The apocryphal texts we have examined so far focus primarily on the life of Jesus, from his birth to his early resurrection appearances. The texts are similar in many ways to the canonical Gospels, which also present tales of Jesus, and to Revelation, in which Jesus takes John on a visionary journey. But the New Testament contains more than Gospels and apocalypses. The four canonical Gospels are followed by the Acts of the Apostles, an account of the early years of the Church following Jesus’ death, and an assortment of letters, by Paul, Peter, James, Jude and John. These texts also have counterparts among the Christian Apocrypha in tales of the missionary journeys of individual apostles and in additional letters not found in the New Testament. Among the Apocrypha also are tales of other figures in Jesus’ life, such as his mother Mary, his father Joseph, Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. The texts provide readers with biographical information absent from the New Testament. But, as with the gospel materials, the goal of the texts is never simply to ‘fill in’ gaps. Some of them aim also to establish or promote devotional sites where pilgrims can view the saints’ remains. Others are written to support or establish points of Christian doctrine, such as the assumption of the Virgin Mary, body and soul, into heaven. And still others portray their subjects as embodying the beliefs and practices of their communities – beliefs and practices that eventually were declared heretical and are known today only because the texts somehow survived destruction.
Legends and writings of the apostles
According to the canonical book of Acts, Jesus finished his 40 days of post-resurrection teaching and then sent the apostles off on their missionary journeys. Though most of the Acts focuses on the exploits of Peter and Paul, some of the text’s more memorable stories feature the apostle Philip. In Acts 8.4–25, Philip preaches in Samaria and encounters a local magician named Simon – known usually by the name Simon Magus, or Simon the magician. Peter and John come to Samaria at Philip’s request and bestow upon the community the power of the Holy Spirit. Simon offers the apostles money in exchange for this power but is rebuffed for his ‘simony’. This is Simon’s ultimate legacy: his name synonymous with the sin of paying for sacraments or positions in the Church. As we will see, the apocryphal writers have much more to say about Simon, but in Acts his story ends with him repenting of his offence. Then Philip is spirited away to a desert road where he converts and baptizes an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8.26–40). After this interlude, Acts shifts its focus to Paul, and the text finishes with the apostle preaching in Rome.
It has long been suspected that the author of Acts constructed his text based on oral or written tales of the apostles. Perhaps these same sources contributed to other accounts of the apostles’ activities found principally in a body of texts known as the ‘apocryphal acts’. The apocryphal acts report the missionary activities of individual apostles in places assigned to them for evangelization by Jesus. Various sources mention this apportioning of duties; the earliest is Origen, whose account also includes some information that may be derived from the apocryphal acts:
"The holy apostles and disciples of our Saviour were scattered over the whole world. Thomas, tradition tells us, was chosen for Parthia, Andrew for Scythia, John for Asia, where he remained till his death at Ephesus. Peter seems to have preached in Pontus, Galatia and Bithynia, Cappadocia and Asia, to the Jews of the Dispersion. Finally he came to Rome where he was crucified, head downwards at his own request. What need be said of Paul, who from Jerusalem as far as Illyricum preached in all its fullness the gospel of Christ, and later was martyred in Rome under Nero?"
(Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.1, appealing to Origen’s Commentary on Genesis 3)
When they reach their destinations, the apostles preach, convert, work miracles, battle magicians, encounter conflict, and ultimately meet their ends, usually through martyrdom. The five earliest apocryphal acts – those of John, Paul, Peter, Andrew and Thomas – were written in the late second to early third century. Despite the popularity of the acts, representatives of proto-orthodox and orthodox Christianity seem to have had an uneasy relationship with the tales. Early writers seemed comfortable with them; indeed, the Acts of Paul even came close to being considered canonical in some areas, and a portion of the text, 3 Corinthians, was included in the Bibles of eastern churches for centuries. But by the fourth century, orthodox Christianity either edited the apocryphal acts to omit objectionable content or reduced them to just ‘martyrdoms’. Thanks to the orthodox pruning of the apocryphal acts, reconstructing the original texts can be very difficult. Today, only the Acts of Thomas exists in full.
The origins of the apocryphal acts are somewhat mysterious. They do not seem dependent on the canonical Acts, nor are they clearly dependent on one another; yet they share certain common literary and theological elements. In many ways they resemble ancient Greek and Roman novels. Like today’s novels, the Graeco-Roman novels are essentially lengthy narratives; they developed and enjoyed their heyday in the first to fourth centuries CE. One of the best-known novels is the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Flavius Philostratus, which tells the story of a real-life wandering philosopher and wonder-worker of the first century. The apocryphal acts, too, recount the teachings and activities of historical miracle-workers; but thematically they have more in common with a subgenre of the novel known as ‘romances’. The romances, such as Chariton’s Callirhoe and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, follow a stereotypical structure: two young protagonists are separated and then later reunited after a series of adventures and journeys; through it all they remain chaste and faithful to one another. In the apocryphal acts, however, the theme of the romances is inverted: the apostles interact with young women, but there is no consummation; instead, the women deny their former romantic partners and join the apostles in a life of chastity. Looked at another way, the acts can be seen as classic love triangles, with a ruler (representing society) vying for the affections of a woman with another man, the apostle (representing Christianity and/or Jesus).
The theology behind the apocryphal acts is represented in the apostle who lives an ascetic life and advocates celibacy for everyone. This lifestyle may have little attraction to modern readers, but what remains appealing are the important roles played by women in the texts. At times, the women, not the apostles, are the stars of the acts. This has led some commentators to argue that the apocryphal acts were written by and perhaps even for women, to demonstrate how conversion to ascetic Christianity could bring liberation from the restrictive expectations placed on women in societies of the time. It’s an intriguing possibility, but other scholars see the female characters as the least important element of the love triangle – the real drama is the conflict that takes place between the apostles and the rulers, between the sacred powers and the secular authorities.
There is not sufficient space here to discuss all of the apocryphal acts and their numerous medieval revisions. Many of these revisions are not even available in English translations. We will focus our discussion instead on three of the five early apocryphal acts, along with stories of Judas, and some other texts related to the apostles. The activities of the remaining six apostles are recorded in their own acts or martyrdoms, though these texts have attracted far less interest from scholars because they were written somewhat later than the five early apocryphal acts. Some of the later acts, along with orthodox revisions of the early acts, also circulated as a group in the popular Latin collection known as the Apostolic History attributed to Abdias, the first bishop of Babylon, and in the Ethiopic–Arabic Contendings of the Apostles. Several well-known disciples of the apostles – including Mark, Luke, Timothy and Titus – also star in their own texts, as do a few prominent members of the Church introduced in the canonical Acts: Matthias, Barnabas, Stephen and Ananias.
