The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Like Origen before him, Eusebius is an important witness to terminology because his language is very specific. This specificity is too often overlooked. “Disputed” for Eusebius explicitly entails a community of “church scholars” (ἐκκλησιαστικοί) arguing over the validity of these works. It is clear that such scholars were in communication throughout the early Christian period, at least from the time of Irenaeus on (ca. 180), and probably earlier than that in some quarters. In the mid-third century Julius Africanus applied the term spurious to the book of Susannah (attached to the Greek version of Daniel in the Septuagint), saying in a letter to Origen that wordplay in the Greek shows it could not have been part of the original Hebrew Bible.11 Thus, Christian scholars were not arbitrarily accepting and rejecting works as if at random or out of reactionary spite. Instead, they took note of, for instance, the original language and provenance, and these and other qualities were argued over and mattered in disputes over attribution and date. Moreover, it goes without saying that perceived doctrinal positions—e.g., on the person of Jesus or the ethics of abstinence—were also standards of judgment by which various parties judged apocryphal texts according to their own interests.

  For Eusebius, further aspects were equally important to the categorization of Christian writing, such as a recognizable style (ὁ τῆςφράσεωςχαρακτήρ) which should not differ from that of the Apostles. If Origen’s text-critical scholarship was indicative of a legacy of Hellenistic Alexandria, as has been recently emphasized,12 then Eusebius’s attention to style could be said to conform more to a Second Sophistic training in rhetoric and the principles of mimesis. The two trends in Greek literature were closely related, of course, especially in the combination of Greek and Roman educational practice in imperial Rome among “elite communities,” but we should not assume that early Christian definitions of apocrypha were careless or somehow isolated from the larger literary world of Greece under Rome.13

  43.3 COLLECTIONS

  It is worth noting that modern collections of translated apocrypha represent merely a sampling of the surviving texts.14 In order to gain some purchase on this large and diverse literature, anthologies will often categorize works under the two broad labels of “New Testament Apocrypha” and “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.” While these labels offer a convenient method for separating texts dealing with New Testament figures versus texts dealing with Old Testament figures, they tend to obscure rather than elucidate the history of this varied literature.15 Thus, many Old Testament Pseudepigrapha were actually written by Christians, or, if originally written by Hellenistic Jews, were later adopted, changed, and copied by Christians. This is, after all, why they exist today, because they were copied by medieval Christian scribes.16

  Modern critical work on apocrypha is usually traced back no further than to Johann Albert Fabricius’s eighteenth-century selection (1713), but collections of these texts were already in circulation in Eusebius’s day. By the end of the fourth century, the Manichaeans had become infamous among Christians for adopting an authoritative canon of a specific set of Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.17 New apocryphal texts continued to be written throughout Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages and Byzantium, with identifiable patterns of genre and theme that extended back to the earliest Christian literature. It is thus significant, and often overlooked, that the collection, canonization, and anathematization of these texts, as literary and cultural processes, were occurring at the same time that new apocryphal works were being authored. Texts such as the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena (third to fourth centuries), the Acts of Philip (fourth to fifth centuries), the Epistle of Pseudo-Titus (fifth century), the Acts of Barnabas (sixth century), the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (eighth to ninth centuries), and numerous others testify to the continuous stream of apocryphal literature extending from the second century through Late Antiquity.

  In other words, it is difficult to read the processes of the collection and organization of apocrypha in antiquity—even if only to condemn certain texts en masse—as having anything other than an absolutely positive effect on the continued vitality of the literary forms and genres represented by the apocryphal corpus. Both the neutral and the denigrating senses of “apocrypha” presuppose the existence of canonical or agreed-upon narratives.18 Further, as has often been noted by historians of late antique literature, the (even larger and more multifarious) corpus of Christian hagiographical literature was partly inspired by the imaginative worlds first evidenced in Christian apocrypha.19 Far from causing the ossification some scholars have tried to see, this attention paid to Christian apocrypha by late antique writers seems to have had the effect of propping up these texts. The attempts at proscription, therefore, came in response to the proliferation of this literature.20

