Importantly, this all occurred without the slightest evidence that Thecla was ever a historical person. Her story, however, obviously made a powerful impact throughout the Mediterranean and was translated into every Christian language from an early point. It is not an exaggeration to say that, at least according to the surviving apocryphal literature, Thecla was more popular as a female patron than the Virgin Mary until the late fifth century. This is precisely when we see the Thecla literature wane and the literature related to the doctrine of the Dormition of the Virgin begin to take hold of the Christian imagination.50 The explosion of Marian apocrypha was certainly aided by the fascinating and early text now called the Protoevangelion of James (second century). This “foregospel” is most often grouped with Apocryphal Gospel texts in modern collections. However, in the earliest period this text was called the Birth of Mary, signaling perhaps that Marian devotion was not as limited as has been suggested.51
As already noted, scholars often associate the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles with the form of the Greek novel.52 This comparison can only be made indirectly with the five “ideal” novels, since their form is much more consistent and they have survived more or less complete (Xenophon of Ephesus perhaps being an epitome).53 More similar in composition and reception history are the other novelistic works from the Second Sophistic, such as Apollonius King of Tyre, the Alexander Romance, and the Jewish novels (from earlier) like Joseph and Aseneth, Judith, Tobit, or the Greek version of Esther.54 Nevertheless, the number of shared motifs between the Apocryphal Acts and almost all of the novels from the Second Sophistic is striking: shipwrecks, brigands, slavery, brothels, travel, suicide, entombment, the reunion of long lost couples, and so on.55 In certain cases it seems that the Apocryphal Acts may even have had a direct effect on the novels of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus.56 This is not the venue to discuss the complex relationship between Apocryphal Acts and the ancient novel, but it is worth reemphasizing that the Acts are not the only Christian texts that demonstrate an awareness of the novelistic style of writing. For instance, dreams and apparitions, common in the ancient novel, appear frequently in apocryphal Gospels and apocalypses. Moreover, one does not have to posit the Apocryphal Acts as a necessary intermediate stage in Christian literary evolution between the New Testament and late antique hagiography. This is the case because, first, papyrological discoveries show that, for the most part, the readership of the novel continued to be strong through the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity.57 Second, narrative fiction shows its influence in many different forms of Christian texts, not only apocryphal, including ecclesiastical history and poetry. For example, one could cite the important “Hymn of the Pearl,” a gnostic verse narrative about a Mesopotamian prince’s journey to Egypt, his imprisonment, self-discovery, and ultimate triumph over evil.58 This text was embedded into the prose Acts of Thomas around 200 CE, though it clearly circulated independently prior to that and has parallels in the early second-century Odes of Solomon.59
Some of the more enigmatic Christian apocryphal texts usually associated with the genre of the novel are found in the corpus of Pseudo-Clementine literature, namely, the Homilies (surviving in Greek) and the Recognitions (surviving in Latin).60 These two texts concern the life of Clement I of Rome and name him as their author, though they focus on the career and teachings of Peter in the East, especially his disputations with Simon Magus (disputations which also serve as the centerpiece of the Acts of Peter).61 The two branches of the literary tradition are related to one another through a common original narrative (the Grundschrift) but diverge substantially from one another in surviving versions.62 The Homilies is more spare in its revision of the narrative, whereas the Recognitions has been sanitized during its translation into Latin by Rufinus.63 The popularity of the Recognitions in the West is represented by a huge number of medieval manuscripts. Syriac epitomes of both branches survive together as part of the earliest dated manuscript in the Western world, copied, according to its colophon, in Edessa in 411 CE.64
43.6 PSEUDEPIGRAPHA, APOCALYPTIC, AND EPISTOLOGRAPHY
In discussions about the pseudepigraphical nature of early Christian apocrypha it is often not sufficiently recognized that writing under the name of a founding father of the religion was extremely common among Hellenistic Jews and that Christian authors adopted the custom in the process of claiming Hellenistic Jewish literature as their own. Recently it has been fashionable to label pseudepigrapha—and many Christian apocryphal texts are just a subset of pseudepigrapha—as “forgeries.” In German, another option is the word Schwindelliteratur, which conveys a sense of “literary hoax” and not just writing under someone else’s name.65 Do pseudepigrapha belong to either category, “forgery” or Schwindelliteratur, or should we be speaking more of a mode of writing employed for various goals? Many scholars would argue that neither category is satisfactory. The pseudepigraphic mode is both less conniving and more interesting than “forgery,” and yet it does not operate at the same level of the complex literary performance of Schwindelliteratur.
