Gospels (Uncanonical)
Gospels (Uncanonical)
Introductory.-1. The Church, as Origen said-or rather, as the translator of Origens Homilies on Luke (1) said for him-the Church has four Gospels, heresy has many. This could be said by the middle of the 3rd century. A century earlier, with the rise of the Gospel canon, a sharp distinction had been drawn between the four Gospels of the NT and all other writings of this class. The present article deals with the latter, not in relation to the former but rather in the light of their own genesis and structure as products of early Christian literature. Still, two preliminary remarks must be made in connexion with the distinction drawn by Origen. One is, that while the Church had only four Gospels in the sense of Scriptures relating to the life of Jesus, which were authorized to be used in public worship and for purposes of doctrine, the early Christians did not by any means confine their reading to the canonical Gospels. Their piety was nourished upon some Gospels which found no place in the canon. And these Gospels were not always tinged with definite heresy. We can see, for example, from the evidence which Eusebius rather grudgingly furnishes for the repute of the Gospel of the Hebrews in certain circles, that an uncanonical Gospel like this had a vogue which was only partially affected by the necessity of excluding it from the canon. Also, before the canon gained its full authority, a Gospel like that of Peter could still keep some footing within a community. The Church might have its four Gospels as classical and standard documents for the life and teaching of Jesus; fortunately, it felt obliged to stamp these with the special mark of inspired authority. But Gospels already in circulation did not disappear at once, even when they were excluded from ecclesiastical use. Nor again-and this is the second remark to be made-did the fixing of the canon put a stop to the composition or the editing of such Gospel material. Literature of this kind continued to be produced, not only in circles which were more or less semi-Christian, but especially in the Egyptian Church. It belonged to the category of religious fiction for the most part. Still, it followed in the wake of the canonical Gospels, and what has survived the wreck, reaching us partly on the planks of versions and partly on broken pieces of the original, forms a considerable section of the material for our present survey.
To study these Gospels against the background of the canonical, and to measure them by the standards of the latter, is to do them too much honour. But it is also to do them, or some of them, an injustice. As we shall see, it is a mistake to speak of the uncanonical Gospels as if they were a homogeneous product. They vary widely, not only in age but in spirit. Some of them are documents of heresy,* [Note: e. of heresy which repudiated the name of heresy; cf. V. H. Stanton, The Gospels as Hist. Documents, i. [1903] 244 f.] and were never meant to be anything else; the motive for their composition was to adapt one or more of the canonical Gospels to the tenets of a sect or party on the borders of the catholic Church. But others were written to meet the needs of popular Christianity; their aim was to supplement rather than to rival the canonical Gospels, and in some cases they can be shown to be almost contemporary with the latter-certainly prior to the formation of the canon itself. The problem is still further complicated by the probability that now and then a Gospel of un-heretical character was re-issued in the interests of later parties, while a Gospel originally Gnostic, for example, may occasionally have been pruned of its objectionable features and started on a career within the Church. [Note: A similar process went on in the case of some of the uncanonical Acts.] Certain phenomena seem to point to both of these practices in early Christian literature. An uncanonical Gospel might experience either change; it might rise or fall in the world of the Church. And this would be all the more possible just because it was uncanonical. Neither its text nor its contents ensured it against degeneration or stood in the way of its appropriation by the hands of the orthodox. Either the Church or heresy could drag over a document which lay close to the border, and fit it to strange uses. However this may be, recent phases of critical research in the uncanonical Gospels show us pretty plainly that within as well as without the early Church there was sometimes a good deal of what not only later generations but even contemporaries did not hesitate to call heresy, that this heresy assumed many forms, and that the un-canonical Gospels, as we now have them, often represent heterogeneous and varied interests of such Christian or semi-Christian piety.
2. The extant fragments, mainly Greek and Latin, were first collected in a critical edition by J. A. Fabricius (Codex Apocryphus Nov. Test. editio secunda, emendatior, Hamburg, 1719 [1st ed., 1703]); A. Birch (Auctarium codicis Apocryphi Novi Testament i Fabriciani continens plura inedita alia ad fidem codd. mss. emendatius expressa, Copenhagen, 1804); J. C. Thilo (Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti, Leipzig, 1832); and C. de Tischendorf (Evangelia Apocrypha2, Leipzig, 1876). Later discoveries were mainly incorporated in the texts issued by E. Nestle (Novi Testamenti Supplementum, Leipzig, 1896); E. Preuschen (Antilegomena: die Reste der ausserkanonischen Evangelien und urchristlichen Ueberlieferungen, herausgegeben und uebersetezt2, Giessen, 1905); and E. Klostermann (in H. Lietzmanns Kleine Textet, 3, 8, and 11, Bonn, 1903-04). But Thilo and Tischendorf still form the basis for research, so far as the Greek and Latin texts of several important documents are concerned. In E. Henneckes Neutestamentliche Apokryphen (Tbingen and Leipzig, 1904) there are valuable translations, with introductions and notes, or the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Protevangelium Jacobi, and the Gospel of the Thomas (by A. Meyer), of the Gospel of Peter (by A. Stlcken), of the Traditions of Matthias and some Coptic fragments, etc. (by the editor). The French edition in course of preparation by J. Bousquet and E. Amann (Les Apocryphes du Nouveau Testament, Paris), includes the original texts, but as yet only the Protevangelium Jacobi has appeared (1910).
The eighteenth century brought Augustin Calmets Dissertation sur les Evangiles apocryphes in his Commentaire, Paris, 1709-16, vol. vii.; Jeremiah Jones New and Full Method of Settling the Canonical Authority of the New Testament, London, 1726-27 (written on the basis of Fabricius, along apologetic lines); and J. F. Kleukers similar Ueber die Apokryphen des NT, Hamburg, 1798; followed in the nineteenth century by Arens essay de Evang. apoc. in canonicis usu historico, critico, exegetico, Gttingen, 1835; K. F. Borbergs Bibliothek der neutestamentlichen Apokryphen, gesammelt, uebersetzt, und erlutert, Stuttgart, 1841; J. Pons (de Ngrpelisse), Recherches sur les Apocryphes du Nouveau Testament (thse historique et critique), Montauban, 1850; and* [Note: Tischendorfs prize essay, De Evangeliorum Apocryphorum origine et usu, appeared in 1851; Hilgenfelds serviceable Evangelium sec. Hebraeos, etc., in 1866.] R. Clemens Die geheimgehaltenen oder sog. apokryphen Evangelien, Stuttgart, 1850 (volume of German translations). A French translation of Thilo was issued in 1848 by G. Brunet (Les Evangiles apocryphes 2, paris, 1863), and a poor English compilation, based on Fabricius, Thilo, etc., was published four years later by J. A. Giles (Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti, London). W. Hones worthless and unworthy Apocryphal NT, London, 1820, included the protevangelium Jacobi. Useful volumes of English [Note: J. Ellicotts Dissertation on the Apocryphal Gospels in Cambridge Essays, 1856, is apologetic.] translations were published, however, by A. Walker (in the Ante-Nicene Chr. Lib., xvi. [Edinburgh, 1873]); B. H. Cowper (The Apoc. Gospels, London, 1867, 4 1874); and B. Pick (paralipomena: Remains of Gospels and Sayings of Christ, Chicago, 1908), Two French treatises overshadowed any English criticism during this period, one a critical study by M, Nicolas (tudes sur les vangiles apocryphes, Paris, 1865); the other a Roman Catholic counterpart by Joseph Variot (Las Evangiles apocryphes, Paris, 1878).
In W. Wrights Contributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the New Testament, London, 1865, Syriac versions of the protevangelium Jacobi (a fragment) and the Gospel of Thomas the Israelite were published and translated with notes. Otherwise, the main contributions to the subject during the last century were monographs upon special points and aspects, like P. J. peltzers Historische und dogmenhistorische Elemente in den apok. Kindheits-Evangelien, Wurzburg, 1864; A. Tappehorns Ausserbiblische Nachrichten, oder die Apokryphen ber die Geburt, Kindheit und das Lebensende Jesu und Mari, Paderborn, 1885: and J. Hayers Die apokryphischen Evangelien, auch ein Beweis fr die Glaubwrdigkeit der kanonischen, Halberstadt, 1898-99; [Note: A translation of the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, with notes.] with S. Baring-Goulds Lost and Hostile Gospels, London, 1874, p. 119f.; J. Chrzaszczs Die apokryphen Evangelien, insbesondere das Evangelium secundum Hebros, Gleiwitz, 1888; and C. Bosts Les Evangiles apocryphes de lenfance de J.C. avec une introduction sur les rcits de Matthieu et de Luc, Montauban, 1894.
The older monographs upon their relation to the sources for the life of Jesus, by R. Hofmann (Das Leben Jesu nach den Apokryphen, Leipzig. 1851); J. de Q. Donehoo (Apoc. and Legendary Life Of Christ, London, 1903); and L. Couard (Altchristl. Sagen ber das Leben Jesu, Gtersloh, 1905) have been largely superseded by the exhaustive work of W. Bauer (Das Leben Jesus im Zeitalter der neutest. Apokryphen, Tbingen, 1909).
An excellent survey of recent Oriental discoveries and discussion in this field is given in Felix Haases Literarische Untersuchungen zur orientalisch-apokryphen Evangelienliteratur, Leipzig, 1913; the Slavonic versions are chronicled by E. Kozak in JPTh [Note: PTh Jahrbcher fr protestantische Theologie.] , 1892, p. 127f., as well as by Bonwetsch in Harnacks Altchristl. Litt. i. [Leipzig, 1893], p. 907f.
The principal general articles on the subject are by G. Brunet in Mignes Dict. des Apocryphes, i. [1856] 961f.; R. A. Lipsius in DCB [Note: CB Dict. of Christian Biography.] ii. [1880] 700-17; B. F. Westcott, Introd. to Study of the Gospel 6 London, 1881, p. 466f.; Movers in Wetzer-Welte [Note: etzer-Welte Wetzer-Weltes Kirchenlexikon.] 2, i. [1882] 1036-84; T. Zahn, Gesch, des Kanons, ii. [Leipzig, 1892 621-97; A. Harnack, op. cit. i. 4-25, ii. 1. 589f.; R. Hofmann, in Realencyklopdie fr protestantische Theologie und Kirche 3 i. [1896] 653f. (Eng. translation i. [1908] 225-29); M. R. James in Encyclopaedia Biblica i. [1899] 258-59; Batiffol, in Vigourouxs Dict. de la Bible, ii. [1899] 2114-18; A. Ehrhard, Altchristl. Lit., Frelburg i. B., 1900, pp. 123-47; O. Bardenhewer, Gesch. der altkirchl. Lit.2, i. [do. 1913] 31; J. G. Tasker in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) v. [1904] 420-38; A. F. Findlay in Dict. of Christ and the Gospels i. [1906] 671-85; J. Leipoldt, Gesch. des neutest. Kanons, i. [Leipzig, 1907] 21; R. Knopf in RGG [Note: GG Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart.] i. [1908-09] 543ff.; H. Jordan, Gesch. der altchristl. Lit., Leipzig, 1911, pp. 74-78; H, Waitz, in Realencyklopdie fr protestantische Theologie und Kirche 3 xxxii. [1913] 79-93; and L. St. A. Wells, in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics vi. [1913] 346-352. The discussions of Lipsius, Zahn, and Harnack are most important, together with the criticisms of Tasker and Waitz.
In several NT Introductions the uncanonical Gospels are included, especially by F. Bleek (Einleitung in das NT4, Berlin, 1886, p. 406f.); G. Salmon (Introd. to the NT9, London, 1899, pp. x-xi); and J. E. Belser (Einleitung in das NT, Freiburg i. B., 1905, p. 789f.); there is a chapter on them in E. Renans LEglise chrtienne, Paris, 1879, ch. 26, as well as in F. C. Burkitts Gospel Hist. and its Transmission, Edinburgh, 1906, p. 324f.; and a recent Spanish monograph by E. C. Carillo (Los Evangelos Apcrifos, Paris, 1913); also the relevant paragraphs in Reschs Agrapha (Texte and Untersuchungen v. 4, Leipzig, 1889) and in Histories of Christian literature, e.g. C. T. Cruttwells Lit. Hist. of Early Christianity, London, 1893, i. 160-174; G. Krgers Altchristl. Litt.2, Freiburg, 1898, 16; and P. Wendlands Die urchritl. Literaturforomen2, Tbingen, 1912, pp. 292-301.
3. Writing at the close of the 1st cent. a.d., St. Luke observes in the preface to his Gospel that many had already undertaken to compose a narrative of the life of Jesus: , . (1:1). He does not intend to convey any impression of disparagement by the term . He is not satisfied with their work, but he does not dismiss his predecessors as unauthorized. Nor does he claim for himself any special inspiration. What others have done he proposes to do; only, it is to be in a more complete and orderly fashion.
The Muratorian Canon, in its extant form, does not happen to mention any uncanonical Gospels which are to be avoided by the faithful, unless we are meant to understand some of them as included in the obscure closing words. But more than a hundred years after St. Luke wrote his preface, Origen commented on it as follows: Possibly the term contains an implicit condemnation of those who betook themselves hastily and without any spiritual gift () to the composition of Gospels. Thus Matthew , but wrote under the impulse of the Holy Spirit; so did Mark and John, and similarly Luke. But those who composed the Gospel called and that entitled , they . There is also a Gospel current. Basilides has also ventured to write a Gospel . Many indeed : there is the Gospel and many others; but the Church of God accepts only the four. It is not certain whether Origen intended to suggest that the first two or three Gospels which he named were among the uninspired predecessors of Luke. Probably he did. But the interest of the passage for us lies in the names of the Gospels which his erroneous interpretation of leads him to mention. They must have been among the most prominent of those known to him.
In the 4th cent. Eusebius (HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] iii. 23) ends his catalogue of the canonical or accepted Scriptures with the remark that his object in drawing it up has been that we may know both these works and those cited by heretics under the name of the apostles, including, for example, such books as the Gospels of Peter, of Thomas, of Matthias, or of any others besides them They are not to be placed even among the rejected writings ( ), but are all to be put aside as absurd and impious. Further down in the same century we come upon Ambrose (CSEL [Note: SEL Corpus Script. Eccles. Latinorum.] xxxii. p. 10f.), in his prologue to an exposition of Luke, following Origen almost verbatim. He admits that some of these un-canonical Gospels are read by orthodox Christians, e.g. the Gospel of the Twelve, the Gospel of Basilides, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Matthias (novi aliud scriptum secundum Matthian). But we read, lest we should be ignorant; we read, not in order to keep but to repudiate them!
In the prologue to his commentary upon Matthew, Jerome (a.d. 346-420) also mentions some of the uncanonical Gospels, but his information adds nothing to the data supplied by Origen, from whom he probably derived in the main his knowledge of those documents. After quoting Lukes preface, he applies its language to Gospels like that according to the Egyptians, and according to Thomas, and according to Matthias, and according to Bartholomew, also the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles, and of Basilides, and of Apelles, as well as others which it would take a very long time to enumerate. Following Origen, he interprets Lukes of unauthorized, uninspired attempts. To them the prophetic word of Ezekiel applies (Eze 13:3; Eze 13:6): Woe to them that prophesy out of their own heart, who walk after their own spirit, who say, Thus saith the Lord, and the Lord has not sent them. Also, the word of Joh 10:8 : all who came before me were thieves and robbers. Note, says Jerome, they came; not they were sent!
In pope Innocents Epistle (a.d. 405) to Jeromes friend. Bishop Exsuperius of Toulouse, the canonical list is followed by a note of cetera autem quae uel sub nomine Mathiae siue Iacobi minoris; uel sub nomine Petri et Iohanuis, quae a quodam Leucio scripta sunt; uel sub nomine Andreae, quae a Xenocaride et Leonida philosophic;* [Note: For a defence of the genuineness or this clause, which refers to the Acts of Andrew, See JThSt xiii. [1911-12] 79-80.] uel sub nomine Thomae; et si qua sunt alia; non solum repudianda uerum etiam noueris esse damnanda. This is a fair specimen of the opinions held by the authorities of the Western Churchy; but the official view did not represent the popular, and, as Leipoldt observes. [Note: Geschichte des neutest. Kanons, i. p. 179 (cf. below, p. 482).] such opponents of the apocryphal Gospels were doubtless in the minority. The majority of theologians treated books like the Gospels of James and Thomas not indeed as canonical but still as genuinely apostolic.
Finally, the so-called Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis [Note: von Dobschtz, TU xxxviii. 4 [1912]. He argues for its pseudonymous character, and dates it between a.d. 519 and 535.] includes a list of apocryphal [Note: Apocryphum (apocrypha), which is appended to each title, has its later opprobrious meaning.] Gospels which, by the 6th cent., were supposed to have been in existence:
Evangelium nomine Mathiae
Evangelium nomine Barnabae|| [Note: | If there ever was a Gnostic Gospel of Barnabas, it may have Supplied part of the basis for the Muhammadan (Italian) Gospel of Barnabas-a curious, docetic production (ed. L. and L, Ragg, Oxford, 1907). Cf. W. E. A. Axon in JThSt. iii. [1901-02] 441-451. The Gospel of Barnabas and Matthias appear also at the end of the list of the 60 books in Cod. Barocc. 206.]
Evangelium nomine Jacobi minoris
Evangelium nomine Petri apostoli
Evangelium nomine Thomae quibus Manichei utuntur
Evangelia nomine Bartholomaei
Evangelia nomine Andreae
Evangelia quae falsavit Lucianus
Evangelia quae falsavit Hesychius
Liber de infantia salvatoris
Liber nativitate salvatoris et de Maria vel obstetrici.
By a gross blunder, arising perhaps from a misreading of Jeromes prologue to the Gospels, the writer mistakes the textual recensions of the Gospels made by Lucian and Hesychius for apocryphal Gospels. This does not encourage hopes of accurate information with regard to the other works, particularly when this blunder is regarded as a misunderstanding of what Jerome had written. Thus the writer appears to have had no independent knowledge of the Gospels of Bartholomew and Andrew; his allusion to the former, as well as to the Gospel of Mathias (= ), is probably drawn from Origen, his reference to the latter from Innocent. He also confines himself to Gospels bearing apostolic names.
It is not necessary to go further down for ecclesiastical strictures upon uncanonical Gospels. Those already mentioned will suffice to give a fair idea of the principal writings belonging to this class which were from time to time banned by the authorities. Some, no doubt, were not Gospels at all;* [Note: Tatians Gospel, e.g., was simply the Diatessaron; the Gospel of Andrew was probably the Gnostic of that apostle; the Gospel of Nicodemus was part of the Acts-literature of the 2nd cent.; and several so-called Gnostio Gospels were no more than treatises on religion, as, for example, the Valentinian Gospel of the Truth (Iren. iii. 11. 9).] some were only censured from hearsay; others, as we shall see, existed and flourished in a more or less provincial or surreptitious fashion. But the point is that they had to be banned, and that the ban was often ineffective,
4. We now pass from verdicts upon the uncanonical Gospels to an outline of the information yielded by their extant fragments. But before turning into this rank undergrowth of popular literature in early Christianity, we must state and define one or two general principles and methods of criticism which are essential to any survey of the position.
(a) The present state of research offers almost as many problems as results. In five directions, especially, further inquiry is necessary before the materials which are now accessible can be critically arranged and assimilated. (i.) The Coptic, Sahidic, and Ethiopic fragments, which are being still recovered, require to be sifted. In some cases, as e.g. with regard to the Gospel of Bartholomew, they may prove to furnish data for reconstructing Gospels which hitherto have been mere names in early Church history; in other cases, they may compel the re-valuation of material already known. (ii.) The entire problem of the Jewish Christian Gospels has been re-opened by the researches of critics like Schmidtke and Waitz; the relevant factors are mainly supplied by the higher criticism of writers like Origen, Jerome, and Epiphanius, but the outcome of the discussion seriously affects the estimate of primitive Gospels like that of the Hebrews or of the Egyptians. The subject-matter here is not so much new material as allusions and quotations which require, or seem to require, fresh study. (iii.) Several uncanonical Gospels are still unedited, from the standpoint of modern critical research; even the extant Greek and Latin Manuscripts are not properly collated, in many cases. The Gospels of Thomas and of Nicodemus are instances in point. There is some prospect of these defects being remedied systematically by French scholars, but English investigation has been sadly indifferent to such pressing needs in the field of early Christian literature. (iv.) Even where texts have been edited thoroughly, problems of higher criticism arise. In the case of Gospels, e.g., like the Protevangelium Jacobi, we are confronted with composite productions whose sources go back to different circles and periods; literary problems of structure have to be solved. The numerous versions of some uncanonical Gospels might seem to compensate for the fragmentary condition of others, but in reality the versions are often equivalent to fresh editions rather than to translations, and in this way the recovery of the primitive nucleus is sometimes rendered more difficult than ever. (v.) Finally, the form and the content of the uncanonical Gospels open problems of their own. The stories occasionally show the nave popular imagination working upon the Old Testament, but their methods are wider. There is more in them than merely Haggadic fancy. Les vangiles apocryphes, says Renan, sont les Pouranas du christianisme; ils out pour base les vangiles canoniques. Lauteur prend ces vangiles comme un thme dont il ne scarte jamais, quil cherche seulement dlayer, complter par les precds ordinaires de la lgende hbraque. But it was not simply Semitic methods of compiling a midrash that were followed by the authors of the uncanonical Gospels. Allowance has also to be made for the influence of Hellenistic romances, particularly in the light of recent investigations by Norden and Reitzenstein.* [Note: L. Radermachers Das Jenseits im Mythos der Hellenen, 1903.] This line of inquiry has not yet been followed up; it will lead probably to valuable conclusions with regard to the literary texture of certain strata in these Gospels. More attention has been paid to the influence of Buddhistic and Egyptian religion upon the matter of Gospels like those of the Egyptians, of Thomas, and of Peter. Here also problems are emerging which require careful scrutiny, in view of contemporary research into the syncretistic religious situation of the 2nd cent., particularly but not exclusively with regard to the elements of Gnosticism. In the edifying romance of Barlaam and Ioasaph a later writer adapted boldly the story of Buddha to the ends of Christian monasticism. The Indian traits in our uncanonical Gospels are less plain, but they are probably present under passages which at first sight are almost covered with Christian fancy and doctrine.
(b) The close connexion between the extant fragments and the agrapha renders it necessary to lay down a special [Note: But not, of course, an exceptional one. It bears also upon the criticism of the synoptic Gospels, particularly in the differentiation of Mark and Q.] principle of criticism, viz. that when the same saying, in slightly different versions, recurs in more than one fragment, three possibilities are open to the critic. (i.) The early Christian writer who quotes the saying as part of some Gospel may be quoting loosely from memory, and, either for that reason or for some other, confusing one Gospel with another. (ii.) On the supposition that the quotation is correctly assigned, it may have been preserved in more than one Gospel; it is unlikely that certain sayings were monopolized by one document. Or, when this possibility is set aside, (iii.) one Gospel may have borrowed from another. There has been a tendency to ignore the second of these possibilities, in particular. What we know of certain Gospels may be enough to show that a given quotation is incompatible with their idiosyncrasies, but not all quotations possess this characteristic quality, and room should be left for the hypothesis that, some allied Gospels contained a good deal of common matter.
One illustration of this may be quoted, for the sake of clearness. Take the well-known saying, He who seeks shall not cease till he finds, and when he has found he shall wonder, and wondering he shall reign, and reigning he shall rest. The last two clauses are cited by Clement of Alexandria as part of the Gospel according to the Hebrews (Strom. ii. 9. 45), but elsewhere (Strom. v. 14. 96) he quotes the whole saying, without mentioning its origin, in order to illustrate Platos aphorism that wonder is the beginning of philosophy. Independently, the entire saying has turned up among the agrapha of the Oxyrhynchite Papyri, apparently as part of a collection of words addressed by Jesus to some disciples, including Thomas. In the later Acts of Thomas (ed. Bonnet, 1883, p. 243) an echo of the saying also recurs: Those who partake worthily of the good things there [i.e. in the treasury of the holy King] rest, and resting they shall reign, and, as if this were not enough, the problem is further complicated by what sounds like an echo in 2 Clem. v. 5 (know, brothers, that the sojourning of the flesh in this world is little and for a brief time, whereas the promise of Christ is great and wonderful, is rest in the kingdom to come and in eternal life), and by a very faint echo in the Traditions of Matthias, if we can trust Clement of Alexandria (Strom. ii. 9. 45), who cites from the latter, Wonder at what is before you, to illustrate again the Platonic doctrine of wonder.
Now it is tempting to deduce from this, among other indications, that the common source of the Oxyrhynchite Logia and the quotations in 2 Clem. was the Gospel according to the Egyptians, or that this saying is a water-mark of some Thomas Gospel. The former hypothesis would be corroborated if the source of the quotations in 2 Clem. could be proved to be the Gospel of the Egyptians, for the echo in 2 Clem. follows close upon one of these quotations (see p. 495), and upon the whole this is the least improbable hypothesis. But the second of the possibilities (ii.) is as feasible as the third (iii.). It is at any rate hasty to assume that such a saying was only accessible in a single document.
