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 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?

Our latest New Testament Apocrypha class took a tour of the Apocryphal Acts. We began with a look at the canonical Acts, focusing on some aspects of the text important for the discussion of orthodoxy and heresy—namely, Luke’s interest in bringing certain (not all) Christian groups into accord (note his silence on Alexandria and Syria), and the significance of James (and sometimes Peter) for Jewish-Christianity. We also read the spurious “lost ending” of Acts created in the 19^th century (you can read it HERE). This is a text rarely discussed in our field because it is a modern (or pre-modern) apocryphon, but really the only difference between this text and what we call New Testament Apocrypha (and indeed some canonical texts) is the date (well, that and ancient apocrypha are ancient texts that claim to be by ancient Christian writers, whereas Acts 29 is a modern text that claims to be by an ancient Christian writer).

The Apocryphal Acts are an excellent resource for discussing the nuances in the distinction between canonical and non-canonical literature. These texts were declared heretical by the Roman Church but the narratives and the martyrdoms were retained and transmitted in a variety of forms (individual stories, summaries), including their incorporation into collections of Lives of Saints. Many elements in the texts are cemented in Christian tradition.  

We looked at excerpts from three texts: the Acts of Peter, the Acts of John, and the Acts of Thomas. The students were asked, as usual, to look for both orthodox (i.e., fairly normal) and heretical (i.e., unexpected) elements in the texts. They were struck, as could be expected, by the radical asceticism in the texts, particularly in some of the more outlandish stories from John (or was that just me?). The doceticism in the texts is also quite surprising, and certainly brings the Acts into the orbit of Gnostic Christology (in the sense that Gnostics also saw Jesus as not human, not that the Acts are necessarily Gnostic).

It is unfortunate that the Apocryphal Acts are such lengthy and, frankly, ponderous texts. It is difficult to get students to invest their time in reading them, even in excerpts. Several years ago I used Keith Hopkins’ A World Full of Gods (1999) for a course on Greco-Roman religions; two chapters provided summaries and discussions of the Acts of Thomas and Andrew. Hopkins is an evocative and creative writer; perhaps in future I can have the students read his work as a gateway into the texts. If you haven’t read Hopkins’ book, you really should.

Last week’s New Testament Apocrypha class (yes, I’m a little behind due to some rather nasty viruses on my home computer) 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).

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. We finished our John discussion with a quick look at the late medieval apocryphon The Dialogue of the Paralytic with Christ (text available HERE) which spins out of the story in John 5:1-15.

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 (we discuss those issues in the Gnosticism course). I like to spend time on both liberal and conservative arguments for the value and utility of these texts. This time we looked at Nicholas Perrin’s argument for Syriac composition of the Gospel of Thomas (in Thomas and Tatian. Atlanta 2002). Another scholar, Craig Evans, relies on Perrin’s arguments in his book Fabricating Jesus and mentions also signs of Lukan redaction in Thomas. For more on his position read my post about Evans’ book HERE.

The latest class for my New Testament Apocrypha course 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. I pointed out to the students 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

My course on the New Testament Apocrypha focused yesterday on “Mark and Related Apocrypha,” including fragmentary gospels (PEgerton, POxy 840, Gospel  of Peter, Secret Mark) and agrapha. The bulk of the class was taken up by a discussion of Secret Mark. I told the class that this is a particularly interesting text because the scholars (and non-scholars) who work on it are deeply invested in the issue of its authenticity, thus leading to some fiery debate. We looked at Stephen Carlson’s evidence for forgery (he prefers “hoax”) and the various responses to that evidence by Scott Brown, Allan Pantuck, Roger Viklund, and others.

I’ll use this space here to point the students to a number of resources mentioned in class that can deepen our discussion of the text.

1. Stephen Carlson’s blog Hypotyposeis. Carlson discusses Secret Mark very little these days, but there are some archival posts here about his book and reactions to it.

2. Scott Brown’s review of Peter Jeffery’s book, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled, and Jeffery’s response to the review.

3. Timo Paananen's Salainan evankelista blog, featuring chapter’s from his thesis on Secret Mark.

4. My summary of the Secret Mark panel at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

5. Roger Viklund’s article on the so-called “forger’s tremor” of the Secret Mark manuscript. And look HERE for some comments from an anonymous commentator on the photo debate (he mentions a correspondence between himself and a scholar who says Carlson thinks there is something fishy about the colour photographs Viklund uses for his article).

6. Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck’s discussion of Carlson’s handwriting expert.

7. The results of the handwriting analysis conducted by Biblical Archeological Review (and comments on this analysis from Salainan evankelista, HERE and HERE).

8. And the video shown in class of Lee Strobel commenting on the text (and see HERE for Roger Viklund’s response to Strobel and Evans’ book).

The first complete lecture for the NT Apocrypha course took place last night (May 5). 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 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 form of Christianity in Edessa was Marcionite (followed soon by Bar Daisan who championed the use of Tatian’s Diatessaron over Marcion’s gospel). (BTW, Mark Goodacre has posted links to new photographs of the Greek fragment of the Diatessaron. You can see them HERE). 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.

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.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the Spring semester at York University and, as is my usual habit, I will be teaching one course. This year it is my course on the Christian Apocrypha (or The New Testament Apocrypha as the calendar lists it). You can see the syllabus HERE. I am asking the students to read Apocryphicity and offer comments on the blog postings. Which means I had better start posting more regularly. Look for my twice-weekly musings as we work through the course material.