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This paper examines the apparently unnoticed presence of the Greco-Coptic term \"gnostikos\" in a text of the Pachomian corpus, one of the only occurrences of the term in the entire indigenous Coptic corpus. After a careful contextualization of the term and its use by Pachomius, we will look at the way it was understood by the ancient authors, from the \"invention\" of the term by Plato, to its appropriation by Christian writers, notably Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Evagrius of Pontus. We will then see where Pachomius stands regarding his usage of the term \"gnostikos\" and if this attestation can shed new light on the development and use of the term by the first Christians.

This essay explores the place of parabiblical literature in biblical studies through a focus on New Testament apocrypha. Countering the assumption that the significance of this literature pivots on its value for understanding the origins of Christianity, this essay calls for fresh attention to the afterlives of these writings. The first section traces the genealogy of the notion of the NT apocrypha as countercanon, as well as the history of the debate over whether “apocrypha” preserve secret or suppressed truths about Jesus and his earliest followers. It points to the influence of post-Reformation anthological efforts and new concerns for forgery and censorship in the wake of the advent of printing, especially for popularizing a disjunctive model whereby “apocrypha” are imagined to have been systematically suppressed by ecclesiarchs during the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The second section surveys evidence for the elasticity of such writings and for their reception in contexts as far-flung as medieval Christian art and contemporary Japanese anime. This evidence points to the value of alternate approaches to NT apocrypha, reread as an integral part of the making of the memory of the biblical past from late antiquity to the present.

In a striking passage in “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” the “angel” Satan forms animals and little people out of clay and gives them life, only to kill them. This article investigates the episode in relation to its literary source in The Apocryphal New Testament, as edited in 1820 by William Hone. Clemens's interest in Hone's New Testament apocrypha situates him in a web of atheist and rationalist reading. As an inventor of pseudo-biblical apocrypha, he (like his Enlightenment-era models) mobilizes common sense and observed reality against scriptural or parascriptural phenomena, turning “orthodox” morality against itself. The Infancy Gospel fascinates him with its recognition that the advent of a wonder-working child would, in reality, be a disaster. Among Clemens's “philosophical” writings, the “Chronicle” is uniquely involving because it not only propounds Mark Twain's philosophy but also acknowledges its devastating effect on the human being.

The Muslim Tatars of north-eastern Europe (Belarus, Lithuania and Poland) present an interesting example of cultural hybridity. Despite limited contact with the world of Islam, they preserved their Muslim identity for over eight centuries, combining the customs and norms of their adopted homeland, while maintaining their traditional practice of Islam. The religious literature they created (in Belarusian-Polish, written in the Arabic script) demonstrates an eclectic intermingling of these cultural and linguistic strands. The narratives examined in this paper, one from an Arabic source, the other from a semi-apocryphal Biblical text of Protestant sectarian derivation, exemplify the melding of these influences.

In the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great, the ancient world of the Bible—the ancient Near East—came under Greek rule, and in the land of Israel, time-old traditions and Greek culture met. But with the accession of King Antiochos IV, the soft power of culture was replaced with armed conflict, and soon the Jews rebelled against their imperial masters, as recorded in the Biblical books of the Maccabees. Whereas most scholars have dismissed the biblical accounts of religious persecution and cultural clash, Sylvie Honigman combines subtle literary analysis with deep historical insight to show how their testimony can be reconciled with modern historical analysis by conversing with the biblical authors, so to speak, in their own language to understand the way they described their experiences. Honigman contends that these stories are not mere fantasies but genuine attempts to cope with the massacre that followed the rebellion by giving it new meaning. This reading also discloses fresh political and economic factors.

This article explores the pre-history of our present notion of ‘the Old Testament pseudepigrapha’ through a focus on Johann Albert Fabricius’s Codex pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti (1713). It considers Fabricius’s work from four perspectives: as a compendium of knowledge recovered during and after the Renaissance, as a reflection of debates about Scripture in the wake of the Reformation, as a literary artefact of anxieties about authorship in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and as the foundation for nineteenth- and twentiety-century research on the materials collected therein. By revisiting the origins of the concept and category of ‘pseudepigrapha’, the article attempts to bring a broader historical perspective to bear on current debates about the heurism of the label.

I like tennis—both to play and to watch it.1 Nothing is more pleasant than watching an exchange between Federer and Nadal. There is a similar kind of exchange that has been going on in this country in recent years. On one side, there are evangelical New Testament scholars; on the other, liberal scholars working on early Christianity. In the camp of the evangelicals, Ben Witherington,2 Craig A. Evans,3 and Darrell L. Bock4 are playing a defensive game, accusing the others of constituting a “new school,”5 one that prefers heresy over orthodoxy and promotes diversity where unity once was. In the camp of the critics, Elaine Pagels promotes the spirituality of the Gospel of Thomas; 6 Bart D. Ehrman's Lost Christianities flies in the face of his opponents;7 and Marvin Meyer considers the Gospel of Judas a valuable work that reveals in the mind of the dark apostle knowledge of the divine realm.8

With a rigorous use of the sources, the book throws new light on the High Priesthood (301-152 BCE). Setting this institution in the widest contest of the interaction between the Judaic and Hellenistic world, it gives a valid contribution to the international research in this field.

Athanasius of Alexandria's thirty-ninth Festal Letter remains one of the most significant documents in the history of the Christian Bible. Athanasius wrote the letter, which contains the first extant list of precisely the twenty-seven books of the current New Testament canon, in 367 c.e., during the final decade of his life. Like many of his annual Easter letters, the thirty-ninth was fairly long, but only a small portion of the text survives in Greek.1 The Greek excerpt contains Athanasius's lists of the books of the Old and New Testaments, which he calls “canonized,” and a list of a few additional books, like the Shepherd of Hermas, which he says are not canonized, but are useful in the instruction of catechumens. Most studies of the formation of the Christian canon, including very recent ones, examine only this Greek fragment and so discuss only the contents of the lists. But already in the late-nineteenth-century fragments of the much more extensive Coptic translation had been published, and a few scholars, such as Carl Schmidt and Theodor Zahn, used them to write penetrating studies of the letter.2 In 1955 Lefort published all the then-known Coptic fragments in his book of Coptic Athanasiana, and then in 1984 Coquin published another long fragment.3 These served as the basis for my 1995 translation and my 1994 article in this journal on the social context of canon formation in fourth-century Egypt.4