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In the seventh and eighth centuries CE, Christians across the Mediterranean were experiencing the consequences of the rise of Islam and its expansion. With this challenge to Christian hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, Christian writers began to ask about the effect of Islamic expansion on their own lives, practices, and worlds to come. In this article, I aim to contextualize two examples of how late ancient Christians questioned their ability to remain Christian in the face of both Islamic captivity and assimilation: 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (3 Apocr. Apoc. John) and Anastasius of Sinai's (d. ca. 700) Questions and Answers (Questions). I divide this article into three sections. First, I place Christian anxiety over Islamic rule in conversation with Stephanie Camp's concept of the "geography of containment" to explore how some late ancient Christians understood themselves to be geographically and spatially limited by imprisonment or enslavement. I also provide an overview of recent scholarship on Christian responses to early Islamic expansion and anxiety over enslavement, imprisonment, captivity, and assimilation to Islam. Finally, I turn to 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius's Questions to analyze how late ancient Christians turned to monks and patriarchs to find answers regarding the uncertainty of Christian identity under Islamic rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The depiction of the apocryphal infancy stories of Christ is an important subject in the history of western art, and yet it is rarely investigated. This paper reveals the unidentified subject of an early sixteenth-century drawing at Erlangen by an artist from Albrecht Altdorfer's circle. It represents the apocryphal stories of Christ gathering pools, animating clay birds, and reviving a fallen child named Zeno. In this paper, the context of this drawing is discussed, along with the history of depicted apocryphal infancy stories in German art and the reception of the Apocrypha in early sixteenth-century Germany around Altdorfer's circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Research objective: The idea has already been expressed that the eschatological image of the Mongols of Russian annalists, recorded in the Tale of the Battle on the Kalka River of 1223, after some time, through the reports of Dominican Julian and testimony of Archbishop Peter at the Council of Lyons in 1245, influenced the apocalyptic character of the Mongols’ Great Western Campaign in Latin Europe. However, it remains unstu­died why the Russians turned to the terrifying eschatological apocrypha. In the presented study we are going to deal with this question. Research materials: The research is based on a wide range of published original and translated sources of the thirteenth–fourteenth centuries, written in Russian, Latin, French, Arabic, Persian, Syriac and Armenian, as well as the opinions of scholars expressed in literature on related fields. Results and the novelty of research: The appeal of Russian chroniclers to eschatological apocrypha is extremely rare. Before the Tale of the Battle on Kalka, the chronicler refers to the Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius only once, in a chronicle entry about the plundering of Kiev monasteries by the Cumans in 1096. Comparison of these messages, the historical background of the described events, evidence of literary texts, travel reports, chronicles and diplomatic material shows that the Russian writers took upon themselves the responsibility to make a comparison with the Last Times only when a complex of causes formed such a mosaic that it left no other explanation. At the same time, the most important role in the eschatological character of the Tale of the Battle on Kalka was not only caused by the bitterness of the defeat, the demise of many princes and warriors and the desolation of Novgorod Svyatopolchich, but also by the diplomatic rhetoric carried by the Mongol conquerors “from sea to sea”, the warlords of the khan and the people who came from the deep depths of Inner Asia to rule the whole world.

Studies of the Christian apocrypha have paid relatively little attention to the authors' self-awareness and intentions. The authors of the Apocrypha often impersonate characters of the apostolic generation or write about events that could not have been known to them. This leads to the suspicion that they are deliberately trying to manipulate the reader by directly deceiving him. In contemporary scholarship, apocryphal literature is often described as "forgery". We believe that in many cases this is not an accurate characterisation. The aim of the authors was not manipulation, creating a power relationship of authority with the reader, but the reconstruction of tradition by responding to a new Sitz im Leben. The article emphasises the secondary, derivative character of apocryphal literature. The authors of the Apocrypha were convinced of the veracity of their texts because they systematically relied on sources that were reliable from their point of view: the future canonical gospels, the oral contents, often with folkloric features, theological topoi taken over from the previous generation. This made it possible to attribute their work to the apostles or their companions, since the belief of the time was that the work of the disciples could rightly be attributed to the teacher. It is very likely that some of the works reflect the experience of altered states of consciousness.

