Book Note: Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions (Tony Burke, ed.)

Professor Burke's newest edited volume came my way today: Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha.  It represents the proceedings from the 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium. 

The book collects excellent papers from Bart Erhman, Periluigi Piovanelli, Stanley Porter, Brent Landau, Scott Brown, Pamela Mullins Reaves, Gregory Peter Fewster, Anne Moore, Timothy Pettipiece, Brandon Hawk, Tony Burke, Bradley Rice, Eric M. Vanden Eykel, Caroline Schroeder, James McGrath, Mark Goodacre, and Janet Spittler.

The articles address questions that have long dogged scholars.  Are apocryphal Christian texts fakes or forgeries? Were they intentionally written to deceive Christians?  Do they contain facts or fictions?  Why were they composed?

The answers in this volume are as varied as the stories themselves, from intentional fakes meant to deceive like the fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, to honest attempts to capture ongoing religious revelation like the Revelation of the Magi. 

Texts covered include Acts of Paul, Apocalypse of Paul, Revelation of the Magi, Secret Gospel of Mark, Letter of Peter to Philip, apocryphal Corinthians, Secret Book of John, Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Life of Saint Issa, Gospel of Jesus' Wife, and miscellaneous early Christian papyri.

I think that this volume is a valuable contribution to how we understand authorship of ancient Christian texts, whether we define them as fakes or the real deal.

Book Note: Who Do People Say That I Am? (Vernon K. Robbins)

There is a fantastic new book just published that covers Jesus and the gospels, canonical as well as extracanonical.  Vernon Robbins,

Who Do People Say I Am? Rewriting Gospel in Emerging Christianity

.

Professor Robbins' book is the best there is on the market in my opinion.  I highly recommend it to you, especially if you are looking for a book to teach this subject.

Robbins sets the more commonly known representations of Jesus in the Bible alongside lesser-well-known portraits of him found in texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, and the Acts of John.  He does this, not simply as a rehash of general knowledge, but applying all of his years of accumulated knowledge of orality, rhetoric, cognition and the social fabric of Christianity to the material.  You are face-to-face with Robbins the veteran professor sharing generously his knowledge.

The book is very accessible in terms of style and yet very careful in terms of historical detail.  A perfect match for the non-specialist reader, and specialists from other areas of New Testament study who want to get a handle on the extracanonical material.

Book Note: The Apocryphal Gospels (Ehrman and Plese)

Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Plese (eds.),

The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 

This is a brand new book and an incredibly useful one at that.  A big "THANKS" to Ehrman and Plese for putting this book together!

It is a collection of apocryphal gospels (Infancy Gospels; Ministry Gospels; Sayings Gospels; Passion, Resurrection and Post-Resurrection Gospels).  The book does not include the Coptic gospels from Nag Hammadi or the Berlin Codex, with the exceptions of the Gospels of Thomas and Mary.  The editors also have included the Gospel of Judas from the Tchacos Codex, but the translation is based only on the Kasser-Wurst critical edition.  So it does not yet take into account Ohio fragments whose translation and photographs have been released by Wurst on his website

HERE

. So this translation (like all of them that have been published so far, including my own) needs to be corrected and updated already.

What is great about the volume?  The primary language texts are on the face pages, with translations on the opposite pages.  There are brief introductions to each text, which help orient the readers to some of the main issues for each text. 

There are very few footnotes on critical textual issues, however, so this will not replace the critical editions for researchers.  But it will be very handy to have all these primary texts in one neat handbook for quick reference and use in graduate courses. 

My main criticism is that the bibliographies are uneven and too selective.  They target certain resources, while leaving out other crucial materials on these texts.  This means that the bibliographies are so selective that they are not targeted for the public or for graduate students and researchers who appear to be the volume's targeted audience.  I wonder why the bibliographies are so selective, given that this is a volume of 611 pages, and the bibliographical pages usually take up less than half a page with lots of white space left.  Another page of bibliography on each of the gospels would have made the volume that much better and would have added very little in terms of additional pages.