The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture

Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

From the early days of Christianity, gospel authorship has been a question of fundamental importance. While the names donning the four canonical gospels of the New Testament have long held their place, critical scholars recognize that the original authors of these texts are unknown. Thus, the question of gospel authorship remains a vibrant conversation, one into which Robyn Faith Walsh has entered with The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament Within Greco-Roman Literary Culture. Offering a tantalizing possibility, Walsh argues that the Synoptic Gospels are not primarily religious texts, but literary works created by “elite cultural producers” (p. 110), Greco-Roman authors who had an interest in Judaean culture and religious motifs, but who may not have understood themselves as belonging to a Christian community.

In addition to the introduction and conclusion, this book is divided into five chapters, each with titled subsections that create a straightforward framework for the reader to follow. Its relatively short length betrays the amount of information that is packed within its pages, and yet it is written in a style fit for a broad range of readers, from undergraduates to fellow scholars in the field.

In the Introduction, “Diamonds in a Dunghill: Seeking New Approaches to Early Christian Studies,” Walsh lays the groundwork for her argument, suggesting that the scholarly efforts to reclaim definitive communities behind the Synoptic Gospels have been filled with trouble. New Testament scholarship has often ignored knowledge of ancient writing practices in favor of oral traditions and imagined literate spokespersons for early Christian groups. It is here that she first describes the Gospel authors as “creative writers” but not “biographers or historians” (p. 16) as we might understand those terms today. Furthermore, Walsh uses this introduction to dispel the notion that the Gospels were exceptional, asserting instead their proper place within Greco-Roman literary culture.  

In Chapter 1, “The Myth of Christian Origins,” Walsh seeks to reframe some of the perceptions of early Christianity as presented in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. Christianity did not have a rapid, explosive beginning but one which was slow and meandering. Nor were its early days comprised of overarching institutions or unambiguous communities. Its separation from Judaism, furthermore, was an ill-defined divergence which calls into question the early existence of a distinct Christian religion. Texts which became part of the New Testament functioned to reinforce notions of “Big Bang” (p. 8) Christian origins, especially as second century Christians began assembling and codifying material they found important. But Walsh cautions that scholars must be careful not to reinforce the mythic origins of the Christian movement as pure history.   

Chapter 2, “The Romantic Big Bang: German Romanticism and Inherited Methodology,” demonstrates the influence of German Romanticism on modern New Testament scholarship. This intellectual movement had wide-ranging impacts, influencing politics, philosophy, and religion, and adhered to the belief that humanity could not “exist outside a community or state” (p. 52). Critical New Testament scholarship emerged alongside and within these Romantic Era notions and was infused with the idea that the Gospel authors represented communities of early Christians. Textual studies of New Testament literature sought to recapture the spirit of the early Christian Volk, as the Brothers Grimm, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche and others attempted to do for the German people. The Brothers Grimm, Walsh argues, were especially influential in their persistent belief that it was possible to reclaim the essence of communities through literature, and that the proper scrutiny of texts could reveal its oral roots. The Gospel authors came to be viewed as the “representative author-geniuses of their age” (p. 78) standing in for an otherwise amorphous community. Walsh dedicates ample time to this subject (over one quarter of the book) but feels greater reflection on the roots of modern New Testament methodology is needed and calls for a revision of some long-held practices.     

Chapter 3, “Authorship in Antiquity: Specialization and Social Formations,” analyzes the Greco-Roman world of literary education and production. It highlights the literary reality of the ancient Mediterranean world, one in which the vast majority of individuals could not read or write. Those who could read and write were set apart in their skillsets and their ability to produce and influence aspects of culture. The authors of the Gospels, therefore, should be recognized as writers engaging in the same categories of influence as other figures from this epoch of history such as Homer, Plato, and Virgil. It should be noted that these elite skillsets did not necessarily equate to elite socioeconomic status, as slaves were frequently deployed in the production of written texts. Writers would often share and adapt common subjects and motifs, crafting their own versions of stories which were already in circulation.[1] Walsh offers Philo of Alexandria as an example of an author who is interested in religious subjects but is not necessarily writing for religious communities.

