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 a film I picked up at SBL called “Letters of Faith,” a documentary relating to the Abgar Correspondence (I have yet to view this but will post on it after Wednesday).

Our last official lecture took place last week. 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 Koran).

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 Koran. 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 Koran 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 students of the course are working feverishly on their major paper for the course. The description is as follows:

Choose an apocryphal text that we have not examined in class from the following list: Acts of Andrew, Acts of Barnabas, Acts of Mar Mari, Acts of Philip, Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena, Apocalypse of Thomas, Apocalypse of the Virgin, Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, Book of the Cock, Epistle of Christ from Heaven, Epistle of Lentulus, Gospel of Nicodemus, and Revelation of Stephen. Prepare a paper on the text featuring the following: a brief description of its contents, an overview of previous scholarship, a summary of its manuscript sources, and a case for why the text is important for the study of the Christian Apocrypha and/or the history of Christian Literature.

When I created the syllabus this assignment sounded like a really good idea. It makes them look at a text we haven’t examined in the course, but particularly a text that does not receive enough attention from scholars (mostly because they are considered “late”). But the assignment has caused the students a great deal of stress. The problem is that the bulk of the scholarship on these texts (and there’s not much of a “bulk” there) is in French or German. So the students are very limited as to what resources they can use to write their papers. Ah well, a lesson learned for next time.

As promised in my last post, here are some brief comments about this year’s Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Keep an eye out also for Jim Davila’s roundup on Paleojudaica (he may even have some good photos) and April DeConick’s comments on Forbidden Gospels.

The meeting took place in sunny San Diego, California—a wonderful location. Usually I try to take some time at conferences to check out the city a little but most of my wanderings were relegated to the boardwalk behind the hotels and a trip to the nearest mall for gifts for loved ones. One night was dedicated to a death-defying trip south of the border to Tijuana. After polling about 1000 other academics, I could find only one other brave soul willing to join me on this “spiritual quest” (the “spirit” in this case was a bottle of Tequila); in retrospect, they are far wiser for it.

On day two I took in the papers of the Early Christian Families Group and an AAR session on “The Holy Child: Traditions of the Infant and Child Jesus”. In the evening I squeezed in at the end of the crowded session on “Books of the Gospel of Judas: An Evening with the Authors” and stayed around long enough to introduce myself to April DeConick (of Forbidden Gospels fame).

Day three was spent at two Christian Apocrypha sessions. The highlight of these sessions for me was the presentation by Abraham Terian on his forthcoming edition of the Armenian Infancy Gospel (due next year from Oxford). This is a long-neglected text that has been in sore need of an edition. I also enjoyed the session on the “Function of Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphical Writings in Early Judaism and Early Christianity.” Several of the panelists referred to recent discussion of the concept of “canon”—namely, that canons are malleable and differ from one group or one location to another; so it is difficult to speak of one Christian or Jewish canon as if it was universal. The topic of the fluidity of what is “canonical” has been mentioned on Apocryphicity quite often in recent months; so I followed this discussion with interest.

On the final day of the conference I stayed only long enough to present my own paper on “Heresy Hunters in the New Millennium.” The paper was received well—Pierluigi Piovanelli provided a positive response and those present echoed my concerns about anti-Christian-Apocrypha apologetics. The highlight of the discussion that followed the paper came when a student of Darrell Bock stood up, declared his own apologetic interests (very brave in a room full of godless liberals), and said that he was taking from the session a lesson about the need to be scholarly rigorous in his treatment of the literature (and that’s all we ask).

The best part of any conference is the interactions with colleagues and friends that come at receptions, dinners, and late-nights at the bar. You can live down the street from someone but only really see them once a year at SBL or CSBS. And you also get a chance to finally meet face-to-face scholars whose work you have followed and admired from afar.

To next year in Boston…

Today is the day that all the bibliobloggers give their “I’m off to SBL” post. And I’m no exception. I will be presenting a paper during one of the Christian Apocrypha sessions. The paper is a synthesis of my reading and ruminating about modern Anti-Apocrypha polemic (see previous posts accessible through the side-bar on the left). Here is the abstract of the paper:

The popularity of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code has led to a surge of attacks on Christian Apocryphal literature by conservative NT scholars (e.g., Ben Witherington III, Craig Evans, Darrell L. Bock). The work of these scholars is transparently polemical—for example, Evans states that his book, Fabricating Jesus, was written “to defend the original witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus” (p. 17). And their methods are not new; indeed they use the same rhetorical strategies employed by such early heresiologists as Irenaeus, including the use of sarcasm and invective to describe their opponents, the intentional misrepresentation of the heretics’/scholars’ views and the content of the primary texts, the excerpting of material from the texts in order to expose their absurdities, and the demonization of their opponents by associating them with the powers of darkness. “Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium” illustrates the parallels between modern critics and the ancient heresy hunters but focuses particularly on how the two groups use and abuse the apocryphal texts. Perhaps we can learn from the contemporary debate something about the reception of the Christian Apocrypha in antiquity.

I decided to read the finished product in my ongoing Wednesday evening New Testament Apocrypha course. The students were required to complete a book review of Darrell Bock’s The Missing Gospels. The paper launched into a discussion of Bock’s book. 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 have plenty of objections to the book, and to similar works by Witherington, Jenkins, Evans, etc., but these can be found in the earlier posts and the SBL paper. One thing I did mention in class is my frustration at how these authors and their opponents (the Christian Apocrypha scholars) avoid communicating with one another. I had hoped to have one of the apologetic authors respond to my paper at the SBL, but efforts to do so have failed. It might have made for a more animated discussion.

When I return from San Diego I will offer a post mortem of my session, as well as some comments on other CA-related papers.