MARKus BOcKMuEhL Ancient Apocryphal Gospels INTERPRETATION Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 3 11/11/16 9:39 AM © 2017 Markus Bockmuehl First edition Published by Westminster John Knox Press Louisville, Kentucky 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the pub- lisher. For information, address Westminster John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1 396. Or contact us online at www.wjkbooks.com. Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and are used by permission. Map of Oxyrhynchus is printed with permission by Biblical Archaeology Review. Book design by Drew Stevens Cover design by designpointinc.com Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Bockmuehl, Markus N. A., author. Title: Ancient apocryphal gospels / Markus Bockmuehl. Description: Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 2017. | Series: Interpretation: resources for the use of scripture in the church | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016032962 (print) | LCCN 2016044809 (ebook) | ISBN 9780664235895 (hbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611646801 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Apocryphal Gospels—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Apocryphal books (New Testament)—Criticism, interpretation, etc. Classification: LCC BS2851 .B63 2017 (print) | LCC BS2851 (ebook) | DDC 229/.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032962 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1992. Most Westminster John Knox Press books are available at special quantity discounts when purchased in bulk by corporations, organizations, and special-i nterest groups. For more information, please e-m ail [email protected]. BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 4 11/11/16 9:39 AM CONTENTS Series Foreword vii Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xii CHAPTER 1: ANCIENT CHRISTIAN GOSPELS 1 The Four Gospels—and the Others 8 Who Read What in the Early Church? 10 The (Re)Discovery of Noncanonical Gospels 14 “Gnosticism”?—A Definition 18 Gospels of the Original Jesus, Suppressed by an Authoritarian Church? 21 The Design and Approach of This Book 28 How Many Apocryphal Gospels? 31 What Makes a Gospel “Apocryphal”? 38 How to Organize the Texts: A Taxonomy 48 Where to Read the Noncanonical Gospels Today 51 CHAPTER 2: INFANCY GOSPELS 55 Why Infancy Gospels? 55 The Infancy Gospel of James 58 The Infancy Gospel of Thomas 72 Other Infancy Texts 80 Conclusion: Infancy Gospels 84 CHAPTER 3: MINISTRY GOSPELS 87 The Problem of “Fragmentary” Gospels 87 A Note on Q 89 “Jewish Christian” Gospels? 92 Ministry Gospels on Papyrus 104 Papyrus Egerton 2 (+ Papyrus Köln 255) 106 “Papyrus” Oxyrhynchus 840 110 Other Papyrus Fragments 114 A Secret Gospel of Mark? 120 BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 5 11/11/16 9:39 AM The Abgar Legend 121 Alternative Whole Narrative Gospels? 123 Conclusion: Ministry Gospels 132 CHAPTER 4: PASSION GOSPELS 137 The Gospel of Peter 137 The Unknown Berlin Gospel/Gospel of the Savior (P.Berl. 22220) 152 The Strasbourg Coptic Papyrus (P.Argent. Copt. 5, 6, 7) 154 The Discourse on the Cross (Nubian Stauros Text) 155 Passion Gospels Associated with Pilate, Nicodemus, and Joseph of Arimathea 156 Gospels of Gamaliel? 158 Conclusion: Passion Gospels 159 CHAPTER 5: POST- RESURRECTION DISCOURSE GOSPELS 161 New Testament Origins? 162 The Gospel of Thomas 163 The Gospel of Philip 183 Other Dialogue “Gospels” or Gospel- Like Texts from Nag Hammadi 190 The Gospel of Mary 199 The Gospel of Judas (Codex Tchacos) 204 Gospels of the Egyptians 210 Gospel of Bartholomew 212 The Epistle of the Apostles 215 Conclusion: Post- Resurrection Discourse Gospels 220 CHAPTER 6: HOW TO READ APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS 225 Glossary of Technical Terms 239 Bibliography 243 Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources 291 Index of Subjects 302 BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 6 11/11/16 9:39 AM chAPTER 1 Ancient christian Gospels Christians since antiquity have grounded their faith on its authen- tic attestation in the gospel of Jesus Christ received from his first apostles. This grounding is already explicit in the Bible itself and has remained an uncontroversial aspect of historic Christian praxis and worship since antiquity. Throughout their history, churches of virtually every stripe have—for all their tacit or fiercely contested differences—shared a core conviction about Jesus of Nazareth as in some sense