Apocryphicity

My Spring course on the New Testament Apocrypha began last night. As is typical, much of the first night was taken up with discussing the course syllabus. The other half of the time comprised a short introduction to the course material.

It struck me while planning my talk how the NTA have dropped out of public consciousness recently. When I first mounted the course in 2007, it was hot on the heels of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon and the discovery of the Gospel of Judas. We need someone to discover something new real soon or I may start losing prospective students.

There are a few new things that I will try to integrate into the course this time out, including my recent work on the History of the Thirty Pieces of Silver (a brief apocryphon on the price of Judas’ betrayal) and some other lesser-known apocrypha such as the Dialogue of the Paralytic with Christ. I am very interested in broadening the scope of what constitutes Christian Apocrypha (see my page on More New Testament Apocrypha); to this end, I am asking the students to do a major paper on the more obscure texts. It should make for some interesting reading.

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