Freethought & Rationalism Archive

mountainman · 01-05-2008, 07:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roger Pearse

Just try classifying the term 'gospel' based on all this stuff, much of it of no conceivably common genre. All the classifications are arbitrary.

The subject matter is common genre.

Explicitly the Apostles as described in the New Testament
canonical texts, and at least the various "Acts" thereof.

You will have to excuse for the moment my lack of knowledge
on the non canonical texts with the exception of the Acts.
I have not yet moved past looking at the NC Acts.

But at least just these have characters of the same name
as those in the canonical texts published in the Bible. So
the subject matter, inasmuch as the characters presented
in both genres have the same names, and perhaps the same
types of "inter-relationship" (ie: they hung out together),
they were designed as being "common genre".

The question in my mind is why,
by whom and when were the
non-canonical texts actually
written, in relation to their
canonical counterparts.

Best wishes,

Pete Brown

mountainman · 02-11-2008, 05:40 PM

Let us first be clear about what we are dealing with here.
The New Testament apocrypha as a whole
are a textual critic's nightmare

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 94.10.19

D. R. Macdonald, Christianizing Homer, the Odyssey, Plato, and The Acts of Andrew (or via: amazon.co.uk). New York: Oxford University Press,
1994. ISBN 0-19-508722-4.

Reviewed by Robert Lamberton, Washington University

Quote:

The Christian appropriation of Greek polytheist culture in the second century of the common era was, on the whole, not a pretty sight. The principal players were ham-fisted, self-styled philosophers of the order of Justin Martyr and Tertullian, whose claims to teach philosophy amounted to little more than the eviction of the traditions of Greek philosophy from what they defined as the search for truth, and their replacement by a monotonous, scriptural rhetoric, professions of faith, and such inane and ultimately useless equations as "Christ is the logos". Few and far between are the Christian texts that bear witness to any depth of knowledge of polytheist texts, whether philosophical or literary. All in all, the century and a half between the day Paul quoted Aratus to the Areopagites and the time of the confrontations with Greek tradition of the scholarly Alexandrians Clement and Origen offer little to suggest that the nascent Church found time to read the classics or put on a veneer of culture. It appropriated what it could and trampled the rest -- the bulk of the demon-ridden culture of its paranoid vision -- into the mire. The texts of the period are grim and shrill, and even when we reach the richer cultural atmosphere of Alexandria and the higher intellectual standards of Clement and Origen, we search in vain for genuinely protreptic texts, seductive texts that attract rather than proselytize, invite imaginative and intellectual engagement, rather than belabor the all-too-familiar threats, warnings, and injunctions. There is little to give the lie to Lucian's description of his Christian contemporaries: benighted, gullible "poor bastards (kakodaimones) who've convinced themselves that they're going to live forever" (Peregrinus 13). They seem to have been the sworn enemies of any possible pleasure of the text. They generated what is surely the most unsympathetic, in-your-face literature in the Western tradition.

Dennis Ronald MacDonald has been working for some years on a text that goes far to counteract this picture. If the lost original of the apocryphal Acts of Andrew was anything like what he claims it was, and if it was in fact composed in late-second-century Alexandria, then we will simply have to acknowledge that a second-century Christian could and did produce a tale of wit, fantasy, and sophistication, weaving into it themes, motifs, and whole episodes from Homer and Plato and "transvaluing" them into a Christian romance, a deliberate and self-proclaiming fiction of a richly rewarding sort. In his new book, MacDonald presents his reasons for believing that the Acts of Andrew was such a text. I have serious doubts about a great deal of what he claims, but beyond the range of my scepticism enough remains in his arguments to make this an important book that anyone concerned with the literature of the high Empire should read.

Let us first be clear about what we are dealing with here. The New Testament apocrypha as a whole are a textual critic's nightmare.

NT studies lacks a firm chronology.
Luckily, we have Eusebius as a guide.
Oh, and some handwriting opinions.

mountainman · 02-11-2008, 08:10 PM

Here is someone trying to make sense of the "NT Apocrypha".
Richard Bauckham outlines five separate problems with the
currently perceived classification system or nomenclature.

Quote:

THE NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA

Summary of a Lecture by Richard Bauckham on 5 May 1999. [Richard Bauckham is a Professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews. He is a specialist in the Gospel of John; early christology; the Book of Revelation; theological interpretation of scripture; and noncanonical Jewish and Christian literature. He has published numerous books, including a recent collection of essays in the latter area: _The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses_ (Leiden: Brill, 1998).--JRD]

Terminology and definition

There are two traditional terms for this body of literature:

the Apocryphal NT, the title of English collections (Hone 1820, James 1924, Elliott 1993; cf. Sparks' Apocryphal OT),

and the NT Apocrypha, title of the German collections and their English
translations (since the first edition of Hennecke, 1904).