To take an important example, many of the most important pseudepigraphic writings consist of apocalyptic visions given to the patriarchs of the Old Testament: these texts fall under the category of “testaments” and comprise a recognizable genre in Jewish and Christian literature. Christian authors saw in these texts an appealing mode of conveying authority within creative discourse. Many varied texts, including the well-known Testament of Abraham (first to second centuries CE), the Enochic corpus (third century BCE to first century CE), 3 Maccabees (first century BCE) fall into this category.66 In almost every case, it is nearly impossible to separate out the original Jewish and Christian elements of these works: as they stand they are, for all intents and purposes, Christian writings preserved, copied, and translated by medieval scribes in every corner of Christendom. On the background of this corpus, however, the pseudepigraphical nature of early Christian apocrypha becomes much clearer.67 Works such as the Apocalypse of Peter (early second century), the Coptic Apocalypse of Paul from Nag Hammadi (originally second century), the Apocalypse of Paul or Visio Pauli (fourth century), and the Apocalypse of Thomas (fourth century) apply the mode of pseudepigrapha to different types of first-person apocalyptic, thus imitating very closely the “testament” or “vision” literature just mentioned.
An important, related genre is the apocryphal epistle, which like the apocryphal apocalypse is written in the first person. Often such texts suggest an emergent literary form in the Second Sophistic which came into its own in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, that of the “question-and-answer” (ἐρωταποκρίσεις).68 The text that is most clearly a crossover between these various genres is the popular Questions of Bartholomew (second to sixth centuries), which discusses in question-answer format (among many other topics) the descent of Christ into Hell (the descensus Christi).
Similarly, the Epistula Apostolorum (late second century) and the Book of Thomas the Contender (Nag Hammadi, second to fourth centuries) are written as dialogue texts and also take the form of letters. Given the vibrancy of the genre of the literary epistle in the Second Sophistic, it is perhaps no surprise that Christians seized upon the form and expanded it into a didactic tool. More unexpected, perhaps, is the fact that this type of container-literature could hold a remarkable number of different episodes and themes. Like the Questions of Bartholomew, the Epistula Apostolorum shares close affinities with the Ascension of Isaiah in its discussion of the Christ’s descent into Hell: there is clearly a fundamental apocalyptic or visionary aesthetic shared between these three texts. However, departing from the apocalyptic aesthetic, the discussion of the descensus Christi in the Epistula Apostolorum occurs as merely one of a number of revelatory answers that the risen Jesus offers to the Apostles in the course of a long session of questions they put to him. Thus, in the Epistula Apostolorum the apocalyptic, epistolary, didactic, and pseudepigraphical modes are all combined together in what seems to be a very early Christian a
pocryphal text.
43.7 CONCLUSION
The narratives of the canonical Gospels and Acts from the New Testament offered enough of a window onto the infancy of Jesus, the careers and martyrdoms of the Apostles, and the End Times that Christian writers and readers were stimulated to create imaginative worlds that extended far beyond what was written in the New Testament. The dramatis personae of the canonical texts sparked a firestorm of literary activity. Moreover, expectations of the imminent return of Jesus coincided with the sufferings of Christians and Jews in various communities throughout the Mediterranean and triggered a spate of apocalyptic visions which drew directly on Jewish literary styles from the Second Temple period. In almost every case there are parallels in genre between corpora called New Testament Apocrypha and Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Both groups include novelistic narrative, apocalyptic, aphoristic, and sapiential literature, epistolography, historiography, hymnography, and prophecy.
