Apocryphicity

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 …

CFP: Visualizing Women in the Apocrypha

July 16, 2018 by Tony

Call for Papers for Special Session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS 2019)

May 9 to 12, 2019

Western Michigan University

The proposed session is devoted to the construction and visualization of women as reflected in apocryphal sources with the aim of bringing into attention this generally neglected topic/sources which seem to be underrepresented. The existent literature, in the general field of apocrypha, indicates that there is space for debate on issues connected to gender in these sources.

Research in this field concentrates mostly on the textual tradition and transmission of apocryphal texts, yet aspects concerning the construction and function of women and gender still need to be addressed. Hence, we seek to examine issues related to the status, function, and identity of women who may be models and/or background figures in fields pertaining, but not limited to: theology, religious studies, textual studies, manuscript studies, art history in a transdisciplinary perspective.

Original work and research is welcomed starting from the Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages, both in the East and West. The sessions refer to the concept of ‘apocrypha/on’ as movable texts whose composition does not end in the fourth – fifth centuries in the context of the establishment and closing of the canon. This permits to address issues concerning the evolution, transmission, adoptation, and adaptation of sources.

This session also aims to bring the intellectual outcome of these sessions into the attention of the general public by publishing the proceedings of the debates in the …

The Gnostic Pinocchio

July 8, 2018 by Tony

One of my tasks this summer was to complete a paper begun many years ago (I first presented it at the SBL Annual Meeting in 2003!). As I often do, I committed myself to finish the paper by agreeing to contribute it to a special volume of the journal Religious Studies and Theology in honor of my doktorvater Michel Desjardins, who recently retired. The origins of the paper go back to Michel’s 1995 Gnosticism class at Wilfrid Laurier University. He casually asked the class about analogues to the gnostic cosmogonies that would help readers understand and appreciate them. Eager to impress, I came up with the Pinocchio analogy and presented it to the class at our next meeting. I have used the parallels in my own Gnosticism classes ever since. Gnostic parallels to films are somewhat de rigueur these days, with lots of examples appearing in the past few decades (e.g., The Matrix, The Truman Show), but back in 2003 this one was somewhat novel and I have found that it works really well in my classes—it’s the one thing the students remember! What follows is a shortened version of the submitted paper (notes and citations have been removed also for ease of reading).

Disney famously said, “We just make the pictures, and let the professors tell us what they mean.” He was adamant about keeping religion out of his films. True to Disney’s word, except for occasional christening and wedding ceremonies, there are few explicit religious elements …

2018 New Testament Apocrypha Course: Week 10

May 17, 2018 by Tony

My New Testament Apocrypha course finished up last week with a class focusing on two aims: a look at anti-gospels (i.e., texts written by non-Christians for non-Christians to either lampoon or criticize Christianity, or to recast Jesus for a new religious system) and modern apocrypha. We also participated in an online chat session discussing Philip Jenkins’ book The Many Faces of Christ, which the students had to read for their book review assignment. As mentioned in previous posts about the course, York University is currently embroiled in a labour dispute, so the course has been continuing as a combination of online video lectures (the latest can be seen HERE) and chat sessions.

I began the lecture on anti-gospels with a short discussion of Christian-Jewish conflict in the first few centuries. I covered Mark’s apocalyptic discourse warning of being “handed over to councils and beaten in the synagogues” (13:9-13), John’s parents of the blind man who worried about being cast out of the synagogue for confessing Jesus as the Christ (9:22-23), arrests and executions of apostles in Acts, Paul’s issues with Judaizers, and several sections of Matthew (his genealogy which seems to anticipate criticism of Jesus’ conception, the slander of the disciples stealing the body of Jesus [28:11-15], and the declaration “Let his blood be on us and on our children!” [27:25]). These led into a discussion of Celsus’ The True Word and of possible references to Jesus in the Talmud.

Finally I arrived at the Toledoth Yeshu (the …

2018 New Testament Apocrypha Course: Week 9

May 7, 2018 by Tony

This week marked our final look at ancient Christian-authored apocrypha; our final class, in two weeks, focuses on anti-Christian apocrypha (the Toledot Yeshu and the Gospel of Barnabas) and, newly added this year, modern apocrypha. But this week we looked at tales of Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist, and Jesus’ wife Mary Magdalene (just joking).

Again, as a result of York’s labour disruption, I created a video lecture for this week’s class (which you can view HERE, if you wish). I began with a discussion of references to the family of Jesus in patristic literature: the names of Jesus’ sisters according to Epiphanius, traditions about the death of James, and Hegesippus (via Eusebius) on the grandsons of Jude and Jesus’ cousin Symeon, who took over the office of bishop of Jerusalem after the death of James.

I turned next to the Marian apocrypha, beginning with a discussion of Stephen Shoemaker’s paper, “Rethinking the ‘Gnostic Mary’: Mary of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala in Early Christian Tradition” (JECS 9.4 [2001]: 555-95), in which he argues that there is much assimilation and confusion of the various Marys in apocryphal Christian traditions. Shoemaker focuses on two of these Marys, but I discussed also Mary of Bethany and the “other Mary” (=Mary, mother of James?) at the tomb, all of which are combined in various ways in the texts. This is demonstrated in the Life of Mary Magdalene, a late-antique text from an unpublished Greek manuscript and in a Latin

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2018 New Testament Apocrypha Course: Week 8

April 27, 2018 by Tony

Classes at York University are mostly suspended as a result of a rather lengthy strike of our sessional, contract, and graduate student instructors. In order for my students to finish up the course, I resumed classes this past week in an online form, with weekly video lectures and chat room discussions. It is not an ideal way to conduct my courses, but it allows me to honor the strikers by not crossing the picket lines, and honor the students by helping them complete their courses. If you are interested in watching the video lecture, you can see it on Youtube (it’s nothing fancy, but gets the job done).

This week we covered the apocryphal acts, a corpus of material that typically does not excite students. Jesus appears very little in the texts and, let’s face it, the apocryphal acts are rather long and tedious. That said, our sourcebook for the course (Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures) reduces the texts well to their more interesting components. And hey, who can resist tales of necrophilia and severed genitals?

I started by providing a little context to the texts with a discussion of the canonical Acts, noting, among other things, the text’s depiction of Simon Magus and its abrupt ending with Paul in Rome. This led to a brief look at two modern apocrypha: the 29th Chapter of Acts and the Long-lost Second Book of Acts. Both continue Paul’s missionary work, either in Britain or in Palestine, and give the authors’ opportunity to …