(c) It is also fair to remember that some of the early uncanonical Gospels are known to us only in fragments and quotations made usually for the purpose of proving their outr character. This easily gives a wrong impression of their contents. Suppose, for example, that all we knew of the canonical Matthew amounted to a few passages like Mat 2:23; Mat 5:18-19; Mat 7:6; Mat 17:24-27; Mat 19:12; Mat 27:52-53, suppose that Lukes Gospel was preserved in stray quotations of Luk 2:42-49, Luk 6:20-21; Luk 8:10, Luk 16:9, Luk 18:8 b and Luk 24:42-43 -would our impression of the Gospels in question be very much more misleading than may be the case with Gospels like those of the Hebrews or of the Egyptians or of the Nazarenes? It is possible that some of the uncanonical Gospels may not have been as eccentric as they seem to us. But, even when allowance is made for this possibility of an error in our focus, the general character of most of the uncanonical Gospels must be recognized (cf. 1). When Archbishop Magee preached before the Church Congress at Dublin, an Irish bishop is reported to have said that the sermon did not contain enough gospel to save a tom-tit. An evangelical critic might say the same about the uncanonical Gospels, for the most part, and he would not be saying it in haste. It is rare, upon the whole, to come across any touches or traditions which even suggest that by their help we can fill out the description of the Synoptic Gospels. As we read Marlowes Faustus or Goethes Faust for reasons quite other than a wish to ascertain the facts about the real Faustus of the 16th cent., so it is with the majority of the uncanonical Gospels. Their interest for us is not in any fresh light which they may be expected to throw upon the character of the central Figure, but in the evidence they yield us for ascertaining the popular religion of the early Christian Churches, the nave play of imagination upon the traditions of the faith, and the fancies which the love of story-telling employed to satisfy the more or less dogmatic or at any rate the pious interests of certain circles in Syria and Egypt especially. The large majority of the uncanonical Gospels belong to Church history rather than to NT criticism, and to a period of Church history which is mainly post-apostolic. Their varying background covers several centuries and soils. They were being produced as late as the Muhammadan ea, and as early as the 1st cent. a.d. But, with one or two exceptions, we cannot do justice to them unless we set them not over against the Gospel literature of the first hundred years after the Death of Jesus but among the currents and movements which occupy the subsequent two hundred years of Christianity in the Mediterranean basin. The interests which led to their composition were sometimes doctrinal. There was a constant desire* [Note: Which, as we learn from Clement of Alexandria (Eus. HE ii. 1), was by no means confined to Gnostic Christians (see W. Wrede, Des Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien, 1901, p. 246 f.).] to convey esoteric teaching under the guise of revelations made by the risen Christ to His disciples, between the Resurrection and the Ascension, for example; there was also a desire to recast or amplify the Synoptic traditions in order to express certain views of the Christian gospel. Furthermore, dogmatic interests led to the elaboration of stories about the birth of Mary as well as of Jesus, and to the composition of tales which filled up the childhood of Jesus. But the latter were as often due to nave curiosity as to dogmatic aim, and a much larger part must be assigned to the former motive (if it can be called a motive) than is usually allowed. Here the influence of Oriental folk-lore and mythology would naturally operate, in addition to the desire to mark the fulfilment of OT prophecies. And it would operate not as a purely literary motive but as one result of preaching and teaching. The same interests which led to the rise of midrashic literature among the Jews led to the rise of uncanonical Gospel-stories among the early Christians. The popularity of the latter was too strong to be put down by ecclesiastical decisions. Not even the strict use of the canonical Gospels in the worship of the Churches was able to check the popular appetite for such tales and traditions as survive in the uncanonical Gospel literature; they were read for private edification [Note: There is a significant indication of this in Jeromes letter to Laeta, advising her how to bring up her daughter (Ep. cvii. 12). The girl is to read the Gospels, which are never to be laid aside Let her eschew all apocryphal writings; if she desires to read them not for the truth of their doctrines but out of reverence for their miracles, let her understand that they are not the work of those whose names they bear, that many faulty things are mixed up in them, and that it requires great discretion to look for gold among mud. This was written in a.d. 403.] even when they were not used in worship; and recent discoveries have proved how numerous and wide-spread were the versions of such Gospels even when the term apocryphal in its opprobrious sense was being applied to them by the authorities. The historical critic has something better to do than look in these Gospels for primitive, authentic traditions about the teaching and ministry of Jesus, which may correct or supplement the nucleus preserved in the canonical Gospels; if he does so, he will be likely as a rule to look for a kingdom and find asses. On the other hand, he has something better to do than to pour indiscriminate ridicule on these popular documents. Their ends and motives, however little they may appeal to a modern mind, were not always perverse. For example, in one of the extant sahidic Gospel-fragments (Texts and Studies iv. 2 [1896], pp. 165, 237), the narrator, after describing (partly as in the Protevangelium Jacobi, 21; see below, p. 484) how the star of Bethlehem had the form of a wheel, Its figure being like a cross, sending forth flashes of light; letters being written on the cross. This is Jesus the Son of God, anticipates an objection. Some one will say to me, Art thou then adding a supplement to the Gospels? Unfortunately, the fragment breaks off here, and we have no means of knowing how the writer answered his critic, unless from a Coptic sermon of Euodius, who praises such supplements-evidently as justified by Joh 20:30; Joh 21:25. It is not often that we come upon any such self-consciousness in the writers of the uncanonical Gospels. Usually we have to infer their spirit and aim from the contents of their work. But even so, the nave temper which characterizes several of the leading uncanonical Gospels is as noteworthy as the theological tendencies which dominate others.
5. The very fact that such Gospels were composed is significant, in view of the fact that Gospel in the 2nd cent. began to be limited to the sayings and deeds of Jesus.* [Note: Harnacks Constitution and Law of the Church, 1910, p. 308 f.] It proves the steady interest in Jesus, even in circles where the interest was due to tendencies more or less, semi-Christian in character. No doubt, several of the uncanonical Gospels, as we shall see, [Note: g. the Gospels of Nicodemus and of Andrew (p. 480), besides the later Eternal Gospel of Abbot Joachim (beg. of 13th cent.) based on Rev 14:6. The Gospel of Thaddaeus owes its existence apparently to a variant reading of Mathiae as Matthaei in the text of the Decretum Gelasianum (cf. von Dobschtzs note in TU xxxviii. 4 [1912] p. 293).] were not originally called Gospels at all, while even those which professed to be such should be rather described as religious handbooks or treatises; still, even after we make such qualifications, we must recognize that, whether an uncanonical Gospel wished to make Jesus more or less of a human being than the Synoptic or Johannine tradition presented, there was a wide-spread desire to convey new ideas by means of a tradition about His personality. Acts of various, apostles were not sufficient; even apocalypses did not meet the demand. Gospels were necessary, and Gospels were supplied. [Note: The literary form of Gospel came to be indistinguishable more than once from that of Acts (cf. the Gospel of Mary) as well as from that of Apocalypse.]
This involved not only a dissatisfaction with the canonical Gospels, on the score of what they contained as well as of what they omitted, but a certain dependence upon them, in several cases. The unknown authors, as Renan neatly puts it, font pour les vangiles canonizes ce que les auteurs des Post-homerica ont fait pour Homre, ce que les auteurs relativement modernes de Dionysiaques ou dArgonautiques ont fait pour lpope grecque. Ils traitent les parties que les canoniques ont avec raison ngliges; ils ajoutent ce qui aurait pu arriver, ce qui paraissait vraisemblable; ils dveloppent les situations par des rapprochements artificiels emprunts aux textes sacrs. For a certain class of the uncanonical Gospels, this is fairly accurate, but others make remarkably little use of the canonical narratives except as points of departure. Renans subsequent remark also requires modification: Comme le catholicisme dgnr des temps modernes, les auteurs dvangiles apocryphes se rabattent sur les cts purils du christianisme, lEnfant Jsus, la sainte Vierge, saint Joseph. Le Jsus vritable, le Jsus de la vie publique, les dpasse et les effraye. Renan is thinking here of the Gospels of the Infancy. [Note: An admirable account of their motives and characteristics is given by Meyer in Henneckes Neutest. Apok., pp. 96-105.] But since his day discoveries of papyri and manuscripts have shown that even the Mission and Manhood of Jesus did not entirely escape the notice of the uncanonical Gospels.
This enables us to fix upon a principle of arrangement for these Gospels. It is open to the critic at this point to follow one or other of three paths. One is to group them on a principle which partly estimates their form and partly takes into account their character, viz. Gospels of the Synoptic type which have some claim to represent early tradition; Gospels which are Gnostic or heretical; and Gospels which aim at supplementing the gaps in the canonical stories especially of the Birth and Resurrection. This is the usual method since Harnack. Another is (cf. Nicolas, op. cit. p. 17f.) to divide them into (a) pro-Jewish; i.e. Gospels mainly practical, in which Christianity is presented as the renovation of the OT; (b) anti-Jewish; and (c) unsectarian. But there are serious difficulties in carrying out this arrangement, and it is best, upon the whole, to classify them according to their subject-matter, viz. those devoted to the parents and birth of Jesus, those which cover the course of His life, and those which narrate the Passion and Resurrection. Tischendorfs plan was different: Quod ita instituam ut tria liberorum horum evangelicorum genera diatinguam, quorum primum comprehendit qui ad parentes Jesu atque ipsius ortum, alterum qui ad infantiam eius, tertium qui ad fata eius ultima spectant. But materials have accumulated since Tischendorf wrote, which show that the middle part of the life of Jesus was not left untouched by the authors of this literature. It used to be argued, indeed, that the uncanonical Gospels showed next to no interest in the central part of the life of Jesus, between His Baptism and the Passion. Even if this were the case, it would not be quite so remarkable as might appear. Such a concentration of interest upon the beginning and end of the life was natural to the early Church. For example, after finishing an account of the origin of the four Gospels, the author of the Muratorian Canon proceeds: Consequently, although various elements are taught in the several books of the Gospels, this makes no difference to the faith of believers, inasmuch as by one controlling Spirit all things are announced in all of them with regard to the Nativity, the Passion, the Resurrection, His intercourse with His disciples (conversatione cum discipulis suis), and His two-fold advent. Here the salient points selected lie outside the central part of the life of Jesus, unless we admit a partial exception in the allusion to intercourse with the disciples. But the uncanonical Gospels do not entirely ignore this section. Even apart from the famous correspondence of Jesus* [Note: For traces of similar epistles of Jesus, cf. Augustine, de Consensu evang. i. 9-10. For the epistle of Christ which fell from heaven, cf. G. Morin in Revue Bndictine (1899), P. 217 f., and a monograph on its Eastern version and recension by M. Bittner in the Denkschriften der kais. Akad. der Wissenschaften (Philos. Hist. Klasse, vol. li. Abth. 1) for 1906.] and Abgar (Eus. HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] i. 13), or-in the form which it assumes in the Doctrina Addi-His oral message to that monarch, we possess several Gospels which must have covered the ministry of our Lord, and the Oxyrhynchite fragment (see below, p. 499) now swells their number. Any classification has its own drawbacks, owing to the heterogeneous and fragmentary character of the extant materials; but the triple arrangement proposed had, upon the whole, fewer obstacles than either of its rivals. In the following discussion, therefore, the uncanonical Gospels will be treated as follows:
(1) Gospels relating to the Birth and Infancy of Jesus; (2) general Gospels, covering His entire life and ministry, from the Birth to the Resurrection, either on the type of Matthew-Luke or of Mark-John; (3) Gospels of the Passion and Resurrection.
I. Gospels Relating to the Birth and Infancy of Jesus
(a) The Protevangelium Jacobi.-A certain element of romance. attaches to this uncanonical Gospel. Daring his travels in the East, William Postel, a French humanist of the 16th cent., who devoted himself to Oriental languages and comparative philology, came across an edifying treatise which was read in several churches. He procured a copy of the work, and cherished great expectations about his find.* [Note: Hallam describes his as a man of some parts and more reading, but chiefly known for mad reveries of fanaticism (Introd. to the Literature of Europe3, 1847, i. 468).] Here was the original prologue to Marks Gospel, evangelii ad hunc diem desiderata basis et fundamentum, in quo suppletur summa fide quicquid posset optari.
Postels Latin version was published in 1552 by Theodore Bibliander (Proteuangelion seu de natalibus Jesu Christi et ipsius matrix virginis Mariae sermo historicus divi Jacobiminoris ). The Greek text was first published by M. Neander (Apocrypha; hoc e st narrationes de Christo, Maria, Josepho, cognations et familia Jesu Christi extra Biblia inserto etiam Protevangelio Jacobi grce, in Oriente nuper reperto, necdum edito hactenus 1563, re-issued in 1567), who did not share Pastels or Biblianders enthusiasm [Note: Henry Stephen, in his Introduction au trait de la conformit des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes, ou trait prparatif lapologie pour Hrodote (1566), openly expressed his disgust at Postels production, whose origin and popularity he could explain only as a deliberate manuvre of Satan!] for the treatise. One of Tischendorfs Manuscripts (A) was edited by C. A. Suckow in 1840 (Protevangelium Jacobi ex codice ms, Venetiano descripsit, prolegomenis, varietate lectionam, notis criticis instructum edidit), and a Fayym parchment fragment containing 7:2-10:1 was published in 1896 by B. P. Greufell (An Alexandrian Erotic Fragment and other Greek Papyri, pp. 13-19). In spite of these and other contributions, however, the Greek Manuscripts -the oldest of which is a Bodleian fragment from Egypt of cent. v-vi-are very numerous and very incompletely known; the version have not been exhaustively studied; and many important questions, especially those affecting the integrity of the book, must still be regarded as open (M. R. James, in Journal of Theological Studies xii. [1910-11] 625).
The work itself professes to be a or (25:1), and the narrative runs as follows.
The first part (1-18:1) opens by describing how the wealthy Joachim and Ms wife Anna lamented over the fact that they had no child. Joachim is told, to his chagrin, by Reuben (the high priest?) that his childlessness disqualifies him from presenting his offerings to God. Anna, praying in the garden and looking up to heaven, is reminded afresh of her childlessness by the sight of a sparrows nest in a laurel hush; she breaks into the following lament (3: spoiled in the Syriac, and omitted in the Armenian, version):
Woe is me! who begat we, and what womb produced me?
For I was born accursed before the sons of Israel,
I am reproached, and they have driven me with jeers from the Lords temple.
Woe is me! what am I like?
l am not like the birds of heaven,
or the birds of heaven are fruitful before thee, O Lord.
Woe is me! what am I like?
I am not like the beasts of the earth,
for even the beasts of the earth are fruitful before thee, O Lord.
Woe is me! What am I like?
I am not like these waters,
for even these waters are fruitful before thee, O Lord.
Woe is me! what am I like?
I am not like this earth,
for even this earth bears its fruits in season and blesses thee, O Lord.
An angel assures her that God will give her a child, and eventually Mary is born-the idea of the story corresponding thus to that of John the Baptists birth in Luk 1:5 f. Anna now proceeds to fulfil her vow of consecrating the child to God. [Note: Annas song of praise (Luk 6:3) is more appropriate than is usually the case with such songs in the Bible:
I will sing a song to the Lord my God,
for he has visited me and taken from me the reproach of my enemies;
the Lord has given me fruit of righteousness, a single fruit but many-sided in his sight.
Who will tell the sons of Reuben that Anna is suckling?
Hearken, hearken, ye twelve tribes of Israel: Anna is suckling.]
The baby is not allowed to walk on the common earth till her parents take her, at the age of three, to Jerusalem, where she is welcomed by the priest and left in the temple, like a dove nestling there. Her parents, in a transport of wonder at her, depart. They vanish from the story,* [Note: The Armenian version (3) kills them both off in one year at this point.] which at once (8) hurries on to describe the action taken by the priests when this wonder-child reached the age of puberty (twelve or fourteen years-the Manuscripts vary). An angel bids Zechariah, the high priest, summon the widowers (bachelors, in the Armenian version) of Israel: let each bring his rod, and whoever has a sign shown him by the Lord, his shall the woman be. Joseph is then suddenly introduced (9:1, And Joseph, throwing aside his axe-It is assumed that the readers know he was a carpenter or joiner-went out to meet the heralds (or, the widowers). A dove emerges from his rod, and he is reluctantly assigned the charge of Mary. He protests, I have sons, and I am an old man, [Note: In his vehement attack on Helvidius, Jerome insists that Joseph as well as Mary was a virgin. The Protevangelium is content to show how he could not have been the real father of Jesus.] while she is a girl. I am afraid of becoming ridiculous to the sons of Israel. But he is warned of the penalties attaching to disobedience, and eventually agrees. Only, to ensure the credibility of the virgin-birth, the author observes that Joseph left her at once in his house and went off to a distant task of building. Meanwhile the Annunciation takes place, Mary visits her kinswoman Elizabeth, and returns home. When she is sis months pregnant, Joseph returns home, and is distressed at her condition. He has been put in charge of this virgin, and he has failed to keep his charge! Who has deceived me (her)? Who has done this evil deed in my house and defiled the maiden? Has not the story of Adam been re-enacted in my ease? As the serpent came and found Eve alone, and beguiled her, when Adam was singing praise, so with me. In a dream, however, an angel reassures Joseph. Nevertheless, when the authorities of the Temple discover Marys condition, Joseph is charged with the crime of having secretly married a virgin whom he undertook to guard. First he, and then Mary, are made to undergo the ordeal of Num 5:11. They pass the test scatheless. And the priest said, Since the Lord God has not disclosed your sine, neither do I condemn you ( ; cf. Joh 8:11). So he sent them away. And Joseph took Mary and went home, rejoicing and glorifying the God of Israel. [Note: This must have been A serviceable episode for apologetic purposes; the story of Mat 1:18 f. did not vindicate Mary to anyone except her husband. But it was specially essential to the argument of our author, who is at pains to show that there was no question of a real marriage between Joseph and Mary.]
The story then (17-18:1) describes Joseph and Mary travelling to Bethlehem as in Luk 2:1. On the road, Joseph turned and saw she was sad; but he said to himself, Perhaps what is in her is paining her. Again Joseph turned and saw she was laughing. So he said to her, Mary, what does this mean? Why do I see your face now laughing and now sad? And Mary said to Joseph, Because I see with my eyes two peoples, one availing and lamenting, the other rejoicing and exulting. [Note: This prophetic vision is a blend of Luk 2:34 and Gen 25:23 (where the two nations are in Rebeccas womb). In pseudo-Matthew they become the Jews and the Gentiles. Here they are probably no more than the unbelieving and the believing. Mary suffers no birth-pangs; her sorrow a purely spiritual.] As the time of her delivery is imminent, Joseph leads her into a cave (), leaves her in charge of his sons, and goes off in search of a Hebrew midwife in the district of Bethlehem (18:1).
At this point (18:2) the narrative|| [Note: | Cf. De Lacy OLeary in Intern. Journ. Apoc. xxxv. [1913], p. 70 f.] suddenly changes to the first person; and I Joseph was walking and not walking, etc. All nature is still and silent. The birds of the air are motionless; so are all animals and human beings within sight. Joseph secures a midwife, carefully explaining to her that Mary has conceived by the Holy Spirit. But in the middle of their conversation the narrative again* [Note: The Syriac fragment passes straight from 18:2 to 19:1.] resumes the third person (19:1), and a further abrupt touch [Note: Possibly echoed in Clem. Strom. vii. 16. 93.] occurs in 19:2, where the mid wife leaves the cave and Salome met her. Salome, like Thomas (Joh 20:25), refuses to believe the story of the virgin-birth without tangible evidence. This she receives, with a temporary punishment for her incredulity. She carries the child, in obedience to an angels command, crying, I will worship Him (i.e. God), [Note: Jesus, in the Syriac as in pseudo-Matthew (see below, p. 488).] for a great King has been born for Israel. The narrative then proceeds (20:4): and she went out of the cave justified (), And lo a voice said to her, Salome, Salome, do not proclaim the miracles () you have seen, till the child reaches Jerusalem. And (21:1) Joseph was ready to go into Judaea .
Here the line of the narrative is again broken abruptly. Joseph is never mentioned again. 21:1-22:2 re-tells Mat 2:1 f., with elaborations. The magi have seen a star of enormous size, shining among these stars and eclipsing their light. The star conducts them to the cave, where the magi see the infant with his mother Mary; and they brought out of their wallet gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh. And being instructed by the angel not to enter Judaea , they went to their own land by another road. [Note: The simplicity of the story is noticeable; in the primitive farm (expanded in the versions and later MSS) the magi do not even adore the child, and no attempt is made to name them, as in the Armenian version, which calls them Melchior, prince of Persia, Baltasar, prince of India, and Gasper, prince of Arabia. The angel goes to them at once after the Annunciation, and they were led by the star for nine months, and then came and arrived in time for the birth from the holy virgin. This is reproduced in the Coventry Nativity play.] The omission of Joseph would not of itself he significant (in view of Mat 2:1-12), were it not that in 22:1-2 the initiative is assigned to Mary instead of to Joseph (as in Mat 2:13 f.). Hearing of Herods order to massacre all children of two years and under, Mary hides the child Jesus in an ox-stall. Evidently, the original narrative ignored the flight to Egypt. But what it substituted for this remains a mystery, for at this point (22:3) the story suddenly breaks into an account of John the Baptist and his parents. The child John is among the infants sought for by Herod, and Elizabeth in despair prays to a mountain in the hill-country, O mountain of God, receive mother and child. The mountain immediately parts in two and shelters them, protected by a light (for an angel of the Lord was with them, watching over them). Herod, unable to make Zechariah (who is high priest) confess the whereabouts of his child, has him murdered inside the Temple, on the ground that his son is to be king over Israel. At daybreak, as Zechariah does not come out, one of the priests ventures inside; he sees clotted blood beside the altar, and hears a voice saying, Zechariah has been murdered, and his blood shall not be wiped up until his avenger comes. His body is never found, but his blood turned to stone. The Simeon of Luk 2:25 is chosen by lot to succeed him, and with this the story ends. The epilogue runs: I, James, the writer of this history, when a riot arose in Jerusalem at the death of Herod, withdrew myself to the desert till the riot in Jerusalem ceased, glorifying the Lord God who gave me the gift and the wisdom to write this history. The book thus professes to be written not only by an eye-witness but immediately after the event.
In spite of Zahns and Conradys arguments to the contrary, it is almost necessary to postulate the composite character of the Protevangelium, although the sources cannot he disentangled with much precision. Even in 1-18:1 there are traces of different strata, e.g. the sudden introduction of Joseph in 9:1, and the episode of Mary sewing the purple and scarlet* [Note: Perhaps, like the emphasis on the health of her parents, a reply to the current depreciation (Orig. Cels. i. 28 f.) of their position. But the wealth of Joachim is probably taken over from that of his namesake in Sus 1:4.] for the veil of the Temple (10, 12). The fatter episode could be parted from the context not only without difficulty but with a gain to the sequence of the narrative. [Note: In his vehement attack on Helvidius, Jerome insists that Joseph as well as Mary was a virgin. The Protevangelium is content to show how he could not have been the real father of Jesus.] On the other hand, neither 1-18:1 nor 18:2-22:2 can be regarded as complete sources. The legend of Zechariahs murder in 22:3-24, on the other hand, is a watermark of late origin. In the light of the Investigations by A. Berendts, [Note: Student ber Zacharias-Apokryphen und Zacharias-Legenden, 1895, p. 37 f.] it is clearly subsequent to Origen, who knows quite a different version of Zechariahs. death-one which connects it closely with the virginity of Mary (he was murdered, according to this tradition, between the Temple and the altar, for having permitted Mary to enter the court of the virgins after she had given birth to Jesus). Had Origen read 22:3-24 in his , he would not have written as he has done upon Mat 23:35. For the existence of the legend in the form of 22:3-24 the first evidence is from Peter of Alexandria ( [Note: The obscure sentence in 10, At that time Zechariah was dumb, and Samuel took his place, until Zechariah spoke, may be an Interpolation; but even if Simeon (cf. Luk 2:25) is read for Samuel with some MSS, It remains an erratic block. It seems to presuppose the story (or the tradition) of Luk 1:5 f.] a.d. 311), and even this evidence is not absolutely decisive.
Whether the composite work underwent successive expansions or, as is less likely, was recast by a Gnostic author, 1:1-18:1, which is practically a , probably belonged to the book of James, from which Origen quotes. His quotation is based on this part, and on this part alone; the rest of the book never mentions the other children of Joseph. If the conclusion (25) was part of the original romance, the story must have included the incidents of Herods massacre, though in a form differing from that preserved in the Apocalypse of Zechariah [Note: Some details from this seem to underlie the Armenian version in ch. 3.] as it now appears in 22:3-24. For some reason, the latter must have been substituted for the original conclusion, or added to a narrative which had lost its ending. Whether 18:2-21:1 was also an extract from some Apocryphum Josephi, which became appended to 1-18:1, or whether the author of the book of James himself combined the fragment with his other source, is a problem which cannot be decided definitely either way, in view of the obscurity surrounding the literary origins of this as of most other pseudepigrapha.
Here, too, as in the Oxyrhynchite fragment (cf. p. 499), the attempt to describe the conditions of Jewish ritual shows the writers ignorance. That Joachim should be repelled from his right to offer in the Temple oil the score of childlessness (1:2), and that girls could remain within the Temple like vestals, are only two of the unhistorical touches which indicate unfamiliarity with the praxis of Judaism. The romancer knows his OT better.
