Apocryphicity

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 a film I picked up at SBL called “Letters of Faith,” a documentary relating to the Abgar Correspondence (I have yet to view this but will post on it after Wednesday).

Our last official lecture took place last week. 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 Koran).

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 Koran. 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 Koran 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 students of the course are working feverishly on their major paper for the course. The description is as follows:

Choose an apocryphal text that we have not examined in class from the following list: Acts of Andrew, Acts of Barnabas, Acts of Mar Mari, Acts of Philip, Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena, Apocalypse of Thomas, Apocalypse of the Virgin, Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, Book of the Cock, Epistle of Christ from Heaven, Epistle of Lentulus, Gospel of Nicodemus, and Revelation of Stephen. Prepare a paper on the text featuring the following: a brief description of its contents, an overview of previous scholarship, a summary of its manuscript sources, and a case for why the text is important for the study of the Christian Apocrypha and/or the history of Christian Literature.

When I created the syllabus this assignment sounded like a really good idea. It makes them look at a text we haven’t examined in the course, but particularly a text that does not receive enough attention from scholars (mostly because they are considered “late”). But the assignment has caused the students a great deal of stress. The problem is that the bulk of the scholarship on these texts (and there’s not much of a “bulk” there) is in French or German. So the students are very limited as to what resources they can use to write their papers. Ah well, a lesson learned for next time.

Today is the day that all the bibliobloggers give their “I’m off to SBL” post. And I’m no exception. I will be presenting a paper during one of the Christian Apocrypha sessions. The paper is a synthesis of my reading and ruminating about modern Anti-Apocrypha polemic (see previous posts accessible through the side-bar on the left). Here is the abstract of the paper:

The popularity of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code has led to a surge of attacks on Christian Apocryphal literature by conservative NT scholars (e.g., Ben Witherington III, Craig Evans, Darrell L. Bock). The work of these scholars is transparently polemical—for example, Evans states that his book, Fabricating Jesus, was written “to defend the original witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus” (p. 17). And their methods are not new; indeed they use the same rhetorical strategies employed by such early heresiologists as Irenaeus, including the use of sarcasm and invective to describe their opponents, the intentional misrepresentation of the heretics’/scholars’ views and the content of the primary texts, the excerpting of material from the texts in order to expose their absurdities, and the demonization of their opponents by associating them with the powers of darkness. “Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium” illustrates the parallels between modern critics and the ancient heresy hunters but focuses particularly on how the two groups use and abuse the apocryphal texts. Perhaps we can learn from the contemporary debate something about the reception of the Christian Apocrypha in antiquity.

I decided to read the finished product in my ongoing Wednesday evening New Testament Apocrypha course. The students were required to complete a book review of Darrell Bock’s The Missing Gospels. The paper launched into a discussion of Bock’s book. 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 have plenty of objections to the book, and to similar works by Witherington, Jenkins, Evans, etc., but these can be found in the earlier posts and the SBL paper. One thing I did mention in class is my frustration at how these authors and their opponents (the Christian Apocrypha scholars) avoid communicating with one another. I had hoped to have one of the apologetic authors respond to my paper at the SBL, but efforts to do so have failed. It might have made for a more animated discussion.

When I return from San Diego I will offer a post mortem of my session, as well as some comments on other CA-related papers.

This week’s New Testament Apocrypha class focused on John and his Opponents. Taking a page from Gregory Riley and Helmut Koester, we looked at the possibility that characters in John are intended to represent other Christian groups with which John’s community was in conflict. Doubting Thomas, therefore, represents the group behind the Gospel of Thomas (which too seems to “doubt” physical resurrection) and Mary Magdalene represents the group behind the Gospel of Mary (which seems to portray Mary as a visionary). I’m not entirely convinced by the Riley-Koester argument but I do think it’s worth considering (everything is “worth considering,” especially when I don’t feel compelled to take a stand).

One student commented on how so much early Christian literature is devoted to conflict between Christian groups. And it’s a good point. Christian proselytizing seems to have been primarily an oral discipline, while texts were for apologetic or polemical purposes.

Our orthodoxy/heresy discussion focused on two aspects of John. The first is John’s sources. As many scholars maintain, John was constructed in layers with the primary layer being a “Signs Gospel.” Like Q, this text no longer exists and is not included in the NT and therefore is non-canonical, but it is preserved in a sense through John’s use of it, which makes it canonical. Another source for John is the story of the Woman Caught in Adultery. This story is not original to the text, and even shows up in the Gospel of Luke (and, incidentally, according to a note in one manuscript of John, it ultimately derives from a “Gospel of Thomas”). Technically, this is a non-canonical story—text critics should argue for its removal from John (like Romans 16:24, which can be tricky to find in many Bibles)—but it is a treasured story so it remains canonical.