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This brief note aims at contributing to the study of the reception of parabiblical narratives in hadith literature and Islamic historiography. Taking the Testament of Abraham as a case study, it sets out to analyse a particular literary motif shared by this text and an early version of the miʿrāǧ (Ascension) of the Prophet Muhammad. The comparative analysis demonstrates that the Testament of Abraham could have provided a number of elements for the redaction of at least one particular section of the miʿrāǧ. This hypothesis finds support in other cases of textual correspondence between several sections of the Testament of Abraham and other Islamic works such as the Tafsīr of Muqātil ibn Sulaymān (d. 150/767), the unedited Kitāb Mubtadaʾ al-dunyā wa-qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ of Abū Ḥuḏayfa al-Buḫārī Isḥāq ibn Bišr (d. 206/821) and Ibn ʿAsākir's Taʾrīḫ madīnat Dimašq (d. 571/1176). The examined material thus throws additional light on the continuity between late antique apocrypha and nascent Arabic literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial for guest-edited issue, “Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures,” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 31 (December 15, 2019).

This reading of the late antique Coptic apocryphal work the Apocryphon of John (Ap. John) as Bible fan fiction finds that Ap. John uses the same transformative techniques as fan fiction, but that the manner in which these transformations are legitimized depends on the Christian tradition Ap. John is part of. Several strategies for transforming canon are operative in Ap. John. Even when Genesis is subverted in Ap. John, the rewriting of canonical material is legitimized through strategies already established in other biblical texts. In this manner, Ap. John uses canon to subvert canon.

Far from being beyond the reach of reason, the miracles narrated in the Apostolic Acts actually instantiate a specific type of rationality, as anti-function, that disrupted the phallocentric economy of the Greco-Roman world. This article will discuss the lives of three apostolic women--Thekla, Drusiana, and Maximilla--as case studies and demonstrate how their lives, and the miracle narratives associated with them, disrupted the two processes that ensured the rationality of the symbolic order of the Greco-Roman world, namely specularization and abjection. Since the maintenance of the symbolic order depended on the specularization and abjection of women, the liberation of women necessitated the disruption of these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is Christianity a ‘religion of (canonical) books or a ‘religion of memories’? What role did the books that would eventually become canonical play in various early Christian contexts? This article explores the history of the canon, especially in relation to early Christian ‘landscapes’ and ‘places of memory’. The role of ‘canonical’ and so-called ‘apocryphal’ writings in the construction and development of these ‘places of memory’ is discussed. It is argued that instead of labelling the latter works ‘apocryphal’, it would be better to call them ‘useful for the church’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to highlight the role of the Christian apocrypha as an expression of the popular piety and the sense of faith of the faithful regarding Mary of Nazareth in face of its opponents. To this end, the unfolding of Marian devotion during the first centuries of Christianity is shown, especially through analysis of the Protoevangelium of James or The Nativity of Mary and diverse apocryphal writings that deal with the dormitio of the Virgin. These works markedly influenced art, liturgy, and the official proclamation of the Marian dogmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vision of Theophilus is one of the important apocryphal narratives concerning the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt. Although the text is known to survive in Arabic, Ethiopie and Syriac, a lost Coptic original has long been accepted by scholars. The pres-ent paper introduces a hitherto unidentified fragment from the Coptic version of this text. The fragment came from the White Monastery in Upper Egypt and it is currently kept in the National Library in Paris. The fragment is edited in this article together with its Arabic and Ethiopie parallels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Ololon, a character in the poem "Milton," by William Blake. It notes that scholars wonder why Ololon was described "as a Virgin of twelve years" and ponder where the phrase, which is assumed to be associated with the Virgin Mary, may have originated. However, the phrase is not in the Bible, but appears in "Protoevangelium Jacobi," or "Infancy Gospel of James" from the Christian Apocrypha. It contends that other aspects of the "Protoevangelium" in the garden identify the symbolism of the expression.

This reading of the late antique Coptic apocryphal work the Apocryphon of John (Ap. John) as Bible fan fiction finds that Ap. John uses the same transformative techniques as fan fiction, but that the manner in which these transformations are legitimized depends on the Christian tradition Ap. John is part of. Several strategies for transforming canon are operative in Ap. John. Even when Genesis is subverted in Ap. John, the rewriting of canonical material is legitimized through strategies already established in other biblical texts. In this manner, Ap. John uses canon to subvert canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial for guest-edited issue, "Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures," Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 31 (December 15, 2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]