both a human being in history and yet also “God with us.” Jesus has always been encountered and experienced in a variety of ways. Most prominent since antiquity have been practices of prayer and common worship that include a liturgical meal celebrating both his memory and his presence, accompanied by the public reading of the four gospels—authoritative writings about his teachings and ministry received in the names of his earliest disciples. But the early Christian use of gospels also has a fascinating dynamic of its own, operating in theologically powerful and yet sur- prisingly polyvalent ways in diverse periods and communities. The term “gospel” surfaces in the earliest tradition as character- izing Jesus’ message. Matthew and Mark both present “the gospel” (to euangelion) as the radical message and praxis of Jesus about the 1 imminent coming of God’s kingdom (see esp. Mark 1:14–15; 8:35; 10:29; 13:10; Matt. 4:23; 9:35; 24:14). Luke, who is more aware of BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 1 11/11/16 9:39 AM ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS the public, imperial context of his writing, does not seem to like this noun, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. He never uses it in his gospel, and in Acts it appears only once each on the lips of Peter and of Paul (Acts 15:7; 20:24). The verb “to announce good news” (euangelizomai), on the other hand, occurs frequently in both Luke and Acts. Even Matthew and Mark, however, already show a transition in meaning that evidently occurred at a very early stage in the tradi- tion—it is in fact already complete in the Letters of Paul, which predate all four New Testament gospels. Whereas “the gospel” in Matthew and Mark almost invariably reports what Jesus himself preaches and enacts, even here there are signs that by the time of these evangelists “the gospel” has become the content of the message he entrusts to his disciples, and indeed the message about him. So Matthew’s Jesus himself can promise that “this gospel of the kingdom” will be proclaimed throughout the world after his death (Matt. 24:14; 26:13). And Mark 1:1 opens with the words, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ”—a famously ambigu- ous phrase that leaves unresolved whether the gospel here in view is Jesus’ message (as in 1:14), the message about Jesus (e.g., 13:10; 14:9), or perhaps even—by a kind of metonymy—Mark’s own book that sets forth this message. But it clearly involves the person of Jesus, including his message and ministry as well as his death. Additionally, and well before Mark writes his account, it is already clear that when in the early 50s Paul preached to the Corinthians the gospel by which they are saved, this entailed at a minimum a narrative passion and resurrection sequence involv- ing “Christ died for our sins, . . . he was buried, . . . he was raised on the third day, . . . he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, then” to many others in succession (1 Cor. 15:1–6; cf. 2 Tim. 1:10; 2:8). There seems moreover to be continuity here with the simi- larly sequential narrative, quoted a few chapters earlier, of words and actions of Jesus “on the night when he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23–25). A few decades later, in a more retrospective account of Peter’s first preaching to the Gentiles during the mid-3 0s, the narrative of Acts has Peter assuring his audience at the house of Cornelius 2 about “the word” God sent to the children of Israel, “proclaiming the good news [euangelizomenos]” of peace through Jesus Christ (Acts 10:36, my translation). That “word” (logos), he goes on to say, BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 2 11/11/16 9:39 AM Ancient Christian Gospels came to expression through the “message” (rhēma) associated with certain particular events that recently transpired in Jewish Palestine, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. (Acts 10:37–41, NRSV) In other words, even the earliest stages of the tradition, both as attested in Paul and as attributed to the remembered Peter in Acts, envisaged the gospel to include a narrative about Jesus’ public ministry and message, culminating in his death and resurrection. (Significantly, Luke places a Mark-l ike apostolic gospel outline on Peter’s lips. This is despite its obvious divergences from the structure of Luke’s own gospel account with its addition of birth, infancy, and ascension stories.) Readers familiar with the gospels and with cognate English words like “evangelical” are