Apocryphicity

I mentioned in a previous post several texts that tend to be omitted from "New Testament Apocrypha" collections and thus have been neglected in scholarship. Typically this is because they are relatively late texts and thus fall outside of the temporal parameters of the formation of the New Testament. As a means of attracting attention to these texts I have added a new page (More Christian Apocrypha) to my site focusing on the texts. At the moment it is little more than a list of the material but I will add more information to the page when time permits. Any suggestions for additions and general improvement would be appreciated.

I have been thinking this past week about the typical contents of CA collections and what texts tend to be included and what get left out. The parameters are usually temporal—i.e., most collections include only material that is pre-Constantinian (the Pleiades collection is an exception)—though earlier studies of CA did include some later texts because there were not that many texts yet available. This led me on a search for some of these forgotten texts; many of which are found on the Church Fathers page of the New Advent site (scroll down to “Apocrypha”).

The English translations of the texts offered here are quite old and often unacknowledged. But they do offer the reader a glimpse at the texts as they were known to scholars at the end of the nineteenth century (or thereabouts). For some, more work has been done in the interim, but many have yet to be examined in sufficient detail. Here are a few of the more interesting texts:

Avenging of the Saviour

Narrative of Joseph of Arimathaea

Apocalypse of the Virgin

Acts of Barnabas

Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena