A couple of interesting blog posts on the publication of translations of lesser known New Testament apocrypha.
http://www.apocryphicity.ca/2016/06/12/2016-csbscsps-more-new-testament-apocrypha-panel-part-1/http://www.apocryphicity.ca/2016/06/12/2016-csbscsps-more-new-testament-apocrypha-panel-part-2/Kloppenborg noted a tendency in Christian Apocrypha to resist the “taming” or “sanitizing” observable in canonical texts: “[the apocrypha] belong to the repertoire of what, in antiquity, was typical of the nature of the gods: they inspired fear and awe. Shape-shifting among gods and heroes is well-attested in antiquity. They visited humans in dreams and visions. They killed or maimed those who dishonored them or who failed to give them their due.” He asked: “is the relative ‘tameness’ of the canonical gospels and the disinclination of the learned Christian writers— Justin, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Eusebius, etc.—fully to embrace part of this repertoire, in spite of their commitments to the notion that Jesus was divine, a matter of a kind of inertia of a ‘core’ tradition that was always dominated by the plain-talking Jesus and Paul’s ignoring of the Jesus tradition; or is it a result of the apologetic instincts of already visible in Luke, and obvious in Justin, Tertullian, Origen and other writers, who for their own reasons did not want to endorse depictions of Jesus that made him too much like Men, Pan, Hermes or Athena…. Do apocryphal traditions provide other glimpses of bits of material that have avoided the editorial hands of apologists?”
Third of the panelists to speak was Alicia Batten, who, incidentally, shared a class of Kloppenborg’s with me in our first year of graduate school at the University of Toronto. She called the MNTA collection a “goldmine,” stating that “the contributors and editors have done an admirable job of delivering thorough introductions to each apocryphon which afford readers with a basic orientation from which they can pursue more focused questions.” She asked about the possibility of broadening the scope of the material to include Muslim texts, referring in this context to traditions about Mary and Jesus from the Qur’an showing points of connection with the Protoevangelium of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Along the same lines she suggested incorporating also the Gospel of Barnabas, a late-medieval Muslim anti-gospel.
Regarding Batten’s suggestion to broaden our scope to include Islamic texts, there is more material to be found in Islamic literature on Jesus outside of the Qur’an, and those who study this literature have noted the parallels with Christian Apocrypha (and certainly we should pay it more attention). Some of our contributors incorporated this research into their entries—namely, Slavomír Céplö’s discussion of the Life of John the Baptist by Serapion and Alin Suciu’s entry for the Investiture of Abbaton. Despite our mandate to focus on texts from the first ten centuries, I am tempted to follow Batten’s suggestion to incorporate Gospel of Barnabas to a future volume, as well as some medieval gnostic texts of the sort mentioned in the Cheese and the Worms (specifically the Secret Supper, known also as the Book of John the Evangelist).
Topic: More New Testament Apocrypha