Apocryphicity

I have been reading Robert M. Price’s Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost Gospel Novels (Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock, 2011). Occasionally Price contextualizes some of the books he examines with discussions of theories and results of biblical scholarship. Sometimes, however, this contextualizing is drawn from what most of us would consider “fringe” scholarship—for example, dating the composition of the canonical gospels to the mid-second-century,  Barabara Theiring’s ideosyncratic views on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament  as “put together and heavily rewritten by Polycarp” (p. 169, appealing to David Trobish, The First Edition of the New Testament [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000]).

Another of Price’s contextual nuggets is the claim that the Gospel of Judas is a forgery (p. 76-77, 181). Price appeals here to an article by Richard J. Arthur, Associate Professor of New Testament at the Unification Theological Seminary (“The Gospel of Judas: Is It a Hoax?” Journal of Unification Studies 9 [2008] 35-47, available online HERE). Price summarizes the article in three points: the text betrays an awareness of modern moral issues (“it seems to be editorializing on the priestly scandals of our time, as it depicts priests sleeping with women and ‘sacrificing’ children, this last perhaps pointing to abortion or molestation”), part of the gospel copies from The Secret Book of John (“the impression one gets from reading it is a patch transferred out of context, no longer making the sense it did in the original”), and it contains a scribal error found also in one of the extant copies of John from Nag Hammadi (Price asks, “what are the chances that the scribe of Judas copied from another [i.e., non Nag-Hammadi] copy of The Secret Book of John that made the very same goof in the very same spot?”).

Price accedes that the papyrus on which Judas is written is genuinely ancient (and, I might add, it was carbon-dated by the National Geographic Society to between 220 and 340 C.E.) but the text is not (but, again, the ink appears to be an ancient recipe). He goes on to declare that the forger is one of the members of the NGS team, but does not say which one (the team includes: Rodolphe Kasser, Gregor Wurst, François Gaudard, Marvin Meyer, and Florence Darbre). Arthur does not make this charge in the original paper, but he does say, “that our hoaxer is a member of the community of modern Coptic scholars who have special regard for Codex II as the first exemplar of the Apocryphon of John from Nag Hammadi to be published. He concludes the paper on a conciliatory note, despite the severity of the accusation: "The Gospel of Judas is probably a hoax, and all the writings in it of recent authorship. These writings were prepared in our time, on some old papyrus leaves, probably from a palimpsest, without a binding. There is no cause for rebuke. One of our colleagues has created great excitement; he is a jolly fellow and has done us all a favor.”

I’m not able to interact with Arthur’s theory on a linguistic level, but I do find his literary and text-critical arguments unconvincing (that the second-century church suffered from similar problems in leadership and its critics hurled at it typical insults does not surprise me, and it is not improbable for a similar error to occur in texts drawing upon common material). I can only assume other scholars have not been convinced by Arthur’s arguments given that I have not come across any other reference to his article. Those interested in the debate over the origins of Secret Mark may find the issue of interest since, once again, we get cavalier accusations of forgery against an eminent scholar in the field.

Alin Suciu has an interesting post about reconstructing a Coptic Homily on the Virgin Mary by Theophilus of Alexandria. The homily contains some apocryphal traditions about the Magi and the death of Zachariah, the latter derived from the Protevangelium of James.

The Christmas broadcast of 60 minutes featured a short piece on the Vatican Library. Watch it HERE.Earlier this year they did a longer documentary on the monasteries (and libraries) of Mount Athos (HERE).

The papers presented at last Spring's Symposium on Secret Mark—Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate—have been accepted for publication by Cascade Books. I am currently editing the papers and hope to have the manuscript to the publisher in February.

There are plans also for another York Christian Apocrypha Symposium, but not until 2013. It was unlikely that we would receive funding without some "outcome" from the first symposium, and there was some delay in securing a contract in time for funding proposal season. We do not know yet what the topic will be for 2013, but I will post information when it becomes available.

Grrr. Sorry, I don't know how to embed the video, but here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkHNNPM7pJA&lr=1.

The latest issue of Biblical Archeology Review (Nov./Dec. 2011) has a feature on the Revelation of the Magi, a text published in English for the first time by Brent Landau last year. An excerpt from the story is available on-line at the BAR site.