The other aspect of John related to orthodoxy and heresy deals with John’s relationship to the Synoptic Gospels. I had the students read an article by D. Moody Smith (“The Problem of John and the Synoptics”). In the article, Smith discusses the assumptions made about apocryphal gospels—they are late, derivative of canonical texts, and contain bizarre embroideries and expansions of canonical texts. By such a definition, John looks like an apocryphal gospel. Matthew and Luke seem to consider Mark “scriptural”—it is clearly an authority for them and they follow its structure and style. But John does not. Also John is not featured as prominently as the Synoptics in the Apostolic Fathers, and its esteem among non-proto-orthodox groups made orthodox writers suspicious (the Muratorian Canon features a lengthy justification for its inclusion in the list; Hippolytus wrote a defense of John against Gaius who wanted it eliminated because it disagreed with the Synoptics). In essence, Smith is saying that John is apocryphal because it does not follow Mark, but its inclusion in the NT makes it canonical.

Our discussions of Thomas and Mary were fairly standard fare (overview of sources, theories of origin, etc.). We focused more on the use of the characters of Mary and Thomas and possible parallels between the texts and John than on each text’s particular theology or christology (I have to hold some things in reserve for next semester’s Gnosticism class). I like to spend time on both liberal and conservative arguments for the value and utility of these texts. This time we looked at Craig Evans’ statements (from Fabricating Jesus) about the composition of Gospel of Thomas; my summary was very quick and may have been unclear, but it can be read in my post about Evans’ book HERE.

Update on Secret Mark: if you want to continue to follow the discussion of the authenticity of Secret Mark, click HERE for Peter Jeffery’s extremely polite response to Scott Brown’s lengthy review of The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled.

Last week’s New Testament Apocrypha class (yes, I know, I’m still a little behind on blogging, and virtually everything else) focused on the family of Jesus—i.e., a discussion of traditions about the brothers and sisters of Jesus and an examination of texts about the final days of his parents (the Assumption/Dormition of Mary and the History of Joseph the Carpenter). We also took a look at the Abgar Correspondence.

Of principle interest to me, as usual, is the issue of the categories of orthodoxy and heresy. The Abgar Correspondence can be considered, once again, orthodox apocrypha: it is a text created by orthodoxy to validate their presence in Syria. Creating apocrypha is not just a pursuit of “heretics”; and such a leading figure of orthodoxy as Eusebius was gullible enough to believe this text authentic. And he makes this determination not because he has conducted the proper investigations to determine its authenticity (Do the early church writers mention it? no. Does it have apostolic credentials? no. Is it widely used in the churches? no) but because it fits the agenda of orthodox Christianity. It makes one wonder how much the selection of the NT texts was determined by the same motive.

The fine line between orthodoxy and heresy is breached also in the Mary and Joseph texts. We discussed in class the interplay between the Dormition and doctrines about Mary’s death—what came first, the notion that Mary was assumed into heaven at her death (or some such variation)? or the text which established this idea? Is the doctrine dependent on the text or the text on the doctrine? The same problem occurs with the parents of Mary in the Proto-Gospel of James: was there a tradition established about Anna and Joachim before James, or was James the originator of the tradition? Unfortunately, it’s not possible to answer these questions but I think we can be certain that developing doctrines and apocryphal texts interacted with one another over the centuries, with the texts supporting and widely-disseminating new doctrines before they became official teachings of the church.

In our discussion of the family of Jesus I promised to provide more information about James Tabor’s recent book on this topic, The Jesus Dynasty. Here are the basic points of his theory:

The “other Mary” (mother of James and Joses/Joseph) at the tomb in Mark and Matthew is Jesus’ mother.

John mentions a Mary, the wife of Clopas, at the cross with Jesus’ mother and Mary Magdalene. Eusebius tells us that this Clopas was the brother of Joseph and he had a son named Simon. This means that both Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary the wife of Clopas have three sons named James, Joses, and Simon. Therefore, Tabor thinks the two Marys are the same woman and that Mary remarried after the death of Joseph. According to Jewish custom, she married her late husband’s brother. The brothers and sisters of Jesus are all the progeny of Mary and Clopas. In short, then: Mary of Nazareth=Mary mother of James and Joses=Mary wife of Clopas.

The “James, Jude and Simon” listed among the twelve disciples are actually Jesus’ brothers.

