Infancy Gospel of Thomas on Youtube

We are into the second week of a junior / senior seminar on the Non-canonical Gospels here at Duke. It's the first time I have taught a course like this at the undergraduate level and it is already proving really stimulating. We took as our first text the Protevangelium of James and we are now moving on to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. It gives me the opportunity to share one of my favourite Youtube clips, an animated version of Infancy Thomas 9:



There is another short video of interest on Youtube that relates to the Infancy Gospel. It is about four minutes long and is clearly a clip from a longer documentary. From the look of it, it is an American (Discovery Channel? History Channel?) piece surveying non-canonical Gospels. Of particular interest in this clip are the comments from John Dominic Crossan, who is as engaging as ever. He comments on Jesus as a "divine brat" in the text, "Dennis the Menace as god", but adds that Jesus learns ultimately that "The function of great power and great wisdom is to do good":



Update (Friday, 9.55): In comments, Tony Burke mentions that the clip above is from Banned from the Bible (History Channel, 2003).

No Other Gospel - Nick Perrin

The Fall 2007 issue of Christian History and Biography features an article of interest by Nicholas Perrin:

No Other Gospel
Despite the appearance of Gnostic "gospels," the early church decided that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were without rival.
by Nicholas Perrin
from Issue 96: The Gnostics Hunger for Secret Knowledge

It turns out that Nick was at school with Dan Brown; and he admits to being "one of the few literate adults living who has not read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code". Count me in the same club; and I have no intention of ever reading it. The short article is nicely written, and it provides a good introduction to the issues from a conservative perspective, though it side steps some of the issues that scholars might wish to highlight. It does not, for example, make clear that the issues under discussion are controversial within the academy, even if it is universally acknowledged in the academy that Dan Brown has no serious understanding of these issues. The most problematic paragraph is this one:

Historically speaking, those touting the apostolic origins of the apocryphal gospels had little to stand on. These texts came much later than the four-fold gospel collection. The canonical gospels were all first-century documents; all four offer credible eyewitness accounts of Jesus of Nazareth. The apocryphal gospels, written generations later, can barely compete with this claim.

This drives too strong a wedge between "canonical gospels" and "apocryphal gospels". We may not be talking about "generations"; that sounds a bit like overstatement. In contemporary New Testament scholarship, the idea that "all four offer credible eyewitness accounts" is a highly dubious claim, and one that should not be made with so little qualification. It is true that there is now a case that the canonical gospels are reliant on eyewitness testimony (Richard Bauckham) but as far as recent New Testament scholarship is concerned, this is a new and highly controversial claim that is only now beginning to be tested, and even Bauckham does not claim that the four are written by eyewitnesses (except perhaps John).

The Strangeness of Biblical and Apocryphal Texts

Over on Apocryphicity, Tony Chartrand-Burke continues his enjoyable series on the Top Ten Faulty Arguments in Anti-Apocrypha Apologetics. One of his top ten is as follows:

9. Characterization of CA texts as containing “bizarre” embroidering (see Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 163-166; Jenkins, Hidden Gospels, p. 105). Certainly some parts of the CA are bizarre to modern readers. But the NT texts too are pretty bizarre. The canonical gospels feature a man who is born from a virgin, speaks to voices from heaven, walks on water, multiplies food, heals afflictions, and rises from the grave. How are these things any less “bizarre” than a talking cross (Gospel of Peter) or a cursing Jesus (Infancy Thomas; see the canonical Acts for plenty of examples of cursing holy men)? We all (scholars and non-scholars) know the canonical texts so well that often we give little thought to how strange these texts are. I like to begin my courses on the Bible by encouraging the students to see the biblical texts in all their “bizarre” glory.

The post reminds me of an exercise I have often done with undergraduates when we begin to explore non-canonical Christian texts. I gather together a series of quotations, some taken from the New Testament, some taken from Christian apocryphal texts, and I put them on a hand-out but do not give the source of the texts. I try to make sure that each quotation is a good paragraph or so. I then ask the students, in class, to study the sheets and to ask themselves whether they think the texts in question come from (a) the New Testament or (b) a non-canonical text. I then ask them to state their reasons. The results vary from group to group, but one of the most memorable experiences I had was of a student who guessed that the coin in the fish's mouth (Matt. 17.24-27) must be a non-canonical text because it was so weird. She was horrified to discover that it was in the Bible. The exercise helps students to think through some of their own presuppositions as they approach texts, and provides an entertaining way of getting them thinking about issues of canonical and non-canonical texts.

The disciples writing the Gospels

Always hoped that I'd be an apostle
Knew that I could make it if I tried
Then when we retire we can write the Gospels
So they'll all talk about us when we have died

That's a bit of Jesus Christ Superstar, of course, from the Last Supper scene. This idea of the disciples themselves writing the Gospels is an old one. It is present, for example, in the ?mid-late second century Apocryphon of James (translation here):

... the twelve disciples were all sitting together and recalling what the Saviour had said to each one of them, whether in secret or openly, and putting it in books.

Apocalypse of Peter on-line

A couple of year's ago (Apocalypse of Peter on-line), I transcribed and uploaded the Greek text of the Apocalypse of Peter from Lic. Dr. Erich Klostermann (ed.), Apocrypha I: Reste Des Petrusevangeliums, Der Petrus-Apocakalypse und des Kerygmati Petri (Bonn: A. Marcus und E. Weber’s Verlag, 1903): 8-11. I have made a couple of minor updates to the MS Word and PDF of the files, which are still found here:

The Apocalypse of Peter (Akhmim Fragment) [MS Word]

Apocalypse of Peter (Akhmim Fragment) [PDF]

István Czachesz URL Update

I've adjusted the URL of Apostolic Commission Narratives in the Canonical and Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles by István Czachesz on my Non-Canonical Christian Texts page.

Apocalypse of Peter on-line

When our post graduate Greek class here were reading Apocalypse of Peter last term, I noticed that there was no electronic text available on-line. So I have created one:

The Apocalypse of Peter (Akhmim Fragment) [MS Word]

I have transcribed it from Lic. Dr. Erich Klostermann (ed.), Apocrypha I: Reste Des Petrusevangeliums, Der Petrus-Apocakalypse und des Kerygmati Petri (Bonn: A. Marcus und E. Weber’s Verlag, 1903): 8-11. It's in MS Word format, but I'll add a PDF version later on. It uses Palatino Linotype, which is a unicode font. I am encouraging people to send corrections to me at M.S.Goodacre@bham.ac.uk so that we can ensure the most accurate text possible.

Update (20.34): thanks to Danny Zacharias for providing this PDF:

Apocalypse of Peter (Akhmim Fragment) [PDF]

Update (23.52): Ricoblog comments.