Apocryphicity

Guest Post: David Brakke “The abundant, never-ending Christian apocrypha, which no list can contain”

November 28, 2017 by Tony

David Brakke appeared on the 2017 SBL review panel for New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. I really enjoyed his paper and asked him to allow me to publish it here.

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I have decided, after investigating everything carefully from the first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

So the author of the Gospel of Luke explained his decision to write a story that many had already written. His account would be carefully investigated and orderly and so give the truth.

1900 years later José Saramago placed these words as the epitaph to his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and so signaled his own audacity and anxiety about telling a story that had been told countless times before. Saramago’s specific challenge of rewriting what has already been written about Jesus becomes in the novel emblematic both of any human being’s inability to rewrite the story that has been written for him or her and also of the Western novelist’s predicament at the end of modernity: How can one write when so many words have gone before, or tell a new story when all the great stories have been …

2017 SBL Diary: Day Two

November 28, 2017 by Tony

My second day at the 2017 SBL began with my first Journal of Biblical Literature Editorial Board meeting. I was surprised to see so many people around the table (and so many people that I know). The large number of submissions to the journal means that a large number of manuscript referees are needed, especially if they want to process them in a reasonable amount of time. Apparently there are two Christian Apocrypha (or “other”) editors: me and Pierluigi Piovanelli. I’ve joked that I took this position because it’s the only way I’ll get my name in JBL; John Marshall (University of Toronto) pointed out that it will be in every issue for the next few years!

After the meeting, I went to my first session of the day: Corpus Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti’s presentation of papers from the new Richard Pervo festschrift Delightful Acts. The session included a paper by NASSCAL Vice-President Janet Spittler (University of Virginia) entitled “Joking and Play in the Acts of John.” She opened with statement by John Chrysostom (Hom. Heb. xv) that Jesus never laughed. That may be true for the Jesus of the New Testament but he laughs plenty in apocryphal texts. Spittler looked at three case studies of Christian humor from the Acts of John: when John jokes with Lycomedes about John’s portrait (26–29), the obedient bed bugs (called by the writer “a certain comic act,” 60–61), and the episode when John sees Jesus in many forms, including …

2017 SBL Diary: Day One

November 23, 2017 by Tony

Every year after the SBL Annual Meeting I take some time to compile a summary of my activities—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. Since I write at a snail’s pace, this summary will be split into three separate posts that will appear over the next few days.

I flew into town Friday around 2:30 pm—far earlier than normal—and thought I could spend the rest of the afternoon leisurely wandering around the book display. That way I wouldn’t have to squeeze the tour in between papers or skip a session. Unfortunately, the display was not yet open, so I had to find something else to do (and who am I kidding? it’s not like I would only go once anyway). So I went back to my room to iron my balled-up suit and do a little work before meeting up with Brent Landau. Over dinner we discussed, among other things, the progress on the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, which has been a bit sluggish due to some contributors having to withdraw because of other commitments or changes in their careers. The first volume contains a provisional list of texts to be included in vol. 2, and that list is looking less …

Christian Apocrypha Books to Look for at SBL 2017

November 13, 2017 by Tony

One of the highlights of the SBL Annual Meeting is the publishers exhibition. As you make your way from one booth to another, keep an eye out for these new books.

Baylor

Dirk Rohmann. Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity: Studies in Text Transmission.

Bloomsbury

Alessandro Falcetta. A Biography of James Rendel Harris 1852-1941. The Daily Discovers of a Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter.

Lee Martin McDonald. The Formation of the Biblical Canon. 2 vols.

Brill

Robert W. Thomson. Ners?s of Lambron: Commentary on the Dormition of Saint John. Armenian Text and Annotated Translation. ARTS 1.

De Gruyter

Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug, eds. Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology. TUGAL 175.

Gorgias Press

János M. Bak. Introduction to Working with Manuscripts for Medievalists.

Tony Burke. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas in the Syriac Tradition: A Critical Edition and English Translation. Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 48.

Amir Harrack, ed. and trans. The Chronicle of Zuqnin: Parts I and II. From the Creation to the Year 506/7 AD.