In Chapter 4, “Redescribing Early Christian Literature: The Gospels, the Satyrica, and Anonymous Sources,” Walsh engages with the literary uses of eyewitnesses, anonymity, and shared motifs. She brings the Synoptic Gospels into conversation with these literary devices and offers the Satyrica as a valuable text for understanding common motifs in the Greco-Roman world. The reader is here exposed to a Greco-Roman work of fiction generally attributed to Gaius Petronius and dated sometime between the middle of the first century and the early second century of the Common Era. A character in the Satyrica is anointed at a meal with close friends in the face of impending death. Later, the crowing of a rooster is taken as a bad omen, and a series of wild events leads to an empty tomb following the crucifixion of several robbers. These motifs draw striking comparisons to Jesus’ anointing by a woman in Bethany, Peter’s denial of Jesus marked by a crowing rooster, and the empty tomb discovered by Jesus’ followers after his crucifixion. Earlier dates for the Satyrica may imply that the gospel authors borrowed these elements and incorporated them into narratives about Jesus, but what becomes abundantly clear, regardless of when one may date the Satyrica, is that the gospel authors were part of a literary world that shared similar thematic elements. Walsh uses these correlations to further espouse that the communities percolating behind the gospel texts, if any, were not religious groups circulating oral traditions about Jesus. Instead, authors in community with other literary minds adapted these texts as a way to flex their creative muscles.  

Lastly, Chapter 5, “The Gospels as Subversive Biography,” examines the Gospels as texts with rebellious themes, positioning them within the broader range of biographical material produced in the Greco-Roman world. In certain respects, the Gospels share similarities with other ancient biographies, although Walsh admits that “biography” is a term which could encompass several different types of ancient literature. Generally speaking, these biographies focus on an important figure, such as Alexander the Great, and seek to elevate them by highlighting their accomplishments and virtuous character. Sometimes the subjects of these texts possess magical powers and superior intellect and may even be portrayed as a social outsider. Authors of biographies sought to retell the story of an individual’s life, but embellished or outright created some stories if they felt it was necessary. The biography was not so much about telling an exact history, but explaining what type of person the subject was. Not all biographies were subversive, but Walsh claims that the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus is best defined using such a term. Jesus is said to have taught in parables, belonged to a lower-class sector of society, and been a “social underdog” (p. 173). The main figure of the Gospels is on the fringes of society, and the Gospel narratives gave a voice to those on the margins.    

The conclusion, “‘Lions mate with lions’: Creative License and Future Directions,” is a short valediction filled with a challenge. The Gospels are literature. They are art. They may be something more, but critical engagement requires theoretical work be done on how to understand the authors, audiences, and literary cultures of the ancient world. Walsh poses a legitimate question regarding the scholarly attempts to “read between the lines” (p. 198) of ancient texts in order to gain access to a true, unadulterated version of the past: can one rely on the author of an ancient text to “truthfully communicate anything about real life?” (p. 198).   

A critique may be offered concerning a few of Walsh’s perspectives on early Christian communities. While her arguments regarding the Gospels’ relationship, or lack thereof, to religious communities is compelling, it is probable that some communities of early Jesus’ followers existed by the middle of the first century. Paul of Tarsus, author of at least seven New Testament texts, gives evidence of this in the various letters he wrote to Jesus followers. To be sure, attempts to define these communities encounter some the same problems Walsh describes concerning the Gospels, and accounts of Paul and Christian conversions in the Book of Acts are undoubtedly exaggerated. But Walsh claims that the scholarly acceptance of Paul’s “rhetoric about communities” (p. 41) reinforces the myths of Christian origins, a claim which requires greater explanation. Walsh’s strict understanding of a community may be to blame here, as she feels greater evidence for the “cohesion of the participants” (p. 42) in these groups needs to be demonstrated.    

Determining who wrote the Gospels will continue to be an endeavor of the scholarly community. Regardless of who the original authors were, the truth remains that these texts are products of the Greco-Roman literary world, and as such, they should be understood within that context, not as exceptional artifacts of an isolated time and place. Walsh succeeds at bringing this literary world to the forefront and her knowledge of the Classical world is on full display. This book challenges the longstanding perceptions of Gospel origins, as well as the established paradigms of New Testament scholarship, while reminding us that biblical scholarship must remain open to adaptation and introspection.

Tyler Blaine Wilson is a graduate student at the University of Denver. His research interests include the Gospel of Mark, the historical Jesus, and Christian origins.

