Apocryphicity

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.

Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck, now well-known as critics of Stephen Carlson's book The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark, have composed a guest-post on Timo Paananen's Salainan evankelista blog. It is an excellent piece that confronts Carlson's argument that the manuscript of Secret Mark betrays signs of a forger's tremor. (And if you read to the end you'll see a little comment from me).

Timo S. Paananen at the Salainen Evankelista blog has posted on a recent article by David Landry on the Secret Mark debate. Landry is rather positive about Stephen Carlson’s achievements, but strangely negative about the rebuttals of Scott Brown and Allan Pantuck. For my part, I am still interested in mounting a real debate on the text in a public forum and will be pursuing the idea when the time comes for us Canadian scholars to beg for government funding. Stay tuned.

I have updated the text on my Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas page to reflect the work I completed recently on a translation of the unpublished manuscript Vat. Syr. 159, the only manuscript published (well, almost published) to date that includes the full text of the Syriac tradition of this text (previous Mss are all fragmentary). I am working now on another branch of the tradition preserved in eleven known (and unpublished) Mss. And one of these Mss (Mingana Syr. 5) can be viewed on-line at the University of Birmingham's Virtual Reading Room (the text begins at fol. 18).

I was recently e-mailed a link to an article (though it is only on-line and apparently unpublished) on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas that suggests the author of the text was a child. Here is the LINK and the abstract (make of it what you will):

Apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Thomas is very controversial apocryphal text of uncertain origin. More authentic recent Czech translation by Petr Pe?áz (Dus, Pokorný 2001) tries to preserve original colloquial style and suggests an idea that the author of this text was not an adult person, but a child – boy at prepubescent age (10 – 12 years) with hyperactive tendencies. All the text represents childish megalomaniac imagination, which helps the child to cope with everyday conflicts with teachers, the father and friends by means of identification with young Jesus. The text had been probably forgotten in child’s lair and revealed a few decades afterwards without recognizing the real childish author. This article illustrates this hypothesis by comparing the gospel’s style with other literal works of similar age children and the Gospel of Mark and tries to depict a plausible psychological profile of the childish author by deliberate classification of his cognitive, emotional, moral, psychosexual stage of development.

My long-awaited (well, by me at least) critical edition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is due to be published this year. Seeing it in print seems a little closer to reality now that it is listed in the Brepols on-line catalogue (and it's a steal at a mere 160 Euros!). The listing will soon be updated with the following product description:

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT), an early apocryphal writing about Jesus’ childhood, was first published from a Greek manuscript in the seventeenth century. At the time, and for several centuries thereafter, scholars believed the text to be the “Gospel of Thomas” mentioned by a number of early Church writers and frequently associated with gnostics. With the publication of the true Gospel of Thomas from Nag Hammadi in 1956 interest in the text waned. A few scholars published editions of various versions of the text—including Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Latin, and Slavonic—but study of the Greek tradition stalled, despite indications of the existence of a number of manuscripts that could greatly improve our knowledge of the text. This edition brings together all known published and unpublished Greek manuscripts of IGT, assigns them to four separate recensions (Greek A, B, D, and S), and presents them in Greek and English translation. Attention is also paid to the versions, particularly the Slavonic and Latin traditions, which are shown to be translations of Greek A and Greek D, and therefore help to establish the original form of those recensions. The early versions (Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, and another Latin translation) are discussed also as they inform the text of Greek S, an important new recension which brings us much closer to IGT’s original form and should be considered the new textus receptus for study of the gospel. The edition also features a detailed overview of previous scholarship on the text, and a commentary on the gospel that seeks to situate it in its appropriate theological and socio-historical contexts. Scholars of early Christianity have been waiting centuries for a comprehensive critical edition of IGT. While more work needs to be done on some of the versions of the text, this volume fulfills much of the needs of scholarship by providing a vastly improved edition of IGT in its likely language of composition.

Roger Viklund has posted this excellent response to a discussion between Craig Evans and lee Strobel about Secret Mark (from Strobel's The Case For the Real Jesus). The comments Evans makes are similar (and thus similarly erroneous) to those he makes in his own book, Fabricating Jesus, which I discussed back in 2007 in this post. Viklund has written now several compelling on-line articles about Secret Mark. They can be found on his web site HERE.

(Yes, I know, I have hardly been regular on posting these “CA of the week” features, but I try) A helpful reader has passed along a link to Pitts Theology Library at Emory University which has prepared an excellent research guide on Early Christian Apocrypha (one I will certainly recommend to my students).  It provides information on concepts and methodology, print resources, on-line resources, and research guidance. Of particular interest is the extensive alphabetical list of texts. Selecting a text will give you a brief description of the text, the original language and estimate of time of composition, alternate titles, and a source for English translations (where available).