Sources and studies
For a recent and comprehensive survey of the literature, see Hans-Josef Klauck, The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The translations used in the following discussion are from J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 229–533, unless otherwise noted. On women as composers of the apocryphal acts see Stevan L. Davies, The Revolt of the Widows and Virginia Burrus, Chastity as Autonomy. Summaries of the later apocryphal acts are found in J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 512–33 and Hans-Josef Klauck, The Apocryphal Acts, pp. 231–53.
The Acts of John
The Acts of John is an ideal place to start our investigation of the apocryphal acts because it is indicative of the style and interests of the corpus as well as the difficulties involved in studying them. Originally the Acts of John was about as long as the Gospel of Matthew, but now only two-thirds of it survives. Scholars have cobbled together its contents from a variety of sources. These include a fourth-century fragment from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy. 850), a handful of Greek manuscripts of isolated stories, and numerous manuscripts in multiple languages of the conclusion to the text: John’s metastasis (or ‘departure’ from life; unlike the other apostles, John did not die a martyr). There is still uncertainty as to the ordering of the materials; for example, chapters originally numbered 87 to 105, found in only one Greek manuscript, are now believed to have once stood between 36 and 37.
Several stories within the Acts of John reflect the apocryphal acts’ interest in celibacy. In the first story (chs 48—54), a young farmer kills his father for warning him not to sleep with the wife of a fellow labourer. In despair over his crime, the farmer prepares to kill the woman, her husband and himself. Then the apostle John appears on the scene. John restores the young man’s father to life, but the farmer, still seeking revenge on the object of his lust, cuts off his genitals and throws them at the woman. John then admonishes him for such an extreme response, saying it is not his genitals that were the source of his problems but his passions.
In the second story (chs 60—61), John and his companions stay overnight at an inn. To his dismay, John’s bed is infested with bedbugs. He commands the bugs to leave his bed and they do so, gathering in the corner of the room until he commands them to return to the bed in the morning. How is this story about celibacy? Well, in Greek the words for ‘bug’ and ‘girl’ are very similar to one another; an astute reader of the text in Greek would recognize that the story is really about John ordering women from his bed.
Finally, the third story (chs 62—86) introduces us to Callimachus, who covets John’s companion Drusiana. When Drusiana became Christian, she refused to sleep with her husband Andronicus. In response, he locked her up in a tomb saying, ‘Either I’ll have you as a wife, as I had you before, or you must die!’ (63). Fortunately, Drusiana was able to persuade Andronicus to adopt Christianity and celibacy just as she did. But now Drusiana must deal with the advances of a second man, Callimachus. Distraught over having brought him to sin, Drusiana dies of grief. Undaunted, Callimachus persuades Andronicus’s steward Fortunatus to help him gain access to Drusiana’s tomb so that he can defile her body. Later, John and his other companions arrive and see Fortunatus slain by a serpent. Callimachus, though, has repented of his sins after encountering an angel who came to protect Drusiana’s body. The story finishes with John raising Drusiana to life; in turn she raises Fortunatus, but he refuses to repent and eventually succumbs to the poison of the snake bite.
Another major section of the text (chs 87—105) features a dialogue between John and Drusiana about Jesus. This section bears a distinctly Docetic flavour – that is, Jesus is portrayed as only ‘appearing’ (from the Greek dokeo) to be human. John narrates the time when he and his brother James were called by Jesus to join his ministry. At first John sees Jesus as a man ‘fair and comely, and of a cheerful countenance’ (88), but James sees him as a child. Later, Jesus appears to John as a man, bald-headed with a thick and flowing beard, but to James as a youth whose beard is just starting. This polymorphic (‘many-formed’) portrayal of Jesus is confusing to John, but it clearly demonstrates to the reader that Jesus is not like normal humans. Indeed, Jesus is said to never close his eyes nor leave footprints; he is even ghostlike – John says, ‘sometimes when I meant to touch him, I met a material and solid body; and at other times again when I felt him, the substance was immaterial and bodiless and as if it were not existing at all’ (93). Polymorphic depictions of Christ are not unique to the Acts of John; the motif occurs in a number of texts from the Christian Apocrypha, including the Acts of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, the Secret Book of John and the Revelation of the Magi.
Next follows the most fascinating portion of the text: a rival account of the Passion of Jesus. The events take place before Jesus’ arrest. Jesus is with the apostles, and he asks them to join him in a hymn. The hymn is mostly a series of contradictory statements, followed by the audience’s response of ‘Amen’ – for example,
"I will flee and I will stay; I will adorn, and I will be adorned; I will be united, and I will unite; I have no house, and I have houses; I have no place, and I have places; I have no temple, and I have temples."
The meaning of the hymn becomes clear after Jesus’ arrest. Having fled along with the other disciples, John hides in a cave at the Mount of Olives. There Jesus appears to him, bathed in light, and says,
"John, to the multitude down below in Jerusalem I am being crucified, and pierced with lances and reeds, and gall and vinegar is given me to drink. But to you I am speaking, and pay attention to what I say".
What follows is a description of the cross, not as the physical instrument of Jesus’ death, but as the symbolic ‘cross of light … which has united all things by the Word’ (98—99). And the body that hangs upon that wooden cross is not truly Jesus. So, he can both suffer and suffer not, be hanged and not hang. Only John is given this knowledge, and Jesus warns him that others will not understand: ‘I was reckoned to be what I am not, not being what I was to many others; but they will call me something else, which is vile and not worthy of me’ (99). It is tempting to see behind this section of the text evidence of the conflict partially visible in the canonical letters of John, which discuss a division in the community that led to the departure of certain members who refused to confess that ‘Jesus Christ [had] come in the flesh’ (1 John 4.2–3; and 2 John 7). The Acts of John and the canonical epistles can be seen, perhaps, as the products of two groups of Christians branching out from the community behind the Gospel of John, each having their own particular views about the divinity of Jesus. The full-blown Gnosticism of the Apocryphon of John, discussed in the previous chapter, may reflect a further stage in the development of the Acts of John’s Docetic view of Jesus.
