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Rediscovering the Apocryphal continent. New perspectives on early Christian and late antique Apocryphal texts and traditions. Edited by Pierluigi Piovanelli and Tony Burke . (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 349.) Pp. xi + 456. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. €134. 978 3 16 151994 9; 0512 1604

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Rediscovering the Apocryphal continent. New perspectives on early Christian and late antique Apocryphal texts and traditions. Edited by Pierluigi Piovanelli and Tony Burke . (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 349.) Pp. xi + 456. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. €134. 978 3 16 151994 9; 0512 1604

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2018

Simon Gathercole*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Abstract

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Reviews
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

This volume is a welcome addition to the study of the Christian Apocrypha. It represents the proceedings of a series of conferences in different places, which means that it does not have much cohesion as a collection of studies, although there are some threads which emerge in several places. One of the centres of gravity in Piovanelli's introductory essay is the importance of the Association pour l’Étude de la Littérature Apocryphe Chrétienne (AELAC), which has made a number of contributions to the critical study of the Apocrypha, but is perhaps underappreciated in certain scholarly circles. A distinctive of this group is the dismantling of the boundaries between Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha, to which the essay by Davila on the ‘Christian’ composition of ‘Jewish’ pseudepigrapha is relevant. A further concern of Piovanelli is to expand the range of literature beyond, in both religious and chronological terms, the confines set by, say, M. R. James's Apocryphal New Testament. Hence, this volume includes an article by Pettipiece on the ‘Five Limbs’ in Manichaean literature, as well as studies by Yoshiko Reed and Piovanelli himself touching upon literature from the fourth and fifth centuries and beyond. This stands alongside less unexpected essays on, for example, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Judas. Apocryphal Acts and other material about the Apostles is also present. There is an insightful comparison of Luke's Acts with the Acts of Paul by Peter Dunn, asking which is most likely to be a second-century work. Bishop Hovhanessian's study of the Repose of the Blessed John in Armenian tradition (which corresponds in part with Acts of John 106–15) argues that this was originally a composition independent of the Acts of John uncontaminated by various aspects of the latter's dubious theology. Five studies on the Pseudo-Clementines (by F. Stanley Jones, K. Coblenz Bautch, G. B. Bazzana, D. Côté and N. Kelley) at the end of the volume represent a focused series of essays on that intriguing corpus. One of the most important contributions is the first chapter proper after the introduction, by Tony Chartrand Burke on the current state of study on the Christian Apocrypha, which would repay reading both by those familiar and unfamiliar with the field. If the essays in this collection are united, such a unity lies less in content than in a mood which tries to steer a via media between sensationalism on the one hand and a Eusebian traditionalism on the other.