[1] This is something which the author of the Gospel of Luke attests to.

Editor's Response

I wish to cordially thank Dr. Samuel Cook and Dr. Jacob Lollar for their reflections on and critique of the Parabiblica Coptica volume. They both have raised several important points, but in what follows, I would like to limit myself to two issues.

First, I believe that Cook is spot on in noting that the Coptic scholars of today are still struggling to overcome the colonialist prejudice of our predecessors (which, of course, does not mean that we should not explore and learn from past scholarship—only that we should not do it uncritically). Indeed, the assumption that a Coptic literary work, be it an apocryphon, a martyrdom, or a sermon, is inadvertently a translation from the Greek original still permeates the field—even if there is no evidence whatsoever that this work was ever available in the Greek language.

Today we are even ready to take a step further and to appreciate the fact that some texts in antiquity were undoubtedly translated from Coptic into Greek. For instance, Alin Suciu has recently convincingly demonstrated that the early ascetic authors Paul of Tamma and Stephen of Thebes wrote in Coptic—even though their works also exist in Greek. As for the Coptic apocrypha, the same most certainly holds true for the Investiture of Michael. We should, therefore, be open to the possibility that some other apocryphal texts, extant in both Greek and Coptic, were in fact original Coptic compositions. For example, all the extant Greek manuscripts of the Acts of Andrew and Bartholomew (Martelli 2015: 78–97) preserve an abbreviated version of the text, while the Coptic fragments (Guidi 1887) bear witness to the original, unabridged version. We should thus seriously consider the possibility that not only was this apocryphon written in Coptic, but that it may have never existed in Greek in its complete form.

With this in mind, perhaps we should also be more conscious about our presuppositions regarding the inner-Coptic literary transmission. The Sahidic dialect was undoubtedly the dominant one in the first millennium, and the vast majority of literary texts that came down to us from this period are written in Sahidic. But do we always need to assume that a text extant in a non-Sahidic dialect is necessarily a translation from Sahidic? Personally, I find it quite likely that, in the north of Egypt, various texts were originally composed in the Bohairic dialect.

In this respect, quite remarkable is the apocryphal Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests, which was part of the “official” dossier of the apostle Matthew and until recently was known only in Arabic and Gəʿəz. In 2018, however, Suciu published a Bohairic fragment of this text, which was discovered in the “Dome of the Treasury” (qubbat al-khaznah) of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. With this discovery, we can now be certain that the Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests was initially written in Coptic. I strongly suspect, however, that it is not an accident of preservation that no fragment of this text survives in Sahidic. In codex MONB.QY, which contains exclusively the apostolic “preachings,” the place of the “preaching” of Matthew is occupied by the Martyrdom of Matthew, augmented with an episode about the apostles casting lots and dividing up their mission-districts. In codex MONB.MS, the heading that reads “This is the preaching and the passing-away of saint [Matthew], the apostle [and] evangelist” is similarly followed by the Martyrdom of Matthew. In both cases, the compilers needed the “preaching” of Matthew and, in both cases, they filled the slot with the Martyrdom of Matthew. The Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests would seem to be a more fitting candidate, and a likely explanation as to why neither of the two compilers used it is that it never existed in Sahidic. In other words, it seems reasonable to surmise that the Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests is an original Bohairic composition.

My second point pertains to Lollar’s apt remark on the Coptic and Syriac apocrypha as “distinct constellations” in the parabiblical universe. I believe that it is indeed advisable to abstain from trying to explain shared features between the two traditions by postulating direct influence or dependence. In many instances, the similarities emerge in the process of parallel development. This is why it is so exciting to observe those instances where the two traditions actually meet—as is the case of the famous Monastery of the Syrians in Wādī al-Naṭrūn. The mural painting referenced by Lollar is indeed remarkable. In my view, it represents a felicitous marriage of the Coptic and Syriac traditions. On the one hand, Andrew is depicted with bristling grey hair, its locks resembling tongues of flame. This depiction is typical for the Coptic iconography of the apostle, as evidenced, for example, by the famous fresco of the Virgin Enthroned from the Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bāwīṭ. Moreover, as I pointed out in an earlier publication (Miroshnikov 2018: 15–17) many Coptic apocrypha testify to the intimate link between Andrew and fire. For instance, the so-called Historia Sacra, a collection of legends of various biblical figures, reads:

Andrew, the brother of Peter, was a flame of fire more than all the apostles; and if he went into the city to preach, and they did not listen and receive his preaching, he would be wroth, so as to cause a fire to come forth from the heaven and burn them. For this reason one of the apostles was set to walk with him, so that, if his anger blazed against them (i.e., the unbelievers), he might say to him straightway: “Remember the commandment of our Savior which He gave us, saying: ‘Go and preach to all the nations, and baptize them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost’ (Matt 28:19).” And so his spirit would rest and be established straightaway aright.

