Abstract
In a joint session at the 2022 annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Patristic Studies and the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Mona Tokarek LaFosse assembled a panel of reviewers to engage with the texts presented in the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (Eerdmans, 2020). This article is a response to those papers by Tony Burke, the editor of the volume. The response addresses a number of themes raised by the reviewers, including the selection and arrangement of the texts, their troubling depictions of race and gender, the role of orality in their creation, and how the texts can be used in the classroom.
The second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures was released in July 2020, five months or so after the COVID-19 pandemic led to closures of universities and the suspension of in-person academic gatherings. This review panel was originally planned to coincide (roughly) with the volume’s release date; as I write this response, the third volume is in production with the publisher. Three volumes in seven years is a rapid rate of speed for a project like this. But the short time between the second and third volumes is due to the publisher’s desire to keep the volumes uniform in size, and the second volume ran over the limit by 100 pages. As a consolation for having to remove some of the contributions, the publisher granted us a third volume (not guaranteed at that time). We had five texts already completed, and I did not want the contributors to wait too long to see their work published. There are no plans as yet for a fourth volume, though the publisher has said they are willing to continue the series; I am just not sure I am yet.
And while I am on the subject of contributors, they should receive the praise here for what they have accomplished. I was continually surprised and delighted by what I learned from their work. When you stretch, as we have, the geographical and temporal limits of what is considered ‘Christian Apocrypha’, you quickly move out of your scholarly comfort zone. I could not have completed this project without the help of patristics scholars, medievalists, Byzantinists, Hagiographa specialists, Coptologists, Syriacists, and so on.
And Canadians. The origins of the series go back to a gathering of North American Christian Apocrypha scholars at the University of Ottawa in 2006 titled ‘Christian Apocrypha for the new millennium: Achievements, prospects and challenges’. In attendance were some of the heavyweights in Christian Apocrypha scholarship and some rising stars from Canada (including convener Pierluigi Piovanelli, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Lily Vuong, Dominique Côté, Timothy Pettipiece, Paul-Hubert Poirier, Louis Painchaud and Tony Burke) and the USA (Dennis MacDonald, François Bovon, Stephen Shoemaker and Cornelia Horn). Many of the papers were published, along with additional essays, a decade later (Piovanelli and Burke, 2015). In the final session of the event, discussion turned to the creation of a project that would highlight the work of North American scholars. European scholarship was well represented in collections in French (Bovon et al., 1997–2005), German (Schneemelcher, 1987–1989; new edition by Markschies and Schröter, 2012) and Italian (Erbetta, 1966–1981; Moraldi, 1971), and even in two major compendia from the UK (first by MR James (1924), then later revised by JK Elliott (1993)). But there was nothing comparable in North America. No firm plans for a group project were made at that time, but the seed of the idea for New Testament Apocrypha was planted, bearing fruit in its first volume in 2016 (on the planning of the two volumes, see Burke, 2012, 2019).
The three reviewers of my work have given me much to think about, and since there is some overlap in their comments, I will respond thematically rather than individually.
Selection of texts
The first things that readers consider when they open a compendium are the selection and arrangement of the texts. Scholars love to challenge categories and question not only what topics or texts appear in a volume but also which scholars are included (ideally a balance of career stage, gender and racial identity). The introduction to the volume does discuss some of these issues as a response to reviews of the first volume. But essentially what gets included really depends on the interests and areas of expertise of the contributors; unlike most other compendia, which are arranged by category (e.g. Schneemelcher’s (1987–1989), and now Markschies and Schröter’s (2012), first volume covers gospels; the second examines acts, epistles and apocalypses), New Testament Apocrypha includes texts from across the entire range of genres in each volume. Sometimes, I do reach out to my Apocrypha colleagues with the hope of having a particular text covered. For example, once it was apparent that a few Johannine apocalyptica were to be included in the second volume, I went looking for contributors who could work on the other known texts in the corpus. Temporally, we generally include texts composed before the tenth century, but this is applied loosely, given that determining the time of composition is difficult and sometimes later texts contain earlier material. Charles suggests we look at texts from more recent centuries and I, too, would like to see more work on such texts. The study of ‘modern Apocrypha’ – such as The Life of St Issa and The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife – is also one of the areas of interest that characterizes North American scholarship (expressed in Piovanelli (2005) and in several papers in Burke (2017)), and would set this series apart from the European compendia. Bradley Rice and I have discussed co-editing a separate volume on modern Apocrypha; with luck, that will appear in the coming years. It would be a welcome replacement of the two major (and openly hostile) works on the material by Edgar J Goodspeed (1931) and Per Beskow (1981).