The Acts of Paul
Paul, the famous letter writer of the New Testament and self-professed apostle to the Gentiles, is well represented in the Christian Apocrypha, though not always in flattering ways. His evangelizing activities are narrated in the Acts of Paul, the earliest attested of the apocryphal acts. It is mentioned by Tertullian around 200 CE, and both Origen and Hippolytus (c. 204) quote from it without any sense of it being heretical. Even in the fourth century some Christians continued to value the text; this is reflected by Eusebius, who considers the Acts of Paul a ‘spurious’ writing (along with the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter), but not heretical. Like the Acts of John, much of the Acts of Paul is now lost. What remains are principally three large units which also circulated independently of each other: the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Corinthian Correspondence (featuring 3 Corinthians), and Paul’s martyrdom. The theme of the text, as with the other apocryphal acts, is sexual abstinence. It infuses virtually every episode of the text and is the substance of Paul’s preaching. There is some basis for Paul’s interest in abstinence in his authentic letters – in 1 Corinthians he writes that it is best that Christians not marry, but if they are married, that they live as if they were not (1 Corinthians 7). In the Acts, however, sexual continence is so important that resurrection is promised as a reward specifically to those who keep themselves pure.
The Acts of Paul and Thecla is perhaps the best-known story of all the apocryphal acts. That is because its portrayal of the virgin Thecla, who baptizes and preaches as an apostle, offers tantalizing evidence for a form of early Christianity in which women had important roles, roles denied women even in some modern churches. If the available manuscripts are any indication, Thecla enjoyed great popularity in antiquity – we have 80 Greek manuscripts, four Latin versions, and translations into eastern languages. And throughout medieval times, Thecla, as the first woman martyr, was a much venerated saint.
Thecla’s story begins when Paul, accompanied by Demas and Hermogenes (mentioned as opponents of the faith in 2 Timothy 4.10 and 1.15), enter the city of Iconium. Paul begins to preach and, in a series of beatitudes, he imparts his teaching on sexual abstinence:
"blessed are those who have kept the flesh chaste, for they shall become a temple of God; blessed are the continent, for God shall speak with them … blessed are those who have wives as not having them, for they shall experience God."
Thecla is entranced by Paul’s words. But her mother Theoclia and her fiancé Thamyris worry about the effect these teachings are having on her. Through the scheming of Demas and Hermogenes, Thamyris manipulates the city’s proconsul to imprison Paul. Undaunted, Thecla visits Paul by night. When she is discovered, she is brought before the proconsul, who condemns her to be burned at the stake. Paul, on the other hand, is merely flogged and expelled from the city. Thecla needs to die as an example to other women who refuse to fulfil their appointed roles in Iconium society – to obey and care for parents, and to marry and be submissive to husbands. So disruptive is Thecla to order in Iconium that her own mother bursts out, ‘Burn the wicked one; burn her who will not marry in the midst of the theatre, that all the women who have been taught by this man may be afraid’ (3.20). But God has other plans for Thecla. At the last moment, Thecla is saved from the fire by a miraculous torrent of rain and hail.
Thecla rejoins Paul and together they journey to Antioch. There an influential citizen named Alexander becomes enamoured with her. Thecla refuses him and humiliates him in public by tearing his cloak and pulling off his crown. For this she is sent before the governor, who condemns her to die in the arena in battle against the beasts. But in Antioch, unlike her native Iconium, the women call out to Thecla in support, and even some of the female animals refuse to harm her. The climax of the battle comes when Thecla throws herself into a pool of water filled with seals; there she baptizes herself and then a bolt of lightning kills the seals. Further attempts to kill Thecla fail until finally Alexander begs the governor to set her free. Thecla meets up with Paul again and he commissions her to preach the gospel. Her missionary journeys first take her to Iconium where she makes peace with her mother and discovers that her former fiancé Thamyris has died. Thecla then travels to Seleucia where tradition says she lived as an ascetic for 72 years.
The conflict over the roles of women in the Acts of Paul and Thecla had real-life consequences. Tertullian shows disdain for the text because women were appealing to it to defend their right to teach and baptize (Baptism 17). He reveals also that the author of the Acts was an elder, or presbyter, in Asia who wrote the text in Tertullian’s day in order to add to the prestige of Paul. As punishment, the presbyter was removed from office. Thecla also may reflect discussion about women’s roles in the Church from as far back as the early second century. The canonical Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus) defend the traditional roles of women, encouraging them to be submissive to their husbands, love their children and be good managers of the household (see particularly Titus 2.3–5). Were the Pastoral letters written in reaction to the Acts of Paul and Thecla? If so, the Asian presbyter must be considered a compiler of earlier stories of Paul, not their author. If not, certainly they react to a similar point of view that calls for women to be allowed to participate more actively in the Church.
Scholars interested in the Christian Apocrypha’s proto-feminist portrayals of women or their positive female imagery are frequently cautioned by critics that the texts very likely had no bearing on Christian practice and relationships. But in Thecla we have that much sought-after concrete example of a text that was written and used by Christians to argue for expanded choices for women in society and some level of equality between men and women in Christian communities.
Paul’s renown as a writer of letters does not go ignored by writers of the Christian Apocrypha. An episode in the Acts of Paul set in Corinth includes a copy of a letter that Paul is said to have written to the community. In the story, two men, Simon and Cleobius, come to Corinth saying,
"There is no resurrection of the flesh but only of the spirit, and the body of man is not created by God, and God did not create the world and does not know the world, nor has Jesus Christ been crucified but only in appearance, and he was not born of Mary nor of the seed of David."
Disturbed by this new teaching, the Corinthians send a letter to Paul at Philippi seeking his guidance. Paul’s response counters Simon and Cleobius’s Gnostic theology with standard proto-orthodox teachings. The letter, like the Acts of Paul and Thecla, circulated independently of the Acts of Paul. Some churches, in Syria and Armenia, even included it in their Bibles as 3 Corinthians.
Also sometimes included in Bibles alongside the canonical letters of Paul is an Epistle to the Laodiceans. The letter was composed between the second and fourth centuries in Greek but now exists only in Latin and European vernaculars. Surprisingly, it appears also in a few Latin New Testament manuscripts from the sixth and eighth centuries and was even included in John Wycliffe’s English Bible from the fourteenth century. A ‘letter from Laodicea’ is mentioned at the end of the canonical letter to the Colossians (Colossians 4.16). The original letter to the Laodiceans, if it ever truly existed, is now lost, but a later writer made up for this loss with the apocryphal Epistle to the Laodiceans, created by cobbling together phrases found in Philippians and Galatians.
Also included among the Pauline Apocrypha are the Epistles of Paul and Seneca, a series of 14 letters exchanged by Paul and the first-century Roman moralist. Jerome was convinced of their authenticity, and so they were regarded down to the Renaissance. But they appear to date from the fourth century. For a conversation between two great thinkers, the Epistles are rather disappointing. Most of the time the writers simply exchange compliments and declarations of friendship. In one letter, Seneca writes of Paul’s letters, ‘they are so lofty and so brilliant with noble sentiments that in my opinion generations of men could hardly be enough to become established and perfected in them’ (1). Seneca tells Paul he has read his letters to Nero, who ‘was amazed that one whose education had not been normal could have such ideas’.