And he knows it in Greek. The attempt to establish a Hebrew original for the Protevangelium has been unsuccessful; it is bound up with a desire to put it earlier than the Synoptic Gospels, on which, as on the Septuagint , it plainly depends. But, as it is uncertain whether Justin Martyr owes to it touches like that of the cave|| [Note: | According to Chaeremon, the Egyptian historian (quoted by Josephus, c. Apion. i. 32 [292]), the mother of Rameses also bore him in a cave.] and the curious phrase about Mary in Dial. 100 (cf. Protev. 12:2), the date of the earliest section cannot be assigned definitely to the first quarter of the 2nd century.
In the Armenian Church the Protevangelium formed the basis for the first part of a large work which included a Gospel of the Infancy and later apocrypha on the life and miracles of Jesus. According to F. C. Conybeare, who prints one or two chapters of the section based on the Protevangelium (AJTh [Note: JTh American Journal of Theology.] i. [1897] 424-442), the entire work consists or 28 chapters, and goes back to an older Syriac test which was used by Ephrem Syrus. The short Syriac fragment published by Wright (Contributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the NT, p. 17f. gives merely a somewhat abbreviated farm of 17-25. The larger, complete, Syriac version published by Mrs. A. S. Lewis (Studia Sinaitica, xi. [1902]), is in all probability a version of some Greek text practically corresponding to Tischendorfs. Both in the Syriac and in the Armenian versions the Protevangelium forms only the introduction fur subsequent apocrypha on the Nativity or on Mary. Versions of the Protevangelium abound, testifying to its wide popularity as a religious story-book in the early Church. In addition to the Armenian, there were Arabic and Slavonic versions or editions, as well as Egyptian. A small Sahidic fragment has been edited by Leipoldt (Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1905. p. 106f.).
The popularity of the Protevangelium, even apart from its advocacy of the absolute virginity of Mary, is not unintelligible. The story is told with much simplicity and pathos, in its original form. There are vignettes of peasant life, of nature, and of domestic affection, which single it out from the other uncanonical Gospels-glimpses, for example, of Anna standing at the door as her husband drives home his flocks, and running to embrace him, of Elizabeth dropping her needlework and running to the door when Mary knocks; or of Anna (in the Armenian test) tossing her baby merrily in her arms. None of the Infancy Gospels is so free from extravagance and silliness. The child Jesus is a child, and, if the halo has begun to glow round the head of Mary, she is still a woman. No tinge of Docetism makes her unreal. Even the narrator keeps himself strictly in the background. The skill with which the author has contrived to tell his story is beat appreciated when we compare the crude, coarse handling to which some of its materials are subjected in the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew.
Occasionally there are touches which remind the reader of Buddhistic legends; e.g. in the 1st cent. (a.d.) life of Buddha (cf. Chinese version in SBE [Note: BE Sacred Books of the East.] xix. [1883]) Buddha is born miraculously, without causing his mother pain or anguish (11:9), and at his birth the various cries and confused sounds of beasts were hushed, and silence reigned (11:33). But the proofs of Buddhistic influence are not cogent (cf. von Dobschtz in ThLZ [Note: hLZ Theologische Litteraturzeitung.] , 1896, pp. 442-446); the comparative study of folk-lore in its modern phases renders hesitation on this point prudent.
Special Literature.-L. Conradys hypotheses of its Semitic original and its priority in the birth-stories of Matthew and Luke are printed in SK [Note: K Studien und Kritiken.] (1889) 728-784, and Die Quelle der kanonischen kindheitsgeschichte Jesus, Gttingen, 1900. The best editions are both French, by Emile Amann, Le Protvangile de Jacques et ses remaniements latins, Paris. 1910 (Greek text of Protev., Latin texts of pseudo-Matthew 1-17 and the Nativity of Mary, with French translation, introduction, and notes); and C. Michel, protvangile de Jacques, pseudo-Matthieu, Evangile de Thomas, textes annots et traduits, Paris, 1911 (with the Coptic and Arabic versions of the History of Joseph the Carpenter, translated with notes by Peeters); cf. Haase, pp. 49-60.
(b) The Gospel of Thomas.-The , or Gospel of Thomas, survives in two Greek recensions, one (A) longer than the other (B)* [Note: In Peregrinus Proteus, 1879, p. 39 f., J. M. Cotterill tries to show that A and B are from the same hand, and that the author not only uses the LXX of Ecclesiastes but deliberately parodies some verses of Proverbs-two equally hazardous hypotheses.] but the Manuscripts are not earlier than the 14th or 15th century. The Latin version (L), however, survives in a Vienna palimpsest as yet undeciphered, and the Syriac (S) in a manuscript of the 5th or 6th century.
No satisfactory edition has yet appeared, but Tischendorfs Greek texts have been edited and translated by C. Michel, Evangiles Apocryphes, i. (1911), Protvangile de Jacques, pseudo-Matthieu, Evangile de Thomas; S is published in Wrights Contributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the New Testament, pp. 6-11, etc.
According to Haase (pp. 38-48), L represents in the main a version of A, while S also, though independently, resembles A; but all imply a common source which is not extant.
We know from Hippolytus (Philosoph. v. 2), that the Naassenes appealed, on behalf of their tenets, to a passage in the Gospel according to Thomas, which ran as follows; He who seeks Me will find Me in children of seven and upwards ( ), for hidden there I shall be manifested in the fourteenth age (or aeon, ). No other citation has been preserved.* [Note: Even this one is echoed only once, and that vaguely, in the pert reply of Jesus to the Jewish schoolmaster preserved in pseudo-Matthew 30:4 (I was among you with children, and you did not know me).] Indeed, apart from the reference of Eusebius (HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] iii. 25. 6), it is only mentioned again by Cyril of Jerusalem, who twice warns Christians against it as a Manichaean production (Catech. iv. 36, There are only four Gospels in the NT; the rest are pseudepigrapha and noxious. The Manichaeans wrote a Gospel according to Thomas which, invested with the fragrance of the evangelic name, corrupts simple souls; vi. 31, Let no one read the Gospel according to Thomas, for it is not by one of the Twelve, but by one of Manes three wicked disciples). Since the Manichaeans possessed a Gospel of Thomas as well as a Gospel of Philip (see below, p. 501), this Manichaean Scripture may have been the Gospel mentioned by Hippolytus, possibly in a special form.
Zahn attempts to date the original Gospel quite early in the 2nd century. He regards the second half of the quotation made by Hippolytus as a Naassene comment, and thus is free to minimize the Gnostic character of the work. He further argues that Justins description of Jesus (Dial. 88) as a maker of ploughs and yokes in His native village is derived from the story in A 13 = S 13 = L 11 (Joseph, who made ploughs and yokes, had an order from a rich man to make a bench. One plank turned out to be too short, but Jesus rose to the emergency, pulled the plank out to the proper length, and thus relieved His father). This may be no more than a coincidence, and Justin might have derived the touch from oral tradition. But it is certainly remarkable how little Gnostic fantasy pervades the Story of the Infancy, in any of its extant forms; apart from the great allegories of the letter Alpha which the lad Jesus is reported to have taught His teacher, the stories and sayings are naive rather than speculative. On the other hand, the childhood of Jesus is possibly filled with miracles owing to a desire of heightening His Divine claims prior to the Baptism. It is usually argued that this motive also implies a Docetic interest, since the miracles represent Jesus as not really a human child, but exempt from the ordinary conditions of human nature. This, however, is not a necessary or even a probable interpretation of the stories. They exaggerate the supernatural element, but they do not suggest a wraith or phantom in the guise of a child. In S 6-8, the reply of Jesus to His teacher does recall dogmatic interests (I am outside of you, and I dwell among you. Honour in the flesh I have not. Thou art by the law, and in the law thou abidest. For when thou wast born, I was When I am greatly exalted, I shall lay aside whatever mixture I have of your race), but the tone and even the wording are not remote from the Fourth Gospel; and, as the Gospel evidently passed through several editions or phases, it may have accumulated such elements in the gradual course of its development. The above-quoted passage, for example, is peculiar to S, as we can see from the remark of Epiphanius (li. 20). There was even a tendency among orthodox Christians* [Note: Usually, Joh 2:11 was held, as e.g. by Euthymius Zigabenus, to rule out such legend of miracles done by the boy Jesus.] to accept stories of miracles during the boyhood, in order to refute the Gnostic theory that the Divine Christ did not descend upon Jesus until the Baptism-a tendency which helps, among other things, to account for the tenacious popularity of such tales. From this very natural point of view, the rise of these stories may have been due to interests which were not distinctively Gnostic, whatever be the amount of dogmatic tendency that must be ascribed to their later form. [Note: The influence of Egyptian mythology is asserted, but exaggerated, by Conrady in SK (1903) 397-459.]
There is no ground for denying that some Gnostic Gospel of Thomas existed during the 2nd century. The quotation preserved by Hippolytus does not occur in any of the extant recensions of the Thomas Gospel which afterwards sprang up; but even these, for all their size, cannot hove corresponded to the entire work, which (on the evidence of Nicephorus) extended to no fewer than 1300 stichoi, almost double the length of the longest extant recension. Even in these extant recensions it is probable that the orthodox editor (or editors) must have removed the majority of Gnostic or Docetic allusions. And the Hippolytus quotation would naturally be one of those. Furthermore, we have an indirect proof that such a Thomas Gospel did exist prior to Irenaeus. In describing the tenets of the Marcosians, that Church Father charges this Gnostic sect with introducing apocryphal and spurious scriptures (i. 20. 1), and with circulating the following legend. When the Lord was a boy, learning his letters, and when his master said to him as usual, Say Alpha, he said Alpha. But when the master went on and ordered him to say Beta, the Lord replied, You tell me first what Alpha means, and thon I will tell you what Beta means. The Marcosians, Irenaeus adds, told this story to show that Jesus alone knew the mysterious significance of Alpha. The legend illustrates the mystic content which the sect put into the letters of the alphabet, [Note: g. Alpha and Omega. One of the Marcosian fantasies was that the dove at the Baptism Indicated the perfection or Christs nature, the symbol of a dove being Omega and Alpha.] but its immediate interest for us lies in the fact that this story occurs in the Story of the Infancy.
Irenaeus proceeds (i. 20. 2) to show how the Marcosians also misinterpreted the canonical Gospels to suit their propaganda; e.g. Luk 2:49 they explained to mean that the parents of Jesus did not know He was telling them about the Father; in Mat 19:16-17 (quoted as, Why call me good? One is good, my Father in the heavens) the word heavens denotes aeons; and the word hidden in Luk 19:42 denotes the hidden nature of the Depth (). Among these quotations from the Gospel (i.e. the canonical Gospels) Irenaeus includes one which does not occur in our four Gospels: His saying, I have often desired to hear one of these words, but I had no one to tell me, indicates (they allege), by the term one, Him who is truly one God. This curious and unparalleled Legion may have been quoted by mistake from on un-canonical Gospel like that of Thomas, but we cannot do more than guess upon a point of this kind. In an 11th cent. Athos manuscript of the Gospels (cf. Stud. Bib. v. [1901-03] 173) there is a note to the effect that the pericope adulterae belonged to the Gospel of Thomas ( ); if so, it must have occurred in an edition which has not been preserved.
The extant recensions, to which we have just referred, are versions of a Story of the Infancy ( ) narrated by Thomas, which is, and may have been intended to form, a sequel to the stories of the Protevangelium Jacobi. The resemblances and differences between the four recensions may be seen by comparing their accounts of an incident which happens to be recorded by all the four, viz. the unpleasant story of how Jesus once became unpopular.
A 4-5B 4-5L 5S 4-5 (translation Wright).
Again, he was passing through the village, and a boy ran and knocked against his shoulder, Jesus was angry, and said to him, Thou shalt not go back as thou camest. And at once he fell and died. Some who saw what happened said, Whence was this child born, for every word of his becomes act and fact? And the parents of the dead boy went to Joseph and blamed him, saying, With such a child, thou canst not dwell With us is the village. Or, teach him to bless and not to curse; for he is killing one children.Some days later, when Jesus was passing through the town, a boy threw a stone at him and struck him on the shoulder. Jesus said to him, Thou shalt not go thy way. And at once he fell down and dial. Those who happened to be there were astounded, saying, Whence is this child, that every word he utters becomes act and fact? And they went off and complained to Joseph, saying, Thou canst not dwell with us in this town. If thou desirest to do so, teach thy child to bless and not to curse; for he is killing our children, and everything he says becomes act and fact.A few days later, as Jesus was walking with Joseph through the town, one of the children ran up and struck Jesus on the arm. Jesus said to him, Thou shalt not finish thy journey thus. And at once he fell to the earth and died. But when they saw these wonders, they cried out, saying, Whence is that boy? And they said to Joseph, Such a boy must not be among us. Joseph went off and brought him, but they said to him, Go away from this place; but if you must be among us, teach him to pray and not to curse. Our children have been insensate.And again Jesus had gone with his father, and a boy, running, struck him with him shoulder. Jesus says to his, Thou shalt not go thy way. And all of a sudden he fell down and died. And all who saw him cried out and said, Whence was this boy born, that all his words become facts? And the family of him who was dead drew near to Joseph and say to him, Thou hast this boy; thou canst not dwell with us in this village unless you teach him to bless.
And Joseph called the child apart and admonished him, saying, Why doest thou such things? These people suffer, and hate us, and persecute us. Jeans said, I know these words of thine are not thine. Still, I will say nothing, for thy sake. But they shall bear their punishment. And immediately his accusers were blinded. And those who saw it were terribly afraid and perplexed; they said of him, that every word he uttered, good or bad, became fact and proved a marvel. And when they [he?] saw Jesus had done such a thing, Joseph rose and took hold of his ear and polled it hard. The child was much annoyed and said to him, It is enough for thee to seek and not to find. Certainly thou hast not acted wisely. Knowest thou not that I am thine? Do not vex me.Joseph was sitting on his seat, and the child stood in front of him; and he caught him by the ear and pinched it hard. Jesus looked at him steadily and said, That is enough for thee.Joseph called Jesus and reproved him, saying, Why does thou curse? These inhabitants hate us, But Jesus said, I know these words are not mine but thins; for thy sake I will say nothing; let them see to it in their wisdom! Immediately those who spoke against Jesus were blinded; and they walked up and down, saying, All the words that proceed from his mouth take effect. But when Joseph saw what Jesus had done, he angrily caught him by the ear. Jesus in a passion said to Joseph, It is enough for thee to see me not to touch me. For thou knowest not who I am; if thou knewest that, thon wouldest not irritate me. And although I am with thee now, I was made before thee.1 [Note: L covers the childhood of Jesus from his second year, A from his fifth to his twelfth year, and B from his fifth to his eighth.] And he drew near to the boy, and was teaching him and saying Why doest thou these (things)? And these people reckon them, and hate thee. Jesus says, If the words of my Father were not wise, he would not know how to instruct children, And again he said, It these were children of the bedchamber, they would not receive curses. These shall not see torment. And immediately those were blinded who were accusing him, But Joseph became angry, and seized hold of his ear, and pulled it. Then Jesus answered and said to him, It is enough for thee, that thou shouldest he commanding me and finding me (obedient); for thou host acted foolishly.
A fair idea of the characteristic contents of this Gospel may be derived from one or two extracts, such as the story of Jesus and the sparrows (B 3): Jesus made out of that clay twelve sparrows. It was the Sabbath-day. And a child ran and told Joseph, saying, Behold, thy child is playing about the stream and he has made sparrows out of the clay, which is not lawful, When he heard this, he wont and said to the child, Why dost thou do this, profaning the Sabbath? But Jesus did not answer him; he looked at the sparrows and said, Fly off and live, and remember me. And at this word they flew up into the air. And when Joseph saw it, he marveled. On the strength of this anecdote Variot (op. cit., p. 228f.) ventures to compare the Gospel of Thomas to the Fioretti of St. Francis. Another tale is that of Jesus and the boys foot (L 8): A few days afterwards a boy in that town was splitting wood, and he cut his foot. As a large crowd went to him, Jesus went with them. And he touched the foot which had been hurt, and at once it was healed. Jesus said to him, Rise up, split the wood, and remember me. It is as a thaumaturgist that Jesus appears in A 11: When he was six years old, his mother gave him a pitcher and sent him to draw water and bring it into the house. But he knocked against someone in the crowd, and the pitcher was broken. So Jesus unfolded the cloak he wore, filled it with the water, and carried it to his mother.* [Note: It is conjectured that this was suggested by Pro 30:4.] And when his mother saw the miracle which had taken place, she kissed him. And she kept to herself all the mysteries she saw him do. On the other hand, a better spirit is shown in the following anecdote (S 16): And again, Joseph had sent his son Jacob (James) to gather sticks, and Jesus went with him. And while they were gathering sticks, a viper bit Jacob (James) in his hand. And when Jesus came near him, he did to him nothing more but stretched out his hand to him and blew upon the bite, and it was healed (from Act 28:3-5?)
A closes with quite a sober version of Luk 2:41-52, which substitutes for Luk 2:50 the following passage: The scribes and Pharisees said, Are yon the mother of this child? She said, I am, They said to her, Blessed art thou among women, for God has blessed the fruit of your womb; such glory, such virtue, such wisdom we have neither seen nor heard. S also ends in this way, but the passage first quoted occurs at the close of L (in substantially the same form), to round off a miraculous cure (15: A few days later, a neighbouring child died, and its mother grieved sorely for it. On heaving this, Jesus went and stood over the boy, knocked on his breast, and said, I tell thee, child, do not die but live. And at once the child rose up. Jesus said to the mother of the boy, Take your son and give him the breast, and remember me ) which occurs earlier (in A 17).
The data are so scanty that even conjectures must be tentative, but we may attempt to explain the literary problems by assuming that an original Gospel of Thomas was afterwards used (edited?) by the Marcosians and Naassenes, and that it subsequently formed the basis for the story of the Infancy in its various recensions. Was another version of it circulated among the Manichaean Christians?* [Note: The Manichaean literature is said by Timotheus to have included also, among its devilish and deadly contents, the living Gospel (cf. Photius, Bibl. 85). Diodorus devoted the first seven of his twenty-five books against the Manichaeans to refuting what he thought was their vividum evangelium, but which was really the modium evangelium written by Adda.] Or was the Gospel of Thomas which they used an independent (native or Indian) work? These are questions to which, in the present state of our knowledge, no definite answer can be given.
Protests were repeatedly made against the , from Chrysostom onwards; but the work mast have enjoyed a popularity among Oriental Christians which orthodox censures were unable to check. One proof of this popularity may be found in the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew and the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, which have worked up materials furnished by the Thomas Gospel into independent collections of stories for the edification of pious Christiana. The second of these two Gospels seems to have circulated among Jews and Muhammadans as well.
(c) The Gospel of pseudo-Matthew.-The Gospel of pseudo-Matthew owes its present title to Tischendorf, the first editor of the Latin text, since the manuscript he used was headed: incipit liber de ortu beatae Mariae et infantia Salvatoris a beato Matthaeo evangelists hebraice scriptus et a beato Hieronymo presbytero in latinum translatns. Thilo had already given this title to the Gospel of the Nativity of Mary. Both pieces (the former at least in one or two Manuscripts ) are prefaced by the forged correspondence between Jerome and two bishops, in which the latter plaintively bewail the apocryphal and heterodox character of the current books upon the birth of Miry and the Infancy of Jesus; they have heard that Jerome has come into possession of a Hebrew volume on the subject by the evangelist Matthew, and beg him to translate it into Latin for the apologetic purposes of the faithful. Jerome agrees, explaining that the book was intended by Matthew for private circulation, and that in making it public e is not adding to the canonical Scriptures. This is the authors adroit* [Note: Except in one point. He makes Jerome plead love for Christ as the motive for his translation. Did he forget that the author of the Acts of Paul and Thecla had been condemned in spite of his plea that he had invented the Acts out of love for St. Paul?] way of winning a welcome for his production and safeguarding it against suspicion. He had the fate of the Protevangelium Jacobi and the Gospel of Thomas before his eyes. But such a description of the writings contents as this correspondence presents is obviously more suitable to the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew than to the little treatise on the Nativity of Mary, which never alludes to the Birth and Infancy of Jesus. Tischendorfs nomenclature is therefore more correct than Thilos.
The Thomas Story of the Infancy has been exploited by the author in the third part of the book (25-42), but this is only one of his sources. The Protevangelium Jacobi is another (1-16), In fact, the Gospel must have carried the name of James occasionally; Hrotswitha, for example, the Abbess of Gandersheim (10th cent.), who paraphrased it in Latin hexameters for the benefit of her nuns, entitled her work, Historia nativitatis landabilisque conversationis intactae Dei Genetricis, quam scriptam referi sub nomine sancti Jacobi fratris Domini.
In the first part (1-17), which describes the birth and maidenhood of Mary, her marriage, the virgin-birth, and the escape from Herod, the features of moment introduced are as follows. The home of Marys parents is definitely Jerusalem (in the Protevangelium this is only a matter of inference); Joachim does not offer sacrifices for forgiveness; he absents himself for five months instead of forty days; Annas vow to consecrate her child is made before, not after, the angers announcement; an angel bids her go to meet Joachim; in Protev. 7 Mary, aged three, dances when set down on the third step of the altar, but here (4) she runs up the fifteen steps to the Temple so rapidly that she never looks back; she is mature at the age of three, remains in the Temple as a paragon of virginal piety, fed daily by one of the angels, and often in conversation with them; any sick person who touches her goes home cured; her courteous greeting instituted the custom of saying Deo gratias; she refuses to be married, and takes the vows of virginity; Joseph, already a grandfather, is chosen from the widowers to take charge of (not to marry) Mary; the jealousy of her five maids is rebuked by an angel; the Annunciation is made when she is working at the purple for the veil of the Temple; Mary does not hide during her pregnancy, nor does she visit Elizabeth;* [Note: The cleaving of the mountain to shelter Elizabeth and John the Baptist from Herods fury, and indeed the whole Zechariah legend, is omitted.] Joseph does not upbraid her, and lie apologizes to her for his suspicions; after she successfully passes the ordeal for virgins, the people kiss her feet and ask her pardon; the brilliant light in the cave at Bethlehem does not diminish; Salome adores Jesus [Note: The angels sing Luk 2:14 in adoration of the infant Jesus in the cave; the ox and the ass in the stable also incessantly adore him (14)-in fulfillment of Isa 1:3 and Hab 3:2 (LXX, ).] (not simply God, as in Protev. 20), and is not forbidden to declare the wonder of the virgin-birth; only angels witness the birth, and as soon as Jesus is born He stands on His feet; the star is the largest ever seen in the world; the magi offer gifts to the blessed Mary and Joseph as well as to the child; Marys fear of Herods fury (Protev. 22) is omitted.
The second part (18-24) describes with picturesque detail the flight to Egypt and the residence of the holy family there. Some of the legends hare sprung from the soil of the OT. For example, when Mary is terrified by dragons issuing from a cave (18), the infant Jesus leaves her bosom and confronts them, till they adore him and retire (from Psa 148:7), Docile lions accompany and aid their oxen, and wolves leave them untouched (in fulfilment of Isa 65:25). Again, when Mary and Jesus entered the Egyptian temple, all the idols bowed and broke (in fulfilment of Isa 19:1). The OT is enough to explain the last-named legend, without recourse to the later and rather different Buddha-legend in the Lalita Vistara (viii.). Athanasius, by the way, welcomes this incident (de Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 36), which he accepts without a shadow of suspicion, as a proof of the supreme glory of Jesus. Another pretty legend [Note: Which passed into the Qurn (ed. E. H. Palmer [SBB vi. and ix., 1900], xix. 20-26) in a simpler form.] occurs in 20-21, where Mary rests from the heat under a tall palm-tree and longs to eat some of the fruit hanging high overhead. Joseph tells her he is more concerned about the lack of water, since their water-skins are empty. Then the infant Jesus, resting with happy face in the bosom of his mother, says to the palm, Bend thy branches, O tree, and refresh my mother with thy fruit. Immediately, at this word, the palm bowed its crest to the feet of the blessed Mary, and they gathered from it fruits with which all were refreshed. After they had gathered all its fruit, it remained bent, waiting his command to rise at whose command it had bowed down. Then Jesus said to it, Raise thyself, O palm, be strong, and join the company of my trees which are in the paradise of my Father. And open from thy roots the vein of water which lies hidden in the earth; let the waters flow, that we may be satisfied therewith. At once the palm rose up, and at its root a spring of water began to trickle forth, exceedingly clear, cool, and bright. Next day, before leaving, Jesus rewards the palm by allowing an angel to transplant one of its branches to paradise. This palm, he tells the terrified spectators, shall be prepared for all the saints in the place of bliss, as it has been prepared for us in this lonely spot.
The third part (25-42) describes incidents in the boyhood of Jesus, from the return to Judaea , for the most part on the unpleasant lines of the Gospel of Thomas. The incident of the taming of the lions is new, however (35-36). Jesus, a boy of eight, went one of Jericho one day to the banks of the Jordan, and walked deliberately into a cave where a lioness lay with her cubs. The lions adored him. Jesus then improved the occasion by telling the astonished crowd, How much better are the beasts than you! They recognize the Lord and glorify him, while you men, made in Gods image and likeness, do not know him! Beasts recognize me and are tame; men see me and do not acknowledge me. Jesus then crosses the Jordan, accompanied by the lions, the waters dividing to right and left (of. Jos 3:16, 2Ki 2:8), and dismisses his wild companions in peace.
