Biblical Archaeology Review

Alin Suciu has become an expert on this literature. His Ph.D. dissertation, Apocryphon Berolinense/Argentoratense (Previously Known as the Gospel of the Savior). Reedition of P. Berol. 22220, Strasbourg Copte 5–7 and Qasr el-Wizz Codex ff. 12v–17r with Introduction and Commentary (Université Laval, 2013), includes a comprehensive survey of all the pseudo-apostolic memoirs (see pp. 75–91). The thesis will soon be published in E.J. Brill’s series Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae.

These two texts will appear in Burke and Landau, New Testament Apocrypha.

Paul C. Dilley examines this phenomenon particularly for the Western church in “The Invention of Christian Tradition: ‘Apocrypha,’ Imperial Policy, and Anti-Jewish Propaganda,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 50 (2010), pp. 586–615. Interest in this area of study has led to the creation of a new series from Penn State University Press called Inventing Christianity, edited by L. Stephanie Cobb and David L. Eastman.

This re-evaluation has been brought to wider attention lately by Philip Jenkins in The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) was an early and prominent voice in this discussion.

See James Robinson, The Story of the Bodmer Papyri (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011).

The Oxyrhynchus and other early apocrypha manuscripts are available, with photographs, in Thomas A. Wayment, The Text of the New Testament Apocrypha (100–400 C.E.) (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

For further details about the formation of the canon, as well as challenges to the notion of the settling of the canon in the fourth century, see the work of Lee Martin McDonald, including The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority, 3rd ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007) and The Formation of the Bible: The Story of the Church’s Canon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2012).

For an accessible collection of the early (first–fourth-century) texts discussed in this article, see Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). Late-antique and medieval apocrypha receive far less attention, but the forthcoming collection edited by Tony Burke and Brent Landau (New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans]) is a step toward remedying this problem.

Ronny Reich, Stone Scale-Weights of the Late Second Temple Period (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2015).