Recently I have read two treatments of the Secret Gospel of Mark, one brief (a few pages from Robert M. Price’s Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost Gospel Novels [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011]) and one more detailed (Edward Reaugh Smith’s The Temple Sleep of the Rich Young Ruler: How Lazarus Became the Evangelist John [Great Barrington, Mass.: SteinerBooks, 2011]). One merely presents old and erroneous arguments for the forgery of the gospel, the other offers a thorough overview of recent developments in the study of the text.

Price’s book is a comprehensive study of novels based on the notion of the possible impact on Christianity of the discovery of a lost gospel. It is a sequel of sorts of his earlier book The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church was Left Behind (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007). In chapter three Price discusses J. H. Hunter’s 1940 novel The Mystery of Mar Saba, which Price and others (notably Craig Evans in his paper for the Secret Mark Symposium back in April; summarized HERE) believe gave Smith “the idea for a real live ‘lost gospel’ hoax of his own” (p. 28). Despite acknowledging the existence of photographs of the manuscript, Price remains “unconvinced” of the genuineness of the text. He postulates: “Suppose Smith found some blank pages at the end of that library book, and they spoke eloquently to him nonetheless, whispering to him of an opportunity for a rich joke. And then perhaps he got to work composing the Clement piece with its implied homosexual evangel. If so, he would have been following he precise strategy employed by the scheming forgers of the Shred of Nicodemus in The Mystery of Mar Saba” (p. 30). If this statement sounds familiar, it is drawn from Price’s article “Second Thoughts on the Secret Gospel” from Bulletin for Biblical Research 14 (2004): 127-132 (cribbed entirely for his discussion of Secret Mark in Secret Scrolls, showing that Price’s views have not changed in the intervening years; you can read the entire article HERE). Both the book and the article make two arguments (among others) for forgery that must be dispensed with. First, he says, “if anyone could mimic the handwriting style of a desired period, it would be the erudite Smith” (p. 31). This makes Smith out to be superhuman, and it is an argument that has been effectively countered by Allan Pantuck in his paper for the Secret Mark Symposium (and hinted at in a recent contribution to Biblical Archeological Review). Hopefully the publication of Allan’s paper will put an end once-and-for-all to the belief that Smith had the ability to forge the document. The second of Price’s arguments is the following: “If Smith had forged the text, a few items would make additional sense. For one, it would be a bit less surprising to see that Smith presumed to print his name on one of the previous printed pages! ‘Smith’ along with the manuscript number he assigned it, 65, is plainly visible in the photographs. Was he signing his own work?” (p. 31). This is another statement made at the Secret Mark Symposium (though I forget who made it). To anyone who works with manuscripts, this is patently ridiculous. Catalogers of manuscripts routinely make some indication in the manuscript to identify it for future scholars. The British Library, for example, will stamp a manuscript with the name of the library and write in a shelf mark (e.g., Add. 2274); without this, how will scholars distinguish one manuscript from another? Smith wrote his name and an identifying number in all the manuscripts he catalogued at the monastery (and, I presume, other monasteries) so that a reader of his catalogue could find the manuscript in question (well, until it was removed and became inaccessible to scholars).

Juxtapose Price’s treatment of Secret Mark by E. R. Smith’s lengthy treatment in The Temple Sleep of the Rich Young Ruler. E. R. Smith approaches the text through a particular theological perspective—namely, the “spiritual science” of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. I admit to no attraction to Steiner’s theology, nor to any theology as a method for reading and interpreting ancient texts, but that does not detract from the value of E. R. Smith’s appendix on Secret Mark scholarship (p. 208-265). This is the first lengthy evaluation of recent major works on the text by Scott Brown, Stephen Carlson, Peter Jeffery, Allan Pantuck, and Francis Watson. Admittedly, it is somewhat one-sided: E. R. Smith heaps criticism upon Jeffery and Carlson, but (again admittedly, for my part) the criticism is deserved. Particularly captivating is E. R. Smith’s careful refutation of Carlson’s arguments for forgery (or, as Carlson prefers, hoax); Carlson approached the problem as a lawyer, not a scholar, and Smith counters with arguments demonstrating his own legal expertise. E. R. Smith includes also the first published comments by Roy Kotansky, a scholar who knew Smith, about Smith’s  Greek capabilities—apparently sorely inadequate for forging the document (these comments were e-mailed by Kotansky to Scott Brown)—and E. R. Smith’s and Brown’s discovery that Smith did not understand the geographical setting for the resurrection story in Secret Mark even five years after its discovery. E. R. Smith also responds to the recent handwriting analyses commissioned by BAR and to Carlson’s misuse of professional document examiner Julie C. Edison’s letter to him about his methods (discussed in an on-line article by Brown and Pantuck on Salainan Evankelista). The only stone left unturned in this overview is Roger Viklund’s refutation of the “forger’s tremor” (found HERE).

