Christian Apocrypha in Ancient Libraries

Several of the most prominent literary discoveries of the past century have been the contents of ancient libraries—i.e., collection of texts, rather than single texts or single codices. Many of these libraries include Christian apocryphal literature. The Oxyrhynchus site, for example, includes material that may have derived from a Christian scriptorum or that was borrowed/copied from the library of Alexandria. Among the texts found at the site are fragments of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Peter, the Acts of John, the Gospel of Mary, and two unidentified apocrypha. The Bodmer Papyri (aka the Dishna Papers), which may have belonged to a monastery library, include the Infancy Gospel of James and 3 Corinthians. And, the most well-known collection of Christian apocrypha, the Nag Hammadi Library, which may have originated at a nearby Pachomian monastery, features numerous apocryphal texts including the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip. This paper reviews the manuscript evidence of the apocryphal texts from these libraries to get a sense of how the texts were regarded by those who collected them. Do they exhibit any of the features typically found in manuscripts that derive from ancient libraries? Are the apocryphal texts treated any differently than any other texts in the collections? Given the place of the apocryphal texts in each collection, what can be said of the interests of the person or group that used them? The paper includes also a discussion of allusions in early Christian literature to other ancient Christian libraries that contained apocryphal texts.