The apocryphal Pauline letters stand out among the Christian Apocrypha because of their semi-canonical status. But they were afforded this status primarily because the letters are so consistent with proto-orthodox theology. Indeed, it’s hard to take offence at them when they do very little but parrot statements found in Paul’s canonical letters. Keep in mind, though, that the author of the Acts of Paul and Thecla and authors of other unorthodox Pauline apocrypha also saw a consistency between their views and those of their beloved apostle. Paul’s views on such issues as resurrection and celibacy are often contradictory or at least sufficiently ambiguous that they can be developed in multiple directions. The inconsistent portrayals of Paul in apocryphal texts derive ultimately from Paul’s own inconsistencies of thought.
Sources and studies
For a discussion of the interplay between the Acts of Paul and the Pastoral Epistles, see Dennis R. MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle. To read other Pauline apocrypha, see the Revelation of Paul and the Prayer of the Apostle Paul in Marvin Meyer, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, pp. 15–18, 313–19.
The Acts of Peter
As the rock upon which the Church is built (Matthew 16.18), Peter holds a prominent place among the apostles, and is thus the subject of numerous apocryphal texts that record his activities and his teachings. In many of them, Peter battles Simon Magus, the Samaritan magician from Acts 8, in miracle contests to determine who is the true God – Simon or Jesus. In other texts, Peter clashes with his fellow apostle Paul to determine who preaches the true gospel.
Like other apocryphal acts, the Acts of Peter is today incomplete; what we have of the text is reconstructed from a number of disparate sources. The most important of these is a sixth-/seventh-century Latin translation known by scholars as the Actus Vercellenses, which preserves about two-thirds of the Acts but seems to have changed the original text’s theme to reflect a problem encountered by Christians in the third and fourth centuries: the forgiveness of those who leave the faith at times of persecution but wish to return. The original interests of the Acts of Peter, which accord with the other apocryphal acts, can be observed in our other sources for the text: the martyrdom from three Greek manuscripts and numerous translations (in Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Slavonic, Arabic and Ethiopic), a single Act of Peter in Coptic from the fifth-century Bruce Codex, and a Greek fragment of chapters 25 and 26 in Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 849, dated to the late third or fourth century. Additionally, the Greek Life of St Abercius, from the fourth century, recycles speeches and stories from the Acts of Peter as episodes in the life of Abercius, a second-century bishop of Hierapolis.
The main drama of the text is a miracle contest between Peter and Simon Magus. The canonical Acts says little – and little that is flattering – about Simon, but other Christian sources reveal more about his life and teachings. Justin Martyr (First Apology 26.2; see also Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.23.1–4), himself a former native of Samaria, says that Simon came from the Samaritan village of Gitta and was active in Rome in the reign of Claudius (41–54 CE). The Samaritans in Rome worshipped him as the ‘First God’ and his companion Helene was considered his ‘First Thought’, a term in Gnostic literature for a being that represents the creative power of God and, at the same time, functions as his consort. Justin tells also of a statue on the Tiber River bearing the inscription ‘to the holy god Simon’. This statue was found by archaeologists in the sixteenth century but Justin had the inscription wrong – it actually reads ‘to the faithful god Semo Sanco’, a Roman deity. Someone, either Justin or Simon’s followers or someone else, wilfully or accidentally misread the inscription. The Acts of Peter, like the canonical Acts, shows no interest in the historical Simon’s teachings; he is used in these texts essentially to prove the superiority of Christianity over other religious systems of the day.
The lost early chapters of the Acts of Peter may have contained an expansion of the story of Simon from Acts (recounted in summary, it seems, in ch. 17). Apparently, in this new telling of the tale, Simon was not so repentant of his attempt at simony and now he has come to Rome to attract new followers. When Peter arrives, he challenges Simon to confront him in battle. They meet in the forum where the people of Rome pay high fees for a chance to see this contest of champions. They challenge Peter to outperform Simon, shouting,
"Show us, Peter, who your god is or which majesty it is which gave you such confidence … We have had evidence from Simon, let us have yours also; show us, both of you, whom we must believe."
Ultimately, Peter wins the contest and the crowd calls for Simon’s death. Surprisingly, Peter won’t allow it. Harkening back to the Actus Vercellenses’ theme of forgiveness, Peter says in Simon’s defence, ‘For should even he repent, it is better. For God will not remember the evil’ (28). But forgiveness is clearly not the theme of the original text, for in a summary chapter (32) in the martyrdom, Simon meets his end at Peter’s hand. According to the story, Simon returns to Rome and demonstrates his ability to fly. Worried that the believers would once again abandon Christ and follow Simon, Peter prays, ‘let him fall down and become crippled but not die, let him be disabled and break his leg in three places’ (32). And fall he does. Simon’s followers carry him off to Aricia where, following an operation, Simon dies of his injuries.
The martyrdom of Peter features the theme of celibacy so prevalent in other apocryphal acts, as well as typically unorthodox teachings. Peter is arrested for encouraging his converts to abandon intercourse. At his own request, Peter is crucified upside down to reflect the backward nature of the world, which sees ‘the ugly as beautiful and the really evil as good’ (38). The remedy for this situation is found in a saying of Jesus found also in the Gospel of Thomas; Peter says,
"Concerning this the Lord says in a mystery, ‘Unless you make the right as the left and the left as the right, and the top as the bottom and the front as the back, you shall not know the Kingdom.’"
(38; cf. Gospel of Thomas 22)
The conflict between Peter and Simon is told also in several other apocryphal texts. The most interesting of these by far is the Pseudo-Clementine Romance, where Simon is portrayed in many ways very much like the apostle Paul. Pseudo-Clement is named for the prominence in the text of Clement, a successor to Peter as Bishop of Rome and the author of 1 Clement from the Apostolic Fathers. The sources for the text are quite complicated and scholars have yet to reach consensus on how they relate to each other and how they originated. There are two main versions: the Homilies, a collection of 20 sermons of Peter in Greek, and the Recognitions, a ten-book narrative translated into Latin by Rufinus of Aquileia around 407 CE. The two are believed to go back to a common Jewish-Christian source written in Syria in the third century.
