Apocryphicity

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 …

Our second week looking at resurrection texts focused on apocalypses. We began with a short reading from the beginning of the Apocalypse of Paul with its claim to have been found, along with a dusty pair of shoes, in a chest in the home of Paul in Tarsus. We have seen such claims before in the Coptic Pseudo-apostolic memoirs. It’s a curious feature: for all orthodox Christianity’s bluster about apocryphal texts being fakes and forgeries, many orthodox writers had little hesitation in creating some of their own apocryphal texts to serve their own purposes. The look at this introduction served as a lead-in to the conventions of apocalyptic literature, including, as in Apoc. Paul, the motif of hiding a book away and rediscovering it centuries later when all of its prophecies appear to have come to pass.

After a brief discussion of the canonical Book of Revelation, we spent a short time looking at several apocryphal apocalypses of John. The first of these, usually called 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, continues the story in Revelation with John asking additional questions of Jesus, this time about the form that the dead will take when they rise from the grave: as thirty-year-olds and bodiless, without any distinguishing features (shape, size, colour). Another text, the Questions of James to John,  features James asking John questions about redemption. Simon Peter and Mary Magdalene are presented as examples of people who had committed grave sins yet they repented and achieved salvation. Mary, …

My course on the New Testament Apocrypha focused this week on part one of a two-part discussion of “Ministry Gospels”—i.e., texts focusing on Jesus’ adult life, between the infancy gospels and the passion narratives. For this first part we looked at agrapha and fragmentary texts, the latter group including Jewish-Christian gospels, several papyri from Oxyrhynchus, and the Secret Gospel of Mark. Our next class is dedicated to complete Ministry Gospels, namely the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip, and two fragmentary texts we ran out of time to cover: the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of the Savior.

We began with agrapha, the “unwritten” sayings of Jesus, though clearly they are written or we wouldn’t have them to study. More accurately, the term denotes sayings of Jesus that are not in the New Testament Gospels, appearing as variants in Gospel manuscripts, Acts, fragmentary apocryphal texts, works of the Apostolic Fathers, in Islamic texts (go HERE for a selection of some of these), and such unlikely locations as a mosque in India, which bears the inscription “Jesus, on whom be peace, said: ‘The world is a bridge. Go over it—do not settle on it!’” I discussed the methodology scholars of the agrapha use to reduce the great number of agrapha (270 by one count) to a manageable amount of “authentic” Jesus material (though I cautioned that this is not necessarily the goal of the study of this material; there are reasons enough to study any …

This week’s class focused on Infancy Gospels, with particular emphasis on the Infancy Gospel of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the earliest examples of this literature. We began, however, with a discussion of the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. It helps considerably to have the students spend some time discussing canonical texts, in part so they can see what the noncanonical texts do with the earlier traditions and also because some students come into the course without any knowledge of Christian texts, biblical or otherwise. So we read Matthew 1-2 together and noted its similarities and differences with Luke 1-2. The differences are particularly significant as infancy gospels like Infancy James must confront these differences in the process of harmonizing the two accounts. I discussed also the reference to Jesus’ brothers and sisters (and lack of mention of Joseph) in Mark 6:3 and the anti-Christian polemic in Celsus’s True Doctrine, the Talmud, and the Toledot Yeshu (all in anticipation of our examination of Infancy James).

For Infancy James we looked first at a segment from the documentary Banned From the Bible (History Channel, 2003), which helped students recall the contents of the text and opened up conversation on some of the interpretations and implications of the text. I emphasized in our discussion that there are several features of the text that have become integral to Christian teaching about Mary, including the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the Doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity, the names …

Last week I began the latest incarnation of my course “The New Testament Apocrypha” (syllabus posted on my parent site HERE). As in previous years, I am posting weekly reflections on each week’s lecture, in part to encourage pedagogical discussion on how to teach this material (and I won’t always do it well), and to provide a forum for my students to offer their thoughts on the course (and thereby gain additional participation marks).

The first class mostly comprised housekeeping: going over the syllabus, providing some background on the New Testament for the benefit of students who have never taken a course in Christianity, and running over some basic concepts (“apocrypha,” “canon,” etc.). The second class, which took place last night, had more substance, so I start this reflections series at week two.

This second class covered two topics: canon formation and the categories of orthodoxy and heresy. The readings entailed an assortment of canon lists from our primary text collection (Bart Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures) a few chapters from our course textbook (my Secret Scriptures Revealed), and a chapter from Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.

The class began with reading the Muratorian Fragment as a group. I like to start each class with a discussion of one of the assigned texts; it gets people talking early in the night rather than at the end, when they are starting to get tired (this is a three-hour evening class after all). We went through this …