There are several problems with this terminology:

(1) The term 'NT Apocrypha' might suggest a fixed collection of texts, like the OT apocrypha (= deutero-canonical works), whereas in fact we are dealing with a very open category, potentially inclusive of a very large number of works.

(2) Either term might suggest that the works in question were in some sense candidates for inclusion in the NT canon and at some point in the process of the formation of the NT canon were excluded. This would be very misleading. Only three of these works (Apocalypse of Peter, Acts of Paul, Gospel of the Hebrews) were ever listed among the 'disputed' books (antilegomena) which some treated as canonical (reading them as authoritative Scripture in Christian worship). Many which were written before and during the process of canonization are treated by later authors as 'rejected' (apocryphal) works, but for various reasons were complete non-starters, never seriously considered candidates for canonical status. Many more were written during
and after the completion of the canon, not as potentially canonical works or as rivals to the canonical books, but as works functioning to supplement the canon.

(3) The term 'apocrypha,' which came to be used by the Fathers in the sense of 'spurious' or 'rejected' books, suggests literature that was rejected and suppressed in mainstream Christianity. This is true only of some of these works, to a greater or lesser degree, and differently in different periods. The Gnostic works were those first called 'apocrypha' and were vehemently rejected in mainstream Christianity from the second century. But many of the so-called NT apocrypha were not doctrinally unorthodox. Some of these were officially rejected but remained popular in practice. Such works continued to be written by orthodox Chtristians into the early middle ages, and some of the NT apocrypha were extremely popular throughout the middle ages, not suppressed, but not treated as authoritative in the canonical sense (e.g. the infancy Gospels and the apocalypses that revealed the fate of the dead in the afterlife). So the status of these works varies enormously, from those
used only by heretics to those used widely by the orthodox, and with varying kinds of authority or usefulness for those who read them.

(4) If the terms 'Apocryphal NT' and 'NT Apocrypha' should not be understood as implying candidature for and exclusion from the NT canon, what kind of relationship to the NT is envisaged? By classifying the apocryphal literature as Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Apocalypses, the collections suggest that these are works in the same genres as those of the NT texts, and that we are dealing with the same kind of literature that we find in the NT. In fact, this is the case with only quite a small minority of the texts called NT Apocrypha. Most of the apocryphal Gospels are not comparable in literary genre with the
canonical Gospels; the apocryphal Acts of Apostles resemble the canonical Acts in some ways, but also differ sufficiently to constitute a different literary genre; by contrast with the NT, there are very few apocryphal Epistles; and the apocryphal Apocalypses are mostly more like Jewish apocalypses than like the NT Apocalypse of John. Literary genre is not a satisfactory way of defining the way these texts relate to the NT. I suggest rather: the works in question are either attributed to or about NT characters.

(5) The terms 'Apocryphal NT' and 'NT Apocrypha' cannot, of course, cover works which are either attributed to or about *OT* characters. Christians did write such works (mostly apocalypses, but also narrative works), as well as editing Jewish works of this kind. Such works are included, if anywhere, in editions of the OT Pseudepigrapha. This is potentially misleading, because it suggests that the OT Pseudepigrapha are Jewish and the NT Apocrypha Christian. It is especially misleading if a collection of OT Pseudepigrapha takes (Charlesworth's OTP does) as a criterion of inclusion that a work must preserve Jewish traditions, even if in Christian redaction. This means that Christian OT Pseudepigrapha fall between the two stools, and that the examples that do occur, e.g., in Charlesworth's OTP are usually studied only for the sake of their possible Jewish substratum or contents. (Moreover, if we are looking for early Jewish traditions in Christian works, I think we are as likely to find them in the Apocalypse of Peter or the Apocalypse of Paul, as we are in the Ascension of Isaiah or the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah.) Most scholarship on the OT Pseudepigrapha has been interested in them as Jewish literature, so that those which are originally Christian or the Christian redaction of others have been seriously neglected. Responding to these
problems the CCSA includes both 'NT Apocrypha' and 'Christian OT Pseudepigrapha,' refusing artificial distinctions between them, and prefers the term 'Christian apocrypha' for the whole corpus of literature.

The content of the rest of the lecture will be found (in more detail than as given) in the following three published articles

by Richard Bauckham:

"Gospels (Apocryphal)," in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. J. B. Green, S. McKnight and I. H. Marshall (Downers

Grove, Illinois/Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1992) 286-291.
"Apocryphal Pauline Literature," in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, ed. G. F. Hawthorne and R. P. Martin (Downers Grove,

Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993) 35-37.
"Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Literature," in Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments, ed. R. P. Martin

and P. H. Davids (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997) 68-73.

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