  Since 1983, the “Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum” has published critical editions of apocryphal texts, of many different genres and themes. The long gestation period of some of the editions, however, speaks to the difficulties of dealing with the manuscript traditions and reception histories. Not only are numerous early Christian languages usually involved in any edition of such texts, but the textual stemmata are often nearly impossible to establish with confidence.21 This is partly because of the translations but perhaps even more because of a literary principle repeatedly invoked by textual scholars of Christian apocrypha called “multiformity.” Multiformity is the existence of multiple surviving copies of a text that are different enough from one another to be classified as independent works, though related at the level of a shared “myth” or “story” core (e.g., Acts of Peter, second century).22 Apocryphal stories were used as “sites” for writing and rewriting, and multiple texts survive with the same titles even as their contents differ significantly. Thus, because of the prevalence of multiformity in Christian apocrypha, the corpus challenges the concept of known, individual texts and authors.23 Even for an age like the Second Sophistic in which the concept of authorship became a means of subversion and satire, Christian apocrypha vastly expand the realm of what is possible in this period with regard to authorial misdirection, diglossia, and anonymity.

  43.4 APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS

  Probably the most diverse yet compelling group of early Christian apocrypha include the word “Gospel” in their titles. In some cases these titles are merely modern conventions, but for the most part the “Gospel” title is found either in the ancient and medieval manuscripts (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas, second century) or in the testimonia of contemporary authors who read or knew about these texts (e.g., Gospel of the Ebionites, second century). In a handful of cases the word “Gospel” is found in the texts themselves in a self-referential manner (e.g., the Gospel of Truth, early third century). In their literary form, apocryphal Gospels differ from one another, and from the canonical Gospels, much more than, say, the Gospel of John differs from the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke).24 The variety of literary expression among apocryphal Gospels is impressive, and several different and competing cosmological worldviews are assumed or argued for in the apocryphal Gospels, especially among the works today grouped together under the umbrella of “Gnosticism.”25 Many of the latter survive only in Coptic, having been unearthed in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, and published in critical editions and translations from 1977 onward. It is usually assumed that these Coptic codices, dating from the fourth century, represent translations of earlier works originally written in Greek, though in certain cases (e.g., the Gospel of Mary, third century) the Coptic text represents a very different piece of literature from the surviving Greek fragments.26 In other cases (e.g., the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, ca. 200) the Syriac language offers a better literary Sitz im Leben for the original work.27

  Clearly there were more stories in circulation about Jesus than have survived in the canonical Gospels themselves. The closing of the Gospel of John tells us as much: “But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world it
self could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25, RSV). Likewise, the opening of the Gospel of Luke refers to “many” other attempts at telling the history of Jesus’s life (Luke 1:1–4). The immediate question, however, is how do the apocryphal Gospels that survive relate to these statements; do they include some of the very stories that John and Luke allude to? Most scholars would say probably not, or if so, only in an attenuated fashion. One clue to this is that the apocryphal Gospels almost all presuppose the existence of the canonical Gospels, though not necessarily all four.28 While “Gospel” itself as a genre designation is not a transparent term, the apocryphal Gospels (and the copyists of their manuscripts) seem to understand the term primarily as a written text, whereas the canonical Gospels seem to use the term to mean a spoken message of “good news” (εὐαγγέλιον = κήρυγμα), and in that they mimic the usage of the term in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in the Hellenistic period, the Septuagint.29 By contrast, the textual meaning of “Gospel” appearing in the apocrypha parallels the way in which theologians like Irenaeus of Lyons used the term from the mid-second century onward.

  If we were to include all texts known by manuscript titles, early testimonia from Irenaeus and others, or by their own use of the term “gospel” self-referentially, then there are about forty individual surviving texts that fall under that category.30 These texts, however, differ widely from one another in content. Unlike the canonical Gospels, several of them include elaborate descriptions of their underlying cosmologies. The Gospel of Truth (early third century), attributed to the Gnostic writer Valentinus, who lived in Rome in the 140s but who taught all over the Mediterranean, is one of the most sophisticated of these texts. Likewise, the recently discovered Gospel of Judas (second to third centuries) emerged from a Gnostic sect called the Sethians. Both of these texts describe the creation of the material world as happening outside the intentions of the perfectly good creator-god, and Jesus, for both of them, serves as a messenger and savior to lead those who recognize him (and only them) to the spiritual God from within the dark world of the material. The Sethians traced their lineage back to a secret line of knowledge extending down to them from Adam and Eve’s “other” son, Seth.

