PDF editions are even available on archive.org. The PDF editions, however, are basically pictures of pages.

What if there was a high-quality full-text edition of Tischendorf’s Evangelia Apocrypha available? Not just available, but openly available for scholars to use in whatever research or digital humanities projects they were involved in? And not just the Latin and Greek text, but the apparatuses too?

We’re closer to that than we have ever been. If you’ve worked with Evangelia Apocrypha, you know that the Greek text uses a distinctive font. This font makes optical character recognition (OCR) difficult because it isn’t like other Greek fonts. However, Bruce Robertson of Mount Allison University in New Brunswick has been working on the problem of Greek OCR (see his project Heml, Historic Event Markup and Linking) and wanted to try and OCR this volume. Rick Brannan provided him some training data based on Rick’s corrected transcription of Tischendorf’s Acts of Pilate A, and Bruce loaded it up in his environment.

The result is now available in Bruce’s Greek OCR Challenge. The interface places the page scan on the left and the OCR’d text on the right. It allows for relatively pain free correction of the OCR’d material. You can see (and …

On Byzantine Apocrypha and Erotapokriseis Literature

February 28, 2019 by Tony

As I work through the contributions to the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, I am struck by how many of them are related to a genre of literature that has not been discussed much in connection with apocryphal texts. This genre is erotapokriseis (question-and-answer) texts. For an introduction to this literature, see Péter Tóth, “New Wine in Old Wineskin: Byzantine Reuses of the Apocryphal Revelation Dialogue,” in Dialogues and Debates from Late Antiquity to Late Byzantium (ed. Averil Cameron and Niels Gaul; New York: Routledge, 2017), 77–93 (available on academia.edu) and Yannis Papadoyannakis, “Instruction by Question and Answer: The Case of Late Antique and Byzantine Erotapokriseis,” in Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson; London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 91–105 (also online HERE).

The genre can be defined widely enough to include any dialogue literature, going as far back as Pseudo-Aristotle’s Problemata (compiled over a period stretching from 300 BCE to 600 CE) and, in their early form, are structured as an exchange between a master and his disciples. This should be familiar to readers of such apocryphal texts as the Dialogue of the Savior and the Letter of Peter to Philip, in which a (typically) post-Easter Jesus responds to a series of questions from his disciples. Kurt Rudolph called these texts “apocryphal revelation dialogues,” Helmut Koester, more provocatively, “dialogue-gospels.” The prevalence of the form among the so-called “gnostic” texts of the Nag Hammadi Library led to …