sometimes surprised to discover the extent of scholarly debate and controversy about the origin and precise meaning of the early Christian use of the term euangelion. One school of thought has long stressed the conviction that the term must be understood as originating in connection with the Hellenistic use of euangelia (Greek plural) to denote “happy news” or “good news”—as used in the eastern empire most publicly in relation to official Roman imperial announcements about good news like the accession, birthday, or victory in battle of the emperor as “Savior” (sōtēr, a word the New Testament uses much more sparingly than later Christian tradition). The most famous pre- Christian example is an inscription in praise of the birthday of Caesar Augustus that was erected at Priene and other cities in Asia Minor in 9 BCE. He is celebrated as “our God” whose birth “signified the beginning of happy news [euangelia] for the entire world.” Even without using the word “gospel,” the Roman poet Virgil’s famous Fourth Eclogue, composed around 42 BCE, deploys 3 Isaiah- like imagery in anticipation of an age of eschatological peace and salvation associated with the birth of an unnamed child (though BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 3 11/11/16 9:39 AM ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS not perhaps identifiable as the hoped-f or son of Mark Antony and his wife Octavia, as scholars used to think). The notion of public good news had been common currency for many centuries, being attested ever since Homer (Odyssey 14.152, 166: euangelion, singular). Indeed the commonplace inflation of such terminology could even become the butt of jokes: the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (ca. 446–386 BCE) already had a sausage seller poking fun at bawdy market hyperbole by intoning, “Hey, Senators, I’m the first with tremendous news [euangelisasthai]: never since the war began have sardines been so cheap” (Knights 642–45; trans. Roche 2005). The familiarity of such terminology can be gauged too by its adoption as a Latin loan word: the Roman writer Cicero repeatedly and somewhat informally does this, as when writing to his friend Atticus in 60 BCE, “First, I have what I think is good news [euangelia] . . .” (Letters to Atticus 2.3.1). One might think, therefore, that Christian talk of to euangelion, the good news, basically just recycled for Jesus a well-k nown cliché that could evoke little more than a yawning response. That would hardly convey the sort of grandly anti-i mperial ambition which the claim of a Christian euangelion is sometimes said to advance. To be sure, resistance to the force of empire soon became at least a sporadic occurrence—and sometimes part of the very essence of what it meant to be a Christian, as stories about the trials of martyrs repeatedly affirm. But despite sometimes heated scholarly debate, it remains difficult to document in the New Testament any sense that the use of the term “gospel” serves a clear anti-i mperial function. A related line of argument has sometimes taken such early Christian terminology to imply the church’s origin not as a Palestinian Jewish messianic movement but as a Hellenistic divinized hero cult, drawing on culturally commonplace idioms and assumptions about heroes or rulers. But to acknowledge the existence of such potential Hellenistic resonance is not yet to understand what a (or the) gospel conveys in the early Christian texts. Even for Greek-s peaking Jews and Christians, gospel language must have carried a kind of dual significance. On one hand, there will have been at least an awareness of the secular use of “good news,” sometimes exploited in the 4 service of ideological ends and propaganda. Jewish writers in Greek like Philo and Josephus repeatedly illustrate the currency of such a BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 4 11/11/16 9:39 AM Ancient Christian Gospels meaning of “good news.” Secular as well as religious overtones were indeed in the air, even for Jews. On the other hand, however, we must recognize that the Greek terminology was also already part of a richly textured discourse of prophetic and divine communication in older, pre-C hristian Jewish Greek Scriptures. In that respect the Greek words conveyed a Jewish, Old Testament meaning—often associated with the second part of the book of Isaiah, which announces the Servant of the Lord’s return to redeem Jerusalem (52:7) and speaks of “good news” to the afflicted and imprisoned (61:1, both times using the verb