  A controversial Coptic text from Nag Hammadi, which also survives in Greek fragments, is the Gospel of Thomas (second century), famous for its seemingly close relationship to the synoptic Gospels via a notional sharing of a lost “sayings source,” Q (from German Quelle, “source”).31 The Gospel of Thomas has proven difficult to situate with any confidence. It comprises 114 sayings of Jesus. Of these only three overlap indubitably with the synoptic Gospels (logia 20, 64, and 65), and given the quotation of 1 Corinthians 2:9 in logion 17, these echoes from the Gospels are not terribly remarkable. More adventurously, it has been posited that the Gospel of Thomas was related to the Gospel of John in some manner—namely, one might be responding directly to the other—but this view has not won wide favor.32 The Gospel of Thomas does not reveal any type of Sethian or Valentinian cosmology. Instead, it is completely sapiential and aphoristic in character.

  However, when the varied corpus of apocryphal Gospels is considered, the Gospel of Thomas becomes more interesting. At its outset it presents the Apostle Thomas as the bearer of secret wisdom revealed by Jesus only to him. This very image of Thomas as having a special relationship to Jesus is found in other “Thomasine” texts. For example, in the Acts of Thomas (ca. 200)—in which Jesus commissions Thomas to evangelize India—the Apostle is said to be the “twin” of Jesus, playing on his Greek name in the canonical Gospels, Judas Thomas Didymus (“Judas Thomas the Twin”), Didymus being a literal translation of the Aramaic Tōmā.33 Further, like the Gospel of Thomas, the so-called Book of Thomas the Contender (second to fourth centuries) is written in a similar sapiential mode and does not include an explicit cosmology. Finally, an even more striking text attributed to Thomas is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (third century), which takes up the very brief sketch of Jesus’s youth offered in Luke and turns it into a bizarre but captivating narrative of Jesus’s childhood angst among his playmates.34 This enfant terrible kills his schoolteacher for striking him and also two children for taunting him and he mocks his father Joseph’s discipline, all while going around and healing people who are sick or injured. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas thus seemingly represents a mixture of the early Christian images of Jesus as a compassionate sojourner among the outcasts of society and a supernatural master of all creation. As such, it signals above all the variety of expression possible in Christian literature of the period.

  A number of now-lost apocryphal texts with the title Gospel are known because they were cited by early Christian writers.35 This group includes the so-called “Jewish-Christian Gospels,” which generated a lot of attention in the ancient world even though no complete texts have survived.36 Most significant among these was the Gospel of the Nazareans, a text which seems to have been written quite early (early second century) and, more importantly, was originally in Aramaic and not Greek. Eusebius and Jerome knew the copy in the library at Caesarea, and Jerome claims to have translated it into Greek (“from the Syro-Chaldaic tongue but in Hebrew characters”; i.e., perhaps Palestinian Aramaic, but not Syriac). Jerome also says it was sometimes called the “Gospel of the Apostles,” that it was “in use among the Nazarenes and Ebionites,” and that “most people” thought this was the authentic text of Matthew. He does not appear to disagree with their assessment. However, complicating the issue is the fact that a number of different Gospel texts were attributed to Jewish-Christian groups like the Ebionites or even to the Jews themselves: these include the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Gospel According to the Hebrews. Both of these are sometimes conflated with the Gospel of the Nazareans and it can be difficult to know exactly which text or group the ancient author citing them had in mind. Eusebius’s and Jerome’s ascription of the Gospel of the Nazareans to the Apostle Matthew (and, in Jerome, to the whole company of the Apostles more generally) is interesting and demonstrates that similarities of reception and authentication were being used by widely divergent Christian communities. The habit of ascribing texts to the “patriarchs” of Christianity differed very little from the same practice that ascribed much of what we call the Pseudepigrapha to the patriarchs of the Old Testament.37