The framework of the original text documents Clement’s interactions with Peter along with some details of Clement’s earlier life. In a letter appended to the Homilies, Clement informs James that Peter has died and that Clement has been appointed his successor. Attached to the letter is ‘Clement’s Epitome of the Popular Sermons of Peter’, which forms the bulk of the text. As Clement describes the activities and teachings of Peter, he tells also the tale of his own family’s separation and reunion – the ‘romance’ of the title. Shortly after Clement’s birth, his mother Mattidia had a vision warning her that, if she did not leave Rome immediately with her twin sons (Faustinus and Faustinianus), all of her family would die. They head off to Athens and are never heard from again. When Clement turns 12, his father Faustus sets out to sea in search of his wife and sons; then he too goes missing.
Clement grows to adulthood, becomes interested in Christianity and joins Peter on his journeys from town to town in pursuit of Simon. In Pseudo-Clement, Peter’s encounters with Simon are less miracle contests than wars of words; but through these disputes we learn much about the beliefs of the Jewish Christians who composed the text. We also discover some additional details of Simon’s life, including the story of his birth, his time spent in Egypt learning magic, and his association with John the Baptist – Simon is said to have been second-in-command to John, and became leader of the group after John’s death, before leaving to gather his own followers. In the course of the narrative, two former followers of Simon are revealed to be Clement’s lost brothers, and the three are reunited eventually with their mother and father.
The Jewish-Christian origin of Pseudo-Clement adds weight to the theory that Peter’s opponent in the text, though named as Simon, is really Paul, an apostle often vilified in Jewish-Christian texts. In one of Peter’s disputes with Simon (Homilies 17.13–19), Peter diminishes Simon’s interpretation of Jesus because the knowledge was granted to him only in a vision. Peter, on the other hand, knew Jesus when he was alive. Peter asks,
"Can anyone be made competent to teach through a vision? And if your opinion is, ‘That is possible,’ why then did our teacher spend a whole year with us who were awake? … But if you were visited by him for the space of an hour and were instructed by him and thereby have become an apostle, then proclaim his words, expound what he has taught, be a friend to his apostles and do not contend with me, who am his confidant; for you have in hostility withstood me, who am a firm rock, the foundation stone of the church."
(Homilies 17.19.1,4)
Paul, too, only knew Jesus from visions (see Galatians 1.15–17; Acts 9.3–6); so it is tempting to see Peter’s criticism here as an attack on the apostle to the Gentiles. As further proof, scholars point to Peter’s words in the Epistle of Peter to James that begins the Homilies:
"For some from among the Gentiles have rejected my lawful preaching and have preferred a lawless and absurd doctrine of the man who is my enemy. And indeed some have attempted, whilst I am still alive, to distort my words by interpretations of many sorts, as if I taught the dissolution of the law and, although I was of this opinion, did not express it openly."
(Homilies 2.3–4; cf. Paul’s criticism of Peter in Galatians 2.11–14)
Pseudo-Clement is not our only evidence of Jewish-Christian antipathy towards Paul. Several early Christian groups, who followed at least some Jewish practices, also spoke out against Paul. According to the bishop Epiphanius, the Ebionites, who many scholars believe composed Pseudo-Clement, circulated ‘trumped-up charges of evil-doing and deceit’ against the apostle (Refutation of all Heresies 30.16.6–9). Another text showing Peter at odds with Paul is the Book of the Rolls. The text, likely of Syrian origin, contains a mixture of material composed before and after the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century. Among the older materials is an account of several miracle contests between Paul and Peter. Though Paul later reveals he only contended with Peter to orchestrate conversions to Christianity, Peter instructs his disciple Clement to guard his teachings from Paul. He says to him, ‘As God lives no one ought to divulge these mysteries to Paul [or be he Paul] or those who resemble him’ (p. 405), and goes on to describe Paul as the one ‘who had tampered with the language of the books’ (p. 406).
The conflicts between Peter and Paul in the Christian Apocrypha may seem shocking given how well the two seem to get along in the canonical Acts. Peter even comes to the defence of Paul when the Jerusalem church questions his mission to the Gentiles (Acts 15.7–11). But even the canonical New Testament shows occasional signs of tension in their relationship. For example, in the letter to the Galatians, Paul expresses anger at Peter for refusing to eat with the Gentile Christians of Antioch (Galatians 2.11–14) and thereby causing a rift in Antioch’s Christian community. By the time of composition of Pseudo-Clement and the Book of the Rolls, Jewish Christians were an ever-shrinking minority in the Church and, declared heretics by the more powerful Gentile majority, were eventually persecuted out of existence. It should come as no surprise after all, then, to find evidence of Jewish Christians fighting back against orthodox persecution, though surreptitiously, through texts in which Peter, their apostolic champion, battles and defeats the apostle to the Gentiles with his superior teachings and divine might.
Sources and studies
There is no current, complete English translation of the lengthy Pseudo-Clementine Romance. For now, the translation from the Ante-Nicene Fathers collection can be read online at the ‘Compassionate Spirit’ website. To read more about the Jewish-Christian origins of the text see F. Stanley Jones, An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity; and for additional information about Simon Magus see Birger A. Pearson, Ancient Gnosticism, pp. 26–33. Other Petrine apocrypha not discussed here include the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles (in Marvin Meyer, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, p. 357–66) and the Preaching of Peter (also known as the Kerygma Petri, an early second-century text available only in excerpts provided by Clement of Alexandria and Origen; see pp. 34–41 in Wilhelm Schneemelcher’s New Testament Apocrypha collection). The Book of the Rolls (also known under the titles Clement and the Apocalypse of Peter) is available in Garshuni and Ethiopic. For a translation of the Garshuni text, see Alphonse Mingana, ‘Apocalypse of Peter’.
The Life of Judas
Judas, the infamous betrayer of Jesus, does not have his own acts and martyrdom texts. Unlike the other apostles, Judas did not die with honour after a glorious career of preaching and performing miracles. Instead, he met a gruesome end, either at his own hand by hanging (Matthew 27.1–10) or by falling and splitting open (Acts 1.16–20). A third account of Judas’s death attributed to Papias of Hierapolis (Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, Book 4, fragment 4, as reported by Apollinaris of Laodicaea) says he became bloated with disease, so much that ‘his genitals appeared more loathsome and larger than anyone else’s, and when he relieved himself there passed through it pus and worms from every part of his body, much to his shame’. Eventually, he died from the agony. Other traditions about Judas appear in a range of apocryphal texts discussed already (the Syriac Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Book of the Cock, the Gospel of Judas, Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea, and the Descent into Hell). Further details of Judas’s life are provided in two additional texts.
