In his book, Jesus Outside the New Testament, Robert Van Voorst lays out all the evidence that mentions Jesus outside the New Testament. In the chapter you'll be reading, he discusses eight "sources" that we can discuss. The first is the agrapha—sayings scattered around in various people's books as random quotes from Jesus. As you read this section, try to separate out what he says about the agrapha that come from Paul (an early apostle of Jesus whose 7 letters appear in the New Testament and date quite early, 51–64 CE), and the agrapha attributed to other authors, which mostly come from the 2nd-to-4th centuries.
After that section, Van Voorst gets into some more substantial material, introducing the gnostic Christians and their important book, the Gospel of Thomas. In 2012, a newly discovered "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" (pictured to the right), was announced, also from these gnostic Christian circles. This one, unlike the Gospel of Thomas, turned out to be a hoax—always a possibility with new discoveries. As you skim Van Voorst's translation of the Gospel of Thomas, consider the ways it is like and unlike Q from our last class.
He then introduces a few other apocryphal works. You might want to use the chart below to keep track of what each says about Jesus; and the quotes from Jesus in the other agrapha(here's a downloadable copy):
Source
Date
Independent Information about Jesus
Agrapha in Paul
Agrapha in other authors
Gospel of Thomas
Protoevangelium of James
Infancy Story of Thomas
Gospel of Peter
Secret Gospel of Mark
Ascents of James
Assigned
Readings
Secondary:
Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament 179-218; online class
prep
Charlesworth, James H. and Craig A. Evans. "Jesus in the Agrapha and Apocryphal
Gospels." In Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of
the State of Current Research (ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans; NTTS
19; Leiden: Brill, 1994) 483-91.
Schneemelcher, Wilhelm. The New Testament Apocrypha, 2 vols.,
trans. R. McL. Wilson Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992; German
original, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1989.
Links
Noncanonical
Literature - Online texts hosted by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology;
we are reading many of our texts for today's class from this site.
The
Nag Hammadi Library - The Gnostic Texts found in Egypt in the 1950s, hosted
by the Gnostic Society Library.
The Gospel of Jesus' Wife - In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King published a fourth-century Coptic papyrus fragment in which Jesus refers to someone (probably Mary Magdalene) as "My wife" and mentions that "she will be able to be my disciple." The document is a copy of a late second-century manuscript. This link takes you to the HDS press release, which provides a summary of the discovery and access to a draft article that Dr. King will soon publish in Harvard Theological Review. For further bibliography, see the resources listed on this Nag Hammadi page from Prof. Murphy's Gender in Early Christianity class.
In this video from the Harvard Divinity School, Dr. King introduces the manuscript.
In his book, Jesus Outside the New Testament, Robert Van Voorst lays out all the evidence that mentions Jesus outside the New Testament. In the chapter you'll be reading, he discusses eight "sources" that we can discuss. The first is the agrapha—sayings scattered around in various people's books as random quotes from Jesus. As you read this section, try to separate out what he says about the agrapha that come from Paul (an early apostle of Jesus whose 7 letters appear in the New Testament and date quite early, 51–64 CE), and the agrapha attributed to other authors, which mostly come from the 2nd-to-4th centuries.