It is interesting to me to see in reviews and conversations which texts in the volume have attracted the most attention. Hannan enjoyed The Adoration of the Magi, and LaFosse and Charles discuss The Acts of Thomas and His Wonderworking Skin. 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John has also seen some resurgence of interest due to its inclusion in the volume. I am not sure what to make of these interests, but it is gratifying to see newly published texts or revisited texts enter or re-enter scholarship because of the series. Regarding previously published texts, like 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, Charles asks why these particular works were included. The decision is based on the expansion of access to manuscripts; many texts published about a century ago were based on one or a few manuscripts, and over time it has been determined that these manuscripts are inferior to more recent discoveries. In such cases, the goal is to establish a better text, and a better translation. In one case, the fragmentary Sethian Dialogue of the Revealer and John, there are no new manuscripts, but the text seems to have escaped many people’s notice – even scholars of Gnosticism. I thought it was worth revisiting so that it could be given a more comprehensive examination.
The arrangement of texts presents its own challenges because there is great fluidity of genre in Christian Apocrypha, not only among texts but also within texts. In general, the volumes follow the traditional categories of gospels, epistles, and so on. But what do you do with a text like The Epistle of Pelagia? Despite its title, the text is not an epistle at all, and its content focuses on an episode in the travels of Paul, so it would be more at home with apocryphal acts. In the end, I thought it best to let the title be my guide and placed it with epistles – which is not so strange given that there are several ‘epistles’ in the New Testament that are not epistles either! Another example of challenging categories is the Coptic apostolic memoirs, which feature episodes from the life of Jesus, or post-Resurrection appearances, or tales of apostles, wrapped up in pseudepigraphical patristic homilies (on this category of texts, see the seminal work of Suciu, 2017). Here, content was more often the guide – if a memoir focuses on Jesus’ post-Resurrection teaching, for example, it went in apocalypses; if on his earthly life, in gospels, and so on. The second volume also introduced a new category of texts – church orders – which is not a traditional canonical category, but, as I mention in the introduction, the Ethiopian canon contains three church-order texts, and some early New Testament codices (Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus) include some supplementary texts with contents that place them outside of the usual genres (The Epistle of Barnabas, The Shepherd of Hermas), so I think there is a good precedent for broadening the categories a little.
Presentation
Charles and LaFosse ask why some texts are presented in parallel columns. With something like The Apocalypse of Thomas, which has two distinct recensions, it seemed best to present the material in parallel so that readers can clearly see where they differ. But why do this with The Investiture of Michael, given that the three witnesses are not that different from one another? The decision in these cases was due to the nature of the sources and to conventions in the study of Coptic texts. Many of the manuscripts are fragmentary because they were dismembered and sold to different institutions. They are now being rejoined, at least virtually, by scholars working to reconstruct the texts. Thus, it is important in that field to make it clear where each fragment begins and ends. Another reason for parallel columns is because it is difficult to determine which source has primacy. One of my contributions, 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, is extant in two manuscripts with varying contents; rather than choose one as the base text and place readings from the other in the notes, it seemed more prudent to offer both in parallel so that the reader can see clearly the range of the evidence. This approach also reflects the goals of New Philology, which holds that every iteration of a text has its own story to tell. The search for the ‘original text’ is no longer the primary goal for many text critics, particularly in the study of Christian Apocrypha where there is such wide variation in the traditions.