(d) The History of Joseph the Carpenter.-One of the latest developments of the legends relating to the Infancy of Jesus is represented by the History of Joseph the Carpenter, which purports to be the story, told by Jesus to the disciples on the Mount of Olives, of the life and death of Joseph. It is a genuinely native product of Egyptian piety, not earlier than the 4th century. At several points it recalls the Testament literature, and probably it belongs to that category rather than to the Gospel category. Sahidic, Bohairic, and Arabic versions (cf. Haase, pp. 61-66) are extant.
(e) Unidentified fragments.-The four Sahidic fragments upon the life of the Virgin Mary, published by Forbes Robinson (Texts and Studies , iv. 2 [1896], p. 2ff.), maintain her virginity after the Birth of Jesus, but abjure the ideas which afterwards developed into the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (Cursed is he who shall say that the Virgin was not born as we are) and the Assumption (Cursed is he who shall say that the Virgin was taken up into the heavens in her body. But she died like all men, and was conceived by mans seed as we are). The outline of the fragments generally resembles the story of the Protevangelium Jacobi and pseudo-Matthew, with some curious idiosyncrasies. Joachim her father was formerly called Cleopas (according to Codex B of pseudo-Matthew 32, Anna married Cleopas after the death of Joachim); he and Zechariah were brothers, and Anna was the sister of Elizabeth; a white dove (=Mary) flies to Anna in a vision; Mary in the temple never washed in a bath (a favourite ascetic feature of the Egyptian nuns), nor did she use perfumes; she conceived by the hearing of her ears, and she is the Mary who visits the tomb and receives the commission of Mat 28:10 (cf. Albertz in SK [Note: K Studien und Kritiken.] [1913] 483f., on this point); she works miracles of healing after the Resurrection, but modestly forbids the apostles to record them; when she dies, her soul leaps into the arms of her Son. It is doubtful, however, if these fragments originally belonged to a Gospel at all. Probably they are part of the dbris of the Mary literature (cf. Haase, p. 77f.) which developed out of the legends represented by Gospels like the Protevangelium Jacobi, where the main interest is really in Mary rather than in Jesus. It is through the channel of such religious fiction, from the Protevangelium Jacobi to the so-called Transitus Mariae, formed in part by local legends and pagan views on the relation between sex and religion, that the mythology of the early Church flowed over into art and literature. Painters like Titian and Perugino, poems like the Byzantine Christus Patiens, and stories like the Golden Legend, were as indebted to this source as the calendar of the Roman Churchs festivals.* [Note: There is a monograph by R. Reinsch on Die Pseudo-Evangelien von Jesu und Marias Kindheit in der romanischen und germanischen Literatur, Halle, 1879.]
II. General Gospels, covering the entire life and ministry of Jesus
(a) The Jewish Christian Gospels (the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Nazarenes, the Gospel of the Twelve, the Gospel of the Ebionites).
Special Literature.-The quotations from and the Patristic allusions to the Gospel according to the Hebrews, together with the Gospel of the Ebionites, are collected, with critical studies, [Note: The varying directions of criticism are traced by Handmann (cf. Moffatt, LNT2, Edinburgh, 1912, pp. 259-261). Of the earlier studies, one of the most acute is in chs. vii. viii. of R. Simons Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament, Rotterdam, 1689.] by E. W. B. Nicholson (Gospel acc. to the Hebrews, London, 1879), Zahn (Gesch. des Kanons, ii. 642-723), R. Handmann (Texte and Untersuchungen v. 3, 1888), J. H. Ropes (Texte and Untersuchungen xiv. 2, 1896, p. 77f.), A. Meyer (in Henneckes Neutest. Apok.), and A. Schmidtke (Neue Fragm. u. Untersuchungen zu den judenchristl. Evangelien, Texte and Untersuchungen xxxvii. 1, 1911) cf. also Waitzs important study, Das Evangelium der zwlf Apostel in ZMTW (1912, p. 338f., 1913, pp. 38f., 117f.). In the light of Schmidtkes and Waitzs researches, it is no longer possible to treat the Gospel according to the Hebrews without handling the Gospel of the Nazarenes and the Gospel of the Ebionites, since the quotations usually assigned to the first are disputed. In the following section, therefore, these three Gospels will be discussed together.
The general problem may be stated thus. Four Jewish Christian Gospels are mentioned, and quoted in the literature of the early Church: the Gospel of the Hebrews (HG), the Gospel of the Nazarenes (NG), the Gospel of the Ebionites (EG), and the Gospel of the Twelve, i.e. of the Twelve Apostles (TG). [Note: A later Syriac Church-compilation with this title has been edited by J. Rendel Harris: The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles, together with the Apocalypses of each one of them, Cambridge, 1900. Whether the Coptic fragments edited by Revillout (Patrolog. Orient., ii. 2, Parks, 1903-05, p. 123 f.) belong to this, or to some allied Gospel of the Twelve, is a moot point (cf. Haase, p. 30 f.). It also seems doubtful whether this Syriac TG can be show to rest on a source akin to the EG of Epiphanius.] Were there really four Gospels of this kind? Or are some of these titles no more than different descriptions of the same Gospel? This is a problem which goes back to the 5th century. Jerome apparently held HG=TG, and this equation has been accepted by critics like Hilgenfeld, Cassels (Supernat. Rel., 1874-77, pt. ii. ch. iii), Lipsius, and Resch, with varying definitions of its age and content. One of the notable features in Schmidtkes recent monograph is that he not only challenges the ordinary equation of HG = NG in recent criticism, but reconstructs an HG which absorbs practically all the material assigned to TG, so that HG becomes equal to EG, as Nicholson had already argued. The usual identification [Note: Occasionally in the sense that EG is no more than an Ebionitic copy or edition of the original catholic HG.] of EG = TG (Hilgenfeld, Zahn, Harnack, etc.) is combined by Waitz with a refusal to equate HG and NG.
Of these four, TG is mentioned much less often than HG; our first knowledge of it is of a Gospel hearing this title (i.e. with the twelve apostles as its authors or authorities) which is mentioned by Origen next to the Gospel of the Egyptians (see above, p. 479). We hear of NG first in Jerome, and for EG we are mainly indebted to Epiphanius. But we do not know to what extent these titles were interchangeable, and whether different writers meant the same work when they mentioned HG or TG, for example. The most hopeful method of arriving at some solution of the problem is to approach it along the line of the allusions to Jewish Christians in the early writers of the Church.
There were Jewish Christians, according to Justin (Dial. 88) who maintained that Jesus was born In the ordinary way. Whether all the Jewish Christians whom Justin knew held this position, or whether it was only some of them, is not quite clear; all he asserts is that the majority of Christians in his day preferred to believe in the virgin-birth. The real dividing line among Jewish Christiana was drawn by their view of the Law (Dial. 47); the stricter party sought to enforce the Law upon Gentile Christians, while the more tolerant were content with obeying it themselves. It was over this question of practice, not over a, Christological issue, that differences arose. With Irenaens the situation is different. Writing in the West, he is not acquainted with the varieties of Jewish Christians in Palestine and Syria; to him they are all Ebionites, who believe Jesus was the son of Joseph, reject St. Paul as an apostate from the Law, and use no Gospel but that of Matthew (Haer. i. 26. 2, iii. 11. 7). Origen is better informed (Cels. v. 61). He recognizes the two-fold classification of the Ebionites or Jewish Christians, and holds that both rejected St. Paul (v. 65), but says nothing about any special Gospel used by those who rejected the virgin-birth. The difficulty presented by the statement of Irenaeus remains, viz. how could any party in the Church adhere strictly and specially to the Gospel of Matthew, if they believed (iii. 21. 1) in the natural birth of Jesus? Must they not have omitted all or part of the first two chapters? Yet Irenaeus seems to imply that they did not alter or abbreviate Matthews Gospel,* [Note: Their Gospel must have been, apparently, EG; NG contained Matthew 1-2, and HG could not be called a Mattaean Gospel.] for he contrasts them favourably with Marcion. The Ebionites, who use only that Gospel which is according to Matthew, are convicted out of that Gospel itself of holding wrong views about the Lord; whereas Marcion, who mutilates the Gospel according to Luke, is shown by the parts that survive in his edition to be a blasphemer against the only living God (iii. 11. 7; cf. iii 21. 1). The loose statement of Irenaeus is corrected or explained by Eusebius of Caesarea (HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] iii. 27. 4); he declares that the Ebionite Christians, who took so low and poor a view of Christs person as to believe that He was born naturally, and who rejected St. Paul as an apostate from the Law, used the so-called Gospel according to the Hebrews, and attached little value to the other Gospels. But this HG was not the special possession of these Ebionite Christians. It was the particular delight of Christian Jews (iii. 25. 5: ) More than that: the last-named passage from Eusebius proves that HG was ranked by the Church among the scriptures which though not within the canon but disputed are nevertheless recognized by the majority of the orthodox ( ). This class of scriptures includes the Apocalypse of John ( , Eusebius puts in). And nowadays () some have also included the Gospel according to the Hebrews. By some Eusebius plainly means orthodox Christians, as distinguished from the Christian Jews whose enthusiasm for this Gospel was natural and taken for granted. He implies that this tendency to disparage the Gospel was comparatively recent.
Here we begin to suspect confusion. What Eusebius calls the Gospel was at once the sole [Note: At the same time, strict Jewish Christians who held the OT to be the revealed truth, and Christianity a consummation of the Jewish religion, would not necessarily attach the same canonical value to a Gospel as other Christians (cf. Handmann, p. 108 f.). This consideration may also serve to account for the targumistic features of NG and the freedom with which the text is treated in EG.] Gospel of the Ebionites, who denied the virgin-birth as well as the authority of St. Paul, and the favourite Gospel of Christian Jews. It was even regarded by some of the strictly orthodox as only second to the four canonical Gospels and distinctly above Gospels like those of Peter, Thomas, and Matthias!
The suspicion that * [Note: The size of the HG known to Nicephorus in the 6th cent. amounted to 2,200 stichoi, i.e. larger than Mark and smaller than Matthew-though such comparative calculations depend on the size of the writing being the same, which is not to be assumed invariably.] was being used loosely to describe more than one Gospel [Note: This was felt long ago by Gieseler (Historisch-kritisch Versuch ber Entstehung der schriftl. Evangelien, 1818, p. 8 f.), and elaborated by Credner (Beitrge, 1832, p. 399 f.), who almost distinguished EG, HG, and NG under the common title of . How easy it was for early Christians to fall into confusion of this kind may be seen from the fact that in some quarters Tatians Diatessaron was actually called the Gospel according to the Hebrews (Epiph. xlvi. 1).] is confirmed by two other lines of evidence.
(1) The first of these runs parallel to the references already quoted, and is derived from the statements of Jerome. It is to Jerome that we owe our knowledge of the existence of NG, but his statements about this Gospel and the Nazarenes who used it require to be carefully sifted, and when they are sifted they witness to a difference between HG and NG which Jerome for some reason ignored. At first sight, almost everything would seem to turn upon the interpretation of Jeromes famous allusion in his treatise contra Pelagianos, iii. 2: In the Gospel according to the Hebrews, written in the Chaldaic and Syriac tongue [i.e. Aramaic, or Western Syriac] [Note: The meaning of Jeromes words may be seen by comparing his remarks in his Preface to Sam. and kings (= Prolog.Galeatus):Syrorum quoque et Chaldaeorum lingua testatur, quae Hebraeae magna ex parte confinis est.] but in Hebrew letters, which the Nazarenes use to this day, (the Gospel) according to the apostles (secundum apostolos) or, as most suppose, according to Matthew, (the Gospel) which is in the library at Caesarea, the story runs, Behold the mother of the Lord and his brothers said to him, John the Baptist is baptizing for the remission of sins; let us go and be baptized by him. But he said to them, What sins have I committed, that I should go and be baptized by him? Unless perhaps what I have just said is (a sin of) ignorance. And in the same volume, If your brother has sinned in word, he says, and made amends to you, receive him seven times in one day. Simon his disciple said to him. Seven times in one day? The Lord answered and said to him, Yes and up to seventy times seven, I tell thee. For even in the prophets, after they had been anointed with the Holy Spirit, matter of sin was found. The opening words [Note: Handmann (p. 111f.) thinks that Jerome wrote secundum apostolos to prevent this Gospel from being confused with the heretical Gospel of the Twelve (evangelium secundum xii. apostolos).] seem to suggest that Jerome identified HG and TG (=the Gospel of the Ebionites), but he is simply reproducing at second-hand the conjecture about HG and the Gospel of the Ebionites, neither of which he seems to have known; as the only Semitic Gospel he knew was NG, he naturally attributes to it the floating titles and opinions which had gathered round the others.
This is corroborated by the fact that he sometimes uses Nazaraei loosely for heretical Jewish Christians (practically = the Ebionites of earlier writers), and sometimes speaks of them in special connexion with the local Church at Syrian Bera. Now, whatever Gospel or Gospels the former used, and whoever they were, it is plain that the latter class of Jeromes Nazaraei could not have been the Ebionite Christians of Irenaeus, Origen, and Eusebius, for, according to their interpretation of Isa 8:22; Isa 9:1, which Jeromequotes, they honoured St. Paul and his Gospel (per evangelium Pauli in terminos gentium et viam universi maris Christi evangelium splenduit).|| [Note: | Their catholic attitude to the canonical Scriptures, including not only Matthew but Acts, John, and even St. Pauls Epistles, is excellently deduced by Schmidtke (p. 107 f.) from Jerome, references in his Commentary on Isaiah. But we do not see why it follows (pp. 125-126) necessarily that their Gospel could not have included the unhistorical legend about the appearance of the risen Jesus to his brother James. This was surely in line with St. Pauls own tradition (1Co 15:7). The latter no doubt puts the appearance to James fourth instead of first in chronological order, but, in view of the very different accounts in the Gospels (particularly Matthew and John), we can hardly lay stress upon the prominence assigned to James as if this were incompatible with the catholic position of the Nazaraei. After all, as Schmidtke himself admits, they were keen upon circumcision and the Law as national traditions. As Matthews Gospel had no record of any appearances to individual disciples, the way lay open for a harmless legend of this kind in honour or James the Just. If St. Paul put the appearance to him before his own vision, why should not the Nazaraei?] They were Jewish Christians of non-heretical opinions, as is implied in Jeromes account in de Viris illustribus, 3: Matthew who is also Levi, the apostle who had been a tax-gatherer, first in Judaea composed the Gospel of Christ in Hebrew letters and words for the benefit of those belonging to the circumcision who had believed. It is not quite certain who translated it afterwards into Greek. Further, the Hebrew (original) itself is kept to this day in the library at Caesarea which Pamphilus the martyr gathered most diligently. I was also given permission to copy it, by the Nazaraei who use this volume in Bera, a town of Syria.
(2) The second line of proof which suggests that HG and NG were not identical is as follows. In his Epistle to the Church at Smyrna (3:1-2) Ignatius writes: I know and believe He was in the flesh even after the resurrection. And when He came to those with Peter, He said to them, Take, handle Me and see that I am not a bodiless phantom. This may be a loose paraphrase of the Synoptic saying in Luk 24:39, but the early Church preferred to regard it as a quotation from some uncanonical Gospel. Unfortunately, the three writers who mention it do not agree upon its origin. Origen (according to the Latin version of the preface to his de Principiis) said it came from a little book called the Teaching of Peter, which had no claim to be authentic (ille liber inter libros ecclesiasticos non habetur neque Petri est scriptura neque alterius cuiusquam qui spiritu dei fuerit inspiratus). This sounds so definite that we are surprised to learn that Eusebius (HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] iii. 36, 11) does not know what source Ignatius used. Jerome, however, twice asserts that it was the Gospel which he had translated. As both Origen and Eusebius knew HG, Jeromes statement must be an error, if he is referring to HG. But it is very difficult to suppose that he could have made such a mistake about a Gospel which he had translated, and the inference must be either that his HG was a different edition from that known to Origen and Eusebius, or more probably that it was not HG but NG. This latter hypothesis explains why Eusebius could not place the quotation, for Eusebius knew HG but not NG. There is no reason why such a quotation should not have occurred both in NG and in the pseudo-Petrine document mentioned by Origen. It is of course possible that one of them borrowed from the other; perhaps Ignatius used the Petrine document (Zahn), while NG used Ignatius or that document (Schmidtke). But the last-named hypothesis implies that Jerome had an extremely superficial knowledge of NG, and this is on other grounds unlikely. It is true that Jerome required an expert to translate the Chaldee or Aramaic text of Tobit into Hebrew, that he might render it into Latin; and his acquaintance with the original of NG must have been equally second-hand. But this does not prove that he could not have known its contents with sufficient accuracy. There is no obvious reason to doubt his veracity, or to hold that he did not know, e.g., that this or that quotation occurred in NG, even supposing that he translated the latter as rapidly as he did Tobit.
Schmidtkes reconstruction is in outline as follows. At on early period the Church at Syrian Bera broke up-or, at any rate, the local Jewish Christians soon formed a community of their own, apart from the Gentile Christian Church. It was these Jewish Christians who were the real Nazarenes of the early Church. Outside Bera there were none. When Epiphanius calls the Nazarenes a sect of the primitive Church, he is simply confusing them with the Nazarenes of Act 24:14-15, where St. Paul protests, on being charged with being a ring-leader of I cherish the same hope in God as they ( ) accept. Here means St. Pauls Jewish accusers, but Epiphanius mistook the words for a reference to the Nazarenes. In reality, these Nazarene Christians of Bera preserved their consciousness of belonging to the Church; they accepted the virgin-birth of Jesus and honoured St. Paul as an apostle (see above. p. 490 n. [Note: . note.] ), though they retained, like some of the Jewish Christians afterwards known to Justin, a number of Jewish peculiarities of custom and belief. Their Gospel was an Aramaic version (135-150 a.d.) of Matthews Gospel, which was a sort of targum; it also included some touches from the other canonical Gospels. Now it was this document, according to Schmidtke, which caused all the subsequent misunderstandings of the Church about the Hebrew Gospel which formed the basis of the canonical Matthew. This version of Matthew was supposed to have been the original of Matthew. Papias was the first to go wrong, and he misled Eusebius and Apollinaris, as well as Irenaeus and Origen. Even those who knew Hebrew and Syriac were misled into calling NG a Hebrew document, since they assumed it was the basis of the canonical Matthew with its Jewish Christian characteristics. The only writer who had a first-hand knowledge of it was Hegesippus (circa, about a.d. 180). Eusebius secured a copy only when he wrote the Theophania; he did not know it when he composed his Church History. And even when he did read it he imagined, thanks to Papias and others, that it was the Semitic original of Matthew.
The copy of Eusebius in the library of Caesarea fell into the hands of Jerome. But Jerome, like Epiphanius, for the most part depended not on this Gospel directly but on the information supplied by the distinguished scholar, Apollinaris of Laodicea, who had edited an exposition of Matthew, in which his Hebrew scholarship enabled him to quote fragments of this Nazaraean Gospel. That dishonest and unreliable writer, Jerome, had no first-hand acquaintance with the Nazarenes, of whom he says so much. He was the Defoe of his age.
Hegesippus, as Eusebius points out, used both NG and HG. The latter* [Note: EG (see below) was also a Greet composition, but, unlike HG and like NG, it was allied to Matthew, though not so closely as NG.] was an independent Greek work, equivalent to TG whereas NG was neither an independent work nor a Greek composition, but a Syriac document reproducing Matthews Gospel in the main. The mistaken identification of HG and NG was Jeromes fault. He imagined that this Gospel of the Nazarenes which he saw in the episcopal library of Caesarea was the Gospel according to the Hebrews, and Schmidtke bluntly declares that his story about translating it (circa, about a.d. 390) is a fabrication. [Note: Bede, in the beginning of the 8th cent., made the fact of Jerome having quoted and translated the Hebrew Gospel the reason for holding that the latter was to be ranted not among apocryphal but among ecclesiastical histories (in Luk 1:1).]
It is not necessary here to discuss the details of Schmidtkes brilliant and searching investigation. His strictures on Jerome (pp. 66-69) are too sweeping; his conjecture about the relation between Apollinaris and the extracts from the Nazarene Gospel is hardly more than ingenious; and his tendency to attribute misunderstanding to early Christian writers, although it is in the main justifiable, carries him into some extreme positions. But his analysis of the extant data has succeeded in showing afresh [Note: The loose usage of as a Gospel title was seen by several earlier writers besides those already mentioned (p. 490). Holtzmann, e.g. (Einleitung in das Neue Testament3, 1892, p. 487 f.), suggested that it was applied to a whole series of more or less cognate Greek and Aramaic compositions. Lipsius preferred to regard HG as assuming different shapes in different circles and at different times. This is almost inevitable, when HG and TG are identified.] the strong case for regarding HG and NG as different works. So much at any rate may be granted. On the other hand, the identification of HG and EG breaks down; Waitz is probably right in regarding EG as an independent work. The differentiation of HG, NG, and EG is a precarious task, however, and in the present state of our knowledge no reconstruction can claim to be more than conjectural. The probability is that there were several Jewish Christian Gospels approximating more or less closely to the type of Matthew. Jewish Christians who claimed to be the true Hebrews, and who saw in Christianity the completed form of Hebrew religion, could well, as Waitz observes, call their Gospel a Gospel according to the Hebrews, even although it was written in Greek. There were varieties of such Jewish Christians, from the orthodox Nazaraei to the extreme wing of the Ebionite Christiana, and there is no reason to doubt that more than one Gospel was composed and circulated by them. If one of these was an Aramaic version of Matthew, it would be particularly easy for later writers to use loosely as a linguistic title, and thus to imagine that HG meant either a Hebrew Gospel or the supposed original of Matthew. One of the obstacles in dealing with the entire problem of the Jewish Christian Gospels is due to the fact that some early Christian writers and fathers often mention books which they seem never to have seen, and that their references to the Gospel books of the Jewish Christians are too loose and vague to be taken at their face-value. This applies particularly to Epiphanius and Jerome. When the latter, for example (de Vir. illustr. 2), introduces the quotation about the Lords post-Resurrection appearance to His brother James, by declaring that it occurred in the Gospel called according to the Hebrews, which I recently translated into Greek and Latin, and which Origen often uses, he is surely confusing HG and NG. He is anxious to prove the importance of NG; that is why he says it was often cited by Origen.* [Note: According to Schmidtke (p. 134 f.), Jerome betrays here the fact that he copied this story from Origen; but this is not a necessary inference (cf. p. 490 n.).] But what Origen cited was HG. There is an error of memory here, at any rate. So with Epiphanius. He explains (Haer. xxix. 7, 9) that the Nazoraeans-Jewish Christians who practised Jewish habits of life, and who had their headquarters at Syrian Bera-possessed and used the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew; he declares that their edition was unmutilated (), but does not know if it contained the genealogy from Abraham to Christ. This is to distinguish the Nazoraeans from sectarian Christians like the Cerinthians, who (Haer. xxviii. 5, xxx. 14) used a mutilated Matthew, leaving out passages like Mat 1:1-17; Mat 10:25; Mat 26:18. Obviously, his remarks are contradictory. If he knew that the Gospel used by these Nazoraeans was unmutilated, he must have known whether it contained Mat 1:1-17 or not. He is speaking about this NG either from hearsay or from a hasty perusal of Irenaeus, and, with a carelessness which is characteristic of him, at several points confuses it with EG.
The rival theories thus are: (i.) HG and NG either identical or different editions of the same work; (ii.) HG and NG different works entirely. The latter seems preferable, but in any case it is essential to have the extant data before us.
(a) In the first place (cf. Schmidtke, pp. 1-31, 63f.), we possess a number of marginal scholia on Matthew from a group of minuscule Manuscripts which, partly on the basis of von Sodens researches and discoveries, Schmidtke regards as witnessing to a special type of text or a special edition of the Gospels dating not later than a.d. 500. These scholia are held to be exegetical notes, probably drawn from the Commentary on Matthew which Apollinaris of Laodicea wrote, prior to Jerome. They profess to quote the readings of . (sc. ). Perhaps the discredit into which the supposed Aramaic (original) Matthew was falling, on account of its use by heretical sects, led to the pious preservation of these brief extracts on the margin of Church copies. There is a good deal of speculation in the eye of this hypothesis. The scholia, however, are unmistakable.
In Mat 4:5 the Jewish Gospel read for , in Mat 5:22 it omitted and in Mat 6:13 the doxology to the Lords prayer; at Mat 7:5 it read:* [Note: below, p. 495.] If you are in my bosom and do not the will of my Father who is in heaven, I will cast you out of my bosom; in Mat 10:16 it read for , in Mat 11:12 for , in Mat 11:25 for ; in Mat 12:40 it omitted the second three days and three nights; in Mat 15:5 it read ; it omitted Mat 16:2 b-3 and read son of John for Bar-Jonah in Mat 16:17; in Mat 18:22 after seventy times seven it read: ; in Mat 26:74 it read ; and in Mat 27:65 it had: .