  43.5 APOCRYPHAL ACTS OF THE APOSTLES

  The category of Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles appears somewhat more consistent than that of Gospels but is perhaps still not consistent enough to constitute its own genre.38 As with the Gospel texts, we are dealing here with a category that partly comes from the self-referentiality of works in the ancient world, partly from the descriptions of readers in that same world, and partly as a convenience for modern readers. The standard five Acts—comparable in this formulation to the set of “ideal” Greek novels—are (in rough chronological order of authorship) the Acts of John (ca. 150–160), the Acts of Paul (ca. 170–180), the Acts of Peter (ca. 190–200), the Acts of Andrew (ca. 210), and the Acts of Thomas (ca. 220–240).39 To call these standard, however, is to project an image of inviolate texts confident in their own independence. On the contrary, it is with this category that the literary principle of multiformity in surviving exempla can be demonstrated most clearly. Furthermore, only the Acts of Thomas survives complete; the others are all fragmentary. Many other Apocryphal Acts survive that do not belong to this group: these include the fourth- to fifth-century Acts of John by Prochorus (a very popular text in Byzantium) and the contemporary Acts of Philip (a theologically rich defense of “encratic” or rigorously abstinent monasticism).40 As with the Apocryphal Gospels, the Apocryphal Acts continued to be written throughout Late Antiquity and consequently offer one of the most vibrant literary histories from the late ancient world.

  The legends recounted in the Apocryphal Acts concern primarily the careers and deaths of the named Apostles from the canonical Gospels. In this way, as noted above, they presuppose the existence and aut
hority of those canonical Gospels, even while expanding and sometimes attempting to correct them. Many of the stories they contain have become part of the collective memory of the early church: Peter’s crucifixion upside-down following his quo vadis? confrontation with the risen Jesus on the way out of Rome; Paul’s description as “small in size, bald-headed, bandy-legged, with large eyebrows, hook-nosed, full of grace”; Paul’s baptism of a lion; Thecla on the pyre and her self-baptism in an arena in Antioch; and John’s rebuke of the bedbugs.41 While these texts are sometimes dismissed as popular or “subliterary” writings, it is precisely their popularity as a historical phenomenon which ensured the longevity of such episodes. The Apocryphal Acts also attest a high view of Christology in the century following Jesus’s ministry: Jesus is clearly equated with God in all of these texts, even while often appearing polymorphically as his alter egos, the Apostles (the alter Christus motif).42 The martyrdoms of the Apostles are consistently the centerpieces of the Apocryphal Acts and inspired and interacted with the martyrial literature from the late second century and later.43 In their focus on the careers and deaths of individual Apostles they thus resemble much more the singular visions of the canonical Gospels than they do the multifronted canonical book of Acts.44 Nevertheless, historiographical pretentions are shared between all of these texts and are shared too with the ancient novel or romance.

  Apocryphal Acts are sometimes said to have enjoyed a readership among early Christian women.45 This is applied above all to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which occupies the middle third of the Acts of Paul, though it circulated on its own.46 Arguments about readership tend to be circular when we have only the work itself to go on.47 With Thecla, however, there might be enough material evidence in addition to the text to offer a cautious affirmation. Certainly the heroes of the Acts of Paul and Thecla are all women: Thecla, Tryphaena, Falconilla, and a female Lion in the Antiochene arena. Moreover, Thecla’s defiant self-baptism—in the face of male oppression, including her abandonment by Paul—was striking enough to ancient readers to elicit reproach by Tertullian as early as 200 CE, very shortly after the Acts of Paul were written.48 Despite such censures, Thecla became the preeminent female saint in the early Church. She was titled “protomartyr” from an early point, being thus paired with the protomartyr Stephen from Acts 7 and received a number of narrative treatments, including multiple extensions to the Acts of Paul and Thecla and a major rewriting and extension of her legend in the fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thecla.49