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.

April DeConick at The Forbidden Gospels mentions a forthcoming book by Marvin Meyer on the full range of Judas traditions from early Christian writers. The book is due in November and is titled Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends About the Infamous Apostle of Jesus. This is a welcome resource as these traditions, though not all contained in gospels, are nevertheless apocryphal traditions and deserve greater exposure and discussion.

Ben C. Smith has a brief post on the Letter of Lentulus over on Thoughts on Antiquity.

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.

(I recently moved into a new house and have been without an internet connection at home for two weeks. So, I am a little behind on posting my usual post mortem of my New Testament Apocrypha class. Here is last week’s post; this week’s will follow shortly).

This week’s New Testament Apocrypha class covered the agrapha and fragmentary gospels. The course is structured so that we review an orthodox/canonical text and then discuss related heretical/non-canonical texts. This week the orthodox text was Mark. The point of the structure is to have the students see how the apocrypha expand upon or react to other texts (the assumption is that the apocrypha are later than the canonical material, though my lectures note the theories of Koester, Crossan, et al who claim otherwise). This structure also allows us to look at the orthodox material for heretical ideas, or ideas that heretics will read into them, such as Mark’s adoptionist Christology.

In our discussion of agrapha I was struck by the methodology employed to delimit the 270-or-so known agrapha. It makes sense to eliminate some material from the corpus, such as material now identified as apocryphal texts (Gospel of Thomas) or fragmentary texts typically featured separately in editions (Papyrus Egerton). But otherwise the goal  appears to be to find which agrapha could go back to the historical Jesus. Therefore, anti-Christian polemical sayings are eliminated, as are agrapha from Muslim sources (indeed many of these are transformations of narratives from apocryphal gospels), and sayings with parallels in pagan literature. The elimination of this material is unfortunate. All of these are useful for seeing developments in Christian traditions and would be worth giving wider visibility. I tend to object to the idea that we should be focusing solely on “early” material. But most objectionable about this methodology is the elimination of “heretical” sayings—i.e., sayings that do not agree in form or content with the canonical gospels. The assumption is that the historical Jesus would not say anything that is distinctly different from what we find in the canon. No wonder then that many scholars see little in the agrapha to change our knowledge of the historical Jesus.

Much of our discussion of fragmentary gospels focused on Secret Mark. Not a scholar of Secret Mark, I am happy to remain agnostic about the issue of the text’s authenticity. So, my lecture provided the students with an overview of Stephen Carlson’s position that the text is a forgery. Each point of his argument was countered with objections brought forward by Scott Brown and some objections of my own. Scott has become the go-to-guy for rebuttals of the forgery hypothesis advanced by Carlson and, more recently, by Peter Jeffrey. For Scott’s reply to Jeffery, see his lengthy review of Jeffery’s book, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery at the RBL site and then see Carlson’s response to Brown on Hypotyposeis (and be sure to read the comments from other readers). For another recent post on Secret Mark see Roger Pearse’s comment on Thoughts on Antiquity.

Carlson seems genuinely surprised that Scott “is not budging” on his belief that Secret Mark is genuine and critiques Scott for “overstatements” that Jeffery’s arguments are unsubstantiated (alas, Carlson does not confront Scott’s arguments against Jeffrey’s case for forgery). I have not read Jeffery’s book but I was surprised at some of what Scott says about the author’s position on the text—particularly on his reading of it as “obscene” (p. 250), misogynistic, and supportive of pederasty. Jeffrey apparently shows great disrespect to Smith, almost to the point of demonization (he states: “And I pray for the late Morton Smith—may God rest his anguished soul,” p. ix). Jeffery’s agenda seems more to discredit Secret Mark for its homosexual content (a forced identification—e.g., Jesus’ “seizing of the boy’s hand” is meant to be a euphemism for genitals? the cave tomb represents a closet?) and it’s “forger” for his homosexual lifestyle than to present a solid, carefully-researched case for its inauthenticity. Again, I don’t necessarily support Scott’s position that Secret Mark truly is an ancient gospel, but I am impressed at the rigour of his research (this 47-page review includes references to the archive of Smith’s correspondence, which assists in dispensing of some elements of the forgery hypothesis, particularly those elements that bear on Smith’s motives). Those, like Jeffrey, who wish to argue for forgery need to read Scott’s book (Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery) and follow his example.

Addendum: Stephen Carlson clarified his position on Secret Mark in a post on his blog Hypotyposeis. Carlson believes the text is a hoax, not a forgery–that is, Morton Smith invented the text as an elaborate joke on the academy. My apologies, Stephen, for being imprecise.

Roger Pearse at Thoughts on Antiquity drew my attention to recent additions of on-line manuscript catalogues to the Syriac Studies Reference Library. This information is very useful to those of us who study Syriac apocryph–myself included, as I continue my work on a critical edition of the Syriac version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

Ben Smith at Thoughts on Antiquity pointed out the site Paracalypsis which features several Greek editions (some old) of CA texts (P. Oxy. 840, P. Egerton, Protevangelium of James, Gospel of the Ebionites, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas (in Coptic), Acts of Paul, Acts of John, and two non-CA texts The Didache and The Epistle of Barnabas.

I discussed a few weeks ago the topic of palimpsests in CA studies. Anyone interested in the topic may want to see the recent publication J. Gippert, Palimpsest Codex Vindobonensis georgicus 2 (Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi: Series Ibero et Caucasia. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). This Old Georgian codex contains a number of biblical, hagiographical, and homiletic texts, but the text of interest to us is a version of the Protevangelium of James from the fifth to the eighth century. More than 95 % of the codex has been deciphered.