Forgotten Sources & Lost Texts
The research of many scholars of early Christianity over the past two centuries has enabled us to recover a lost and alternative perspective on the Jesus movement following the crucifixion. This perspective is in sharp contrast to the standard portrayal of Luke-Acts, in which Peter and Paul, as the two chief apostles, work in harmony to take a unified gospel message beyond the confines of Judaism. This reconstruction centers on James, the brother of Jesus, as undisputed leader of a community that remains devoted to Jewish Law or Torah. Peter is fully allied with James, while Paul seen as an enemy or apostate who has abandoned the Jewish faith. Our sources for this perspective, sometimes called “Jewish Christianity,” or “Ebionite,” are scanty. Some have been completely lost, others survive as fragmented quotations, while a few are detectable as embedded sources within larger works.
Prof. April DeConick of Rice University and I will be doing a Biblical Archaeology Seminar on some of these lost and forgotten sources in San Antonio, Texas on October 19th and 20th. The complete program with full information can be found at the BAS Web site. Perhaps we will see some of you there.
I plan to deal with four major sources, each of which potentially provides insight into the Nazarene community led by James, brother of Jesus:
1. The Syriac “Ascents of James.” There is a corpus of literature called the Pseudo-Clementines (PsCl) that dates to the 4th century CE but apparently incorporates and thus preserves materials that are much earlier. The PsCl corpus is made up of two lengthy novel-like treatises called the Homilies and the Recognitions, as well as three shorter “epistles,” including a letter of Peter to James. Embedded in the Recognitions, is an older text that Robert Van Voorst has identified as the “Ascents of James.” Although the Recognitions as a whole survives only in Latin, this section, R 1.33-71, is contained in two Syriac manuscripts. F. Stanley Jones has argued that this early source functioned as a kind of competitive “counter-history” to that found in Luke-Acts.
2. An Arabic 11th century Muslim Anti-Christian text written by ‘Abd al-Jabbar. This text, published by Shlomo Pines in 1966 (The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christiantiy According to a New Source), is intended as a Muslim refutation of Christianity and a defense of Mohammed as the Prophet. The author, in the course of his polemic, quotes Christian texts that clearly do not derive from our canonical gospels but are reflective of a Jewish-Christian community that is observant of the Torah. These embedded texts touch on Jesus’ teachings, his execution, and the history of his early followers in Jerusalem.
3. Old Slavonic version of Josephus, Jewish War. Our Greek texts of Josephus, Antiquities mention John the Baptist, Jesus, and James, as I have discussed in a recent post, while the Greek version of his earlier work, Jewish War, contain no such references. However, there is extant, in a number of Old Slavonic/Russian manuscripts of the War, three passages on John the Baptist, four on Jesus, and one on the early Christians–none of which are found in the Greek. These were first published in the West in 1906 in German. Scholars are divided over the date and provenance of these passages, but they are quite fascinating and worth considering for their possible historical value.
4. A Recovered Apocalypse of John the Baptist. Josephine Ford and others have argued that embedded within our present Greek book of Revelation, at the end of the New Testament, is a primitive “apocalypse” developed within circles related to John the Baptizer. It is found primarily in chapters 4-11, and represents the core apocalyptic expectations of the movement arising from the preaching of John and Jesus.
I will begin to discuss some of these materials here over the coming days and weeks.