E. R. Smith’s appendix is praiseworthy for its expansiveness and for its currency. It would make an excellent companion to discussions of recent scholarship on Secret Mark.

This past weekend I participated in John Marshall’s Erasure History workshop at the University of Toronto. The event featured papers by some fine scholars—including John Gager, Eldon Epp, Nicola Denzey Lewis, John Kloppenborg, and Mark Goodacre—which led to eye-opening discussion about the reception and perception of some of the ancient texts that are near and dear to our hearts.

First, what is “Erasure History”? The workshop program defines it as: “the effort to think through significant historical problems as if a crucial surviving source were instead among the lost. This endeavour of programmatically holding data in abeyance is meant to illuminate the conditions under which we actually labour and to facilitate fresh consideration of, and renewed humility before, the generative problems of Western historical scholarship. “ It may seem an odd exercise; as Mark Goodacre said in his presentation, perhaps our efforts are best put to examining the texts that we do have. But he concluded that the exercise does lead to some insights about how we approach lost, found, and rediscovered texts from antiquity.

I’m going to limit my comments to insights related to apocryphal texts (though this is due in part to missing several of the papers thanks to traffic problems; don’t get me started). The first paper to touch on the apocrypha was Mark Goodacre’s “A World Without Mark” (Mark likely will discuss the paper on his own blog within the next few days; check NT Blog). Mark approached his task in three ways: imagining that the Gospel of Mark became lost (not a big stretch considering that Luke and Matthew seem to be writing in order to replace Mark), that it was never written at all, and that it was lost but then found in the mid-twentieth century. This last view is interesting for our purposes because Mark compared this new find to the rediscovery of the Egerton Gospel or the Gospel of Peter. To a scholarly world used to the story as we find it in the other three canonical gospels, the Gospel of Mark would look quite peculiar with its raw, cantankerous Jesus, its harsh portrayal of the apostles, and its absent resurrection story. Scholars who claim that lost, apocryphal gospels are earlier than the canonical gospels are rarely taken very seriously—Mark cited Crossan’s views on the Gospel of Peter in this regard—in part, at least, to resistance to the very idea that apocryphal texts could be superior in any way to the canonical. The Gospel of Mark, in this alternate universe of Mark Goodacre’s design, would be received as a mere curiosity. I have written on this prejudice before—the a priori view that apocryphal texts must be secondary—but I’d like to think that the evidence that the Gospel of Mark presents would be convincing to scholars in ways that the evidence for the Gospel of Peter and others have not. Otherwise, our theory of Markan Priority is not as strong as we believe.

Another paper that touched on apocryphal texts is Nicola Denzey Lewis’ “Gnosticism without Heresiology.” As the title makes clear, this paper imagines how we would evaluate the Nag Hammadi Library and other Gnostic texts without the need to correlate them with descriptions of Gnostics in works by Irenaeus, Ephipanius, and other so-called Heresy Hunters. The heresiologists obsessively categorized heretics into groups such as Sethians, Ophites, Barbeloites, etc. and scholars of Gnosticism have followed this practice despite the absence of such identifiers in the texts. Nicola believes without the heresiologists scholars would still strive to categorize the texts, but perhaps in much more meaningful ways (by “school”—Johannine, Pauline, etc.—or by approach to Hebrew scripture, etc.). Such endeavours have been attempted by Michael A. Williams (What is Gnosticism?) and others, which leads me to wonder how much an influence the heresiologists have on scholars today—most, not all, of us know better than to trust these writers. However, as Nicola pointed out, when the Gospel of Judas was rediscovered, scholars rushed to Irenaeus to situate the text both temporally and theologically, and doing so has muddied the waters in determining how Judas is portrayed in the text. Nicola pointed out also that we appreciate the heresiologists for preserving some texts and ideas that are no longer available to us (including the complete text of the Epistle to Flora).