The role of storytelling in early Christianity is key to the definition of apocrypha. Christian storytelling is never merely entertainment.69 There is always a measure of the informative, the didactic, or the moralizing in every piece of apocrypha. However, inasmuch as the combination of entertainment and didacticism was a hallmark of many types of Second Sophistic literature, Christian apocryphal stories confirm the prevailing style of the period. Recently, the genres of biography and panegyric have been highlighted as shared literary vehicles between classical and early Christian writing, particularly in the fact that classical biographical literature was shot through with didactic, moralizing, and mimetic imperatives.70 This was true of historical biography like Xenophon’s Kyropaideia as much as it was of the Neoplatonic biographies by Porphyry and Proclus.71 Philosophical biography was a common framework for both classical or pagan and Christian authors, taking expression, for example, in funeral orations and encomia on friendship.72 These modes of writing were so endemic to the high and late Roman Empire that at some point it becomes meaningless to differentiate between “classical” and “Christian” texts. Moreover, a shared goal of much Greek Christian literature from this period seems to have been the subversion of imperial hierarchy and social norms.73 In this goal the Christians were certainly reinforcing, rather than challenging, established habits in Second Sophistic literary ideology.
However, despite all these similarities, it is worth acknowledging that the deluge of Christian apocrypha written during the Second Sophistic is more of an exception to prove the rule than another brick in the familiar edifice. The corpus of apocrypha “proves the rule” of the Second Sophistic in its “dark matter” qualities I spoke of in the introduction. These are, first, that apocrypha is an unknown category for most Classicists, falling as it does well outside the canon. Second, its sheer bulk is staggering, yet all the more exciting in its Mediterranean-wide scope, in its subaltern status and engagement with imperial control, in its use of Greek as a means of competition and subversion, and, perhaps especially, in its willingness to allow neighboring languages and cultures to form a part of its narratives. However, the “exception” part of Christian apocrypha is a big one: the corpus is, after all, Christian in terms of its religious content. While being written, disseminated, translated, and culturally absorbed all within a Roman context, Christian apocrypha represent imaginative worlds that make sense only to the Christian mind.
Indeed, as I have tried to show, Christian apocryphal texts were in no small part responsible for the creation and formation of that same Christian mind: they underpin the Christian conception of the natural and supernatural—in terms of what an author or reader was able to imagine could actually happen in the visible world—as well as the early Christian conception of what it meant to be an identifiable minority within a larger political system. Most of all, perhaps, Christian apocryphal narratives satisfied the early Christian love of storytelling and in that—as a question of taste or aesthetics—they presaged an entire literary history of hagiographical writing in every medieval Christian language.
FURTHER READING
In English, the most commonly used anthologies for New Testament Apocrypha are Elliott 2009 (replacing James [1924] 1953) and Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1991–1992 (largely covering the same texts). For the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha the main anthologies are Charlesworth 1983 (replacing Charles 1913); Bauckham, Davila, and Panayotov 2013 (an extension of Charlesworth 1983); and Sparks 1984. A better gauge of the size and diversity of the apocryphal corpus is the Clavis Apocryphorum Novi Testamenti (Geerard 1992), which lists all the works known up to the time of its publication, and includes papyrus, manuscript, and publication information where available. The most authoritative and complete collection of the apocryphal Gospels is now the German translation of Markschies and Schröter 2012, which represents the first part of a complete revision and expansion of Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1991–1992. A more limited selection of apocryphal Gospels in English, with facing-page original text (for Latin, Greek, and Coptic only), is Ehrman and Pleše 2011. Other important collections include Erbetta 1966–1981 (Italian); Bovon, Geoltrain, and Kaestli 1997–2005 (French); and Santos Otero 2001 (Spanish; Gospels only).
Several important articles by François Bovon have been reprinted together in Bovon 1995 and 2011. Numerous collected volumes devoted to individual apocryphal texts have been published by Peeters under the editorship of Jan Bremmer. Fundamental studies of the conceptual issues surrounding apocrypha and pseudepigrapha include Davila 2005, Junod 1992, Koester 1990, Kraft 2007 and 2009, and Reed 2008 and 2009. New critical editions continue to appear in the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum (Brepols).
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