(b) The extant quotations may best be classified according to the source:
Clement of Alexandria cites HG twice-
Strom. li. 9. 45: as it is written also in the Gospel according to the Hebrews, He who wonders shall reign, and he who reigns shall rest.
Strom. v. 14. 96: He who seeks shall not rest until he finds; when he has found, he shall wonder, and wondering he shall reign, and reigning he shall rest.
Origen (in Joh. ii. 6) quotes a saying of the Saviour from the Gospel according to the Hebrews as follows: My mother, the Holy Spirit, took me just now by one of my hairs [Note: From the Jewish story of Bel and the Dragon (v. 36), where an angel lifts Habakkuk by the hair of his head and transports him to Babylon (cf. Act 8:39). In the Christian Haggd, the hairs become a single hair, which reminds us of Eze 8:3.] and carried me off to the great mountain Tabor. He repeats the quotation in his Homilies on Jeremiah (15:4). It is evidently from a description of the Temptation, where Jesus had not His disciples beside Him, as He had at the Transfiguration. Origen quotes the passage in order to prove that the Word came into being through the Spirit; he adds that if one reads Mat 12:50 one cannot have any difficulty about understanding how the Spirit could be called the mother of Christ. In the Gospel, Jesus is the Son of the Spirit (=Wisdom; cf. Wis 1:4 f., Wis 9:17, Luk 7:34-35)
The Latin version of his Commentary on Matthew (Mat 19:16 ff.) has the following passage: it is written in a Gospel called the Gospel according to the Hebrews (if anyone cares to receive this not as an authority but in illustration of the question before us), [Note: Origen hesitates to quote this Gospel as Scripture, not because it is heretical, but because the canon of the four Gospels was now dominant-as it had not been when Clement wrote.] the other [Note: So there were two: for Matthews duplications, cf. Mat 8:28, Mat 20:30.] rich man said to him, Master, what good thing shall I do to live? He said to him, Man, do the Law and the prophets. He answered him, I have done them. He said to him, Go, sell all you possess and divide it among the poor, and come, follow me. But the rich man began to scratch his head, and was not pleased. And the Lord said to him, How do you say, I have done the Law and the prophets? For it is written in the Law, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. And lo, there are many brothers of your, sons of Abraham, clothed in filth, dying of hunger, while your house is full of many goods, and nothing at all goes out of it to them. And turning he said to Simon his disciple, who was sitting beside him, Simon, son of John, it is easier for a camel to enter by the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
This popular version of the story recounted in the Synoptio Gospels tallies partly with Mt. and partly with Lk.; If it represents a conversation at some rich mans table (Meyer), this is a Lucan affinity, for in Lk. (Luk 18:18), as distinguished from Mt. and Mk., the incident is not described as an open-air episode,
Eusebius declares that the story of the woman accused of many sins before the Lord, which Papias quotes, was confined in the Gospel according to the Hebrews (HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] iii. 39. 16). In Theophan. Syr. iv. 12 (ed. Gressmann, 1904, p. 183f.):|| [Note: | On this passage, cf. J. A. Robinson in Expositor, 5th ser., v. [1897] 194 f.] the reason of the divisions between souls that take place in households [Mat 10:34-35] He taught-as we have found in one place in the Gospel which exists in Hebrew among the Jews, where it is said, I (will) choose for myself the excellent [or, worthy] whom my Father in heaven gave to me. On the authority of Mai, another quotation from this Gospel has been usually referred to the Theophonia, viz.: Since the Gospel which has reached us in Hebrew characters pronounces the threat not against the man who hid the money but against him who lived riotously-for he had [Note: Or, it contained ()-in which case we have only a summary, not a verbal quotation.] three servants, one who spent the masters substance with harlots and flute-girls,** [Note: * This phrase recurs in an Oxyrhynchite fragment (see p. 499).] one who multiplied it, and one who concealed the talent; the one was accepted, the other was merely blamed, and the third was shut up in prison-I judge that, according to Matthew, the threat immediately following the conclusion of the word spoken against him who did nothing does not apply to him, but was spoken by way of epanalepsis with reference to the man formerly mentioned, who had eaten and drunk with drunkards. But Gressmann shows that this passage does not belong to the Theophania (cf. his ed. 29); it belongs either to some other author altogether or to some other treatise or Eusebius (Texte and Untersuchungen xxx. 3 [1906] 363). The version of the parable given in this extract witnesses to the dissatisfaction which was felt at an early date with what seemed to be the severe verdict of Mat 25:29-30.
In addition to corroborating the reading of the Jewish Gospel in Mat 4:5; Mat 16:17; Mat 26:74, and repeating (on Mic 7:6) Origens argument from and citation of the Tabor saying, Jerome affirms that in Mat 2:5 it* [Note: Sicut in ipso Hebraico legimus. This might mean in the original Hebrew of the OT, but the analogy of the other reference favours the meaning of in the Hebrew Gospel.] read Judith not Judaea ; in the narrative of the Baptism it contained the following conversation: Behold the mother of the Lord and his brothers said to him, John the Baptist is baptizing for the remission of sins; let us go and be baptized by him. But he said to them, What sin have I committed that I should go and be baptized by him? Unless perhaps what I have just said is (a sin of) ignorance -and the following incident: But it came to pass when the Lord had ascended from the water that the entire fountain [Note: For Jeromes argument (on Isa 11:2), the emphasis falls upon the word entire. The spirit of wisdom is poured out like water on the Elect One In En. xlix. 1f. (cf. LXX of Isa 11:1 f.). Spitta (ZNTW, 1904, p. 316 f.) suggests that fons represents ( ) in the original, and that may have been confused with (columba)-which would explain the remarkable absence of the dove here.] of the Holy Spirit descended and rested on him, and said to him, My son, in all the prophets I looked for thee, that thou mightest come and I might rest in thee. [Note: En. xlii. 1-3.] For thou art my rest, thou art my firstborn son, who reignest to eternity ; in Mat 6:11 it read mahar, i.e. (bread) for to-morrow; at Mat 12:10 it inserted, I was a stone-mason, seeking a livelihood by my hands; I pray you, Jesus, to restore my health, lest I beg food with shame; it also read (at the passage corresponding to Mat 18:21-22?), If your brother has sinned in word and made amends to you, receive him seven times in one day? Simon, his disciple, said to him, Seven times in a day? The Lord answered and said to him, Yes, I tell you, and up to seventy times seven I for even in the prophets, [Note: The second allusion in these citations to the OT prophets.] after they had been anointed with the Holy Spirit, matter of sin was found (cf. above, p. 490); in Mat 21:9 it read: Osanna barrama (i.e. Hosanna in the heights); instead of son of Barachiah|| [Note: | In a Coptic fragment of some late Egyptian (Gospel?) treatise, Jesus denounces the Jews before Pilate for killing the prophets down to Zechariah the son of Barachiah and John his son (Patrol. Orient. ii. 165)-identifying the Zechariah of the canonical Matthew with the other (cf. above, p. 485).] it read son or Jehoiada at Mat 23:35; at Mat 27:51 it read, the lintel of the temple, which was of enormous size, broke and fell in pieces; and it contained (in the neighbourhood of Mat 5:22 or Mat 18:16-17) a saying of Jesus to His disciples, Never be glad except when you look with love at your brother.
These Jerome quotations show a Gospel in which Jesus is called Jesus as well as the Lord (only the latter in the Gospel of Peter), where the narrative of the Baptism has an apologetic purpose as Matthews has (3:14f.)-although the two differ-but which was characterized by nave, popular traits rather than by any theological tendencies. It must have adhered to the general order and even material of Matthew; otherwise, as in the case of the scholia, it would have been out of place to chronicle slight variations of text.
It is more easy to feel that HG and NG were different than to assign these fragments to one or the other. This is the precarious side of the hypothesis advocated by Schmidtke and Waitz afresh. However, to HG we may assign the quotations of Clement and Origen, to NG those of Jerome and the Jerusalem scholia. But naturally there must have been some material common to both Gospels, and we have evidences of this in the fact that both Origen and Jerome witness apparently to the interpretation of Barabbas as son of (their) teacher and to the Tabor saying [Note: As we can see from the Baptism-story in NG (see above, p. 490), no difficulty was felt about calling Jesus the Son of the Spirit and mentioning His human mother, any more than in the Synoptic tradition about mentioning His father Joseph and His Heavenly Father.] about the Spirit as mother. How far, if at all, the scholia of the Jewish Gospel attest the test of HG as well as of NG it is impossible to say. The daemon-saying quoted by Ignatius came from NG, if it came from either of these Gospels. Probably, though not certainly (see note on p. 490), the following passage belonged to HG: But when the Lord had given the linen cloth to the servant of the high priest, he went to James and appeared to him; for James had sworn he would not eat bread from the hour when the Lord had drunk the cup until he saw him rise from those who sleep. Bring a table and bread, the Lord says. He took bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to James the Just, and said to him, My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man* [Note: This is note of primitive origin or colour; the title Son of Man is extremely rare outside the Gospels, and later writers of uncanonical Gospels never copied it.] has risen from those who sleep (quoted by Jerome). The Eusebius quotations are doubtful; the Theophania citations point to NG, but whether the story of the accused woman corresponds to that of Luk 7:37 f. or to that of Joh 7:53; Joh 8:1-10, the probability is that Eusebius means to say that it occurred in HG-a fresh indication that HG was not, like NG, a sort of Matthaean composition or version, We do not know if HG had any Birth-story; [Note: Hegesippus did say that Domitian dreaded the second appearance of Christ as Herod dreaded the first (Eus. HE iii. 20. 2), but it does not follow that he owed to HG this reference to Herod. Oral tradition (as Handmann suggests) might account for it.] perhaps it resembled Mark or John in this respect. And its contents seem to have been different from the exact Synoptic or Johannine type.
Both HG and NG were known to Hegesippus, who brought forward material from both, as Eusebius informs us: (iv. 22. 8; cf. iii. 25. 5). Unless we regard the between and as an error or interpolation (Nicholson, Handmann), the inference from this passage is that the Syriac (Gospel) was used by this Jewish-Christian writer as well as the Gospel of the Hebrews. [Note: Waitz (ZNTW, 1913, p. 121) thinks it was EG that Hegesippus used, not HG; but his reasons are unconvincing. There is no ground for supposing that HG was confined to Egypt, and none for assuming that Jamas was a vegetarian (see below), whose principles would be shared by the Jewish Christiana-and expressed in their Gospel (i.e. EG).] Furthermore, since NG was probably used by Ignatius (cf. p. 491), it may be placed not later than the end of the 1st cent., subsequent to the composition of Matthews Gospel. It was the special Gospel of the Jewish Christians at Bera, originally; it was not marked by anti-Catholic tendencies, [Note: It is still a question how far the text and traditions of NG represent earlier forms than those of the Synoptic narrative.] but owing to its language it never attained the popularity and circulation of HG. The latter was not a translation but a Greek Gospel. It received the name of or Hebrew Gospel from Christians who were not Jews; the title no more meant that it was written in Hebrew than the Gospel according to the Egyptians meant a Gospel written in Coptic. It was the readers, not the language, that suggested the sobriquet, in this case. Again, unlike NG or even EG, it had not Matthews Gospel as its basis or prototype. Clement and Origen never quote it or refer to it as a work allied to Matthew. So far as we can judge from the few allusions and citations that may be accepted as belonging to it, the contents of HG must have been stamped with characteristics which differentiated it from the canonical Gospels and yet commended it for a time to others than Jewish Christians both in Palestine and Syria (probably its original home) and Egypt. But we do not possess any means of determining its date with certainty; whether it was contemporary with NG or written early in the 2nd cent., remains an open question. Later| [Note: But if EG is used in the pseudo-Clementine , and if the latter were written by the middle of the 2nd cent., as Waitz shows good reason for maintaining (cf. ZNTW, 1913, p. 49 f.), our Gospel may be put in the first half or even quarter of the 2nd century. This is corroborated by Irenaeus (cf. above, p. 490), if his Ebionitic Christians used EG.] than NG at any rate, and further from orthodox teaching than either NG or HG, was EG, which seems to imply a knowledge of Luke as well as of Matthew, although it is Matthaean, as HG does not appear to have been. This early 2nd cent. production is known to us from the quotations made by Epiphanius, which enable the following outline to be drawn:
(b) The Gospel of the Ebionites.-According to Epiphanius (Haer. xxx. 3), the Ebionites accepted no Gospel except that of Matthew. This alone they use, like the adherents of Cerinthus and Merinthus; they call it the Gospel according to the Hebrews-a correct description, since it was Matthew alone in the New Testament who composed the narrative and preaching of the Gospel in Hebrew and Hebrew characters. It is true, he adds-and he repeats this in xxx. 6-that Hebrew translations of Johns Gospel and of Acts were said to be kept in the Genizah at Tiberias, which had proved useful in the conversion of Jews. But Matthews Gospel was the only one originally written in Hebrew. This idea of a Hebrew Matthew obsesses Epiphanius among other early Christian writers; it is needless* [Note: Even after Zahns (Geseh. des Kanons, ii. 731 f.) argument that Epiphaniuss statement is correct, and that since Origen the Ebionitic Christians had begun to appropriate for their own Gospel the honorific title of the Churchs HG.] to spend words upon his explanation of as suitable to the original language of Matthew. What is more important for our present purpose is to notice how he proceeds to explain that this Gospel used by the Ebionites was not the canonical Matthew, however, but a mutilated and revised edition (xxx. 13), It began at 3:1. (1) The beginning of their Gospel is: It came to pass in the days of Herod king of Judaea that John came baptizing with a baptism of repentance in the Jordan river; he was said to be of the race of Aaron the priest, the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth. And all went out to him, The story of the Birth and the genealogy were therefore absent from this Gospel. Cutting off the genealogies in Matthew, they make a beginning, as I have already said, in this way; It came to pass in the days of Herod, king of Judaea , under the high priest Caiaphas, that a certain man named John came, baptizing with a baptism of repentance in the Jordan river (xxx. 14). This suggests that the author had Luk 3:1 in mind, but in the following extract (2), by making the Pharisees accept Johns baptism, he differs from the Lucan tradition (Luk 3:7 f.; 7:29-30): John came baptizing, and the Pharisees went out to him and were baptized, and all Jerusalem. And John had raiment of camels hair and a girdle of skin round his loins; and his food (says the Gospel) was wild honey, [Note: The religious vegetarianism of the Ebionite Christians (Epiph. xxx. 15) made them change locusts (, Mat 3:4) into honey-cake (). The verse echoes LXX of Num 11:8 ( .) Note James was an ascetic but not a vegetarian. The words of Hegesippus, which Eusebius quotes (HE ii. xxiii. 5), , mean that he was careful to eat only kosher meat (in the sense of Act 15:28 and Jos. Ant. i. 102, ).] the taste of which was the taste of manna, like a honey-cake dipped in oil (xxx. 13). The account of the Baptism of Jesus, however, did not immediately follow, as in the canonical Matthew, but only after an interval ( ). The author first of all brought Jesus on the scene, and placed the call of the twelve apostles prior to the Lords Baptism, possibly to make it clear that they had not been originally disciples of John, more probably to convey the impression that they had been eye-witnesses from the very outset. (3) There was a man named Jesus, and he was about thirty years of age; he chose us and entering. Capharnaum he went into the house of Simon surnamed Peter, and opening his lips said, As I walked beside the lake of Tiberias [Note: This is almost the only touch in the extant fragments which recalls the Fourth Gospel (6:21), and even this need not be a reminiscence. On the other hand, the Coptio fragments which some propose to connect with this Gospel (cf. 506) show marked Johannine colouring.] I chose John and James, sons of Zebedaeus, and Simon and Andrew and Thaddaeus and Simon the zealot and Judas Iscariot; and I called thee, Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom, and thou didst follow me. You then I desire to be twelve apostles for a testimony to Israel (xxx. 13). The narrative of the Baptism (4) diverges in order and in some details from the Synoptic tradition. When the people had been baptized, Jesus also came and was baptized by John. And when he came up from the water, the heavens opened and he saw the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descending and entering into him. And a voice came from heaven saying, Thou art my Beloved, in thee I am well-pleased-and again-to-day have I begotten thee. And immediately a great light* [Note: See Justins Dial. 88.] shone round the place. Seeing this (says the Gospel), John says to him, Who art thou, Lord? And again a voice from heaven addressed him [or, said of him]. This is my son, the Beloved, in whom I am well-pleased. And then (says the Gospel) John fell down before him and said, I pray thee, Lord, do thou baptize me. But he forbade him, saying, Come, this is how it is fitting that all should be accomplished (xxx. 13). The divergence of EG from NG at this point is clear: the one has a dove, the other has not (cf. above, p. 493); and EG conflates the voices from heaven.
The Gospel must have included the middle part of the life of Jesus, [Note: Origen (de Princip. iv. 22) also quotes the Ebionites interpretation of Mat 15:24.] for two sayings are quoted, one (5) a curious protest against sacrifices (I came to abolish sacrifices, and if you do not cease sacrificing, the Wrath will note cease from you, xxx. 16), and the other (6) a version of Mat 12:46-50=Mar 3:31-35= Luk 8:19-21 (They deny he is a man, on the ground, forsooth, of the word which the Saviour spoke when he was informed, Behold, thy mother and thy brothers are standing outside. Who is my mother and my brothers? And stretching his hand out to his disciples he said, These are my sisters and mother and brother, who do the will of my Father, 30:14). If (5) was substituted [Note: Nicholson (p. 77) suggests that it was part of a paragraph answering to Luk 13:1-3.] for Mat 5:17 (as in the case of (7)), and if the plural in (6) means the various injunctions of the Law as Gods will, we have two indications of the Jewish Christian syncretistic and anti-sacrificial [Note: This led the in (Epiph. xviii. 2, xxx. 8, 18) to criticize parts of the Law and even of the prophets, in spite of their admiration of the OT.] tendency which dominated the Gospel.
The sole saying (7) which has been preserved from the Passion narrative illustrates the vegetarian tendency which we have already seen in the description of John the Baptists food. The Lucan saying, With desire have I desired to eat this passover with you, become: I have not desired to eat this passover of flesh with you (xxx. 22).|| [Note: | Or, Have I desired you?] The Ebionites were vegetarians, probably because they objected to sexual relations as immoral, and consequently to animal food as the product of such relations even among the lower creatures.
The accuracy of Epiphanius is seldom beyond question, and it has been surmised that these quotations in whole or part came from other sources (so, e.g., Credner, Lipsius, Westcott, Schmidtke). Thus (5) may have come from the Clementine Recognitions (i. 39, 54) and (6) from Origens comment on Joh 2:12. But it does not follow that they were current only in these quarters. And as Epiphanius does show some close acquaintance with the tenets and practices of the Ebionites, it is fair to assume that his citations from their Gospel are not invariably inaccurate or imaginary. As the quotation (2) shows, by the substitution of for the Synoptic , the original text was Greek, not Semitic.
Origen (see p. 479) calls it , instead of using , as he does in describing the other Gospels on his list, and as the Latin translator renders it (iuxta* [Note: By iuxta he meant to render , for he goes on to translate by iuxta Mathian.] duodecim apostolos). The probability is that a saying like (3) gave rise to this title; it would suggest, and perhaps was intended by the writer to suggest, that the Gospel was composed by Matthew in the name of the twelve apostles, just like the Gospel of Peter or (according to one legend) the Fourth Gospel. It is true that a similar inference may be not unreasonably drawn, identifying this Gospel with HG, which also claimed to be a Gospel of Matthew; but the inference would not be so conclusive, for in any case the Gospel of the Ebionites, like the other Jewish-Christian Gospels, was based on the canonical Matthew. Its original title may have been the Gospel of the Twelve, by Matthew or the Gospel of the Twelve for the Gospel of the Ebionites is naturally no more than a description of it which emanated from outside circles. It belonged to the Synoptic type; nowhere can it be proved to have derived from the Johannine Gospel.
(c) The Gospel of the Egyptians.-The Gospel of the Egyptians means a Gospel current among the Egyptians, not a Gospel composed by them. The title ( ) first occurs in Clement of Alexandria, who observes that it was used by people (the Encratites) (Strom. iii. 9. 66). By the time that Origen wrote, it had been degraded to the rank of a heretical writing, but Clements language implies an earlier attitude which was more favourable. Thus in Strom. iii. 13. 92 he remarks, propos of one quotation, We possess this saying ( ) not in the four Gospels which have been handed down to us, but in the Gospel according to the Egyptians.
The extant quotations are for the most part taken from dialogues between Jesus and Salome. (a) When Salome asked How long shall death prevail? the Lord said, So long as you women bear (Clem. Strom. iii. 6. 45). (b) Salome says, How long shall death men die? The Lord answers, So long as women bear (Strom. iii. 9. 64; similarly in Excerpta Theod. 67). (c) Then, said she [i.e. Salome], I would have done well in not bearing? as if child-bearing were not allowed. The Lord replies, Eat every herb, but do not eat the bitter [Note: Wobbermins theory (Religionsgeschichtliche Studien, 1896, pp. 96-103) that Orphism has influenced this Gospel involves, among other improbabilities, the literal meaning of herb here, as an indication of vegetarian tendencies.] one (Strom. iii. 9.66). (d) A fourth quotation is less certain. Those who oppose what God has created, in their specious (or fine-sounding, ) continence adduce the words spoken to Salome which we have mentioned above. They occur, I think ( , ), in the Gospel according to the Egyptians; for they say, The Saviour himself said, I came to destroy the works of the female (Strom. iii. 9. 63). The hesitation is curious, but it hardly justifies us in arguing that the quotation must have come from a work like the Exegetica of Cassianus rather than from the Egyptian Gospel. In any case, the leading idea of (c) and (d) is that the distinctions of sex are to be obliterated in the future kingdom, and that marriage as the bitter herb of bodily passion is therefore to be avoided. This is still more vividly put in (e), a fifth quotation. In reply to another question put by Salome upon the time when the kingdom was to be revealed, The Lord said, When you tread under foot the garment of shame, when [Note: The kind of rhetoric became common in some circles; cf., e.g., the Acta Philippi, 140 (p. 90, ed. Tischendorf) and the Acta Petri, 38 (C. Schmidt, TU xxiv. [1903]). But the curious fantasy of the Logion quoted in these Acts does not necessarily imply a use of the Egyptian Gospel.] the two become one, the male with the female, neither male nor female (Strom. iii. 13. 92). Here the garment of shame is the body, which Cassianus regarded as the garments of skin in Gen 3:21. The perfect state means the abolition of all sexual connexions and the physical organism which forms their opportunity, according to the Pythagorean theosophy or perhaps merely Philonic influence.
The dialogue form is common in contemporary Rabbinic tradition, and Salome for some reason was one of the Synoptic figures to whom the later Gnostics (cf. her dialogues with Jesus in Pistis Sophia, 102, 104, 114, 115, 343, 381) and the Carpocratians (Orig. Cels. v. 62) assigned an important rle.
The allusions of Hippolytus and Epiphanius suggest that the Gospel must have contained passages capable of a pantheistic development, but it is naturally impossible to determine, with the scanty data at our disposal, how far these encratitic and modalistic theories of the later Naassenes and Sabellians were due to the text of the Gospel itself and how far to later interpretations.
The Gospel of the Egyptians was probably used by the author of the homily ( a.d. 150) known as 2 Clement. This is not beyond question (cf. Zahn; Haase, p. 3; and Batiffols plea in his study of the Gospel in Vigourouxs Dictionnaire de la Bible, ii. 1625-1627), but the evidence points strongly in favour of such a hypothesis. Thus the saying quoted in Strom. iii. 13. 92 reappears in 2 Clem. xii. 2: When questioned by someone when His kingdom would come, the Lord said, When the two shall be one, the outward as the inward, the male with the female, neither male nor female. If this is so, it proves that the Gospel of the Egyptians had a high place, next to the four Gospels, since it is quoted alongside of them. The writer of 2 Clement gives quite an orthodox and moral interpretation of the saying which he cites, and this would again corroborate the impression that the Gospel of the Egyptians was not originally Encratitic, but only that some of its contents lent themselves to such views. It is possible but hazardous to infer that the three other uncanonical quotations in 2 Clement are also derived from the Egyptian Gospel, viz. iv. 5 (The Lord said, If you are gathered with me in my bosom, and do not my commands, I will cast yon out and will say to you, Depart from me, I know not whence you are, you workers of iniquity ),* [Note: In the context of a passage like Mat 7:22 f.? Practically the same Logion occurs among the scholia of the HG (cf. above, p. 492). Does this mean that the Clement quotations go back to NG, or that the scholia borrowed from 2 Clement, or that Logion lay in both NG and EG? Cf. Schmidtke, p. 297 f.] v. 2-4 (The Lord said, You shall be as lambs in the midst of wolves. And Peter answered and said to him, Supposing the wolves tear the lambs? Jesus said to Peter, Let not the lambs fear the wolves after death; and as for you, fear not those who kill you and can do no more to you, but fear him who after death has power over soul and body, to cast them into the fiery gehenna ), and viii. 5 (The Lord said in the Gospel, If you did not guard what is small, who shall give you what is great? For I tell you that he who is faithful in what is least is also faithful in what is much ). The attempts to identify the Oxyrhynchite fragment (see below, p. 499), the Oxyrhynchite Logia, the Strassburg Coptic fragments (cf. p. 506), the Fayym fragment, or the Gospel of Peter, with this Gospel, have not succeeded in almost any case in establishing a proof which is beyond question, although the affinities with the (first series of) Oxyrhynchite Logia perhaps justify us in assigning the latter provisionally to this Egyptian scripture (cf. J. A. Robinson in Expositor, 5th ser., vi. [1897] 417f.).
