Gnostic and Apocryphal Books

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Eliza10 said:
To save time, I am going to quote from my own post so you can see whats in some of those gnostic and apocryphal books:eek: “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” and “Protoevangelium of James” were foolishly used to support JB Bro’s “3 James’ Theory” in a thread of that name in this subforum. This is from page 4 of that debate. Using apocryphal books to explain Holy Scripture should NOT be done. Its crazy!
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I’ll address your comment here:

First off, apocryphal? Yes. Gnostic? No. About five years ago I made this thread that admittedly didn’t get quite far, but was still a good conversation IMHO. I’ll repeat the thread title: “‘apocryphal’ does not equal ‘gnostic’.”

I think that what really confuses people is how the term ‘apocryphal’ is used. The term ‘New Testament apocrypha’ is often used to denote extrabiblical early Christian literature that talk about the lives and teachings of Jesus or His disciples or some other NT figure in general, their orthodoxy or their content notwithstanding.

Rule of thumb: many gnostic ‘gospels’ are (in a broad way of speaking) ‘New Testament apocrypha’, but not all NT apocrypha are gnostic works. It’s kinda like how some Americans are Catholic, but not all Catholics are Americans. 😉

The Protoevangelium of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas are not gnostic. They are, however, ‘apocryphal’ and pseudepigraphical (i.e. they were not really written by James the Just or Thomas).

These two works are basically the ancient equivalent of fanfiction: they were written by authors who tried to fill in the gaps in the gospels and wondered (like we all do): what did Jesus do when He was a kid? How did Joseph and Mary get to know each other? Who were Mary’s parents?

Early Christians never took these works seriously, as something on par with Sacred Scripture; they simply read it as a form of ‘holy’ fiction. That’s what separate these works from gnostic ‘gospels’: the gnostic gospels explicitly claim to reveal some sort of real, secret knowledge that was never passed onto the mainstream and was only being revealed to the lucky few who get to read or hear these texts. (Really, only gnostics took their fake gospels seriously. :cool:)

Whereas these works, everybody knew that they’re fake, but they never took them seriously anyway. If anything, they simply read them the way we Christians in the modern day read novels like Ben-Hur or The Robe or Quo Vadis or watch movies about Jesus or the saints that contain a fair amount of artistic license and speculation mixed in with factual stuff (virtually all of them do): a form of pious entertainment.

I would actually consider these works to be the modern-day equivalent of the ‘apocryphal’ gospels. For example, Christians might find them interesting and even in a way edifying reading, but no knowledgeable Christian would seriously claim Judah ben-Hur was a real person or that the soldier who won Christ’s robe was really named Marcellus, much less consider these novels and movies to be on the same level as the gospels.

So in other words, these apocryphal literature are nearly worthless as historical sources. Everybody recognizes that: nobody would leaf through, say, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and use that to claim the historical Jesus really killed people with His divine power as a child!

But that’s not why I quoted those two works. It’s for the other reason.

(Continued next post)
 
(Continued)

The reason why I quoted those two works is because of another thing: ‘apocryphal’ literature can and does often reflect popular traditions and belief. (There’s actually a degree of interchange: pious tradition and legends influenced these writings, and these writings in turn influenced later pious tradition.) They may not reflect the facts of the 1st century, but they do reflect the times and the cultural contexts in which they were written.

Catholic apologists (even those from Catholic Answers) usually cite the Protoevangelium of James in order to show that the belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity was already held by some Christians at least at the time the work was written (the late 2nd century), because the author takes that as his starting point. He takes for granted that Mary was ever-virgin and so writes the whole work with that in mind. Quoting from that CA article:

An important historical document which supports the teaching of Mary’s perpetual virginity is the Protoevangelium of James, which was written probably less than sixty years after the conclusion of Mary’s earthly life (around A.D. 120), when memories of her life were still vivid in the minds of many.

According to the world-renowned patristics scholar, Johannes Quasten: “The principal aim of the whole writing Protoevangelium of James] is to prove the perpetual and inviolate virginity of Mary before, in, and after the birth of Christ” (Patrology, 1:120–1).

The incident with Salome’s hand burning when she inspected Mary’s hymen? That’s the author’s (admittedly bizarre, to us) way of emphasizing that Mary’s virginity remained intact even after she gave birth to Jesus - that her virginity was divinely protected. Jesus’ ‘brothers’ being stepbrothers, with Joseph being a widower who was Mary’s guardian? That to him explains how Jesus could have had brothers if Mary remained a virgin even after childbirth. All those stories in the Protoevangelium serve to emphasize the same point: Mary is holy, Mary is ever-virgin. That is the main thrust of the work.

(Come to think of it, if the Protoevangelium was really ‘gnostic’, does that mean Mary’s virginity was originally a gnostic doctrine? I hope not! :eek:)

The reason I quoted the Protoevangelium is the same: because it’s our earliest extant record of the ‘stepbrother’ theory in writing. Maybe the author invented the explanation and later readers just found it neat and adopted it; or (more likely IMHO) maybe the author was adopting a popular belief about the ‘brothers’ of Jesus that was already current in his time.

No matter which it was, what I was trying to show was that this idea already existed in Christianity as early as the late 2nd century, the same way apologists use the work to show that Mary’s virginity was already something held by Christians at the time. The contents’ historicity or entertainment value or degree of improbability does not have anything to do with it. I’m not claiming that the Protoevangelium is a reliable historical source for the life of Jesus or that the ‘stepbrothers’ explanation is really the definitive historical truth anyway.

