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.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am teaching a course this semester on the New Testament Apocrypha (while I prefer “Christian Apocrypha,” NTA has more brand-name recognition). I’m hoping to integrate our discussions in class into blog postings on Apocryphicity in order to encourage participation from the students (thus killing two birds with one stone).

Our first lecture of the term took place Wednesday night (Sept. 19). 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 recent 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 forms of Christianity in Edessa was Marcionite (followed soon by Bar Daisan who championed the use of Tatian’s Diatessaron over Marcion’s gospel). 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.