The use made of it by men like Julius Cassianus, a leader of the Docetic movement who was tinged with Encratitic tendencies, and Theodotus, the Egyptian Valentinian, together with its popularity among Christian circles like the Naassenes and the Sabellians, [Note: According to Hippolytus (Philos. v. 7), it was one of the writings exploited by the Gnostic Naassenes; according to Epiphanius (lxii. 2), the Sabellians used it ( ) in support of their tenets. Both notice corroborate the Egyptian provenance of the Gospel. The Sabellians used it along with the OT and the NT.] may have contributed to the disfavour into which it afterwards fell. Originally its position relative to the canonical Gospels may have resembled that of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Like the latter and the Gospel of Peter, it circulated for a while without incurring any suspicions or hostility on the part of the authorities.
Unlike the Gospel of the Hebrews, it seems neither to have been a translation nor to have been translated. does not mean, in Coptic; the most probable explanation is that it denotes a Gospel meant for and used by the native Egyptian converts, just as meant a Gospel originally designed for the Jewish Christians of Palestine. It is possible that the Gospel of the Hebrews reached the Jewish Christians of Alexandria (Egypt), and that the Gospel of the Egyptians was so named in order to distinguish it from its contemporary; but this is no more than conjecture, although is known to have meant provincial as opposed to Alexandrian, Zahn accounts for the title and circulation of the Gospel by supposing that already, as in later days, the provincial churches of Egypt did not invariably follow the Alexandrian Church, and that, while the latter adhered more closely to the canonical Gospels, the country churches favoured the native product.* [Note: The author is unknown, and no name was ever connected with it-which is one mark of early origin, at any rate of an origin apart from any special seat or tendency.] This meets the requirements of the situation during the later part of the 2nd cent. as fairly as any other hypothesis, and may be accepted tentatively as satisfactory. But there is no reason to suppose that the Egyptian Gospel only followed in the wake of the four canonical Gospels. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the origins of Christianity in Egypt is extremely scanty until the middle of the 2nd century. There is, further, the lack of adequate information about the exact contents of the Gospel of the Egyptians. But if the latter could be used by the author of a non-Egyptian document like 2 Clement by the middle of the 2nd cent., the Egyptian Gospel may have been current c. [Note: . circa, about.] a.d. 125, if not earlier.
Special Literature.-M. Schneckenburger, Ueber das Evangelium der Aegypter, Bern, 1834 (edition of the Gospel of the Hebrews, in the interests of an Egyptian Ebionitic sect); Hilgenfeld, Ketzergesch. des Urchristenthums, Leipzig, 1884, p. 546f.; D. Vlter, Petrusevangelium oder Aegypterevangelium? Tbingen, 1893 (cf. Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1905, pp. 368-372); O. Pfleiderer, Prim. Christianity, iii., London, 1910, pp. 22-228. It is possible (cf. Baumstark in Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1913, pp. 232-247) that traces of the use of the Gospel of the Egyptians are to be found in the Ethiopic Testament of our Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ, recently edited by L. Guerrier and S. Grbaut in Patrologia Orientalis, ix. 3 [1913]; and an attempt has been made (by F. P. Badham and F. C. Conybeare, HJ [Note: J Hibbert Journal.] xi. [1912-13] 805f.) to show that, like the Ascensio Isaiae, it was read by the Cathars of Albi.
(d) The Gospel of Peter.-The Gospel of Peter was used, either for private reading or in public worship, by the Church at Rhossus on the coast of Syria, not far from Antioch, in the last quarter of the 2nd cent. Its use appears to have occasioned some doubt and dispute, however. Serapion, the bishop of Antioch (a.d. 190-203), who seems to have been either a casual or a tolerant person, at first declined to take any steps in the matter; he sanctioned the use of the Gospel, without troubling to examine it carefully. Subsequently, he borrowed a copy from some Docetic Christians, and discovered that although most of it belonged to the right teaching of the Saviour, some things were additions. By the time Eusebius (HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] vi. 12) wrote, it was definitely branded as illegitimate. [Note: The harsh censure of Eusebius (HE iii. 3) is repeated by Jerome (de Vir. illustr. 1).] It is doubtful whether Eusebius knew it at first-hand, and the later allusions to it are probably borrowed from him. At the same time, it has to be remembered that the Gospel of Peter was not obliterated by the episcopal censure of Serapion. Its circulation was never wide, but it was tenacious. The Syriac Didascalia (cf. Texte and Untersuchungen , new ser., x. 2 [1904] p. 324f.) in. the 3rd cent. and Syriac Jewish Christians as late as the 5th witness to its existence and popularity (cf. Theod. Haer. fabul. ii. 2)* [Note: But Theodorets evidence is not above suspicion. How could Nazarene Jewish Christians make so anti-Jewish a book their favourite Gospel? Theodorets reference, like several other references of the same kind, may be to a different volume from out Peter.] in Syriac; and the discovery of the Akhmm fragment attests its circulation in Egypt. Still later traces are detected by Usener (Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1902, p. 353f.). Stocks (Zeitschrift fr Kirchengeschichte , 1913, p. 3), and Leipoldt (Geschichte des neutest, Kanons, i. 177f).
About a.d. 246 Origen, in his Commentary on Matthew (x. 17) observes that The citizens of Nazareth (Mat 13:55) supposed Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary; as for the brothers of Jesus, some say they were sons of Joseph by a former wife who had lived with him before Mary, on the ground of a tradition in the Gospel entitled or the book of James. This tradition, we now know, existed in the primitive source of the Protevangelium Jacobi (cf. p. 484). But it does not follow that it did not also exist in the Gospel of Peter. If so, that Gospel belongs to our second class; and one consideration in favour of this is the extreme unlikelihood of Peters name being specially attached to a Gospel which did not cover the ministry of Jesus. Till the winter of 1886-1887 this solitary reference was all that was known of the Gospel; but the discovery of an 8th cent. manuscript of fragments of Peters Gospel, Peters Apocalypse, and Enoch in Greek, at Akhmm in Upper Egypt, revealed more of the characteristics of this Gospel. Unluckily, the fragment begins and ends abruptly. It opens with the end of the trial; Pilate has washed his hands, but none of the other judges (including Herod) does so. Herod takes the leading part in what follows, [Note: But it is difficult to understand why the writer did not draw material for his anti-Jewish representation from the vain appeals of Pilate to the Jews, or from their deliberate preference of Barabbas to Jesus. Perhaps these were noted in section which have not been preserved.] the aim of the author being to exculpate the Romans and emphasize the responsibility and guilt of the Jews. In the story of the Crucifixion one of the malefactors reproaches not his fellow-criminal but the Jewish by standers, who retaliate by leaving his legs unbroken in order to prolong his agony. It is at this point that the Docetic and semi-Gnostic tendencies of the writer begin to show themselves. On the Cross the Lord was silent, as having no pain; his last cry is, My Power, my Power, hast thou forsaken me? When His dead body is lowered to the ground, there is an earthquake. The Jewish mob and their authorities then [Note: This is inconsequent; but here as elsewhere the fragment does not seem to have preserved the true order of the text. Or, possibly, it has omitted connecting material.] repent, crying, Alas for our sins! the judgment, the end of Jerusalem, is nigh! At this point the author [Note: This Gospel, like the Protevangelium Jacobl and the Gospel of the Twelve, is definitely pseudonymous.] brings Peter on the scene. I and my companions grieved, and, struck to the heart, we hid ourselves, for we were being sought for by them [i.e. the Jews] as male-factors and as intending to set fire to the temple. Meantime Pilate has the tomb guarded, at the request of the Jews. The author then ventures to describe the Resurrection.|| [Note: | On the connexion between what follows and the Jewish doctrine of the heavenly Adam, see Stocks essay in NKZ, 1902, p. 302 f., ib. 1903, p. 528 f. The Cross probably symbolizes the soul of Jesus (see, further, p. 500).] There was a loud voice in heaven, and they [i.e. the sentries] saw heaven opened and two men descending thence, with a great light, and approaching the tomb. The boulder at the opening moves of its own accord, the two figures enter, and the astonished soldiers (including the centurion and the elders) see three men coming out of the tomb, two supporting the third, and a Cross following them; the heads of the two reached as far as heaven, but the head of the One whom they escorted was higher than the heavens. And they heard a voice from the heavens saying, Hast thou preached to them that sleep? And from the Cross the answer came, Yes. The next vision is that of a man descending from heaven and entering the sepulchre. The party of soldiers and Jews then retreat, and agree to say nothing about what they have seen. The following paragraph describes how Mary Magdalene took her friends on the morning of Sunday to wait at the tomb. They find a comely youth inside [=the man who had entered?]; he tells them that the Lord has risen to heaven [there is no Ascension], and they fly in terror. The fragment then breaks off abruptly: Now it was the last day of Un-leavened Bread, and many went away home, since the feast over; but we, the twelve disciples of the Lord, wept and grieved. Each left for home, grieved at what had occurred; but I, Simon Peter, and Andrew my brother, took our nets and went to the sea, and with us were Levi the son of Alphaeus, whom the Lord
According to Peter, there are no Resurrection appearances to the women or to the disciples in Jerusalem. The fragment breaks off on the edge of what seems to be an account of some appearance at the Sea of Galilee to Peter, Andrew, Levi (and some others?). This would tally with the appearance preserved in the appendix to John, only, in Peter it would be an appearance of the Ascended Christ, for the word of the young man (angel) to the woman at the tomb is, he has risen and gone away to where he was sent from (, i.e. from heaven, as in Luk 4:43, where Marks , i.e. from Capernaum, is changed into , i.e. from heaven). A further idiosyncrasy is the apparent length of interval between the Resurrection and the flight of the disciples from Jerusalem to Galilee. Did the writer really mean that a week elapsed? Or is his description due to chronological inaccuracy?
Whether the terminus ad quem for the composition of the Gospel can be carried back earlier than the last quarter of the 2nd cent. depends upon the view taken of its relation to Justin Martyr. It had been already conjectured by Credner and others that the Gospel of Peter might be one of the apostolic memoirs used by Justin, and this conjecture seems corroborated by the Akhmm fragment, which apparently supplies the basis for the references in Apol. i. 35 (the seating of Jesus on the ), i. 40 (The Spirit of prophecy foretold the conspiracy formed against Christ by Herod, the king of the Jews, and the Jews themselves, and Pilate with his soldiers), and possibly 1:50, as well as in Dial. 103 (where Herod is termed a king), Dial. 97 ( -the phrase in Peter), and Dial. 108. Upon the whole, this dependence of Justin upon the Gospel of Peter seems preferable (so, e.g., Harnack, von Soden, Lods) to the alternative hypothesis of von Schubert and Stanton (Gospels as Hist. Documents, i. [1903] 93f., 103f.) that the coincidences between the two are due to the use of a common source, viz. the Acts of Pilate, an official report of the trial of Jesus purporting to have been drawn up by the procurator and perhaps underlying the references in the later Acta Pilati and in Tertullian.
This fixes the date of the Gospels composition approximately within the first quarter of the second century. The terminus a quo depends upon the view taken of its dependence on the canonical Gospels. Those who find in it traces of all four-as if the writer knew them and employed them indifferently, quoting perhaps from memory, to suit his own dogmatic ends-naturally place the Gospel c. [Note: . circa, about.] a.d. 125 as a very early attempt to employ the canonical traditions in the interests of a Gnostic propaganda. The dependence on Mark and even Matthew is, we think, to be granted. The coincidences between Peter and Luke and John (cf. Lode, op. cit. 18f.) are not quite so clear.* [Note: Peter. e.g., introduces Herod among the Judges or Jesus. So far he agrees with the tradition followed by Luke, but then he calls Herod the king, whereas Luke corrects this (9:7) Marcan term (6:14) at an earlier stage, and never uses it in the Passion narrative.] There is room still for the hypothesis that Peter represents a popular, early type of the inferior narratives which Luke desired to supersede. At several points Peter marks the same line of development which recurs in Luke and John, and as a composition from Syrian Antioch, with which the traditions of Luke and John are independently connected, it may even be conjectured to have arisen within the 1st century. To a modern reader, a comparison of its text with those of Luke and John seems at first sight to put its dependence on them beyond doubt. But doubts recur as soon as we recollect that the specific traditions which for us exist primarily in Luke and John were already in existence, at least orally, and that touches which are extant in literature in these canonical Gospels for the first time must have been current decades earlier. Take, for example, a piece of evidence like that of the garden of Joseph. Peter mentions this. The Fourth Gospel also does. Therefore, it is assumed, Peter used the Fourth Gospel. Why? It is surely illogical for those who believe that this formed part of the authentic tradition to assume that the only access to it was through the text of a Gospel at the very end of the 1st century. And even apart from this, such a tradition may have been easily known orally decades before it was committed to writing. [Note: Even apart from the possibility of common written sources, the factor of oral tradition must be estimated if we are not here, as in the Synoptic problem, to be misled by the juxtaposition of printed texts with hypotheses which are ultra-literary and artificial.] The evidence generally alleged for the dependence of Peter upon Luke and John must be sifted in the light of this consideration, and also with a desire to avoid the mistake of supposing that inferior traditions are invariably later, chronologically, than the written forms of what is more authentic. Peter, like the Gospel of the Hebrews, is in danger of being read in the light of an uncritical assumption that the 1st cent. a.d. saw nothing but the circulation of good traditions about the life of Jesus, that the canonical Gospels swept up all of these into their pages, and that the uncanonical Gospels represent invariably the later, fantastic efforts of a generation which had to make up by the exercise of its imagination for the lack of sound materials.
The traces of Gnostic speculation confirm the hypothesis of a date early in the 2nd cent. if not within the 1st. They are too incipient and nave to be described as related to the system of Valentinus; neither the personification of the Cross nor the allusion to Christs Divine Power is much more than the popular setting of ideas which form the basis for the doctrines attacked in the First Epistle of John and in Ignatius. Peter is not the attempt of a Gnostic theorist to work over the canonical texts in the interests of Docetism or Valentinianism.
As soon as the Akhmm fragment was published, it was conjectured by some critics that the Akhmm fragment of the Apocalypse of Peter might also be a part, or an elaboration of part, of the Gospel. The Apocalypse contains a vision of two righteous saints in heaven granted to the twelve on the mountain, with a special revelation, granted to Peter alone, of hell. A similar problem emerges (cf. p. 504) in connexion with the so-called Gospel of Bartholomew. The dividing line between Apocalypses and Gospels of our third class is naturally wavering, and if on other grounds it could he established that the Gospel of Peter was originally Gospel of the Death and Resurrection, there would be less improbability about the conjecture that the Petrine Apocalypse and the Petrine Gospel were either the same work, to begin with, or organically related.
Repeated attempts have been made to connect this Gospel with material extant in other quarters. Vlter (cf. p. 496) actually identifies it with the Gospel of the Egyptians; Harnack suggests that the Pericope Adulterae originally belonged to it; and H. Stocks (Zeitschrift fr Kirchengeschichte , 1913, pp. 1-57) argues that lost fragments of it are embedded in Asc. Is. xi. 2-22, iii. 13b-iv. 18 (the latter passage describes, inter alia, how the Beloved appeared on the third day sitting on the shoulders of Gabriel and Michael, who had opened the tomb).
The remarkable phrase about Jesus feeling no pain ( ) on the Cross ought perhaps to be taken in the light of the description of the heroic Blandina amid her tortures ( ., Eus. HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] v. 1. 56).
Special Literature.-The Akhmm fragment, first published, six years after its discovery, by U. Bouriant in Mmoires publis par les membres de la mission archologique franaise au Caire ix. 1 (Paris, 1892), 137-147, with a photographic reproduction (ib. ix. 3, 1893, p. 217f.), led to a series of critical editions by O. von Gebhardt (Das Evangelium und die Apokalypse des Petrus, Leipzig, 1893); A. Lods* [Note: Besides an earlier study, Evangelii secundum Petrum et Petri Apocalypseos qu supersunt cum latina versions et dissertatione critica, Paris, 1892.] (Lvangile et lapocalypse de Pierre avec un appendice sur les rectifications apporter au texte grec du livre dHnoch, Paris, 1893); H. von Schubert [Note: A smaller pamphlet by this writer (Das Petrusevangelium. Synoptische Tabelle nebst Uebersetzung und kritischem Apparat, Berlin, 1893) was translated by J. Macpherson (The Gospel of St. Peter, Edinburgh, 1893).] (Die Composition des pseudo-petrinischen Evangelienfragments, Berlin, 1893); Zahn (Das Evangelium des Petrus, Erlangen and Leipzig, 1893); Harnack (Texte and Untersuchungen ix. 2, Leipzig, 1893, pp. 8f., 23f.); J. Kunze (Das neuaufgefundene Bruchstck des sogen. Petrusevangelium, do., 1893); P. Lejay (in REG [Note: EG Revue des Etudes Grecques.] , 1893, pp. 59-84, 267-270); van Manen (Het evangelie van Petrus. Tekst en Vertaling, Leiden, 1893); and Semeria (in Revue Biblique , 1894, pp. 522-560). English editions by J. A. Robinson and M. R. James (The Gospel according to Peter and the Revelation of Peter2, London, 1892); H. B. Swete (The Apocryphal Gospel of St. Peter. The Greek text of the newly discovered fragment2, London, 1893; also, . The Akhmm fragment of the Apocryphal Gospel of S. Peter edited with an introduction, notes, and indices, London, 1893); the Author of Supernatural Religion (The Gospel according to Peter, London, 1894); and A. Rutherfurd (Ante-Nicene Chr. Lib. ix., Edinb., 1897, pp. 3-31, with J. A. Robinsons translation ). Critical studies by A. Sabatier (Lvangile de Pierre et les vang. canoniques, Paris, 1893); A. Hilgenfeld (Zeitschrift fr wissenschaftliche Theologie , 1893, p. 439f.); von Soden (ZTK [Note: TK Zeitschrift fr Theologie und Kirche.] , 1893, pp. 52-92): V. H. Stanton (Journal of Theological Studies ii. [1900-01] 1ff.); Vlter (Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1905, p. 368f.); K. Lake (The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, London, 1907, pp. 148f., 177f.); and C. H. Turner (Journal of Theological Studies xiv. [1912-13] 161ff.).
(e) The Gospel of Basilides.-In Alexandria Basilides and his school maintained their apostolic succession along two lines. They claimed as their authority for doctrine Glaucias, the interpreter of Peter (Clem. Strom. vii. 17. 4), and they circulated an edition of the Gospel or Gospels which had been prepared in their own interests. This is the so-called Gospel of Basilides, though the title ( ) was of course due to his opponents.
There seems no reason to doubt the accuracy of Origens reference to a Gospel of Basilides, which that distinguished Egyptian Gnostic must have composed before the middle of the 2nd cent. (possibly under Hadrian, or even Trajan), but the only means of determining approximately its character is furnished by the quotations made by Clement of Alexandria (Strom. iv. 12) from the twenty-third, and by the Acta Archelai (lxvii., ed. C. H. Beeson) from the thirteenth, of the twenty-four books of Exegetica which Basilides himself composed as a commentary upon it. These quotations make it improbable that the Gospel was merely a collection of sayings of Jesus, like the so-called Q or second source of Matthew and Luke. The glimpses we can gain of it* [Note: Jesus did not suffer on the Cross (Iren. i. 24, 4), but changed places with Simon of Cyrene, and stood mocking those who imagined they were crucifying Him. This Docetic representation of Irenaeus differs from that of Hippolytus, according to whom the Jesus of Basilides really died and rose (cf. p. 501).] rather point either (a) to a compilation or harmony based on the canonical Gospels (Zahn, Krger, Bardenhewer), or (b) to a more independent Gospel of the Synoptic type. The similarities between the extant fragments (e.g. that from the 13th book relates to the Parable of Dives and Lazarus) and Lukes Gospel have led some critics (e.g. Lipsius, Windisch, and Waitz) to conjecture that Basilides simply prepared an edition of Luke for his own purposes. In this case, his Gospel would be, like that of Marcion, an altered form of our canonical Third Gospel. Origen more than once refers in his Homilies on Luke to the numerous heretics who had recourse to this Gospel, quoting it like the devil for anti-divine purposes of their own. As Basilides is grouped with Marcion in Origens references, and as the extant fragments can almost without exception [Note: The fragment (Strom. iv. 12) which Zahn connects with Joh 9:1; Joh 9:3 may be connected equally well with Luk 21:12 f. or 23:39f.; and the other fragment, which seems to echo Mat 19:12 (Strom. iii. 1-2) probably was taken not from the of Basilides but from the of Isidore his son (mentioned in the immediate context).] be described as distinctively Lucan, it is not unlikely that his was an edition of Luke.
Special Literature.-Hilgenfelds Einleitung in das Neus Testament, p. 46f.; Zahns Geschichte des Kanons, i. 763-774: Basilides und die kirchliche Bibel; and H. Windisch in Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1906, pp. 236-246: Das Evangelium des Basilides.
(f) The Gospel of Marcion.-Marcions Gospel was certainly an edition of Luke, prepared for the use of those who shared his antipathy to Judaism. This dogmatic purpose explains most of the omissions-e.g. of the first two chapters, of 11:29-32, and of 20:37-38. It is a further question whether his text does not occasionally reproduce a more original form than that of the canonical Luke. But in any case his Gospel, though to a slight degree harmonistic (i.e. introducing material from other Gospels), is not in the strict sense of the term an independent uncanonical production. Its title was the Gospel of the Lord. The best critical reconstruction is in Zahns Gesch. des Kanons, i. 674f., ii. 409f., together with Sandays Gospels in the Second Century (1876, ch. viii.). Hahns earlier reconstruction (1823) was translated into English by J. Hamlyn Hill (Marcions Gospel, 1891).
(g) The Gospel of Apelles.-Apelles, Marcions disciple, is said by Epiphanius (xliv. 2) to have quoted the Logion, , as occurring . If so, he must have used other Gospels than that of his master, for the saying does not occur in Marcions Luke. But it does not follow that he edited or composed a Gospel of his own. The Logion was evidently current in many quarters (cf. Resch, Texte and Untersuchungen xxx. pp. 112-128), though it never occurs in any fragment of an uncanonical Gospel. Apelles simply used it to corroborate his principle of selecting from Scripture the salient passages ( , , ).
(h) The Gospel of the Naassenes.-In the Philosophoumena, Hippolytus quotes a number of Gospel-sayings from the usage of the Ophite Naassenes, but whether they came from a special Gospel composed by this Gnostic sect or whether they are simply citations from some treatise like the Gospel of Perfection or the Gospel of Eve, it is not possible to say. In the former case, it must have been a Gospel compiled from the uncanonical Gospels. One citation is: Why call me good? One is good, my Father who is in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the just and the unjust and sends rain on the holy and on sinners (Luk 18:19, Mat 5:45). Another is: Unless you drink my blood and eat my flesh, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven-and even though you do drink the cup I drink, whither I go thither you cannot enter. Two are distinctively Johannine; one runs thus: His voice we heard, but his form we have not seen; and the other, I am the true Door. The following are distinctively Matthaean; You are whited sepulchres, inwardly full of dead mens bones, since the living Man is not among you, and The dead shall leap from the tombs. The Gospel-if it was a Gospel-was a Gnostic compilation, but neither its date nor its scope can be determined from the few extant fragments. The general tenets of the sect, as recorded by Hippolytus, suggest that it had some affinities with the circle which used the Gospel of the Egyptians.
(i) Three Oxyrhynchite (Greek) fragments.-(i.) A small fragment of a Gospel in a papyrus roll is assigned by Grenfell-Hunt (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, iv. [1904], pp. 22-28) to a period not later than a.d. 250. The mutilated opening reads like a short paraphrase of Mat 6:25=Luk 12:22-23, Mat 6:28; Mat 6:26=Luk 12:27; Luk 12:24, Mat 6:27; Mat 6:31-33=Luk 12:25; Luk 12:29-31 : from morning t[ill evening, nor] from even[ing till m]orning, neither [for your food] what you shall eat [nor] for [your clothing] what you shall put on. [You are] far better than the [lil]ies which grow but spin not. Having one garment, what [do you lack?. Who could add to your stature? He will give you your garment. Then follows (cf. Joh 14:19 f.) a question put by the disciples, with the answer of Jesus. His disciples say to him, When wilt thou he manifest to us, and when shall we see thee? He says, When you are stripped and yet not ashamed.* [Note: e. when the Eden-innocence (Gen 3:7) is restored, and sexual associations abolished. Cf. R. Reitzensteins Hellenistische Wundcrerzhlungen, Leipzig, 1906, pp. 67-68.] Finally, a mutilated fragment at the end may be deciphered so as to yield a saying like that preserved in Luk 11:52, but the restoration is too conjectural to be of any service in determining the original sense of the passage.
