Pseudepigraphy and Coptic Apocrypha: Authority, Authenticity, and Worldbuilding [2023] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Fictional books in Coptic apocrypha [2023]
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, 2023
Coptic literature abounds with references to books that never existed as physical objects in their own right. This article explores the role of fictional books specifically in a selection of Coptic apocrypha deriving from the entire period of Coptic literary production. Whether presented as apostolic, prophetic, or angelic; earthly or heavenly; historical or contemporary, references to fictional books could function as veracity devices, authority claims, or as materials for storyworld creation. Taking as its points of departure recent work on pseudo-documentarism, transnarrative storyworlds, and the cognitive effects of fiction, this article explores implicit claims to authority and authenticity, as well as the fuzzy boundaries and interrelationships between fictional and factual references in meaning-and world-making.
According to the presently accepted scholarly opinion, during the 4 th -6 th centuries Manichaeans widely read and intensively used the so-called Christian apocryphal works, especially the five most important apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The general opinion is mainly based on the polemic writings of the church fathers and a very small number of original Coptic Manichaean texts. In this essay, I challenge this unanimously acknowledged judgment and claim that a closer analysis of the data retrieved from the original Coptic material makes a contrary conclusion more likely. As far as some characters in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, Andrew, John, Peter, and Paul, are concerned, they indeed appear in two psalm-cycles of the Coptic Manichaean Psalm-Book (Psalms of Heracleides, Psalmoi Sarakōtōn). In both cases, however, the author's obvious intention was to provide historical exempla as consolation for the contemporary believers in times of persecution and, in the case of the apocryphal female figures (Thecla, Drusiane, Maximilla, Aristobula, Iphidama, Mygdonia) to counterbalance the male predominance of the characters in these hymns, thus their appearance attests much more to the rhetorical skills of their authors than to the popularity of these apocryphal scriptures among the Manichaeans.
Text–Work–Manuscript: What Is an 'Old Testament Pseudepigraphon'
The 2013 volume Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, edited by Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila and Alexander Panayotov, is a highly important contribution to the field of Pseudepigrapha studies, making previously unpublished material available for further study. This review essay discusses the editorial strategies that have shaped this volume, focusing in particular on the representation of its basic building block, the pseudepigraphon. Exploring two entries in the volume, 'The Book of Noah' and 'The Story of Melchizedek with the Melchizedek Legend and the Chronicon Paschale', this article demonstrates how privileging the early 'work' as the default mode of representation creates imaginations of pseud-epigrapha that may not match the manuscript sources that have in fact survived.
Pseudepigraphy and the New Testament A Challenge to Christian Theology
In modern criticism, most New Testament scholars have come to regard certain books of the New Testament canon as pseudepigrapha. The concept of canonical pseudepigrapha suggests that certain NT writings are “falsely attributed” to apostolic authorship. Such NT writings include; 2 Peter, Ephesians, the Pastoral epistles and so on . The underlying concern is the association of “falseness” with the NT canon. The implication of this assumption is the question of the “integrity” of the NT canon. The problem of pseudepigraphy in the canon challenges the authenticity of the Christian faith, hence the urgent need to address it. Therefore, this paper will attempt to demonstrate the validity of the apostolic authorship of the NT books. It attempts to establish that the acceptance of these epistles as canonical attest to their authenticity as authoritative apostolic writings.
Narratio Ioseph: A Rarely Acknowledged Coptic Joseph Apocryphon
The Embroidered Bible: Studies in Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in Honour of Michael E. Stone, Lorenzo di Tomasso, Michael Henze, and William Adler, eds., Leiden, Brill 2017, 2017
Discussion of a rarely appreciated Coptic Joseph Apocryphon in which I focus on the text as a form of rewritten Scripture. In his highly-regarded studies of Armenian parabiblical literature, Michael E. Stone has cast light on an important, although largely unappreciated, corpus of Jewish and Christian tradition, situated at the fringe of the main trajectories of later Judaism and Christianity. In a recent book, he has also accentuated the interconnection between Jewish and Christian traditions in the context of "parabiblical" textual materials. "It is worth observing," he writes, that the traditions and interpretations that formed the building blocks of these developed narratives were not exclusively Christian in origin. It has been remarked that it is misleading, at least for the first millennium C.E., to treat the various religious and literary traditions that derive from the Bible-Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and others-as if they lived and grew hermetically sealed off from one another, basically as independent traditions. Instead, the interrelations between them are complex and dynamic and involve not only diachronic transmission of shared "parabiblical" material but also mutual borrowing and influence over centuries. In light of these relations, an ongoing process of interpretation and reinterpretation took place.1 It is a pleasure to honor a distinguished scholar and erudite thinker personifying the best qualities of an age-old and venerable university tradition. In Europe at least, the culture embodied by Michael E. Stone's scholarship is now at risk of fading away and succumbing to educational policies dictated by a parochial and short-termed mercantile perspective. Our educational system is haunted by a Zeitgeist in constant pursuit of the newest caprices of the era and determined by an ephemeral economic understanding. The result is that we are currently experiencing an elimination of traditions the values of which it is impossible to quantify from a narrow economic perspective: Damnosa quid non inminuit dies! 1 M.E. Stone, Armenian Apocrypha Relating to Abraham (SBLEJL 37; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2012), 3.
Pseudepigraphic Paulines in the New Testament
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2003
In order to verify the presence of pseudepigraphic epistles in the New Testament, scholars have often argued that followers of a famous philosopher, such as Pythagoras or Plato, wrote pseudepigraphic do-cuments. This argument presumes that pseudepigraphy was an accepted phenomenon in antiquity and that the writing of epistles under someone else's name was socially not offensive. In this article, this presumption is questioned. The article shows that writers could be banished or put to death if it was the intention of their writings to deceive their audience as far as the identity of the author thereof. As epistles are distinguished from short stories or poems, writings which were written with the intention of deceiving their readers should be set apart from those without such an intention. In view of this distinction the article establishes categories of “Pauline” epistles in the New Testament. The aim is to argue that there are indeed epistles which intended to deceive their re...
This article explores the pre-history of our present notion of 'the Old Testament pseudepigrapha' through a focus on Johann Albert Fabricius's Codex pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti (1713). It considers Fabricius's work from four perspectives: as a compendium of knowledge recovered during and after the Renaissance, as a reflection of debates about Scripture in the wake of the Reformation, as a literary artefact of anxieties about authorship in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and as the foundation for nineteenth-and twentiety-century research on the materials collected therein. By revisiting the origins of the concept and category of 'pseudepigrapha', the article attempts to bring a broader historical perspective to bear on current debates about the heurism of the label.