To use another Protoevangelium-related example. The Protoevangelium is the earliest written source we have to give Mary’s parents the names ‘Joachim’ and ‘Anna’. Later apocryphal ‘infancy’ gospels (i.e. those dealing with Mary’s early life and Jesus’ birth) were all to varying degrees influenced by the Protoevangelium, which is pretty much the granddaddy of all later ‘infancy’ gospels and popular retellings of Mary’s early life (and even Eastern icons of the Nativity).

It was that popular in its heyday, so that even when some of the traditions represented in the work fell out of fashion (for example, the ‘stepbrothers’ theory or the dove appearing out of Joseph’s rod), later works simply modified the basic pattern the Protoevangelium molded (so in the rod story, the dove became a flower, which was then identified as a lily; that, or they kept the dove, but it doesn’t literally spring out of the staff anymore).

As I noted earlier, pious tradition and these extrabiblical writings were influencing each other. I mean, it’s easier to remember people when you name them: that’s why we call the good thief ‘Dismas’ (among other names like ‘Joatham’ or ‘Titus’) or the centurion who pierced Jesus’ side ‘Longinus’. Maybe the names were assigned earlier and the author just used this idea for this work, or maybe it was the author himself who gave Mary’s parents these names and this naming made its way into popular Christian consciousness. But no matter which, early Christians found it easier to remember and venerate them with names rather than simply call them ‘Mary’s parents whose names we don’t actually know for sure’.

(As a testament to the Protoevangelium’s popularity, later sources are consistent in naming Mary’s parents ‘Joachim’ and ‘Anna’. By contrast, the other biblical nameless never get the same consistency: the two robbers for example have been variously called Titus and Dumachus or Gestas and Dismas or Ioatham and Maggatras, depending on which source you read.)

If we go by your line of reasoning (I hope I’m not misunderstanding you here, please correct me), if we are to reject the Protoevangelium, does that mean we should no longer call Mary’s parents ‘St. Joachim’ or ‘St. Anna’? Is this naming convention ‘gnostic’ now?
 
(Last one)

Now for the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Yes, it is a very bizarre piece of work. Some might even its picture of a child Jesus who kills and maims people left and right with His divine power rather offensive now.

Seriously, not even the gnostic gospels went as far as this. Their Christs are too busy spouting mystic mumbo-jumbo on the disciples to be using their divine powers on offending humans. 😛 Heck, some of these gnostics wouldn’t have believed Jesus became a child at all. (I mean, they considered the material universe evil/tainted, so for them Jesus could not have been born in a human womb in the first place.) I mean, for them He just ‘appeared’ human: His ‘body’ was an apparition that popped up out of nowhere. So, kid Jesus is out of the question, unless it’s the actually-not-human Jesus appearing as a kid. :rolleyes: In other words, this work’s too bizarre and yet too earthy to be ‘gnostic’.

There’s a reason for this portrayal in the Infancy Gospel. Just like what I said in another place, context is important.

This work was penned by a gentile, Greco-Roman Christian, for a Greco-Roman Christian audience. (Scholars think that the work originated in the same time period and the same geographical region as the Protoevangelium of James: late 2nd-century Syria.) These Christians would have been brought up hearing legends about Greek/Roman gods or divine men doing awesome feats, all the while smiting those who offend them. Since Jesus is of course divine as per Christian belief, maybe our author thought to cast Him in the same vein as these ‘gods’: even in a way, show Him to be greater than all these pagan gods.

(Nothing inherently offensive about this approach, mind: when the missionaries were converting the Germanic tribes - the Danes, the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, etc. - in northern Europe, they often portrayed Jesus as a sort of Germanic warrior-hero, because that’s what their audience would understand and relate to. It’s what’s called inculturation. There’s this old Anglo-Saxon poem, the Dream of the Rood, where Jesus is depicted as being just that - a brave Germanic warlord - with the speaking (!) cross being personified as His faithful retainer.)

In fact, if the work has any faults, maybe it is precisely just that: its Jesus is more Greek (His temper being reminiscent of easily-offended Greek gods) than Jewish. (Heck, this Jesus learns - or rather, ends up teaching His teacher - the Greek alphabet at school!) But then again, the author wasn’t a Jew, so nothing we can do there I guess.

Now the reason why I quoted this work is the same reason why I quoted the Protoevangelium: because it’s another (possible) early record of the ‘stepbrothers’ theory. Note that the work speaks of James not so much as the ‘brother’ of Jesus, but as Joseph’s son. So there seems to be a distinction being made between their relationship: they have the same ‘father’ (Joseph), but if that’s the case, why not just say that James was Jesus’ ‘brother’? Why bother with circumlocutions: “[Joseph’s] son, James”?

As I mentioned earlier, the Infancy Gospel was probably in the same time period and in the same location as the Protoevangelium: Syria, late 2nd century. So what I was trying to show was, that by the late 2nd century there were probably already Christians in Syria who thought that Jesus’ “brothers” were really His stepbrothers (and also, that Mary was ever-virgin). In other words, these non-Jewish Syrian Christians were likely already familiar with this explanation, and two such Christians penned two apocryphal works which took this idea (and a number of other beliefs) for granted.
 
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