The editors think the Gospel of which this formed a fragment must have been composed in Egypt prior to a.d. 150, and that it was closely connected in some way with the Egyptian Gospel and the uncanonical source of 2 Clement. The fragment seems to be from some homily on the passage Mat 6:25 f., in which the preacher dramatizes his teaching by putting it into the form of a dialogue. The edifying tendency corresponds to the primitive Christian instinct about marriage and the sexes which afterwards developed into Encratitism, but which neither then nor afterwards has been incompatible with orthodox belief. The question and answer at the close form a mystic expansion of the preceding saying about the garment-an expansion which presupposes a verbal form of the Logion like that of the Gospel of the Egyptians as it appears in Clements citation, not in that of 2 Clem. (see p. 495), although here the question is put by the disciples instead of by an individual (Salome?). Resch (Texte and Untersuchungen new ser. xii. [1904] 593 n. [Note: . note.] ) holds that the whole fragment comes from the Egyptian Gospel; but there is not enough evidence as yet to show that the Oxyrhynchite Gospel was identical with this early document. Such ascetic tendencies were not confined to any one circle, and it is uncritical to assume that the varied expressions of them which survive in Gospel fragments belonged to the same document, or even to different recensions of the same document. The Oxyrhynchite Gospel may have been the source used in 2 Clement; the difference in the wording of the two passages is not conclusive against this conjecture as it is against the theory that the Oxyrhynchite Gospel or the Clementine source is identical with the Gospel according to the Hebrews.
(ii.) A second Oxyrhynchite fragment was published in 1907 by Grenfell and Hunt (op. cit. v. 840), from a vellum leaf of the 4th (5th?) century. It begins with the conclusion of an address by Jesus to the disciples and proceeds to a dialogue between Jesus and a high priest in the temple* [Note: This is one of the most remarkable features in the fragment. The uncanonical Gospels of the 2nd cent. very rarely furnish any material for the Jerusalem ministry of Jesus.] at Jerusalem (cf. Mar 11:27), the theme of which (cf. Mar 7:1 f.) is the contrast between inward and outward purity:
before doing wrong he makes all sophistical excuses ( ). But take heed lest you suffer like them, for the evil-doers among men do not receive [their due] among the living simply, but await, punishment and sore torture. And taking them [i.e. the disciples] he brought them into the sacred precinct ( ) and walked within the temple. And a Pharisee, a high priest named Levi (?), come up to them and said to the Saviour, Who allowed you to tread the precinct and look at these holy vessels when you have not washed, neither have your disciples bathed their feet? Nay, yon are defiled and you have trodden this holy Place which is clean, which no one treads unless he has washed and changed his clothes, neither does he [venture to loot at] the holy vessels. And (with?) the disciples [the Saviour said], Then are you clean, you who are in the temple? He says to him, I am clean; for I have washed in the pool of David, and after descending by one stair I ascended by another, put on clean, white clothes, and then came and gazed on these holy vessels. The Saviour said to him in reply, Woe to you, blind folk, who see not! You have washed in these running waters, in which dogs and swine have been flung night and day; and you have wiped clean the outside skin, which even harlots and flute-girls [Note: This curious collocation occurs in another fragment of an uncanonical Gospel (cf. above, p. 492), probably NG; Waitz infers that our fragment came from the latter.] anoint and wash and wipe and adorn to excite the lust of men, while within they are [full?] of scorpions and [all vice?]. Now I and [my disciples?], who, you say, have not bathed, have bathed in the [living?] waters which issue from But woe to
Like the four scraps recently discovered (op. cit. X. [1913] 1224), this extract cannot be assigned to any of the 2nd cent. uncanonical Gospels. That it belonged to this century is questioned by the editors, who point out that the ecclesiastical vogue of the canonical Gospels, which became strong towards the close of the 2nd cent., would make it difficult for any document covering the same ground to gain acceptance, and that after about a.d. 180 authors of apocryphal Gospels generally avoided competition with the uncanonical Gospels by placing their supposed revelations in the period of the Childhood or after the Resurrection. If our fragment does not belong to the Gospel of the Egyptians, it at any rate betrays no dogmatic or heretical tendency. On the other hand, the authors acquaintance with the local customs of the Jewish temple in the 1st cent. seems defective (cf. J. Horst in SK [Note: K Studien und Kritiken.] , 1914, p. 451f., and Preuschen in Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1908, pp. 1-12), though more favourable verdicts have been passed occasionally on this feature of the fragment (cf. A. Bchler in Jewish Quarterly Review xx. [1907-08], 330f.; Sulzbach in Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1908, p. 175f.; and L. Blau, ib. pp. 204-215).
(iii.) A tattered leaf of papyrus, copied probably in the earlier decades of the 4th cent., containing fragments of a Gnostic Gospel, has been published by Hunt in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, viii. [1911], p. 16f. From what can be deciphered, it is clear that the contents must have come from some Valentinian or Marcosian source. Not only is the Lord called , as well as (cf. Iren. i. 1. 3),* [Note: This would not of itself mean much; the same title occurs in the earlier Oxyrhynchite fragment (cf. p. 499).] but a distinction is drawn between and (ib. i. 1. 1, 12. 3, etc.). [Note: also occurs in the lacunae.]
Lord, how then can we find faith? The Saviour says to them, When you pass from things hidden [into the light of?] things visible, then the effluence () of conception () will show to you how faith He who has ears to hear, let him hear. The Lord () of [all things?] is not the Father but the Fore-father; for the Father is the source of the things that are to come ( ). He who has an ear For what is beyond hearing [i.e. for the mystic or inner meaning. But the text is uncertain], let him hear. I speak also to those who watch not. Again he said, Everything born of corruption perishes, as the product of corruption; but what is born of incorruption () does not perish, but remains incorruptible as the product of incorruption. Some men have been deceived, not knowing
(j) Three Sahidic fragments.-It may be no more than a coincidence that Thomas should be mentioned in the second series of the Oxyrhynchite Logia, [Note: In The Oxyrhynchus Logia and the Apocryphal Gospels, 1899, C. Taylor connects the first series with the Gospel of Thomas; cf. Scott-Moncrieff, Paganism end Christianity in Egypt, 1913, p. 64 f.] and that he [Note: Photius quotes (Bibliotheca, 232) a tradition that it was he, not Peter, who cut off the ear of the high priests servant (Joh 18:10).] is also exceptionally important in the third of five Sahidic|| [Note: | The Egyptian colouring comes out in the cry of Lazarus, when he is raised: Blessed art thou, Jesus, at whose voice Amenti trembles. The idea of Joh 11:25; Joh 11:45 is expressed by saying that the multitudes gathered together to Lazarus, like bees to a honeycomb, because of the wonder which was come to pass.] Gospel fragments published by Forbes Robinson (Texts and Studies iv. 2 [1896], pp. 168-176). The fragment is lone and remarkable. In the description of the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus bids Thomas go to the man (lad) who has the loaves and fishes. After the miracle, Thomas asks for a further proof of the Resurrection, in the raising of a man from the tomb, not merely in the raising of a dead, unburied person like the son of the widow of Nain. Then the dialogue of Joh 20:27-29 is used to introduce the raising of Lazarus. Jesus takes Thomas (Didymus) specially with him: Come with Me, O Didymus, that I may show thee the bones which have been dissolved in the tomb gathered together again. The entire story (cf. Revillout, Les Apocryphes coptes, p. 132f.) is retold with the special motive of re-assuring Thomas. It is Thomas who, at the bidding of Jesus, removes the stone from the tomb.
This Gospel must have been comprehensive. It included (fragm. 1) an account of the birth of John the Baptist and of Jesus, and also the Ministry, the Death, and the Resurrection. Thus the second Gospel fragment describes the wedding at Cana. The Johannine account is embroidered with some fresh details; Mary is the sister of the bridegrooms parents, and it is they who appeal to her for help when the wine fails, pleading, that this lack will disgrace them as the hosts of Jesus, and that as the Saviour of the world He can do any miracle. The Johannine reply of Jesus to Mary (here=Woman, what wilt thou with me?) is softened by the observation that Jesus spoke in a kindly voice, and by the repeated remark that Mary felt sure He would not grieve her in anything. The rest of the story is told by one of the servants who fill the waterpots. The fourth fragment [Note: It corresponds to a Coptic fragment, published by Revillout (Apocryphes coptes du nouveau Testament, Paris, 1876, p. 124 f.), and is assigned by that scholar to his Gospel of Gamaliel (see below, p. 504).] contains a conversation on the mount of Joh 6:3; Joh 6:15 between the disciples and Jesus, in which Jesus asserts that His kingdom is spiritual. Pilate and the Roman authorities, however, propose to make Him King of Judaea ; such is their admiration for His miracles and character Herod** [Note: * The anti-Herodian bias is even more marked than in the Gospel of Peter.] opposes this. And straightway there was enmity between Herod and Pilate because of Jesus from that day. On coming down from the mount, the disciples and Jesus meet the devil in the guise of a fisherman, with many demons carrying many nets and dragnets and hooks, and casting nets and hooks on the mount: Jesus explains this vision in terms of Luk 22:31-32. John, by permission of Jesus, challenges the devil to a fishing-contest. The devil catches every kind of foul fish which was in the waters-some taken by their eyes, some caught by their entrails, others taken by their lips. The fragment then breaks off, before Satans capture of sinners by their members is outdone by the apostolic capture of the elect.
The Coptic counterpart of this fragment published by Revillout is apparently followed (op. cit. 184) by a fragment corresponding to Joh 7:11; Joh 7:53 f. the time is accomplished. When he said these things, he went into Galilee. When his brothers had gone up to Jerusalem for the feast, he went thither also, not openly but in secret. The Jews, however, sought for him, and said, Where is he? Now it was the house of Irmeel which was his place of residence owing to the multitude. Then they said, What are we to do?
The fifth fragment describes the Resurrection (p. 179f.). The anti-Jewish tendency* [Note: The abuse of the Jews is a favourite theme in Coptic apocryphal sermons (cf. p. 187).] which emerged in the fourth fragment re-appears in the determination of the Jews to burn the very wood of the Cross-a plot thwarted by Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus, who preserve the Cross, the nails, and the written title. A rich Jew called Cleopas, the cousin of the Virgin Mary, buries his son Rufus near the Saviours tomb. The imperfect state of the text at this point leaves the course of events obscure, but evidently Rufus was raised from the dead by Jesus, in response to the prayer of Cleopas, who sat with his back to the stone at the tomb of Jesus. Cleopas saw with his eyes a figure of the Cross come forth from the tomb of Jesus. It rested upon him who was dead [i.e. Rufus]; and straightway he arose and sat. Whereupon Cleopas, who had hitherto been unable to walk, owing to a disease of the feet, leapt up as if he had no disease at all. The description or the Cross recalls the Gospel of Peter.
The fragments are all late; they profess to quote from Josephus and Irenaeus, and in any case must be placed not earlier than the 3rd century. If there was some connexion between later forms of the Gospel of Thomas on the one hand and a Gospel of the Twelve (see above, p. 486) on the other, these fragments might be placed approximately in this quarter. But as the fragments are embedded in homiletical material, there is always the possibility that such stories were imaginative tales, not necessarily drawn from any written Gospel. They illustrate also the difficulty of assigning material like this to our second or to our third group; the later fragments tally in several respects with some Coptic fragments which fall to be noted in our third section.
III. Gospels of the Passion and Resurrection
(a) The Gospel of Philip.-The existence of a Gospel of Philip is attested by the Pistis Sophia, but the only extant quotation occurs in Epiphanius (xxvi. 13): The Lord revealed to me what the soul must say when she mounts to heaven, and how she must answer each of the Powers above. I have known myself, she says, and gathered myself from all quarters, and have not borne children to the Archon, but have torn up his roots and gathered the scattered members. And I know who thou art. For I, she says, belong to those above. So saying, she is released. But if it is found that she has borne a son, she is kept below until she is able to recover her children and attract them to herself.
The fragment reflects the Gnostic idea (cf. Boussets essay in Archiv fr Religionswissenschaft, 1901, p. 155f.) of the ascent of the soul through the heavens, and the magic pass-words required for the journey, but the characteristic feature is the antipathy to marriage, which agrees with the 2nd cent. conception of Philip the Apostle.
According to Epiphanius, this pseudo-Philip Gospel was used during the 4th cent. by an immoral sect of Egyptian Gnostics to justify sexual vice instead of marriage ( , , ). The Gospel of Philip, which, according to the 6th cent. Leontius of Byzantium (de Sectis, iii. 2, , ),* [Note: These Gospels seem to have been Docetic; the Incarnation was ; Jesus changed places with a man (Simon?), and therefore escaped suffering on the Cross; Jesus became invisible when transfigured, etc.] was used by the Manichaeans, may have been a special edition of the original Philip Gospel.
The Pistis Sophia (60-70) proves that this Gospel circulated among Gnostic Christians in Egypt during the 3rd century. If it was the source of Clements tradition that Jesus spoke the words of Luk 9:60 (Let the dead bury their dead) to Philip (Strom. iii. 4. 25), then the date could be brought back to about the middle of the 2nd century. It is no argument against this conjecture to say that the Gospel of Philip did not contain Synoptic material but was a Gnostic speculative work set in the post-Resurrection period. We do not know all that the Gospel contained, and while it professed to have been written by Philip on the basis of revelations made to Thomas, Matthew, and himself by the risen Christ, what Philip wrote was not only the mysterious visions he was to see but all that Jesus said and all that he did-which might (cf. Act 1:1) readily include an incident like that of Luk 9:60. But the identification of the anonymous disciple with Philip (which re-appears in the later Acts of Philip) may have been derived from some other source in written or unwritten tradition; the anti-marriage view of Philip was probably older than the Gospel of Philip, and the latter cannot safely be put much earlier than the last quarter of the 2nd century. It is upon the whole better to place this writing among the Resurrection Gospels than in the second of our groups.
Philip appears in a curious little Coptic fragment of some Gospel (Revillout, Les Apocryphes coptes, 131-132), where he is accused by Herod of seditious conduct; Herod persuades Tiberius to allow him to confiscate all the Apostles property. But it is one thing to put Philip into a Gospel-he would naturally appear in any later Gospel of the Twelve-it is another thing to make him the author of a Gospel.
(b) The Gospel of Matthias.-Neither Origen nor any writer after him quotes from the Gospel of Matthias. It is simply branded (e.g. by Eusebius, HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] iii. 25. 6) along with the Gospels of Peter and Thomas. But Hippolytus (Philos. vii. 20) declares that Basilides and Isidore claimed to have received from Matthias, who had been taught them privately by the Saviour. Hippolytus argues that the contents of these so-called apostolic were really borrowed from the philosophy of Aristotles Categories. [Note: As it happens, the saying about, wonder as the gateway to knowledge occurs In Aristotle (Metaphys. i. 2. 15) as well as in Plato (Theaetet. 155 D).] Again, Clement of Alexandria quotes twice from the Traditions () of Matthias, once (Strom. ii. 9. 45) in illustration of the principle that wonder is the beginning of knowledge (as Plato says in the Thetetus and as Matthias advises in the Traditions, wonder at what is before you, laying this down as the first step to any further knowledge), and once to prove the responsibility of a good example: If the neighbour of an elect person sins, the elect person sins; for, had he behaved as the word [ ] prescribes, his neighbour would have so esteemed his life that he would not have sinned (Strom. vii. 13. 82), Elsewhere Clement observes that, according to some ( ), Matthias taught that the flesh must be fought against and denied, no indulgence granted to its intemperate lust, and that the soul should grow by faith and knowledge [Strom. iii. 4. 26].* [Note: This is also quoted (from Clement?) as a word of Matthias, by Nicephorus Callistus, HE iii. 15.] Are the Traditions the same as the Gospel? It is not decisive against this, that Matthias is introduced as teaching, for both Peter and Philip are represented in their respective Gospels as giving instructions. On the other hand, would be a strange and superfluous title for a writing which was known as a . Clement, like Hippolytus, ranks the Basilidians among the Gnostics who put themselves under the aegis of Matthias [Strom. vii. 17. 108, ); but this reference is not conclusive, for he adds: as the teaching which has come from all the apostles is one, so is their tradition. He objects to one apostles teaching being singled out for special purposes by any sect. But his own references to the teaching of Matthias are upon the whole respectful, and their tone does not suggest a Gospel identical with the of the Basilidians. We might conjecture that the Gospel of the Basilidians ( ) was the Gospel according to Matthias. But Origens evidence is against this, and such data as we can gather for an estimate of the Gospel of Basilides point in another direction. [Note: The one item or evidence that makes One hesitate is Clements version of Luk 19:1 f. in Strom. iv. 6. 35 which begins, Zacchaeus (some say, Matthias) But even if this is any more than an instance of the frequent confusion between Matthias and Matthew, it might simply mean that, in the Gospel of Basilides or of Matthias, Matthias occupied the rle of Zacchaeus. Elsewhere he became confused not only with Matthew but with Simon the Zealot (cf. Schermann, TU 3rd ser. i. 3 [1907], pp. 283-285).] There is no reason why Traditions of Matthias should not have existed alongside of a Gospel of Matthias, and the may refer to the former.
Since Matthias was elected an apostle after the Resurrection (Act 1:23-26), it would be natural to use his name and tradition as the vehicle of more or less secret revelations made by the Risen Lord to the disciples. Hence we may provisionally rank his Gospel in our third class.
In a Coptic fragment, assigned by Revillout to the Gospel of the Twelve (Les Apocryphes coptes, 157f.), Matthias appears at the Last Supper. The Saviour set him with the twelve apostles, and the table was before them. When the Saviour stretched his hand towards the food, the table turned round, so that they stretched all their hands towards what the Saviour ate, and he blessed it. Matthias set down a platter on which was a cock. The salt was on the table. The Saviour stretched his hand to take the salt first, and as the table turned round all the apostles partook of it. Matthias said to Jesus, Rabbi, you see this cock. When the Jews saw me killing it, they said, They will kill your Master like that cock. Jesus sighed. He said, O Matthias, they shall accomplish the word they have spoken. This cock will give the signal before the light dawns. It is the type of John the Baptist who heralded me in advance. I, I am the true light which has no darkness in it. When this cock died, they said of me that I would die, I whom Mary conceived in her womb. I dwelt there with the cherubim and seraphim. I have come forth from the heaven of heaven to earth. It was hard for the earth to bear my glory. I have become man for you. However, this cock will rise. Jesus touched the cock and said to it, I bid you live, O cock, as you have done. Let your wings bear you up, and fly in the air, that you may give warning of the day on which I am betrayed. The cock rose up on the platter. It flew away. Jesus said to Matthias, Behold the cock you sacrificed three hours ago is risen. They shall crucify me, and my blood will be the salvation of the nations (and I will rise on the third day) This fragment witnesses to the prestige of Matthias in the tradition of the early Church; he is admitted to the fellowship of the Last Supper of Jesus, beside the twelve apostles, instead of being merely (Act 1:23-26) added to their company after the Resurrection. It was an easy step from this to make him the author of a Gospel or the vehicle of esoteric revelations.
(c) The Gospel of Mary.-In SBAW [Note: BAW Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften.] (1896, p. 839f.) C. Schmidt describes three fragments from a still unedited Coptic manuscript of the 5th cent., and shows that the title of the first, Gospel of Mary, covers them all. The alternative title, An Apocryphon of John, belongs to the second fragment, but this is intelligible, for the Mary literature tends to be connected with apostolic apocalypses (cf. p. 503). The passage in Act 1:14, where Mary associates with the apostles, formed a suggestive point of departure for this kind of religious romance.
The Gnostic references in these fragments tally so exactly with some of the data supplied by Irenaeus in his refutation of the Barbelo Gnostics (i. 29) that Schmidt and Harnack infer without hesitation that this Gospel of Mary must have been a document of the sect and known to Irenaeus. Hitherto, we had only the assertion of Epiphanius (xxvi. 8) that certain Gnostic sects issued a number of works in the name of Mary. The present find ratifies this assertion.
Now it came to pass on one of these days when John, the brother of James-who are the sons of Zebedee-had gone up to the temple [cf. Act 3:1], that a Pharisee named Ananias (?) drew near to him and said to him, Where is your Master, that you are not following him? He said to him, He has gone (?) to the place whence he came. The Pharisee said to him, By a deception has the Nazarene deceived you, for he has and made you forsake the tradition of your fathers. When I heard this, I turned from the temple to the mountain, at a lonely spot, and was very sad in heart, and said, How then was the Redeemer chosen, and why was he sent to the world by his Father who appointed him? And who is his Father? And how is that aeon created, to which we are to come? Suddenly heaven opens; the Lord appears, explains matters, and withdraws-the audience being not only John but the disciples. They are dismayed at the prospect of having to preach Jesus to the heathen. How can we go to the heathen and preach the gospel of the kingdom of the Son of Man? If they refused to receive him, how will they receive us? Then Mary* [Note: She is evidently with them, as in Act 1:14.] rose, embraced them all, and said to her brothers, Weep not and sorrow not, neither doubt; for his grace will be with you all and will protect you. Rather let us praise his goodness, that he has prepared us and made us men. The discussion proceeds, Mary remonstrating with the incredulous disciples, and finally bursting into tears at a sharp rebuke from Peter. Levi stands up for her, however. But at this point our fragment unfortunately breaks off, and the next episode is an appearance of the risen Christ to John.
A fragment from the Wisdom of Jesus Christ then begins. After his resurrection from the dead, his twelve disciples and seven women, his women-disciples, repaired to Galilee, to the mountain which. The Lords appearance is described as not in his earlier form but in the invisible spirit; his form was that of a great angel of light. The disciples question him on topics of Gnostic speculation, and receive answers.
The third fragment is an episode from the miraculous career of Peter. As he is healing the sick on the day after the Sabbath (i.e. the or Lords Day), a man taunts him with failing to cure his own daughter, who had been for long paralyzed. Peter then heals her. The story closes with an account of the conversion of a pagan, Ptolemaeus.
The Gnostic work from which these fragments are preserved was, according to Schmidt, an Egyptian Gospel of Mary (p. 842f.), and its evident use by Irenaens proves its existence prior to a.d. 130.
(d) The Gospel of Bartholomew.-When Bartholomew evangelized India, according to the tradition preserved by Eusebius (HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] v. 10. 3), he took with him Matthews Gospel in Hebrew. This is not what Jerome and the Gelasian Decree mean by the Gospel of Bartholomew, which they rank among the apocrypha. The latter may now be recovered, in stray fragments from Latin, Greek, and even Coptic sources, although the same kind of problem emerges here as in the case of the Gospel of Peter, viz. how far it is possible to separate the extant fragments from a Gospel and from an Apocalypse, and to assign them to either.
The Latin fragments are preserved in a Vatican manuscript of the 9th cent. (Reg. lat. 1050), in which a compiler of the 7th or 8th cent. has written three episodes from that Gospel, containing conversations between Jesus and Bartholomew. Thus Bartholomew asks Jesus to tell him who the man was whom he saw carried in the hands of angels and sighing heavily when Jesus spoke to him. Jesus replies, He is Adam, on account of whom I came down from heaven. I said to him, Adam, on account of thee, and on account of thy sons, I have been hung on the cross. Sighing, he said to me with tears, Thus it pleased thee, O Lord, in heaven. Bartholomew then asks why one angel refused to ascend with the other angels who preceded Adam, singing a hymn, and why, on being bidden ascend by Jesus, a flame shot from his hands as far as Jerusalem. Jesus explains that the flame struck the synagogue of the Jews, in token of the Crucifixion. Afterwards Jesus said, Await me in yonder place, for to-day the sacrifice is offered in paradise. Bartholomew said, What is the sacrifice* [Note: For munus the Greek has , and, in the reply of Jesus, Unless I am present, they do not enter paradise.] in paradise? Jesus said, The souls of the just enter the presence of the just to-day. Bartholomew said, How many souls leave the body every day? Jesus said, Truly, I tell thee, 12,873 souls [Note: The editors Wilmart-Tisserant (RB, 1913, pp. 161 ff., 321 ff.) add M between XII and D, to approximate to the 30,000 of the Greek.] leave the body daily. The second fragment describes Jesus reluctantly allowing Bartholomew and the other apostles, with Mary, to see the devil, or Antichrist. Jesus places them on Mount Olivet, and after a blast of Michaels trumpet and an earthquake, the Evil One appears, in chains of fire, under a guard of 6,064 angels. He is 600 cubits high and 300 broad. Jesus then encourages Bartholomew to strike Satans neck with his feet, and to ask him about his ways and means of tempting men. Bartholomew kicks the devil, but returns in terror to ask Jesus for something to protect him during the conversation. Encouraged by Jesus, he makes the sign of the cross, kicks Satan again, and forces the furious creature to tell who he is. The third fragment runs: Then Bartholomew approached Satan, saying, Go to thine own place with all like thee. And the devil said, Wait till I tell thee how I was caught when God made man. I was then in the second heaven
The extant Greek fragments, four in number, are much larger than the Latin, but their characteristics are the same. In the first, Bartholomew asks the Lord after the Resurrection to show him the mysteries of heaven. The apostle explains that when he followed Jesus to the Crucifixion, he saw the angels descend and worship Him, but that, when the darkness came, He (Jesus) had vanished from the Cross; all that Bartholomew could hear was a sound from the under world, loud wailing and gnashing of teeth. Jesus explains, Blessed art thou, my beloved Bartholomew, that thou didst see this mystery. And now I shall tell thee all thou hast asked me. When I vanished from the Cross, then I went down to Hades to bring up Adam, and all who are with him, thanks to ( ) the archangel Michael. The sound was Hades calling to Beliar, God comes here, as I see.* [Note: The Slavonic version, which differs considerably from the Greek text at this point, paraphrases Psa 24:7 f.] Beliar thinks it may be Elijah or Enoch or one of the prophets, and encourages Hades to bar the gates. Hades wails that he is being tortured; it must be God. Then, says Jesus, I entered, scourged him and bound him with unbreakable chains, and took out all the patriarchs, [Note: One of the themes which led to the composition of the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus. This Harrowing of Hell became a favourite theme of mediaeval religious romance.] and so returned to the Cross. A Greek replica of the first Latin fragment follows, after which Bartholomew asks, Lord, when thou wast teaching the word with us, didst thou receive the sacrifices in paradise? Jesus replies, Truly, I tell thee, my beloved, when I was teaching the word with you, I was also sitting with my Father. Bartholomew then seems to ask how many of the souls who leave the world daily are found just (the text is corrupt at this point); Jesus replies, Fifty. And how many souls are born into the world every day? Just one more than those who leave the world. Then the conversation ends. And when he said this, he gave them peace and vanished from them.