Mohr Siebeck

Jan N. Bremmer. Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity. Collected Essays I. WUNT 379.

David Creech. The Use of Scripture in the Apocryphon of John. A Diachronic Analysis of the Variant Versions. WUNT II/447.

Patricia A. Duncan. Novel Hermeneutics in the Greek Pseudo-Clementine Romance. WUNT.

Jörg Frey et al., eds. Between Canonical and Apocryphal Texts: Processes of Reception, Rewriting, and Interpretation in Early Judaism and Early Christianity…

Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage, Part 3

November 9, 2017 by Tony

In the first post in this series I discussed the visits of pilgrims to locations mentioned only in apocryphal texts, in the second I provided an overview of the texts that expand on the Flight to Egypt to create a fictional pilgrimage map for those who want to follow in the Holy Family’s footsteps, now I turn to some aspects of the intersection of apocrypha pilgrimage that remain largely unexplored by scholars.

The first of these is the connection between the production of apocryphal texts and the pilgrimage locations associated with them. Egeria mentions reading copies of the works of Thomas at the apostle’s tomb in Edessa (Itin. Eger. 19.2) and while in the city she received a copy of the Abgar Correspondence (Itin. Eger. 19.19). When visiting the martyrium of Thecla in Isaurian Seleucia, Egeria read tales of the saint (Itin. Eger. 23.5), likely from the Life and Miracles of Thecla—a retelling of Thecla’s story from the Acts of Paul along with an account of the end of her life in Seleucia followed by a series of posthumous miracles performed on behalf of pilgrims at the site. The account of Thecla’s final days in Seleucia includes a trip to and from Daphne, which functioned as an itinerary for fifth-century pilgrims on their way to Thecla’s sanctuary.

Several late antique apocryphal acts also establish a connection between characters in the narratives and particular shrines. The Acts of Barnabas, for example, documents the travels of Barnabas …

Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage, Part 2

November 7, 2017 by Tony

The earliest Christian pilgrimage itineraries, discussed in the part 1 of this series post, say little about sites in Egypt, despite the fact that the canonical Gospel of Matthew (2:13–15, 19–21) narrates a visit to Egypt by the Holy Family early in Jesus’ life. Matthew does not say what happened to the Holy Family in Egypt nor how long they resided there, but other Christian writers filled the gap with tales of the family visiting various locations in Egypt, each one a site of miraculous proofs of Jesus’ divinity and superiority over native deities. As time went on, these flight narratives became more and more elaborate, with the most detailed accounts serving as pilgrimage maps for those who want to follow Jesus’ footsteps and visit the sites where Jesus performed his wonders, either in person or vicariously through reading the texts.

The apocryphal flight narratives range in origin from East to West and from roughly the fifth to eighth centuries, with further expansion in the manuscript tradition and in other literature inspired by these tales for centuries thereafter. The earliest developed narrative of the flight story is likely the tales collected in the Gospel of the Infancy, extant today in Syriac and Arabic (for more information visit the e-Clavis pages for the Arabic Infancy Gospel and the East Syriac History of the Virgin). The flight narrative comprises the middle portion of this text (corresponding to Arab. Gos. Inf. 10–24). The section begins with a retelling of Matthew 2:13–15 …

Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage, Part 1

October 31, 2017 by Tony

I have been asked to contribute an essay to the T&T Clark Handbook to Children and Childhood in the Biblical World, edited by Sharon Betsworth and Julie Faith Parker. Initially the editors asked me to write something on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, given my previous work, but I feel that I have said everything I have to say (at least for the time being) on that text and its relationship to real or imagined children in antiquity. Instead I proposed a piece on “Travelling with Children: Flight Stories and Pilgrimage Routes in the Apocryphal Infancy Gospels.” I finished up the paper last week and thought I would share a portion of it here.