euangelisasthai). While the Greek Old Testament does not deploy the noun “gospel” in this fashion in either the singular or the plural, the formative role of widely influential texts like these in the early Christian understanding of the gospel of Jesus is clear. Other Jewish texts in Greek like Psalms of Solomon 11:1 clearly highlight such usage, and Paul quite confidently appropriates Isaiah 52:7 in speaking of the activity of the apostles as proclaimers of a message that is “the gospel” (see Rom. 10:15–16; cf. 1 Cor. 9:14; also Stanton 2013, 281–92 and passim and Horbury 2005, 2006). Unlike the Greco- Roman use almost exclusively of the plural euangelia, the early Christian writers deploy the singular “gospel” (euangelion) consistently and uniquely in relation to the message of or about Jesus. That said, even here there is some evidence of semantic ambiguity from the start. As we saw earlier, Jesus’ message soon became the message about him (Mark 1:1; 14:9; and 16:15; note esp. Matt. 26:13; 24:14, “this gospel,” i.e., not only Jesus’ words and actions but evidently an account of that message and ministry—such as Matthew himself provides; cf. Stanton 2013, 95–98). Already in the corpus of Pauline Letters the term came to be used interchangeably for either the message or its content: the apostle speaks of both “the gospel” and “my gospel” (cf. Phlm. 13 with 2 Tim. 2:8 and Rom. 16:25). As already noted, Luke never uses the noun “gospel” in his narrative of Jesus (but see Acts 15:7; 20:24), although he does deploy the cognate verb twenty-fi ve times in Luke and Acts. In Acts 13:32–33 he places on Paul’s lips a definition of what it means to preach the gospel: “we bring you the good news that what God promised to our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by 5 raising Jesus.” The New Testament’s Johannine writings avoid the BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 5 11/11/16 9:39 AM ANCIENT APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS Greek euangel- word group altogether except at Revelation 10:7 as well as at 14:6, where it denotes a message of judgment. Matthew’s usage in particular evidently had a powerful influence on subsequent understanding of what the gospel might be. Very rapidly, its range of meaning expanded from Jesus’ kingdom message or (as in Paul, e.g., 1 Cor. 15) the message about Jesus’ death and resurrection to include accounts of his life, preaching, innocent death, and resurrection “for us.” As we saw earlier, an early narrative form of this is implied in Peter’s account in Acts 10:34–42, and in the writings of Ignatius (d. ca. 107) it is already evident that “the gospel” designates for him the crucifixion- resurrection message of Jesus (Smyrnaeans 7.2), quite possibly in its Matthean form (cf. Smyrnaeans 1.1 with Matt. 3:15; similarly cf. Didache 8.2 with Matt. 6:9–13; also 2 Clement 8.5, more loosely, with Luke 16:10–11; see further Hill 2006; Foster 2005). Significantly, not later than the middle of the second century the notion of this gospel story “according to” one apostolic figure or another had become attached to gospel books—for example, in Justin, First Apology 66.3 (see Stanton 2013, 92–97). A little before this, Marcion had already identified his edition of Luke as “the gospel.” Similar examples can be found in other early documents: the form of the Didache’s reference to its source suggests that “the gospel” was already used to designate “a gospel writing, almost certainly Matthew, some decades before Marcion” (thus Stanton 2013, 77; cf. Kelhoffer 2014, 72). If this is correct it follows, importantly, that known portions of one or more of the subsequently canonical gospels were known and cited as “the gospel” before any of the extant noncanonical gospels were composed. To some extent this is inevitably a judgment about a serendipitous state of affairs at this present time, which the discovery of new sources or compelling reassessments of existing ones might require us to revise. And absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But in the meantime it matters for our assessment of recent and current claims that while specific literary identifications are sometimes difficult or textually ambiguous (e.g., Luke 16:10–11 in 2 Clement 8.5, cited above), no ancient author refers to any identifiable version of a noncanonical text like Thomas 6 or Q as “the gospel.” Further on this note, it has been repeatedly shown (e.g., Hengel 1984; Gathercole 2013) that while the titles of the existing BrockMuehl_Pages.indd 6 11/11/16 9:39 AM