James becomes the successor of Jesus until his death in 62 CE. Simon succeeded James (presumably because he too was of the “Jesus Dynasty”). Eusebius and Epiphanius report that Jude succeeded Simon at Simon’s death in 106. The Apostolic Constitutions (From the 4th cent.) says this Jude was a brother of Jesus. This makes four of Jesus’ brothers succeeding him as leaders of the group.

Eusebius mentions two grandsons (possibly sons) of Jude who were questioned and released by Domitian (r. 81-96). After this the family of Jesus fades into history.

The predominance of the letters of Paul in the NT, and the Pauline book of Acts, obscures the history of Jewish Christianity (Gentile Christianity tended to minimize its connections to Judaism because of the trouble the Jewish people were giving Rome). The witnesses we have to this form of Christianity are found in Q, James, and Jude. Tabor says these texts “stand as witness to an original version of the Christian faith that takes us back to Jesus himself.”

I have some issues with Tabor’s methodology but I find some aspects of his argument worth considering. It’s certainly interesting to consider what happened to Jesus’ family and why the legacy was not as well-preserved in history as we might expect. We’ll turn later in the course to some later apocryphal texts which may have some connection to early Jewish Christianity, perhaps through the descendants of Jesus.

Last week’s New Testament Apocrypha class focused on Matthew and Luke and related apocrypha—namely, Jewish-Christian gospels and infancy gospels.

The Jewish-Christian gospels are important texts, not least because their very Jewishness suggests that they may be early—Jesus was Jewish, his followers were Jewish; so, perhaps these texts record Jesus’ teachings and mission more faithfully than the more Gentile gospels of the NT. Except for the Gospel of the Ebionites, that is, which shows clear evidence of harmonization of the Synoptic gospels. The students were struck by the different dates assigned to the remaining two Jewish-Christian gospels (Hebrews and Nazareans) by the authors of the two textbooks we use. Bart Ehrman dates the two to the late first century, while Klauck to the early or middle of the second century. There seems to be no reason for Klauck’s late dating other than a need to keep the canonical gospels primary—i.e., no non-canonical gospel can be earlier (and therefore “better”) than the NT gospels. But it is a real possibility that these gospels are indeed early, and we should remain open to that possibility.

To add to the introductions to the texts provided by Ehrman and Klauck I discussed two lesser-known witnesses to Jewish-Christian traditions. The first is Ahmad ibn Abd al-Jabbar’s Confirmation of the Proofs of Prophethood of Our Master Mohammed which Shlomo Pines (“The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity according to a New Source,” 1968) claimed drew upon an anti-Christian polemic composed in Syriac by Jewish-Christians around the fourth to sixth century. The text criticizes Gentile Christians for failing to obey the Mosaic law and for giving up Hebrew (Hebrew was Christ’s language and the language of the original and true Christian gospel). Paul is criticized for denying the validity of all of the Mosaic laws, and is killed by Nero for encouraging the Romans to practice a religion opposed to the true religion of Jesus. Pines’ argument was countered by S. M. Stern (“Abd al-Jabbar’s Account of How Christ’s Religion Was Falsified by the Adoption of Roman Customs,” 1960), and the exchange between the two scholars grew heated. Now some decades later, perhaps it is time to revisit the evidence.

The other lesser-known witness is the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew found in Even Bohan, a fourteenth-century Jewish treatise written by Shem-Tob Ibn Shaprut of Aragon. George Howard (Hebrew Gospel of Matthew, 1995) claims it is a version of Matthew preserved in Jewish rabbinical circles that predates the Greek version of Matthew in the NT. I first read about the text in James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty (2006)—he considers it a valuable source for the early decades of Christianity. Howard’s book was brutally critiqued by William Petersen in 1998 (available HERE); Howard countered the review a year later (available HERE).

The distinction between orthodoxy and heresy again crept into our discussion. The Gospel of the Hebrews apparently contained a version of the woman caught in adultery from John 7:53-8:12. Though it cannot be determined that Hebrews was the original source of the story, certainly the story was not original to the Gospel of John. In a sense, the story is non-canonical—it should not be in the Bible; yet it remains. Childhood stories of Jesus also straddle the canonical/non-canonical divide as images from them appeared regularly in medieval art and iconography. And the Protevangelium of James was virtually canonical in the Greek East; some of its traditions (e.g., the names of Mary’s parents, the perpetual virginity of Mary) even became accepted teaching in the West.

To take this discussion a little further, some early CA scholars identified the texts studied in this course as “orthodox apocrypha” (Gnostic apocrypha, which had not yet been discovered, presumably would have been considered “heretical apocrypha”). All of these texts continued to be copied over the centuries and influenced art and literature. Since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library and other Gnostic texts, the orthodox apocrypha have been somewhat neglected. Yet they form a compelling corpus of texts that is situated on the spectrum of Christian literature just lower in esteem than the Apostolic Fathers.