Difficult contents
Charles mentions the texts’ gender representation (which can be both positive and negative), and both Charles and LaFosse bring up their often fraught portrayal of ‘the Jews’. Also troubling are portrayals of race – I am thinking specifically here about the description of resurrection bodies in 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, which reads: ‘They will be neither fair of skin, nor red of skin, nor black of skin; but all will rise in one appearance and one stature’ (10.4; Brannan, 2020). And the third volume contains two texts in which demons are described as ‘Ethiopian’. This depiction of demons has not gone unnoticed in scholarship – interested readers may consult the work of David Brakke (2001, 2006). Charles mentions also issues of colonialism (both the texts’ production and the circumstances behind the discovery of certain manuscripts); as Hannan says, there is a very small reference in the introduction to The Adoration of the Magi to the ‘colonialist expeditions’ that extracted manuscripts from Turfan (Bremer-McCollum, 2020: 3). But Charles is right that we could do more to acknowledge the troubling origins of the manuscripts we use in constructing our translations. The field has turned its attention to origin stories in recent years – Maia Kotrosits (2012) has been a leader in the re-examination of the discovery story of the Nag Hammadi codices and its connection to colonialist prejudices. Another discovery story that needs a more critical examination is the Edfu manuscripts (from where we get the manuscript of The Mysteries of John). LaFosse mentions embodied experiences, which is another area of exploration that has not yet been applied to apocryphal texts (along with disability studies and 2SLGBTQ+ (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other) perspectives). In these areas, our field lags a little behind New Testament Studies and other cognate disciplines – many of us are working still on publishing and translating the texts – but these are avenues of interest, and perhaps had we begun production of the series today, some space would have been devoted to their discussion.
Intercultural interaction
Somewhat related are Hannan’s comments on the Persian and Zoroastrian interaction evident in The Adoration of the Magi and how awareness of this text helps to point us all in the direction of global or transregional approaches to Christianity. Consider, too, Christian interactions with Islam. Two of the texts in the volume indicate contacts with Islamic traditions and practices (The Investiture of the Archangel Michael and A Homily on the Life of Jesus and His Love for the Apostles). This is another fruitful area of study that is made possible by expanding our definition of what constitutes ‘Christian Apocrypha’ to include texts composed after the first several centuries. We can look forward also to a text in the third volume called The Gospel of Twelve, which deals specifically with the Syrian Christian reaction to the expansion of Islam.
Editing
LaFosse praises the fluidity of the introductions, which differ at times depending on the content or the complexities of interpreting the text. As an editor, I aim for consistency and much of my work on the series is about attaining that (particularly for such things as bibliographical entries). Much effort has been made, then, to have each introduction follow largely the same structure (summary, overview of manuscripts and editions, etc.) when possible. The inconsistency of terminology for the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, though, is an unfortunate oversight. As for the number of parallels cited, the more the better, I think, and what is included depends on what we (the authors, the editor and colleagues who read the contributions before publication) can manage to find. It takes a village.
Orality
LaFosse raises an interesting point about the role of orality in the creation of these texts. Early scholars of Apocrypha (and some more recent) have had what I think is an overly romantic notion of the origins of these texts as stories told by ‘simple folk’, as LaFosse says (quoting Bull and Jenott, 2020: 553). The same is said of stories of Jesus that led to the creation of the Gospels. I am more inclined to think of the main vehicle for the transmission of canonical and noncanonical texts as scribal elites (or better, monastics). They are the ones who tend to fuss over the issues we see in the texts (both orthodoxy and orthopraxy) and are, of course, the ones who write them. If stories were passed on orally, I would think it would be among this group rather than the non-literate. Take later (post-third-century) apocryphal acts, for example. Some of these were written to institute feast days; some to encourage pilgrimage to particular sites. This is all ‘top-down’ creation and transmission. Even texts that look like they had oral origins – like the apostolic memoirs with their homiletic framework – are fictional in their depiction of the circumstance of their delivery (they were not really homilies delivered by these individuals on the specific days mentioned in the texts), though likely these texts were delivered orally to Coptic Christians as readings on festival dates to encourage devotion to the saints (and donations to the holy site). Additionally reflective of oral performance, and this is mentioned also by Charles, is the presence of liturgical elements in the memoirs – sections structured as hymns that one can imagine would have been recited by a congregation. These sections could draw on already established practice or were intended to create such practices; we do not know much about whether they did function this way, but it is interesting to see at least the efforts by these writers to establish Christian practice through the use of Apocrypha. At the same time, however, some voices were condemning others for creating such texts (as we see with John of Parallos’s Homily against the Heretical Books, which is included in the volume as an appendix to The Investiture of the Archangel Michael, the very text that John condemns). Free-floating tales like The Rebellion of Dimas, a story of the good thief inserted in a copy of The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, are also possible evidence of orally circulating material achieving written form, though they could be simply the creation of the particular copyists who first added them to the texts.