The second Greek fragment introduces Mary. The apostles are in a place called Cheltura, when Bartholomew proposes to Peter, Andrew, and John that they ask Mary about the virgin-birth. None of them cares to put the question; Bartholomew reminds Peter that he is their leader, but Peter turns to John, as the beloved apostle and as the virgin (). Eventually Bartholomew himself approaches Mary. The text becomes broken at this point, but Mary evidently utters an elaborate prayer, at the close of which she invites the apostles to sit down beside her, Peter at her right with his left hand under her arm, and Andrew similarly supporting her on the left; John is to support her bosom, and Bartholomew to kneel at her back, in case she collapses under the strain of the revelation. She then tells them: When I was in the sanctuary of God, receiving food from the hand of an angel, [Note: As in the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew (see above, p. 488). The first annunciation takes place earlier in the Gospel of Bartholomew than in the other Gospels of this class.] one day there appeared to me the shape of an angel, though his features could not be fixed (? ); he had not bread or a cup in his hand like the angel who formerly came to me. And suddenly the veil of the sanctuary was torn, and a great earthquake took place, and I fell on my face, unable to bear the sight of him. But he put out his hand and raised me, and I looked up to heaven; and a cloud of dew came sprinkling me from head to foot. But he wiped me with his robe and said to me, Hail, O highly favoured one, thou chosen vessel. And he put out his right hand, and there was a huge loaf; and he laid it on the altar of incense in the sanctuary; he ate of it first, and gave to me. Again, he put out his left hand, and there was an enormous cup, full of wine; he drank of it first, and gave to me. And I beheld and saw the cup full and the loaf. And he said to me, Three years more, and I will send thee my word, and thou shalt conceive a son, and by him all creation shall be saved; and thou shalt be for the saving of the world. Peace to thee, may beloved; yea, peace shall be with thee evermore. And he vanished from me, and the sanctuary became as it had been before. At this, fire issued from her mouth, and threatened to put an end to the world; whereupon the Lord bids her keep silence on the mystery. The apostles are terrified, in case the Lord is angry with them for their presumption in questioning her.
The third fragment is extremely brief and broken. Evidently, the apostles (through Bartholomew?) had asked for a revelation of the under world. Jesus said, It is good for you not to see the abyss. But if you desire it, follow and look. So he brought them to a place called Chairoudek, the place of truth, and nodded to the western () angels; and the earth was rolled up like a scroll, and the abyss was revealed, and the apostles saw it and fell on their face. But the Lord raised them, saying, Did I not tell you, it is not good for you to see the abyss?
The long fourth fragment corresponds to the second and third Latin fragments. Jesus takes them to the Mount of Olives, accompanied by Mary. He is at first stern, when Bartholomew asks Him for a sight of the devil and his ways, but eventually leads them down and orders the angels over Tartarus to make Michael sound his trumpet; whereupon the fearful figure of Beliar appears, to the terror of the apostles. Bartholomew, as in the Latin fragment, is encouraged by Jesus to put his foot on the giants neck and to question him about his names. The reply is, First I was called Satanael, which means angel of God; but when in ignorance I rebelled against God, my name was called Satan, which means angel over Tartarus. He proceeds, against his will, to make further disclosures. When God made heaven and earth, he took a flame of fire, and fashioned me first, then Michael, thirdly Gabriel, fourthly Raphael, fifthly Uriel, sixthly Xathanael, and the other six thousand angels, whose names I cannot utter, for they are the bearers of Gods rod ( ), and they beat me every day and seven times every night, and never let me alone, and waste my strength; the two angels of vengeance, these are they who stand close by the throne of God, these are they who were fashioned first. After them the multitude of angels were fashioned. In the first heaven there are a million, in the second heaven a million, in the third heaven a million, in the fourth heaven a million, in the fifth heaven a million, in the sixth heaven a million, in the seventh heaven a million. Outside the seven heavens. After a few more details on the angels, the fragment then breaks off, in the manuscript (10th-11th cent.) from the library of the Orthodox Patriarch at Jerusalem. The Vienna manuscript shows the devil continuing the list of the angels of the elements.
The contents of these fragments correspond partly with what we know elsewhere* [Note: There is another allusion in pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (de Myst. theologia, i. 3: Bartholomew says that theology is both large and small, and that the gospel is broad and large and, again, contracted).] of the questions of Bartholomew (for the Ethiopic and Coptic versions and recensions of this literature, cf. Lichtenhan in Zeitschrift fr die neutest. Wissenschaft , 1902, p. 234f., and Haase, p. 22f.). They also throw some light upon what lies behind the remark of Epiphanius In the 11th cent. (de Vita beatae Virginis, 25) that the holy apostle Bartholomew said, The holy Mother of God made a will. There seems to be some connexion between the Gospel, whose fragments we have just cited, and the sources of the later Mary literature which is preserved in Sahidic and Coptic fragments (see below). The Coptic fragments glorify the primacy of Peter and the prestige of Mary, with Gnostic and Egyptian colouring (Revillout, Les Apocryphes coptes, 185f.); they begin with an unsympathetic denunciation of Judas by Jesus, one of the first things the Lord does, apparently, being to reproach the traitor in Amenti and confirm his eternal doom. The Gospel from which they are taken was a Gospel of Bartholomew, for that Apostle speaks in the first person.
According to Wilmart and Tisserant, the Jerusalem manuscript approximates more than the others to the primitive text. The original Greek Gospel of Bartholomew, they conclude, appeared vers le IV sicle, dans quelque secte chrtienne en marge de lglise dAlexandrie. It was on the basis of this that the Coptic Bartholomew compositions, whether in the form of Gospel or of Apocalypse, developed the literature whose dbris is now being recovered in still larger quantities.
(e) The Gospel of Nicodemus.-The Gospel of Nicodemus really belongs to the uncanonical Acts. The Acts of Pilate and its allied literature go back to the 4th or 5th cent.-possibly, in some primitive form, even to the beginning of the 2nd; but while Nicodemus is associated with the Acta (in one Greek edition of the text, they profess to be a translation of what Nicodemus wrote in Hebrew; in another Greek edition, Nicodemus is a Roman toparch who translates the Hebrew record of a Jew named aeneas; in the Latin version, aeneas is a Christian Jew who translates the Hebrew record of Nicodemus), they are never styled a Gospel of Nicodemus till the 13th century. It has been conjectured that the title was due to the patriotism of the British, who claimed Nicodemus as their chief apostle (quae coniectura inde aliquam probabilitatem habet quod antiquissima omnium recentiorum versionum est anglosaxonica: id quod documento est quanto honore opus istud iam pridem in Anglia habitum sit, Tischendorf, i. p. lx, n. [Note: . note.] 3); but wherever and whenever it arose, it is quite adventitious.
Critical editions are promised by von Dobschtz (Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (5 vols) iii. 545) and in the French series (cf. p. 479).
(f) The Gospel of Gamaliel.-In one of the Coptic Gospel fragments edited by Revillout (Patrologia Orient. ii. 172f.), the phrase occurs, I, Gamaliel, followed them (i.e. Pilate, etc.) in the midst of the crowd, and it has been conjectured (e.g. by Ladeuze, Revue dhistoire ecclsiastique, vii. 252f., Haase, 11f., and Baumstark in Revue Biblique , 1906, pp. 245-265) that if these fragments belonged originally to the Gospel of the Twelve, or if some other fragments of the later Pilate literature can be referred to such a source, there must have been a Gospel of Gamaliel in existence, perhaps as a special recension of the original Gospel of the Twelve. To this some critics (e.g. Ladeuze and Baumstark) further propose to relegate one or more of the Sahidic fragments which have been already referred to (cf. p. 500), placing the composition not earlier than the 5th cent., since it implies the Acta Pilati. The ramifications of the Pilate literature still await investigation, especially in the light of recent finds (cf. Haase, pp. 12f., 67f.). It would be curious if it could be proved that there was a tendency to use the Gamaliel of Act 5:34 f. in favour of Christianity, as was the case with Pilate. But the period of this Gospel is very late and its reconstruction unusually hypothetical. Si lvangile de Gamaliel est un sermon compos au monastre de Senoudah, comme porte le croire la provenance des manuscrits, il nest pas trange quon y ait vonlu mettre en vidence, dans 1expos de la vie du Christ, le rle de Barthlemy dont on se flattait de possder le corps au monastre, et quon sy soit servi des apocryphes dj existants sous le nom de cet aptre (Ladeuze, loc. cit. 265). The fragments which may be conjecturally assigned to this Gospel (?) tally with the Coptic Bartholomew fragments in several features, e.g. the description of Christ in Amenti, the appearance of Christ after the Resurrection to his mother Mary first of all (cf. p. 505), the narrative of the death of Mary, and the blessing pronounced on Peter as the archbishop of the whole world. Ladeuzes suggestion meets the main requirements of the case better than Revillouts conjecture (Revue Biblique , 1904, pp. 167ff., 321ff.) that some primitive orthodox Gospel of the Twelve (see above) professes to have been edited by Gamaliel, the teacher of St. Paul, who had become a Christian (cf. Zahns Gesch. des Kanons, ii. 673f.). Even if the fragments are assigned to a Gospel, they represent a late compilation, based primarily on the Johannine narrative, and expanded on the basis of legends drawn possibly from a special source. The tradition of Gamaliels conversion is noted in Clem. Recogn. i. 65 and quoted by Photius (Bibliotheca, 171) from earlier written sources: Reperi quoque in eodem illo codice, Pauli in lege magistrum Gamalielum et credidisse, et baptizatum fuisse. Nicodemum item nocturnum (quondam) amicum, diurnum etiam redditum, martyrioque coronatum, quern et Gamalielis patruelem haec testatur historia. Baptizatum vero utrumque a Joanne et Petro, una cum Gamalielis filio, cui Abibo nomen. Nicodemus became a martyr to Jewish fury, on this tradition; once the idea of his conversion and authorship of a Gospel was started, it was not unnatural that Gamaliel should also be brought inside the Christian circle.
(g) The Gospel of Perfection.-Some of them, says Epiphanius (xxvi. 2), speaking of the Nicolaitans or Ophite Gnostics, bring in a manufactured sort of adventitious work ( ) called The Gospel of Perfection, which, he adds ironically, is the very perfection of diabolic mischief! This notice is probably derived from Hippolytus (Philaster, Hr. 33). If it was a Gnostic treatise in Gospel form, it may have resembled, or been related in some way to, the Gospel of Eve; but no details or quotations have been preserved, unless we may suppose that allusions to it occur in the Pistis Sophia, where uncanonical Gospel material is more than once employed.
(h) The Gospel of Eve.-Others, Epiphanius adds (xxvi. 2f.), are not ashamed to speak of the Gospel of Eve, who owed her gnosis to the serpent. One quotation from this Gospel is given: I stood on a high hill, and I saw a tall man and a short man ( ); and I heard as it were a voice of thunder and drew near to listen, and it spoke to me and said, I am thou and thou art I, and wherever thou art there am I also, and I am sown in all ( ). And wherever thou gatherest me from, in gathering me thou gatherest thyself. Probably the quotation which follows, from the secret books of the Gnostics, was also derived from this Gospel: ( ) I saw a tree bearing twelve fruits a year, and he said to me, This is the tree of life. Epiphanius (xxvi. 5) explains that this meant allegorically menstruation. But this so-called Gospel may have been either of an apocalyptic character or simply, as Lipsius suggests, a doctrinal treatise in more or less historical form. In any case, its mysticism assumed a sexual form which readily lent itself to obscene interpretation.
(i) The Gospel of Judas.-The Gnostic Cainites, in the 2nd cent., composed a Gospel of Judas (Iren. i. 31. 1; , Epiphan. xxxvii. 1) in the name of their hero, Judas, who was supposed to have alone penetrated the Divine secret, and consequently to have deliberately betrayed Jesus in order to accomplish it. Nothing has been preserved of this Gospel.
The fifth of Revillouts Coptic fragments (Les Apocryphes coptes, 156-157) contains a novel tradition about Judas. The disciples speak: We have found this man stealing from what is put into the purse every day, taking it to his wife, and defrauding the poor in his service. Whenever he returned home with sums of money in his hands, she would rejoice at what he had done. We have even seen him failing to take home to her enough for the malice of her eyes and insatiable greed. Whereupon she would turn him into ridicule. His wife then, like a Lady Macbeth, instigates him to the crime of selling Jesus. Look how the Jews pursue your master. Up then and betray him to them. They will give you plenty of riches, and we will bestow them in our house, so as to live thereby. He got up, the unfortunate man, after listening to his wife, till he had consigned his soul to the hell of Amenti,* [Note: An Egyptian touch as above (p. 500).] in the same manner as Adam listened to his wife, until he became a stranger to the glory of Paradise, so that death reigned over him and his race. Even so, Judas listened to his wife and thus set himself outside the things of heaven and the things of earth, to end in Amenti, the place of tears and moaning. He went to the Jews and agreed with them for thirty pieces of silver to betray his Lord. They gave them to him. Thus was fulfilled the word which was written; They received the thirty pieces of silver for the price of him who is appraised. He rose up. He carried them to his wicked wife.
Here the motive of Judas is not personal greed; he is a thief, as in the Fourth Gospel, but it is owing to his wifes pressure. She is a temptress, and the misogynism of the author leads him to blame her more than her poor husband. But this is a catholic exculpatory estimate of Judas, in Egyptian circles, which is very different from the Gnostic glorification of him; he is not the author of a Gospel, but he is made out to be not so deliberately the author of Christs betrayal as in the canonical traditions. We cannot tell whether the Gnostic Gospel made use of any such motive to explain his conduct. It is unlikely that this would be so, for his conduct, on the Gnostic theory, required no exculpation.
Another Coptic Gospel fragment, assigned doubtfully by Revillout (op. cit. 195-196) to the Gospel of Bartholomew, belongs to the same line of tradition. The apostle Judas, when the devil entered into him, went out and ran to the high priests. He said, What will you give me for handing him over to you? They gave him thirty pieces of silver. Now the wife of Judas had taken the child of Joseph of Arimathaea to bring him up. The day when the unfortunate Judas received the thirty pieces of silver and took them home, the little one (would not drink). Joseph went into the womans chamber. Joseph was utterly distressed over his son. When the little child saw his father (he was seven months old), he cried, saying, My father, come, take me from the hand of this woman, who is a savage beast. Since the ninth hour of this day, they have received the price (of the blood of the just). When he heard this, his father took him. Judas also went out. He took Then follows a broken passage belonging to the Acts of Pilate literature.
(j) Coptic fragments.-(i.) A Coptic Akhmm manuscript (4th-5th cent.) contains two fragments, which may have belonged to an uncanonical Gospel of the 2nd century. The second is a fragment of prophetic discourse by Jesus, predicting Act 12:3 f. (?). The first opens with Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene going to the sepulchre to anoint the body, and weeping when they find the sepulchre empty. The Lord says to them, Why do you weep? Cease weeping, I am he whom ye seek. But let one of you go to the brethren and say: Come, the Master has risen from the dead. Martha went away and told this to us. We said to her, What hast thou to do with us, O woman? He who died is buried, and it is impossible that he lives. We did not believe her, that the Redeemer had risen from the dead. So she went to the Lord and said to him, No one among them has believed me, that thou livest. He said, Let another of you go and tell it to them again. Mary went and told us again, but we did not believe her. She went back to the Lord and told him. Then said the Lord to Mary and her other sisters, Let us go to them. And he went and found us within and called us outside. But we thought it was a ghost, and we did not believe it was the Lord. So he said to us, Come and Thou, o Peter, who hast denied me thrice, dost thou still deny? And we went up to him, doubting in our hearts whether it was he. So he said to us, Why do you doubt still and disbelieve? I am he who told you, so that on account of my flesh and my death and my Resurrection you may know it is I. Peter, lay thy finger in the nail-marks on my hands; and thou, Thomas, lay thy finger in the lancewounds on my side; and thou, Andrew, touch my feet and see that they to those of earth. For it is written in the prophets:* [Note: Wis 18:17, in a description of the terrors that befell the Egyptians during the plagues. The scriptural authority of Wisdom in wide circles during the 2nd and 3rd centuries is well known, but probably Origen is the only writer who expressly calls this literature prophetic (Hom. in Lev 5:2, in Exo 6:1).] phantoms of dreams on earth. We answered him, We have in truth recognized that in the flesh. And we threw ourselves on our faces and confessed our sins, that we had been unbelieving.
This fragment professes to give the testimony to the Resurrection which the disciples bore, based on revelations received by them from the Lord. As in the appendix to Marks Gospel, their unbelief is emphasized; they refuse to believe the story of the women, and it requires the direct appearance of Jesus to convince them. Therefore we have written to you concerning and we bear witness that the Lord is he who was crucified by Pontius Pilate. The apologetic interest of this emphasis on the original incredulity of the apostles may be to heighten the importance of the Resurrection appearances, as against the denial of the bodily Resurrection by some Gnostics. Even the disciples, it is said, held it impossible once! But they were taught the truth! The fragment mentions Corinthus (= Cerinthus) and Simon (= Simon Magus), and the original Greek Gospel writing, of which it is a translation, was evidently a piece of apologetic fiction issued by some pious (Gnostic?) Christian in order to refute the heretical tendencies represented by these two great names. It professes to be written in the name of the Twelve, and probably appeared during the first half of the 2nd century. The data do not enable us to determine whether it belonged to a Gospel of the Twelve or, as Schmidt thinks, to the pseudo-Petrine literature.
Special Literature.-The fragment was published first by C. Schmidt in SBAW [Note: BAW Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften.] , 1895, pp. 705-711, but a full edition is still awaited; Harnacks essay appeared in Theolog. Studien B. Weiss dargebracht, Gttingen, 1897, pp. 1-8; cf. Bardenhewer, 397-399, Haase, 36-37. Harnack dates it between a.d. 150 and 180, Schmidt somewhat earlier. The second fragment suggests that the Gospel (if it was a Gospel) was a Peter Gospel, but the extent and aim of its Gnosticism cannot be determined in the present state of our knowledge.
(ii.) Some lines of another Coptic papyrus (4th-6th cent.) appear to contain dbris or what was once an uncanonical Gospel. The fragments are extremely mutilated, and the translators and editors disagree upon their age and origin. The last runs thus-evidently the close of a Gospel narrative which described a post-Resurrection scene on the mountain, prior to the Ascension: (that I) may manifest to you all my glory and show you all your power and the mystery of your apostleship (on the) mountain. Our eyes penetrated all places, we saw the glory of his divinity and all the glory (of his) dominion. He invested (us with) the power of (our) apostle(ship). The previous fragment, whose contents are only separated from the other by two or three lines, may be either a piece from the same setting or a fragment of some Gethsemane story. It runs thus: (that) he be known for (his) hospitality and praised on account of his fruit, since Amen.* [Note: According to Revillout, these Amens are not final but introductory = Truly.] Grant me now thy power, O Father, that Amen. I have received the diadem of the Kingdom, (even the) diadem of. I have become King (through thee), O Father. Thou shalt subject (all) to me. Through whom shall (the last) Enemy be destroyed? Through (Christ). Amen. Through whom shall the sting of death (be destroyed)? (Through the) Only Begotten. To whom does (the) dominion belong? (To the Son.) Amen. When (Jesus had) finished all he turned to us and said, The hour has come when I shall be taken from you. The spirit (is) willing, but the flesh (is) weak then and watch (with me). But we apostles wept said (Son) of God. He answered and said (to us), Fear not destruction (of the body), but rather (fear) the power (of darkness). Remember all that I have said to you: (if) they have persecuted (me), they will also persecute you. Rejoice, then, that I (have overcome) the world, and have
The fragments are evidently based upon the Gospels of Matthew and John; so much is clear even from what can be deciphered. Possibly they belonged to some uncanonical Gospel current in Egypt during the 3rd or even the 2nd cent., but the internal data are too slender to support any hypothesis which would connect them with the Gospel of the Egyptians (Jacoby) or even with the Gospel of the Ebionites=the Gospel of the Twelve (Schmidt, Zahn, Revillout). The Gnosticism of the fragments is mild.
Special Literature.-A. Jacoby, Ein neues Evangelienfragment, Strassburg, 1900; C. Schmidt (Gttingische Gelehrtc Anzeigen , 1900, pp. 481-506); Zahn (NKZ [Note: KZ Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift.] , 1900, 361f.); Revillout, Patr. Orient. 1907, pp. 159-161; Haase, 1-11 (where further literature is discussed).
(iii.) Another Coptic fragment from a narrative of the trial is edited by Revillout (Patr. Orient., 161f.): to Jesus who was in the praetorium. He said to him, Whence do you come and what do you say of yourself? I am sore put to it in defending you, and I save you. If you are king of the Jews, tell us definitely. Jesus answered and said to Pilate, Do you say this of yourself, or have other people told you about me? Pilate said to him, Am I a Jew?-I! Your own people have handed you over. What have you done? Jesus replied, My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight to prevent anyone handing me over to the Jews. However, my kingdom is not of this world. Pilate said to him, Then you are a king? Jesus replied, It is you who say so; Iam a king. Pilate said to him, If you are a king, let me learn the truth from your own lips so that you may be relieved of these troubles and these revolutions. Then he said to him, Behold, you confess, you say with your own lips that I am a king. I was born and I have come into the world for this thing, to bear witness to the truth. He who belongs to me hears my voice. Pilate said to him, What is truth? Jesus said to him, Have you not seen-you!-that he who speaks to you is Truth? Do you not see in his face that he has been born of the Father? Do you not hear from his words that he does not come from this world? Know then, O Pilate, that he whom you judge, he it is who shall judge the world with justice. These hands which you seize, O Pilate, have formed you. This body you see and this flesh which they
The fragment is also assigned by Revillout to his Gospel of the Twelve, but it may be no more than a paraphrase of Joh 18:33 f. from some early Egyptian homily. The rest of Revillouts fragments (cf. above, p. 503) are plainly from an Egyptian treatise which belongs as much to the Mary literature as to the category of the uncanonical Gospels.
(k) An unidentified fragment.-In Augustines treatise contra Adversarium Legis et Prophetarum (ii. 14), he quotes a saying from some apocryphal scripture-evidently a Gospel, since he proceeds: but in the Gospel of the Lord, which is not apocryphal (i.e. esoteric), he taught the disciples after the Resurrection about the prophets (Luk 24:27). The quotation is as follows: But when the apostles asked what view should be taken of the prophets of the Jews, who were thought to have sung something about his arrival in the past, our Lord, vexed that they still took such a view, replied, You have sent away the living One who is before you, and you make up stories about the dead! This may have come from some Marcionite or Ebionitic (cf. above, p. 493) Gospel. J. H. Ropes (Texte and Untersuchungen xiv. 2 [1896], 119-120) suggests that it would fit in with the story of Mat 8:22, but the context in Augustine points rather to a post-Resurrection dialogue between Jesus and the disciples.
(l) The Fayym fragment.-The Fayym fragment, first published by G. Bickell (cf. Zeitschrift fr kath. Theologie, 1885, pp. 498-504, 1886, p. 208f.), is a 3rd cent. scrap of papyrus which has received more attention than it deserves; it is no more than a loose quotation of Mar 14:26-27; Mar 14:29-30 (so Zahn, as against Bickell, Harnack [Texte and Untersuchungen v. 4, 481-497], Resch [Texte and Untersuchungen x. 2, 1894, pp. 28-34], P. Savi [Revue Biblique , 1892, 321-344], and others), and cannot be assigned with any probability to the Gospel of the Egyptians or any other uncanonical Gospel. The fragment runs: And in departing he spoke thus. You will all be offended () this night, as it is written: I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered. Peter said, Though all [are offended], not I! The Lord said, The cock will crow twice, and thou shalt be the first to deny me three times. Revillout (Les Apocryphes coptes, 158-159) places it as a sequel to the Matthias fragment quoted above (pp. 501-502), assigning it to his Gospel of the Twelve. But it may have come from some Gospel of our third group, if it came from any Gospel at all.
J. Moffatt.