On the other hand, Andrew in the mural is depicted as preaching to cynocephalic (dog-headed) people. While Innemée in the publication referenced by Lollar correctly identifies this scene as that from the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals, it is worth noting that nowhere in the Coptic tradition do the cannibals of this story seem to be portrayed as cynocephali. The Syriac version of this text, on the other hand, explicitly calls the city of the cannibals “the City of Dogs” (Wright 1871: 102, 115). This notion perhaps developed from a reading of the Acts of Andrew and Bartholomew, which features a cynocephalic individual (called Christianos in Coptic and Christomaios in Greek) hailing from the city of the cannibals. Be that as it may, the image of cynocephalic cannibals seems to be Syriac rather than Coptic, and thus the Andrew mural, I believe, is a beautiful love child of the Coptic and Syriac traditions.

Works Cited

Guidi, I. 1887. “Frammenti copti. Nota IVa.” Atti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei: Rendiconti 3.2,1 ser. iv: 177–90.

Martelli, L. 2015. “Acta Andreae et Bartholomaei (I 2056, CANT 238). Edizione critica e commento della versione greca.” PhD diss., Università di Bologna.

Miroshnikov, I. 2018. “The Coptic Martyrdom of Andrew.” Apocrypha 29: 9–28.

Suciu, A. 2018. “A Bohairic Fragment of the Acts of Matthew in the City of the Priests and Other Coptic Fragments from the Genizah of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.” Le Muséon: revue d’études orientales 131: 251–77.

Wright, W. 1871. Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles Edited from Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum and Other Libraries. London: Williams and Norgate.

Ivan Miroshnikov is a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Researcher at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University, Docent in Early Christian and Coptic Studies at the University of Helsinki, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Egyptological Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of The Gospel of Thomas and Plato: A Study of the Impact of Platonism on the “Fifth Gospel”, the co-author of Coptica Fennica: Catalog of the Coptic Manuscripts from the Ilves Collection Exhibited at the National Archives of Finland (16 June–14 August 2020) , the editor of Parabiblica Coptica, and the co-editor of Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity. He is currently working on publishing various hitherto unedited manuscripts in Coptic, both documentary and literary.

The Possibilities and Limits of "Parabiblical" Literature

Since August 2020, I have been working as part of the ERC funded project “APOCRYPHA: Storyworlds in Transition,” hosted by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. This project aims to study apocrypha attested in the Coptic language (regardless of whether they were originally written in Coptic or translated from another language), which were circulated during the entire span of Coptic literary production— from roughly the 3rd to 14th centuries. Miroshnikov’s volume, Parabiblica Coptica, thus greatly complements our work. Indeed, the definition of apocrypha, which is presented in the preface to this book (p. V), is that of the PI of the APOCRYPHA project, Hugo Lundhaug. In its most recent iteration, this definition describes apocrypha as texts and traditions that elaborate or expand upon characters or events of the biblical storyworld. In turn, the biblical storyworld can be defined as “the imaginary world that is created in the minds of readers or hearers on the basis of one or more biblical and/or apocryphal texts” (Lundhaug, 2023: p. 514 n. 11). In the context of these definitions, it is pertinent to begin with a short comment on issues of terminology regarding the choice of title for Parabiblica Coptica, as discussed in the preface (pp. V–VI).