Scholars of Christian apocrypha have only begun to examine the intersection of pilgrimage and apocrypha. Tobias Nicklas’s recent essay (that fortuitously arrived just as I was writing this paper) “Beyond ‘Canon’: Christian Apocrypha and Pilgrimage” (pages 23–38 in The Other Side: Apocryphal Perspectives on Ancient Christian “Orthodoxies,” ed. Tobias Nicklas et al. [NTOA 117; Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2017) is the first wideranging look at the apocryphal traditions that appear in the early pilgrimage itineraries. These itineraries, composed between the fourth and the seventh centuries, all focus on Palestine, though a few of the pilgrims travel further afield to Sinai and Egypt. References in them to locations from noncanonical texts and traditions include the Piacenza Pilgrim’s mention of a synagogue in Nazareth where he saw “the book in which the Lord wrote his ABC” (an …

Christian Apocrypha at SBL 2017

November 13, 2017 by Tony

The program for the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature is now available. Here, as usual, is my rundown of presentations focusing on Christian Apocrypha. Among the highlights this year are the book review panel for New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, and the mysterious new text being announced by Brent Landau and Geoffrey Smith in the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism session. See you in Boston.

Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S18-118 Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: Apocryphal Letters, Legends, and Sayings
Brent Landau, University of Texas at Austin, Presiding
Kimberly Bauser, Boston College: “Put on Your James Face: Pseudonymous Prosopopoeia and Epistolary Fiction in the Apocryphon of James”
Phillip Fackler, University of Pennsylvania: “Survival of the Most Banal: Paul’s Letter to the Laodiceans and the Correspondence with Seneca”
David P. Griffin, University of Virginia: “Psalm-Quotations in the Epistle of the Apostles and the state of Christian Psalmody in the Second Century”
Adam Carter McCollum, Notre Dame: “East of the Magi: An Old Uyghur (Turkic) Text on their Visit to the Young Jesus”
Jeremiah Bailey, Baylor University: “Male Angels, Resurrection Marriage, and Manly Mary: A Possible Connection Between GTh114 and the Synoptics”
Rick Brannan, Faithlife: “Sounding Biblical: The Use of Stock Phrases in Christian Apocrypha”

S19-330 Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism; Christian Apocrypha (Joint Session; 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM)
Theme: Coptic Apocrypha at Nag Hammadi and Beyond
Adeline Harrington, University of Texas at Austin, Presiding
Sarah Parkhouse, University of Durham: “Why …

Addenda to the Syriac Tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas: A Neglected Edition of the Life of Mary and a Forgotten Palimpsest

November 27, 2018 by Tony

In the short time between when I submitted the manuscript of my new book, The Syriac Tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, to its publisher and when it was printed, two additional sources for the text came to my attention. This was to be expected, particularly for the rather robust Sw recension, in which Inf. Gos. Thom. appears as the fourth of six books in a sprawling Life of Mary collection. It was a big surprise, however, to discover a fifth/sixth-century manuscript belonging to the Sa recension (the best witness to the early form of the text), and that this manuscript had been mentioned in scholarship over a century ago! I promised in the preface to the book that I would publish updates (chiefly via the e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha entries for the three recensions), but I didn’t think I would be doing it so soon!

I will cover the Sw manuscript first. It is an uncatalogued and unnumbered manuscript belonging to the Monastery of St. Ephrem in Holland. It was published in a devotional edition prepared by Julius Y. Çiçek (Die heilige Meryem/Tad’itho d’yoldath aloho Maryam. Holland: Bar Hebraeus Verlag, 2001) that came to my attention via Grigory Kessel. These kind of editions are fairly common in places like Cairo and the monasteries of Greece and essentially entail a transcription of a single manuscript, sometimes with translation. Çiçek’s edition is significant not only for its use of a previously unknown manuscript but also because it is …

2017 International SBL Christian Apocrypha Sessions Report

November 13, 2017 by Tony

This year’s International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature took place August 7-11 at Humboldt University in Berlin, an auspicious location since Berlin is the hub of Christian Apocrypha Studies in German, and Humboldt in particular is where Christoph Markschies, co-editor of the “new Hennecke,” teaches. I was able to attend the first three of four Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha sessions and will provide here some comments on the papers and discussions; Bradley Rice graciously agreed to pass along some comments on the fourth.