A full Life of Judas is found in a number of Greek and Latin manuscripts as well as versions in European and Slavic languages, none dating earlier than the twelfth century. Though rarely mentioned by Church writers, the Life of Judas was extremely popular as folk literature, appearing in incunabula (early printed books), and incorporated into plays and The Golden Legend. The story draws on motifs from the biblical story of Moses and from the Greek myth of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his birth father and married his mother. Judas’s parents are named Reuben and Ciborea. On the night of Judas’s conception, Ciborea has a dream in which she is told that she will give birth to a child who will destroy the people. Reuben and Ciborea cannot bring themselves to kill Judas, so they place him in a basket and send him out to sea. The basket lands in Scarioth where the queen of the country raises him as her own child. Judas reaches adulthood, kills the queen’s son, and then flees to Jerusalem where he enters the employ of Pilate. In the course of his duties he meets up again with Reuben and slays him. Pilate then gives Judas all of Reuben’s property and his wife. One day Ciborea mentions to Judas how she had placed her son in the sea. Horrified, they realize they are mother and son. At Ciborea’s suggestion, Judas goes to Jesus for redemption, becomes one of the Twelve, and later betrays Jesus and dies.
The second apocryphal Judas text focuses on the origins and transmission of the coins paid to Judas to betray Jesus. The Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver is found in two main forms: a western version in Latin translated also into several European languages, and an eastern version in Syriac, found also incorporated into Solomon of Basra’s chronicle the Book of the Bee. Both the Latin and Syriac versions likely derive from a lost Greek original written sometime before the twelfth century. The theme of the Legend is fate. For 2,000 years, the coins stay together as a unit and are providentially guided to their ultimate goal. They begin as the creation of Abraham’s father Terah, are used to buy a burial plot for Abraham and Sarah, are paid to the sons of Jacob in the sale of their brother Joseph, are later deposited in Solomon’s Temple, and with its fall, are taken to Babylon during the exile. From Babylon, the coins make their way eventually to Judaea where the Jewish leaders use them to pay Judas to betray Jesus. Finally, the coins are used to purchase the potter’s field where Judas is buried (mentioned in Matthew 27.6–8; Acts 1.18–19). Gold Judas coins, not silver, were popular relics in the Middle Ages. This transformation from silver to gold is explained in some versions of the Legend. It’s an interesting feature, because it allows owners of the gold Judas coins to become part of the story, to believe that their ownership or stewardship of the holy object is also providentially ordained.
Sources and studies
For the Life of Judas, see Paull Franklin Baum, ‘The Mediaeval Legend of Judas Iscariot’. The western versions of the Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver are surveyed in George F. Hill, ‘The Thirty Pieces of Silver’. The excerpt from Papias can be found in Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, pp. 583–5.
Other people in the life of Jesus
The apostles are not the only characters from the canonical Gospels featured in the Christian Apocrypha. We have seen already in previous chapters that Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, and Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, appear here and there as part of the Jesus biography, particularly in the Protevangelium of James and in Gnostic–mystical texts like the Gospel of Mary and the Pistis Sophia. Additional texts exist that individually focus on these figures, providing additional biographical material and information relating to their veneration as saints.
The Dormition of Mary
Just as Christians composed stories establishing an origin suitable for the mother of God’s Son, they created also a text that brings Mary’s tale to an appropriate conclusion. Actually, they produced numerous texts on this subject – depending on how scholars tabulate the evidence, there are somewhere between 30 and 64 texts about Mary’s death. Though they go by different titles (the best known is the Dormition [or ‘falling asleep’] of Mary) and differ considerably in their contents, they essentially reflect two approaches to granting Mary a dignified end: either Mary dies and after three days she is taken body and soul into paradise, or Mary dies and her body remains on earth awaiting reunion with her soul at the end of time. Both approaches originated in the fifth century and gave rise, many centuries later, to the Vatican’s dogma of the Virgin’s bodily Assumption – meaning that Mary ascended body and soul to heaven just like her Son.
Scholars of the Dormition divide the traditions into two categories: the Bethlehem tradition, in which some of the story takes place at Mary’s house in Bethlehem, and the Palm tradition, in which a palm from the Tree of Life plays a large part in the story. The standard Greek version, attributed to the apostle John, is representative of the Bethlehem tradition. This version is found in over 200 manuscripts, but despite its obvious popularity, it is a poor representative of the original text – it is merely a summary of a much lengthier text found in Syriac manuscripts divided into six books. In the Syriac ‘six-books’ version, Mary goes to the tomb of Jesus daily to pray that she can leave the world and be with her Son in the heavens. On one Friday, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and says her prayers soon will be answered. She returns to Bethlehem and prays that John and all the other apostles, some of whom have died, may attend her in her final days. In answer to her prayer, the apostles come to her on a cloud, plucked from the various locations assigned to them in the apocryphal acts.
The story seems innocuous enough so far, but it quickly takes on a disturbing anti-Jewish tone. Mary asks John for protection because ‘the Jews have sworn that when my end comes they will burn my body’. To reassure her, John promises, ‘your holy and precious body shall not see corruption’. When the Jewish priests become concerned about the healings occurring when people touch the outer wall of her room, they try to convince the governor to drive Mary out of town. Mary is spirited away to Jerusalem, but the Jewish leaders follow and try to burn down the house where she is staying. Then an angel comes to her defence and turns the fire on the malefactors. Despite obvious signs that Mary is protected by divine powers, Jewish characters stubbornly, perhaps demonically, refuse to stop their attacks, even after Mary’s death. When Sunday comes, Mary’s soul is taken by Jesus, and as the apostles carry Mary out on a bed, a Jew named Jephonias attacks the body. In response, an angel appears and strikes Jephonias’s arms from his shoulders with a sword of fire. At the sight of the angel, the Jews finally repent, crying out that she is truly the Mother of God. As for poor Jephonias, he pleads for mercy and Peter restores his arms.
By now, the parallels with Jesus’ death should be obvious to the reader: the story begins on a Friday, Mary dies on a Sunday, and she experiences opposition from Jews and resistance from a Roman governor. The parallels continue when the apostles lay Mary’s body in the garden of Gethsemane in a new tomb. For three days voices of angels are heard emanating from the tomb. The voices then go silent and the apostles say, ‘thereafter we all perceived that her spotless and precious body was translated into Paradise’.