The term “parabiblica,” as Miroshnikov notes, is employed as a more neutral concept, devoid of the negative connotations associated with the term “apocrypha.” Such negative associations come not only out of antiquity—for example in the 39th Festal Letter of Athanasius, discussed in this volume by Nils Arne Pedersen (pp. 151–174)—but are often present in modern scholarship on so-called apocryphal works (see, for example, the discussion in Farag, 2021: pp. 50–51 n. 16). Most importantly, Miroshnikov notes that the readers and writers of the texts discussed in the volume would not think of these as “apocrypha” (p. V). This is very apparent in my own research as part of the APOCRYPHA project on the library of the Monastery of Saint Macarius in Lower Egypt. In this corpus, I would argue that works subsumed under our project’s definition of “apocrypha” were not treated differently from any other literary works and were in fact incorporated into the liturgical celebrations of the monastery alongside other non-apocryphal homiletic and hagiographical works. It is important to remind ourselves that the way we as scholars categorize and discuss these works is a modern construct—something which is also discussed by Dan Batovici in his contribution to Parabiblica Coptica on the Apostolic Fathers (pp. 103–126).

There is a somewhat compelling argument for the use of a more neutral term like “parabiblical” in place of “apocrypha.” Nevertheless, I would argue that employing the term “apocrypha” is unproblematic, as long as the parameters of its use are clearly defined. In the APOCRYPHA project, we emphasize that we employ the term as a purely modern categorization, which does not necessarily reflect how these works would have been perceived in their original contexts. Rather, it is an analytical tool, employed to group together works based on particular features of their contents that are of interest to us as modern researchers. For this reason, one might also note that the terms “apocryphon” or “apocrypha” were used in antiquity, both by authors and readers  (see Burke and Landau, 2016: pp. xxii-xxiii; Shoemaker, 2008: pp. 525–527). This was not always negative: for example, Miroshnikov notes the self-designated Apocryphon of John in the Nag Hammadi Codices (p. V).

In any case, the use of “parabiblical” in place of “apocryphal” does not detract at all from the contents of the volume. What is most pertinent is that whichever term is employed is well-defined and well-delineated. In the case of the discussion on terminology in the preface to this volume, one question lingers: what are the limits of the term “parabiblical”? As Miroshnikov states, the term denotes texts that do not belong to the Bible but “move in its orbit” (p. V). In this case, one could argue that patristic exegetical homilies are parabiblical: they do not narrate stories set in the biblical storyworld, but rather they explain it. As such one might argue that they also move “in the orbit” of the Bible. They are not apocryphal according to the definition of the APOCRYPHA project, but could they also be classed as “parabiblical”? The preface could have benefited from a more detailed definition of what is and is not “parabiblical.”

Turning to the contents of the volume itself, there are several features of the contributions which stood out. More generally, given how much Coptic material is still unpublished or in need of republication, the first section of the volume (“Editiones”: pp. 3–100) is an invaluable contribution to the field. What is particularly useful are the editions and discussions of the apocryphal acts of the apostles—the Acts of Andrew and Paul edited by Christian Bull and Alexandar Kocar (pp. 3–29), and the Preaching of Philip edited by Miroshnikov (pp. 53–100). The apocryphal acts are, I think, some of the most fascinating and enjoyable examples of Coptic literature. Their manuscript evidence is often complex: many of the Coptic witnesses belong to highly fragmentary codices (particularly those of the White Monastery in Atripe), whose codicological reconstructions are highly contested. In general, Miroshnikov’s past work has greatly contributed to our understanding of these works and their manuscripts (see, for example, Miroshnikov 2019; 2018; 2017). The development and transmission of the apocryphal acts, and their relationship to other literary works, is something that is also often understudied and not fully understood. This is addressed quite thoroughly in Miroshnikov’s contribution, in which he explores the relationship—or in this case, the lack thereof—between the Preaching of Philip and other apocryphal acts of Philip. Consequently, the first part of Parabiblica Coptica contributes to the growing interest in, and understanding of, this sub-corpus of apocryphal works.

I would also like to highlight the effectiveness of the way in which the editions and translations are presented—specifically the synoptic comparison of different textual witnesses. This is relevant to the translation of the Preaching of Philip presented by Miroshnikov, and the edition and translation by Dylan M. Burns comparing the so-called “Notes of Some Philosophers” with relevant sections of Ps.-Evodius of Rome’s On the Passion and Resurrection (pp. 31–52). One of the key features of the APOCRYPHA project is working through the lens of Material Philology, which emphasizes textual fluidity and a focus on variations in individual textual attestations of a single work.  A major difficulty in this methodological approach is how to present multiple textual witnesses of a single work in such a way that is useful for the reader. This is, of course, more difficult if there are many attestations, which is often the case with, for example, Greek material. For Coptic, however, we are fortunate (if one can call it so) that we often have very few surviving texts of a single work, making the matter of presenting synoptic editions much easier.

