Apocrypha and Canon

There’s a bias built into how we read the Bible. We treat the four official gospels as the only ones worth knowing, while assuming the apocryphal gospels “just don’t matter.” We ignore them because we think they are silly, irrelevant, confusing, or even heretical. But here’s the catch. If the only gospels you know are the four in the Bible, you don’t actually know those four very well either. You can’t see what made them distinctive, what they competed with, or why they won.

Hosted by Megan Kraege. After the keynote, an open mixer for every attendee, live and unscripted.

Bibles today contain fourteen letters attributed to the Apostle Paul, but this was not always so. For more than a millennium, readers found a fifteenth letter, a Pauline Epistle to the Laodiceans, among their holy scriptures. Across centuries, continents, and cultures, this lost letter inspired Christians to challenge authorities and question received ideas about scripture.

In 1958, Morton Smith announced he’d found a letter, tucked away in a monastery near Jerusalem, that quoted a secret, longer version of the Gospel of Mark. Ever since, scholars have argued: did Smith forge it, or didn’t he? Did he even have the skill to pull it off? Craig Evans, who has spent his career with the oldest Christian manuscripts, says everyone’s been asking the wrong question. The real one isn’t whether Smith forged it. It’s when he got his hands on it. If Smith had this text years before his 1958 “discovery,” it could explain a long list of questions that have puzzled scholars ever since.

Did Jesus offer secret teachings? One buried gospel says he did. The Gospel of Thomas is the most exciting and influential text found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, and it set off a storm of controversy that continues intensely to this day. Do its mysterious sayings open a new window into Jesus’ message of the Kingdom, or are they the “Satanically inspired” heresy early church leaders claimed? Finally, could the Gospel of John have been written to challenge the very ideas in Thomas? Elaine Pagels, whose work on these texts won the National Book Award, takes the questions head-on.

A gospel goes missing for centuries. When it resurfaces, it tells a story the canon never preserved: Mary Magdalene receiving Jesus’ teaching about the soul, then being told to carry it to the other disciples. The Gospel of Mary offers a rare glimpse of Christian teaching before scripture was narrowed to four gospels, when women were central to the movement and the boundaries of orthodoxy hadn’t yet been drawn. Karen King, currently writing a commentary on the text, traces what it meant then and why it still unsettles our understanding of Christian origins.

The New Testament tells exactly one story about Jesus as a child. Early Christians, it turns out, told many more. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is an extracanonical narrative of Jesus (5-12 years of age), and the boy in its pages is not the gentle child of Sunday school. He works miracles, yes. But he also curses other children, and some of them don’t survive it. Mary and Joseph spend much of the story trying to manage a son they don’t fully understand. What is the point of these stories? Why would early Christians tell them? How do they relate to the Gospels of the New Testament?

Who’s the most famous early Christian woman you’ve never heard of? For centuries, the answer was Thecla. The Acts of Thecla, a popular account of a young Christian heroine, was told and retold from the second century on, adapted and translated across generations. Yet her story never made it into the Bible. Janet Spittler follows Thecla through time and place, from the earliest version of her story to the many that came later. Taking the long view reveals something striking: what each generation of Christians found valuable enough to keep, and problematic enough to change. It also overturns a common assumption, that a text left out of the Bible must be fringe or heretical. Thecla was anything but.

Few characters in the New Testament gospels are as enigmatic and reviled as Judas Iscariot. What possessed Judas to betray Jesus? Was his betrayal all part of a grand plan? Enter the Gospel of Judas, which caused a sensation when a sole copy was discovered in an obscure ancient manuscript that came to light in 2007. Can it provide any answers? This lecture will reveal Judas’s secrets hidden for nearly 2000 years.

The Apocalypse of Peter, an alleged eyewitness account of the blessings of the saved and the torments of the damned, was considered part of Scripture for two centuries. Then it suddenly disappeared, unknown to Christian readers for 1,500 years. Its serendipitous rediscovery has helped solve the mystery of its removal: our oldest fragmentary manuscript shows the Apocalypse embraced a doctrine of universal salvation, anathema to fourth-century church leaders.

Most people figure the deaths and burials of Peter and Paul are settled history, that we basically know what happened to Christianity’s two great martyrs. We don’t. The ancient accounts disagree on almost every major point. Why the two apostles died, where, when, whether together or apart, and what became of their bodies. The famous basilicas in Rome look like proof of a single tradition, but those traditions developed over time and were contested from the start. David Eastman, author of three books on these martyrdoms, shows that there was never one clear narrative. The authors of these various stories wrote to address questions and issues in their own time, not to provide a straightforward account of what happened in the first century.

Most of us have inherited one of two Mary Magdalenes: the repentant prostitute of later church tradition, or the secret wife of Jesus made famous by The Da Vinci Code. Both miss her. Step outside the New Testament, into texts like the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas, and a Manichaean psalm, and a different figure emerges. Here early Christians remembered Mary as a leader among the disciples and the special recipient of Jesus’ post-resurrection teaching. Kim Fowler shows that the evidence doesn’t simply prove or disprove these popular images. It reveals something better: early Christians used Mary’s memory in a striking variety of ways, and her real significance, especially around the resurrection, runs deeper than either myth.

The most famous mother in history is barely in the book that made her famous. The gospels give us almost nothing about Mary’s life before Jesus, and even less about what came after. That blank space didn’t last. Christian imagination rushed to fill it, producing texts like the Protoevangelium of James and the Gospel of Mary, that reimagined Mary not only as a wife and mother, but also a disciple, visionary, matriarch, and heavenly sojourner. Tony Burke traces these portraits of Mary and reveals a surprise: so much of what Christians take for granted about her... her virginity, her parents, her own birth... comes not from the New Testament but from books that never made it in.

Two men perform miracles in front of a crowd. One becomes a saint. The other becomes the villain and is called a sorcerer. What actually separates them? That’s the puzzle at the heart of the confrontation between the apostle Peter and Simon Magus, a story told in the New Testament and dramatically expanded in the apocryphal Acts of Peter. Peter’s wonder-working helped establish and prove his apostolic authority, but the boundary between miracle and magic was never as clear as it sounds. Shaily Patel explores how that blurry line shaped early Christianity, and how these unofficial texts were key to building the idea of “orthodox” Christian faith.