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.

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.