The chapter by Burns applies this methodology effectively as he focuses on a section of Ps.-Evodius homily which presents so-called “wisdom that is outside” (wisdom coming from “pagan” Greek sources and thus from “outside” the bible). Burns compares this portion with the content of several leaves from Vienna containing sayings of Greek philosophers in Coptic translation. As such, Burns is dealing not only with textual variation within a single work, but also between two works which, ostensibly, come from very different literary contexts. The synoptic edition he presents illustrates the relationship between these works quite well. There is still much work to be done regarding the expression of textual variation in editions, particularly when we move into the territory of large numbers of textual attestations. This becomes especially pertinent in the field of Coptic studies when we begin to incorporate Copto-Arabic material. This is an issue for which digital humanities may be able to offer solutions, an area that has been gaining more traction in recent years.

In addition to the contribution in part one, I would also like to briefly highlight that of Eugenia Smagina on onomastics and orthography of loanwords in Coptic texts (pp. 175–189). The majority of the chapter is devoted to tracing the transmission of particular names of Satan and lower demons in apocrypha and other texts. This is quite a useful discussion for anyone interested in the origins of such names. One example which I found intriguing was that of the name of the angel of death, Abbaton (pp. 186–187), derived from Hebrew Abaddon via Greek. Smagina dwells on the change in orthography between Greek (abaddōn) and Coptic (abbaton). She suggests that it is not necessarily motivated by Coptic phonetics (that is, the devoicing of delta to tau and the similarities between omega and omicron), but rather may be an association with the word Sabbaton, that is the Seventh Day. As Smagina notes (pp. 186–187), in Pseudo-Timothy’s Encomium on the Angel of Death, Abbaton is the seventh angel (and the only successful one), who is ordered to fetch clay with which to make Adam, as well as being the angel who leads the righteous to the “places of rest.” For this reason, she suggests that the author of the encomium may have made an association between the angel and Sabbaton—the seventh day and the day of rest. Although the matter of phonetic-induced orthographic shifts should not be entirely dismissed, this is nevertheless a compelling and plausible argument.

Finally, I would like to draw particular attention to the contribution of Vincent van Gerven Oei and Alexandros Tsakos on so-called “apostolic memoirs” in Old Nubian (pp.191–224). There are several reasons why this chapter is invaluable. First, the field of Old Nubian studies is (at least compared to other fields like Greek and Roman studies) still in its infancy. As such, any work which furthers our knowledge of the corpus of Old Nubian texts, and their relationship to Coptic literary traditions, is much appreciated. The previous work of both van Gerven Oei and Tsakos has been instrumental in this vein (see, for example, van Gerven Oei and Tsakos, 2020; van Gerven Oei et. al., 2016, Tsakos, 2014). Their discussion in this volume is a strong addition to both Nubian studies and Coptic studies. To choose just one work from the chapter as an example, their discussion of the Investiture of Michael confirms an earlier claim by Gerald M. Browne (1988: p. 17) that the Old Nubian version was translated from Greek, not Coptic. Although this claim was first made almost 40 years ago, the authors note that no linguistic evidence had been provided to back this up—evidence which their contribution to the volume now provides (pp.197–200).

