Apocryphicity

Just a few things recently noted in other people's blogs:

Timo Panaanen at Salainan evankelista offers a critique of Francis Watson's article"Beyond Suspicion: On the Authorship of the Mar Saba Letter and the Secret Gospel of Mark" from JTS. Read also the extensive critiqueat Synoptic Solutions.

April DeConick a The Forbidden Gospels reports on the restoration of images of Peter, Paul, John and Andrew in the Thecla catacomb in Rome.

Mark Goodacre at NTBlog reports Prince Charles' odd use of the Gospel of Mary in a recent speech.

The New Testament Apocrypha course is now winding down (the whimper subsequent to its initial bang). One more class is to come but it will be spent viewing some apocryphal traditions in films—including the Passion of the Christ, the Nativity, the Da Vinci Code, and others.

Our last official lecture took place yesterday. We focused on “anti-gospels,” specifically the Toledoth Yeshu (and related Jewish anti-Christian material from the Talmud) and the Gospel of Barnabas (a 14th-century Muslim text). These texts are rarely discussed in the context of Christian Apocrypha, though the Toledoth Yeshu, at least, was featured in some of the earliest CA collections before other discoveries edged it out. Both texts are discussed in Klauck’s Apocryphal Gospels (the textbook for the course), which inspired me to discuss them in class. And there is merit in doing so. For one, the polemics we find in the Talmud and Toledoth Yeshu are valuable for discussion of Jewish and Christian conflict, conflict that is evident in some of the standard CA texts (including Gospel of Nicodemus). And a discussion of the Gospel of Barnabas allows us to break out of the typical temporal constraints placed on the study of the CA (fourth century) and brings in apocryphal traditions found in Muslim literature including the Qur’an).

One of the more interesting aspects of these two texts is the value accorded therein to the story of the Animation of the Birds (known primarily from Infancy Thomas ch. 2). This story is found in the Toledoth Yeshu and in the Qur’an. Its presence in the Toledoth Yeshu testifies to its popularity—if the TY seeks to lampoon the Jesus biography, then this story must have been considered cherished by Christians in the author’s orbit. The same can be said of the Christians known to Muhammad. Incidentally, in the Qur’an we see non-canonical traditions of Jesus and Mary becoming canonical for another religion. All of these points are further evidence for the fallacy of the canonical/non-canonical dichotomy.

The final half hour of class was dedicated to a discussion of Darrell Bock’s The Missing Gospels. The students had to complete a review of the book, principally so we could balance some of the “liberal” scholarship common to the study of the NTA with a conservative response to this scholarship. From what I gathered from the discussion, the students on-the-whole were not favourable toward the book. Perhaps this is due to being bombarded by primarily liberal points-of-view on the texts over the past three months; perhaps they hope to do well on the review if they adopt what they expect me to say about it; perhaps they are all just really bright.

The principal objection was towards Bock’s bias. They see the book as aimed at a believing audience who want Bock to provide them comfort, to prove for them that the Jesus of the “alternative gospels” is not the true Jesus.  They identified certain rhetorical strategies used by Bock to show the superiority of the “traditional Jesus” (i.e., the Jesus of the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers), primarily because these texts are considered the earliest sources and also because Bock believes the traditional views of authorship of the texts are genuine. The students would have preferred it if Bock made this bias more transparent at the beginning of his book. I was pleased that one student called for more dialogue between liberal and conservative scholars on the value and relevance of the NTA. It is a point I have made also on my published work on the Anti-Christian Apocrypha Apologetic works, of which Bock’s is one of the most-well-known.

For those interested in reading more about Bock’s book and my response to it, you can read the short version of my paper “Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium” published in the on-line SBL Forum HERE. The longer version of the paper will be published later this year in the print journal Studies in Religion. There have been a number of responses to the paper (and these can be accessed by clicking on the “Anti-CA Apologetic” tab to the right of this post). The most interesting of these is by Darrell Bock himself (and can be accessed HERE).

Our latest New Testament Apocrypha class focused on the Life and Letters of Paul and featured a look at such texts as the Acts of Paul, Acts of Thecla, 3 Corinthians, Paul and Seneca, the Epistle to the Laodiceans, and portions of the Pseudo-Clementines. The Pauline literature is a prime example of the phenomenon of early Christian groups coalescing around certain figures and using their chosen persona to present their Christological and theological viewpoints in conflict with other groups. Indeed, we see this phenomenon already in the New Testament in the Deutero-Pauline and Pastoral Epistles.

We began with an overview of Paul’s life and letters from the NT, with emphasis on signs within these texts of intra-Christian conflict (Galatians and Acts on the Jerusalem Council, Paul’s problems with Judaizers). The pseudepigraphical Pauline literature within the NT were discussed also to make it clear that both canonical and non-canonical texts make claims for apostolic authorship, and both sets of claims are potentially authentic (though extremely unlikely for non-canonical works) and spurious (surprisingly common in canonical works). We finished off the canonical Paul by looking at how the Pastoral Epistles develop Paul’s thought in the direction of supporting the institution of the household and introducing a hierarchical organization into the church.

The Acts of Paul (particularly Paul and Thecla) were presented as an example of the parallel development of Paul’s ascetic ideas. Here I was influenced by Dennis R. MacDonald’s classic The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (1983), which makes the claim that the Pastorals were written in response to the radical asceticism and proto-feminism of the Acts of Paul. We then zoomed through the remaining Pauline apocrypha, noting particularly the orthodoxy of the Epistle to the Laodiceans (composed perhaps as a rival to another composed by Marcionites?) and 3 Corinthians (used by orthodox Christians in Syria to bolster their position there over heretical groups).

Finally, the class concluded with a look at anti-Paulinism in the Pseudo-Clementines. Here Simon Magus, a thinly-veiled Paul, battles Peter in a miracle and teaching contest, with Peter characterizing Simon/Paul’s views as “a lawless and absurd doctrine of the man who is my enemy” and whose authority is based only on visions of Jesus (to which Peter responds, “can anyone be made competent to teach through a vision?”). It is interesting to see in this text the descendents of the opponents of Paul from the first century fight back against the power of the thoroughly-Pauline church of the 4/5th centuries. By this time the Jewish-Christianity of the author/community behind the Ps.-Clementines has been declared a heresy and will shortly die out completely. Only a few centuries earlier it was Gentile Christians who were the minority and Paul who faced persecution for his views. But who has the rightful claim as heir to the message and mission of Jesus?