Finally, I come to Jame Corke-Webster’s paper, “History without the Historian: Removing Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History from the Archive,” which I was invited to respond to. Eusebius is best remembered as a compiler of sources for the first three centuries of Christian history, some of which are preserved only in the Ecclesiastical History. James mentioned some of these otherwise lost sources but focused his paper on how Eusebius uses these sources to tell a narrative of persecution—namely, that the persecution experienced in Eusebius’ own time was part of a consistent relationship between Christianity and the state since the beginning of the faith. He noted that scholars tend to evaluate sources for first and early-second century persecution in light of Eusebius’ presentation of the events. For example,  the untitled 1 Clement is identified as a letter of Clement, and its description of hardships as persecution under Domitian, because of Eusebius; Revelation is situated in Domitian’s reign because of Eusebius; and Flavia Domitilla is identified as a Christian martyr (rather, more likely, than a Jewish proselyte or sympathizer) because of Eusebius. Without Eusebius, then, Domitian’s persecution of the church is reduced to the mistreatment of “certain elite individuals.”

James presented an excellent argument for bias in Eusebius and for scholarships’ reliance on the Ecclesiastical History for some aspects of Christian History, particularly the first two centuries. But in my response, I questioned how much modern scholarship continues to be influenced by Eusebius’ interpretation of the events he reports. As with Nicola’s discussion of the heresiologists, do not most (some?) of us know better than to blindly trust the testimony of ancient historians (or modern historians for that matter)? Also, James showed that Eusebius appears to rely heavily for his “persecution narrative” on Tertullian’s Apology; so, without Eusebius, Christianity would have continued to propagate the view that Domitian targeted Christians. I ended my response with a list of some of the sources that would be lost to us without Eusebius, and several of these are related to apocryphal texts:

• Eusebius’s quotations from The Sayings of the Lord Explained by Papias (EH 3.39.3-4) would be missed by those interested in the origins of the gospels (particularly those who argue for Matthean Priority); also, his statement about the enduring value of oral traditions in the early second century is cited often in discussions of the development of early Christian literature. Along with Papias we would lose Eusebius’ own interpretation of Papias’ identification of the two Johns as the authors of the gospel and letters on the one hand and Revelation on the other.
• We would lose Eusebius’ apparent reference to the Woman caught in Adultery as a story not from the Gospel of John, but the Gospel of the Hebrews (3.39.15)
• Eusebius’ sources for first-century traditions would be sorely missed given the lack of information we have from this time period; these include Hegesippus on the Jerusalem church (including an account of the death of James), Gaius (in his Dialogue with Proclus) and Dionysius of Corinth on the deaths of Peter and Paul (2.25); Gaius on the deaths of Philip and his daughters (3.31);  references to Philips’ daughters and to John in a lost Letter of Polycrates of Ephesus to Victor, Bishop of Rome (3.31); Dionysius’ discussion of the heretic Cerinthus (3.28); and traditions about Simon Magus (2.14).
• Without Eusebius we also lose any reason to consider the Gospel of Peter to be docetic; the extant fragment does not support this, but Eusebius quotes Serapion’s The So-Called Gospel of Peter (6.12) which cautions readers at Rhossus about docetic additions to the text. Of course, we do not know for sure that our Gospel of Peter is the same text known to Serapion.
• We lose also Eusebius’ witness to the Abgar Correspondence (believed to be earlier than that found in the Doctrina Addai) and with it some of the information on the beginnings of Christianity in Edessa that Bauer sought to refute in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christianity. Incidentally, Eusebius is usually held up as the source for the view of Christianity that Bauer was trying to counter—i.e., that Christianity began as orthodox and heresy entered into it in an attempt to corrupt the faith; but Eusebius is not the only one to hold that viewpoint, and even without Eusebius, that outlook would still need to be challenged.
• Finally, Eusebius also tells us much about the status of the NT canon in his time (3.25), including the still-disputed status of several NT texts (James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Revelation of John, Gospel of the Hebrews).

All-in-all, it was a thought-provoking workshop and it went off without a hitch (or any hitches were not obvious to those who attended). My thanks to John Marshall for inviting me to participate.

Spurred on by the brief review of The Apocryphal Gospels by Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše (Oxford University Press, 2011) in the LA Times, I have finally gathered together my own thoughts on the collection.