e-Clavis
Hannan offers some praise for the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature’s e-Clavis. The resource was created in 2015 and was the recipient of the 2020 Norman E Wagner Award for innovative use of technology. The number of entries for texts recently surpassed 250, and there are roughly 100 to go; the site also features over 400 Manuscripta apocryphorum pages, which contain full descriptions and links to images, and another 26 Materiae apocryphorum pages with information on pilgrimage souvenirs, book covers and other Apocrypha-related artefacts. It seems to have found an audience – the site was visited by 20,000 separate users in 2022. Hannan mentions how New Testament Apocrypha is integrated into e-Clavis – every text in the volume has an e-Clavis page, and readers of the volume are directed to the site for updates to the bibliography and manuscript sources. I have considered greater integration of e-Clavis into the volumes of New Testament Apocrypha, but I am a bit resistant in all of my scholarship to cite online resources that can be here one day and gone the next. But I am starting to be more confident about the endurance of e-Clavis, and we recently introduced to the site our own clavis numbers for each text (ECCA), which we hope scholars will use as references, along with other clavii, such as BHG (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca) and CANT (Clavis apocryphorum Novi Testamenti).
New Testament Apocrypha in the classroom
The mandate of the series to follow an expansive definition of Christian Apocrypha makes me wonder about the utility of the volumes. Certainly, the materials should be attractive to patristics scholars, but given that most of the texts are post-Constantinian, how might they be useful to New Testament scholars? I appreciate Hannan’s comments about how some particular texts could be used in his classes. His mention of The Life of Judas makes me think of another point that could be made. This was a fairly popular text, with about 50 manuscripts extant in Latin and versions in Armenian, Middle Welsh, Middle English and modern Greek. Texts like this had more impact on medieval Christian piety than some canonical works, and I think that is worth discussing with students. A few other examples: in the first volume, we include The Tiburtine Sibyl, a text that was more widely read and more authoritative in some respects throughout the Middle Ages than the canonical Revelation; the third volume includes The Acts of John by Prochorus, extant in over 150 Greek manuscripts and influential in art and iconography related to the apostle (the manuscripts of Revelation often feature scenes in the life of John taken from this text and other apocryphal acts of John); and four texts in the second volume are essentially sequels to Revelation, offering additional insights about the end times delivered either to John or by John. These texts are worth mentioning to students when discussing the impact and transmission of the Book of Revelation. Also of interest (again mentioned by Hannan) is The Life of Mary Magdalene. We frequently tell our students that the traditional portrayal of Magdalene as a repentant prostitute is not present in the New Testament gospels, but they should know also that this portrayal is a western preoccupation that is not shared with eastern Christian churches. I encourage everyone to consider how even ‘late’ Apocrypha can be of some use in courses on ‘early’ Christianity. I wish to thank Mona Tokarek LaFosse, Ronald Charles and Sean Hannan for engaging with the volume and giving me much to think about in my study of apocryphal Christian texts. I am grateful also to all of my Canadian colleagues and friends in the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies and Canadian Society for Patristic Studies for their support of the series.