The first session began with the paper I previewed on Apocryphicity co-written with Slavomír Céplö (Univerzita Karlova v Praze) entitled “‘Arabic’ Infancy Gospel No More: The Challenges of Reconstructing the Original Gospel of the Infancy.” The paper was an overview of the sources for the Gospel of the Infancy in both Syriac and Arabic and posed some questions about how to present that evidence in a new translation to be included in a future volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. One of the other presenters in the session, Mari Mamyan, was absent, leaving much time for discussion of how the growth of Digital Humanities impacts the construction of critical editions. Christoph Markschies, who was present at the session, remarked that the publisher of his multi-volume compendium Antike christliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung has stated that the current edition will be the last one they publish, because the audience has changed so much over the years—scholars interested in the material are increasingly working online and …

2017 ISBL Preview: “‘Arabic’ Infancy Gospel No More”

November 13, 2017 by Tony

I am about to depart for the 2017 International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Berlin. Slavomír Céplö and I will be presenting at the first of four Christian Apocrypha sessions; for a full listing of the Christian Apocrypha papers at this year’s ISBL see this post. The paper, entitled “‘Arabic’ Infancy Gospel No More: The Challenges of Reconstructing the Original Gospel of the Infancy,” has two aims: to present the current status of our work on the Arabic Infancy Gospel (aka Gospel of the Infancy), and to interact with the session’s theme of “Is this a ‘text’?” (questioning practices of how we title texts and if these titles capture the dynamic, fluid natures of verbal communication). Here is the abstract for the paper:

The Arabic Infancy Gospel (Arab. Gos. Inf.) was first published by Henry Sike in 1697, long before many of the apocryphal texts that now dominate the study of Christian Apocrypha. Only one other edition of the text has appeared in the intervening centuries: from a much-different and likely-superior manuscript at the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Additional manuscripts exist but no one, as yet, has evaluated these witnesses. Nor has there been much effort to integrate into the study of this text the East Syriac History of the Virgin, which shares a large portion of material with Arab. Gos. Inf. This paper presents the results of careful analysis of the manuscript sources for both texts and offers some preliminary observations about how best …

2017 CSBS Christian Apocrypha Session Report

June 3, 2017 by Tony

Last weekend (May 27-29) I attended the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto. For several years now I have organized an ad hoc Christian apocrypha panel—essentially, if enough papers are submitted, I cajole the program director to put them all together into one session. This year we had four papers, and these were paired with two papers that did not fit into other sessions.

The first presentation was by University of Toronto student Ian Phillip Brown: “Where Indeed was the Gospel of Thomas Written?: Thomas as a Product of Alexandrian Intellectual Culture.” Brown argued against the notion that Gos. Thom. was composed in Edessa, a position dominant in discussions of the text, indeed to the point that some scholars romanticize a “school of Thomas” situated in Syria. This idea has spilled over also to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, leading early scholars of the text to assume it too was composed in Syria, and even posit a Syriac origin to the text (a view that I have taken great pains to refute). But, as Brown said, the popularity of a text in a given area is not proof for origin, nor should later texts, in this case the Acts of Thomas, be used to date and situate earlier texts. Brown considers Alexandria a much more likely location for the writing of Thomas as it fits in well with the Jewish exegetical traditions of Genesis practiced there by Philo and others. …

Christian Apocrypha at the 2017 SBL International Meeting

November 13, 2017 by Tony

The 2017 Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting will take place August 7-11 in Berlin Germany. There are five Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha panels at this year’s event, with three of them focusing on Christian Apocrypha. The program book is available online but the complete list of presentations on Christian Apocrypha from all sessions is provided below.