The goal of the collection, in the editors’ words, is to provide “everything that a graduate student or scholar working on the apocryphal Gospels would need or want access to” (p. viii). And, to some extent, they succeed. This is the first ever collection of primary texts in their original languages with facing English translations (though Andrew Bernhard’s Other Early Christian Gospels, used on occasion here, contains a number of texts). And it is undeniably an excellent all-in-one source for the material, drawing in texts from Tischendorf’s Evangelia Apocrypha, several CCSA (Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum) editions, a variety of century-old journal articles, the Nag Hammadi Library, and others. On Tischendorf, the editors comment that his 150-year-old editions are  “inadequate for the needs of scholars today” and that “many texts have been uncovered since Tischendorf’s day, some of them relatively difficult to access” (p. viii).  Nevertheless, they liberally draw upon Tischendorf’s work, primarily in the absence of new editions of certain texts—a deficiency the editors point out on several occasions, lamenting the slow pace of text-critical scholarship.

One of the strengths of this volume is in its expansiveness. Many apocrypha collections (in translation, that is) limit their content to texts composed in the first three or four centuries, thus eliminating a large amount of very interesting material. But this collection, running to almost 600 pages, features such rarely-seen texts as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the History of Joseph the Carpenter, the Dura fragment of the Diatessaron (though an odd choice), an expansive collection of agrapha, and a large amount of the Acts of Pilate cycle (including the Anaphora Pilati, the Paradosis Pilati, the Letter of Pilate to Claudius and other letters, the Vengeance of the Savior, and the Death of Pilate). The editors avoided texts from the Nag Hammadi Library, since they are readily available in current editions, but opted to include the three most commonly-used texts: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Judas. To their credit, they feature both the Coptic and the Greek fragments of Thomas and Mary, and with Judas, though they appeal to the contentious National Geographic edition of the text, they include expanded notes discussing the disputed readings.

As praiseworthy as the collection is, I can’t help but add a few nitpicky criticisms on their treatment of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (a text close to my heart).

• They chose to feature and translate Tischendorf’s Greek A text (fairly standard practice) and the first three chapters of Greek C (usually called Greek D; the same material is found in the late Latin version of the text).  Mention is made of an additional eight Greek Mss (drawing upon my article on the Greek tradition in Apocrypha 14) which “have never been published or made available to scholarly study” (p. 3). But these are certainly available in my PhD diss. (recently published in the CCSA series), and even Reidar Aaasgard’s 2009 IGT-study The Childhood of Jesus (which Ehrman is certainly aware of as he wrote a very supportive endorsement for its back cover) features an edition and translation of the very important Cod. Sabaiticus 259. There may be good reasons not to draw upon these resources, but they should be mentioned.
• Mention should be made also of Thomas Rosén’s study of the Slavonic Mss (The Slavonic Translation of the Apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, 1997). They do note de Santos Otero’s earlier 1967 work but Rosén’s is more recent and it is in English.
• They discuss briefly the two fifth-century Syriac Mss (from London and Göttingen) and allude to three other later Mss. Which Mss are these? Only two (Vat. Syr. 159 and Budge’s Life of Mary Ms from Alkosh) have made much of a mark in scholarship. Many more exist, mind you, but it is still not clear what the editors are referring to. It would have been extremely helpful to include the Syriac IGT in the volume as it includes the longer version of chapter six missing in Tischendorf’s Greek Mss.
• Fabricius is credited with first publishing IGT in 1703 when, in fact, the Ms from the Fabricius collection first appeared in full in a work by J. B. Cotelier in 1698.
• And the Athens Ms of Greek C published by Armand Delatte is mistakenly said to be from the Bibliothèque National (sic) in Paris (p. 25, though they get the location right on p. 4).

Despite these minor reservations for IGT, I heartily recommend Ehrman and Pleše’s collection. But I would caution readers not to think of their editions, in many cases, to be authoritative. These are often merely entry points into the texts and must be supplemented with other text-critical work, particularly the contributions made by l’Association pour l’étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne reflected in the CCSA series and the two-volume French collection Écrits apocryphe chrétiens (1997 and 2005).

I will be participating next week in a conference at the University of Toronto entitled Erasure History:Approaching the Missing Sources of Antiquity (see HERE for more information). I will be responding to James Corke-Webster's paper "History without the Historian: Removing Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History from the Archive." I'd better brush up on my Bauer.