The class came full circle with a few comments on Jean-Daniel Kaestli’s claim that a class of late Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew manuscripts contain material from the Gospel of Nazareans (“Recherches nouvelles sur les ‘Évangiles latins de l’enfance’ de M. R. James et sur un récit apocryphe mal connu de la naissance de Jésus.” Études Théologiques et Religeuses 72 [1997]: 219-233). Similar claims of earlier sources have been made for the Protevangelium of James and of the Latin version of Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Such claims attract attention to the infancy gospels; as in the search for sources for the historical Jesus, the earlier the text or tradition the better. But these texts deserve to be studied in their own right as examples of popular Christian piety on the periphery of the New Testament.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am teaching a course this semester on the New Testament Apocrypha (while I prefer “Christian Apocrypha,” NTA has more brand-name recognition). I’m hoping to integrate our discussions in class into blog postings on Apocryphicity in order to encourage participation from the students (thus killing two birds with one stone).

Our first lecture of the term took place Wednesday night (Sept. 19). We began with a discussion of canon formation and the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy. I assigned readings on canon lists and the first chapter of Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. In all of my recent reading of conservative, anti-Apocrypha apologetic, I have found that, while some take issue with Bauer and his successors (Koester, Ehrman, etc.), no-one denies the fundamental accuracy of his chapter on Edessa.

For those who have not read Bauer, it is the author’s claim that, despite the legend reported by Eusebius that Christianity came to Edessa in the first century as the result of a correspondence between a certain King Abgar and Jesus, the earliest forms of Christianity in Edessa was Marcionite (followed soon by Bar Daisan who championed the use of Tatian’s Diatessaron over Marcion’s gospel). Orthodoxy was slow to take root in Edessa, leading to the orthodox group being christened “Palutians” after the name of their bishop Palut—the title of “Christianity” was given to the region’s first Christians: the Marcionites. Helmut Koester, in a 1965 article, augmented Bauer’s theory in light of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library. Koester claimed the first form of Christianity in Edessa was that of the “Thomas group” reflected in the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas, and the Acts of Thomas. Regardless of which heretical group was there first, “orthodox” Christianity was not normative in Edessa until at least the fourth century.

Bauer’s work is helpful for making the point that the labels of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” depend on one’s perspective. The acrobatics that Bauer must perform to make this point are impressive; he must examine several sources for Christianity in the area and determine that many of them have been invented (including the Abgar correspondence, the Doctrina Addai, and 3 Corinthians) or interpolated (sections of the Edessene Chronicle) by later orthodox Christians (the production of Apocrypha is not limited to so-called heretics). If accurate, Bauer shows that orthodox Christians are quite effective at rewriting history to buttress their claim that in all places Christianity began as orthodoxy and was later corrupted by heretics. Though they accede that Bauer is correct about Edessa, conservative writers do not want to accede that Christianity could have developed similarly in other places. Certainly we should be careful not to make arguments from silence, but it is possible that the evidence is simply lost to us. Bauer also illustrates the need to treat orthodox claims about their origins with suspicion; as he states regarding the orthodoxy portrayal of Christian history: “I do not mean to say that this point of view must be false, but neither can I regard it as self-evident, or even as demonstrated and clearly established” (p. xxiv).

Bauer’s statement is a manifesto that can be (and should be) applied universally—i.e., throughout one’s university education and beyond. If students learn nothing else from this course but that one sentence, I’ll be happy.

In a few weeks I will begin teaching a course on the New Testament Apocrypha (yes, yes, I know "NTA" is not the term I should be using anymore, but prospective students understand it better than "Christian Apocrypha"). I have posted the syllabus on my parent site (HERE) and would welcome any feedback from others who have taught NTA courses in the past (or presently).

My approach this time out is a little different. Taking the methodology of Bauer's Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity as a guide, I will work through NT texts and traditions (e.g., Mark) alongside developments of those traditions in apocryphal texts (e.g., Secret Mark). I have also integrated some later texts into the course (Gospel of Barnabas, Dormition of Mary) that I have not used before. The text books are Klauck's Apocryphal Gospels: An Introduction (the most up-to-date treatment of the texts currently available) and Ehrman's Lost Scriptures (though the primary texts often are not based on current editions, the volume is the most serviceable for what I have planned). The students will also read and review Darrell Bock's The Missing Gospels (to get a sense of critics' arguments about the texts).

I'm hoping to incorporate the course lectures and class discussions into the blog. Perhaps some of the students will make their presence known too.