Second, in the introduction to this chapter, they stress that apostolic memoirs are preserved mostly in Coptic, Arabic, Gəʿəz, and Old Nubian, noting that “this has contributed, in part, to the recent rejection of the assumption that all Coptic literature was translated from Greek” (p. 192). This discussion also appears elsewhere in the volume—for example, in Miroshnikov’s edition of the Preaching of Philip, where he notes that Coptic was most likely the original language of the work (p. 58). The idea that all Coptic works must have been translated from a Greek Vorlage has been a persistent hangover in our field from earlier scholarship, which was undertaken in a very much colonial milieu. These early studies tended to underestimate the creativity of Coptic authors and their contribution to Christian literature. The extreme focus on the “hypothetical Greek original” is perhaps best exemplified by Layton’s discussion on philology and the Nag Hammadi codices (Layton, 1981). He argues for first creating a hypothetical Coptic archetype based on existing textual witnesses, from which the philologist should produce a “word-for-word reconstruction of a Greek witness”, or, failing this, “a free English translation of the Coptic archetype as though translated from the Greek” (Layton, 1981: p. 96). The work of Alin Suciu on the apostolic memoires (see, for example Suciu, 2017: pp. 125–128) and, more recently, the doctoral dissertation of Florian Graz on apostolic memoires with homiletic frame narratives (Graz, 2024), have helped to shift this attitude. It is great to see work in Old Nubian studies helping to support this more nuanced understanding of Coptic literature and its subsequent literary traditions in other languages.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the contribution of van Gerven Oei and Tsakos is noteworthy in its discussion of ethical considerations related to working with manuscripts (pp. 192–194)—something that has often been neglected within philology. The authors outline some of the implications of studying unprovenanced material, including the promotion of illegal excavation and trafficking, and highlight that there are living communities with local, ethnic, and national cultural ties to these artifacts. Most importantly, they raise the issue of one specific manuscript which forms part of their later discussions: namely, the Stauros Text. Although it was purchased at a time prior to any international conventions concerning the removal of material from their country of origin, they note that it nonetheless has an insecure provenance, having appeared suddenly on the antiquities market in Egypt before being purchased for the Prussian Royal Library, now the Berlin State Library (pp. 193–194). Such discussions of insecure or problematic provenance should be standard practice for publications in manuscript studies and related fields. By way of a small critique, I would have liked to see a deeper discussion on the provenance of the manuscripts edited in first part of the volume. For example, in Bull and Kocar’s discussion of the Borgia leaves from MONB.DM (the sigla provided to the manuscript by the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari), they state that the manuscripts in the Vatican library were sent to Rome from Egypt by Jesuit missionaries (p. 6). This discussion could have benefited from more information about how the missionaries came to acquire these manuscripts, or alternatively, since this is usually the case with such manuscripts, a note stating that this information is unknown to scholars.

Both the editions and other studies in Parabiblica Coptica provide valuable contributions to the fields of Coptic studies and manuscript studies, as well as to the study of apocrypha (or parabiblica) more broadly. Most important are those aspects which add to the growing understanding of Coptic literary production as a phenomenon in its own right, rather than as an exercise in the translation of Greek literature into Egyptian. The chapters are concise, well-written and argued, thus making the book easy and enjoyable to read. This volume would be of interest not only to those already familiar with Coptic apocrypha, but those who work with Christian literature in other languages and wish to get a snapshot into such traditions in the Egyptian (and Nubian) milieu.

Works Cited

Browne, G. M. 1988 “A Revision of the Old Nubian Version of the Insitutio Michaelis.” Beiträge zur Sundanforcshung 3: 17–24.

Burke, T. and B. Landau. 2016. “Introduction.” Pages xx–xlvi in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. Edited by T. Burke and B. Landau. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Farag, M. K. 2021. “Rewriting Scriptures as a Homiletic Practice in Late Antique Egypt.” Journal of Coptic Studies 23: 47–61.

van Gerven Oei, V., Laisney, V. P., Ruffini, G., Tsakos, A., Weber-Thum, K. and P. Weschenfelder (eds). 2016. The Old Nubian Texts from Attiri. Dotawo Monographs 1. Goleta CA: punctum books.

van Gerven Oei, V. and A. Tsakos. 2020. “Translating Greek to Old Nubian: Reading between the Lines of Ps.-Chrysostom’s In venerabilem crucem sermo.” Pages 204–240 in Caught in Translation: Studies on Versions of Late-Antique Christian Literature. Edited by M. Toca and D. Batovici. Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 17. Boston/Leiden: Brill.

Graz, F. 2024. “I Found a Little Book which the Apostles Had Written: Frame Narratives in Coptic Apocrypha.” PhD diss. University of Oslo.

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Samuel Peter Cook is a junior fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies “Beyond Canon”  at the Universität Regensburg, and recently a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project "APOCRYPHA: Storyworlds in Transition" and director of operations in its associated Proof of Concept project "Tool for the Analysis of Information Transfer in Manuscript Cultures (TInTraMaC)", both hosted by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. During this time, he has worked on the corpus of Coptic manuscripts deriving from the Monastery of Saint Macarius in northern Egypt. He is currently producing a monograph on their production, distribution, and use, with a particular focus on the monastic use of apocryphal literature.