8-2 Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (9:00 AM to 10:30 AM)
Tony Burke, York University and Slavomír Céplö, Univerzita Karlova v Praze: “Arabic” Infancy Gospel No More: The Challenges of Reconstructing the Original Gospel of the Infancy
Justin A. Mihoc, University of Durham: Mary-Temple in the Protevangelium of James
Mari Mamyan, Yerevan State University: The “Armenian Gospel of the Infancy”: The Ambiguous Fate of the Armenian Apocryphon in the Later Middle Ages

8-25 Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (11:00 AM to 12:30 PM)
Kwang Meng Low, Independent: Text of Subversion: Gospel of Judas and Carnivalesque
Eric J Beck, University of Edinburgh: Hell in Context: A New Reading of the Apocalypse of Peter
Bradley N. Rice, McGill University: The Story of Joseph of Arimathea and the Inventio of Icons in Christian Apocrypha

11-3 Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (9:00 AM to 10:30 AM)
Jonathan Henry, Princeton University: Theories and Methods for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature
Francis Borchardt, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong: The Limits of the “Book” when Studying Ancient Writings
James D. Moore, Brandeis University: Calling all Cards a Spade?: Reflections on the Story of Ahiqar and the Different Editions of the Tale that Go by the Same …

Review: Markus Bockmuehl’s Ancient Apocryphal Gospels

April 24, 2017 by Tony

Bockmuehl, Markus. Ancient Apocryphal Gospels. Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2017.

I am typically leery of studies of Christian apocrypha that come from conservative or Evangelical perspectives (I have written about such works in SBL Forum and her eon this blog). Scholars with faith commitments typically do not treat the texts objectively and sympathetically as expressions of Christian belief that are equally as valid as canonical texts; they frequently disparage the contents of apocryphal texts and spend much of their time lauding and defending the canonical texts against some perceived liberal-scholar pro-apocrypha bogeyman. But I was pleasantly surprised by Bockmuehl’s introduction. Granted, it is not empty of conservative rhetoric (the series is subtitled “Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church” after all), but the book is nevertheless a worthy and up-to-the-minute survey of the texts that draws upon and points readers toward a deep base of Christian apocrypha scholarship.

Bockmuehl confesses that he when asked to write Ancient Apocryphal Gospels back in 2008, he was not receptive to the request. “While this seemed a fine objective in its own right,” he writes, “its intellectual impetus was not mine—nor could I pretend to either passion or expertise in the subject matter” (p. ix). Bockmuehl is perhaps too modest here, as he does have experience with some of the literature, particularly the Protevangelium of James and the Gospel of Peter. Still, I wonder why the series editors did not …

2017 Réunion de l’AELAC

April 23, 2017 by Tony

The annual meeting of the Association pour l’étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne (AELAC) will take place this year June 30 to July 2 at the Centre Jean Bosco in Lyon. The program has been posted to the AELAC web site and is reproduced below.

Friday, June 30

Réunion du comité de l’AELAC avec les responsables des différents projets éditoriaux.

20:15 Présentations.

20:30 Isabel Iribarren (Université de Strasbourg), Utilisations et fonctions des écrits apocryphes dans l’œuvre de Jean Gerson.

Saturday, July 1

9:00 Anne-Catherine Baudoin (ENS Paris) – Zbigniew Izydorczyk (University of Winnipeg), The Latin Versions of the Evangelium Nicodemi.

10:45 Brent Landau (The University of Texas at Austin), A Summary of Research on the Revelation of the Magi in Anticipation of the Forthcoming CCSA Edition.

14:45 Échange d’informations et discussion sur les projets en cours dans le domaine des littératures apocryphes.

15:30 Grigory Kessel (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Sinai Palimpsest Witnesses of the New Testament Apocrypha.

16:45 Paul-Hubert Poirier (Université Laval), Le témoignage du manuscrit de Trichur sur les Actes syriaques de Thomas.

18:00 Zbigniew Izydorczyk (University of Winnipeg), Evangelium Nicodemi : A Comprehensive Database of Latin Manuscripts.

20:30 Assemblée générale de l’AELAC.

Sunday, July 2

9:00 Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh (University College Cork), Recherches sur le Saltair na Rann.

10:45 Stephen J. Shoemaker (University of Oregon), The Coptic Homily on the Theotokos attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem: An Aberrant and Apologetic ‘Life’ of the Virgin from Late Antiquity.