The other version of the Dormition, the Palm tradition, is less well known than the Bethlehem tradition, though it appears to be the earliest, perhaps even originating in the third century. It is found today in the Ethiopian Liber Requiei Mariae (the Book of Mary’s Repose), several fragmentary sources (in Syriac, Georgian and Coptic), a condensed Greek form, and a Latin version influential in the West. It also appears in Coptic homilies. Mary’s death plays a much smaller part in this text. Other traditions are woven into the narrative, including non-canonical stories relating to the exodus, material from the Testament of Solomon, and a story in which Peter and Paul fight the devil. Also found here are some aspects of Gnostic thought, including the soul’s imprisonment in matter and its need to ascend after death in order to return to the heavens.
The palm of the Tree of Life enters the story at the start when Jesus appears to Mary while she is praying on the Mount of Olives. He reminds Mary of the time when the family was travelling to Egypt and the two-year-old Jesus commanded a palm tree to bend down to them so they could pluck its fruit (a story found also in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 20). This telling of the tale includes an interesting monologue from Joseph lamenting his fate: ‘And I am afflicted because I did not know the child that you have; I only know that he is not from me. But I have thought in my heart, perhaps I had intercourse with you while drunk’. Jesus reveals that the palm tree was expelled from Eden and then he restores it to its former home. The text goes on to narrate the story of Mary’s death as in the Bethlehem tradition. The story comes to a close with Mary’s body taken to paradise, where it is reunited with her soul.
The Dormition of Mary rarely appears in collections of Christian Apocrypha, primarily because most scholars consider it to be a relatively late text. But clearly it is important for the history of Christian doctrine about the death of Mary. The Dormition shows that Christians began to think about Mary’s fate as early as the third century, but the doctrine of the Assumption was not finally accepted by the Catholic Church until 1950. Other churches, such as the Eastern Orthodox, also celebrate the Assumption but they do not define the teaching quite so formally. Given the influence of the Dormition on Christian thought about Mary, it must be ranked with the Protevangelium of James and the Acts of Pilate as the apocryphal texts that have had the greatest impact on Christian teachings.
The History of Joseph the Carpenter
Though Joseph was only the adoptive father of Jesus, Christian imagination nevertheless wanted to supply him also with an honourable death. The History of Joseph the Carpenter was composed somewhat later than the early Dormition traditions – perhaps in the late sixth or seventh century. It is found today only in Coptic and Arabic manuscripts. The story is framed by a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples on the Mount of Olives. The apostles ask Jesus about the death of Joseph, and what he reveals to them is written in this text.
As the aged Joseph, now 111 years old, lies on his deathbed, several details are revealed about his life. As in the Protevangelium of James, Joseph was chosen by lot to be the caretaker of Mary, and the brothers and sisters of Jesus are said to be children from Joseph’s previous marriage. But we learn now that Jesus’ stepsisters are named Lysia and Lydia, and further details are given about their mother. Joseph married at 40 and was widowed at 49. Then he spent one year alone and three with Mary before she gave birth to Jesus. This puts Joseph’s death when Jesus was 18. So in Joseph the Carpenter we are given the only story about Jesus set in the time between his discussion with the teachers in the Temple at 12 years old and his baptism around 30 years of age by John the Baptist.
The adolescent Jesus is portrayed as quite distraught about Joseph’s death. He watches his father’s struggle with tears in his eyes, and tells the apostles,
"I, for my part, my beloved ones, was sitting at his head, and Mary my mother was sitting by his feet. And he lifted up his eyes to my face, but was not able to speak, for the hour of death held sway over him. He then lifted up his eyes and released a loud groan. And I held his hands and his knees for a long while, as he looked at me and beseeched me, ‘Do not let me be taken away!’"
Jesus safeguards Joseph’s soul until the angels come and deliver it to God. He then prepares Joseph’s body and declares that it will not decay. Jesus promises also to reward with blessings all who properly venerate Joseph by providing an offering and depositing it in his shrine on his memorial day, as well as for good deeds done in his name, for naming a child Joseph and for copying this text. The interplay here between text and veneration is a common feature of medieval Christian Apocrypha. It demonstrates how story and practice, particularly on feast days, worked hand in hand, even for texts outside the Bible.
The Life of John the Baptist
Scholars of early Christianity are in universal agreement that Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist. The Gospel of Luke (1.5–80) honours this relationship by making John the cousin of Jesus and telling the story of his birth. The Gospels also narrate Jesus’ baptism by John and the circumstances of John’s death – he is decapitated by the Galilean king Herod Antipas because John criticized Herod for marrying the wife of his brother Philip (Mark 6.17–19 and parallels). The importance of John is reflected also in the sheer amount of references to the Baptist found in the Christian Apocrypha. In most cases John appears only in cameo or simply in a reprisal of his role from the canonical Gospels. A few little-known texts, however, expand greatly on the portrayal of John we find in the New Testament. The most important of these texts is a Life of John the Baptist attributed to Serapion, an Egyptian bishop of the fourth century.
The Life of John was composed, likely in Greek, around 385–95 CE. It survives today only in six Garshuni manuscripts of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The story is told through the voice of the bishop Serapion on the occasion of an unspecified feast day for John. It begins with a harmony of details about John’s birth taken from the Gospel of Luke and the Protevangelium of James, finishing with the death of Zechariah and Elizabeth’s flight from Herod’s soldiers into the desert. After five years, when John is seven years and six months old, Elizabeth dies. Jesus, ‘who with his eyes sees heaven and earth’ (p. 242), sees John in the desert grieving and spirits himself and Mary on a cloud to come to his aid. They bury Elizabeth and then Jesus and Mary remain another seven days to teach John how to live in the desert.
The text then shifts to John’s adult career and tells the story of Herod Antipas and his affair with Philip’s wife Herodias. The Gospel account is expanded with a prologue to the story of John’s death, revealing that Herodias and Herod worked together to obtain Philip’s land and then Herodias and her daughter left Philip to join Herod in Judaea where he ‘lived daily with both of them in adultery’ (p. 248). Thanks to Herodias’s scheming, John is arrested and beheaded, but not before predicting the death and resurrection of Jesus and calamities that will befall Herod and Israel. Then things get weird. Herodias wishes to defile the head of the Baptist, but to her surprise it flies up into the air and continues its criticism of Herod in the skies, first of Jerusalem and then throughout the world. After 15 years, the head lands in the town of Homs (Emesa), where it is buried by the townspeople, and a church is built upon the spot. In the meantime, Herodias, her daughter and Herod all meet grisly ends, thus allowing John’s disciples to take his body (recalling Mark 6.29 / Matthew 14.12) and bury it in Sebaste, near the body of the prophet Elisha. Over time the remains are carried off to Alexandria, where Serapion, the author of the text, deposits them in a church built in the Baptist’s honour.
Sources and studies
The History of Joseph the Carpenter can be found in Ehrman–Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels. Several versions of the Dormition of Mary are contained and/or summarized in J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 691–723, but for a much more detailed discussion of the material see Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. For the Life of John the Baptist, see Alphonse Mingana, ‘A New Life of John the Baptist’.
The Life of Mary Magdalene
We finish our look at the people in Jesus’ life with perhaps the most controversial figure of first-century Christianity. Mary Magdalene is featured in a number of the texts we have examined so far. She is often portrayed in apocryphal gospels asking Jesus questions in dialogue or sayings texts (the Dialogue of the Saviour, the Pistis Sophia, the Questions of Bartholomew), appears on occasion in the Pilate Cycle, has an entire gospel written in her name (the Gospel of Mary), and is mentioned in the Gospel of Philip as the ‘companion’ of Jesus. The canonical Gospels identify Mary as one of several women who ‘provided for them [that is, Jesus and the Twelve Apostles] out of their resources’ (Luke 8:3). It is also said that Mary had been exorcised of seven demons (Luke 8.2). Matthew, Mark and Luke place Mary among the women who witnessed the empty tomb, and in the Gospel of John she is the first person to see Jesus resurrected (John 20.1–18). According to Christian tradition, Mary Magdalene was once a repentant prostitute. There is no biblical basis for this identification, though it appears to have arisen from conflating Mary with the ‘sinner’ (Luke 7.37) who anoints Jesus with perfume (Mark 14.3–9 and parallels). This tendency to conflate female characters in the canonical Gospels is an identifying feature of two biographies of Mary, one that casts Mary as a saint, the other as a sinner.
The Encomium (or Praise) of Mary Magdalene, attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–86), is available today in two fragmentary Coptic manuscripts, but the text appears to have been translated from Greek. The text says nothing about Mary being a prostitute. Instead it calls Mary a saint and says she was a virgin from birth to her death. Mary was born to a rich noble family in Magdalia. Her father named her Mary and her mother named her Magdalene after the city of her birth. When her parents die, Mary is entrusted to the care of her older sister, Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary according to the Protevangelium of James. This makes Mary Magdalene Jesus’ aunt, not his wife. The text goes on to portray Mary as actively trying to prevent Jesus’ execution. She writes to the emperor Tiberius, pleading for him to intervene with Herod Antipas; surprisingly, Pilate is not mentioned at all. Tiberius writes back to Mary, but Mary is unable to stop Herod’s hand. Mary then instructs Nicodemus and Joseph to obtain Jesus’ body for burial. As in the canonical Gospels, Mary witnesses the empty tomb, but here she fetches Jesus’ mother, who instead becomes the first to see Jesus risen in the garden. Soon after, the Virgin Mary dies, and the apostles write their Gospels and head off on their preaching journeys. Mary and another disciple, Theophilus, stay in Jerusalem, where Jesus visits her and teaches her ‘many hidden mysteries’ (p. 204).
A far less praiseworthy portrayal of Mary is found in a Greek Life of Mary Magdalene, also incorporated in The Golden Legend. In The Golden Legend’s version of the story, Mary is conflated with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus (from John 11.1—12.8; Mary and Martha also appear in Luke 10.38–42). The three are born to noble parents and enjoy great riches. At their parents’ death, Mary is bequeathed the walled town of Magdala, Martha is granted Bethany, and Lazarus is given a great part of Jerusalem. Mary is tempted by her newly acquired riches, so that ‘she gave her body to pleasure – so much that her proper name was forgotten and she was commonly called “the sinner”’ (p. 375) – she has become Luke’s sinner with the jar of perfume. After Jesus’ death Mary departs with Lazarus, Martha and a few others to Marseilles. There Mary comes into contact with the prince of the province and his wife, and she is involved in their efforts to conceive a child. The story concludes with Mary departing the city and heading off into the desert for contemplation. Fed daily by angels, Mary lives there another 30 years before her death.
Mary Magdalene’s portrayal as a repentant prostitute can be traced as far back as the sixth century, when Pope Gregory the Great wrote of Mary in a series of homilies. This image of Mary has endured, even despite the Vatican’s better-late-than-never disavowal of the tradition in 1969. Some scholars, eager to rehabilitate the image of Mary, draw upon apocryphal depictions of Mary to claim that she was an important early Christian leader, both before and after Jesus’ death. Those who claim, without basis, that Mary was the wife of Jesus replace Mary’s roles as benefactor and witness with those of romantic partner and mother. In doing so, they are just as guilty as Pope Gregory for diminishing Mary’s importance in the early Church.
Sources and studies
The Encomium of Mary Magdalene is available only in French in René Georges Coquin and Gerard Godron, ‘Un Encomium copte sur Marie-Madeleine’. The Life of Mary Magdalene can be read in William Granger Ryan’s English translation of Voragine’s The Golden Legend (vol. 1, pp. 364–83) or in François Halkin, ‘Une Vie grecque de sainte Marie-Madeleine’. For a comprehensive treatment of canonical and apocryphal Mary Magdalene traditions, see Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle.
The legends of the apostles and the stories of the family of Jesus are not considered the most exciting texts of the Christian Apocrypha. And there’s good reason for that. The disarray and disorder in the texts of the apocryphal acts make the stories difficult to follow, and with the constant repetition of the same themes and motifs, the texts quickly become tedious. Most of the other tales have some curious features – such as the portrayal of Judas as Oedipus, or the flying head of John the Baptist – but there is little in them that bears repeated reading. The Jesus apocrypha, by contrast, are far more appealing, with their diverse interpretations of Jesus’ origins, teachings, death and resurrection. Still, we can’t ignore the importance of the texts from this chapter. When written, the texts articulated Christian views and practices that came to be considered heretical, but in their edited forms they remained valuable because of what they revealed about the lives of important early Christian figures. The texts were read on feast days or in private devotion. Some even worked hand in hand with relics and cult sites to encourage proper veneration of the saint. One in particular, the Dormition of Mary, helped to develop and promote an important aspect of Marian devotion. So, even if the legends have less attraction to readers than the apocrypha about Jesus, they are no less important for the history of Christian life and literature.
Hopefully more people will become interested in these texts. As we have seen, several of them are still unavailable to many readers, particularly English readers. New manuscript discoveries of controversial gospels may capture the public’s imagination and sell books, but scholars need to direct some of their energies also to these other texts before they become lost, this time not because of censorship by the Church, but because of scholarly neglect.
Written by Tony Burke in "Secret Scriptures Revealed", SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), London, 2013, excerpts chapter 5. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.