Andrew of Crete and the Immaculate Conception

The focus of my research, the Protevangelium of James, is often cited as the earliest expression of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. As a consequence of my research, I have been reading many Patristic homilies on Mary, some of which speak of her birth and childhood.

Today, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I decided it may be fitting to share one. This is from an eighth-century homily, the Canon on the Nativity, by St. Andrew of Crete (translated by Luigi Gambero in Mary and the Fathers of the Church, 394):

Let all creation dance; let David dance as well, for from his line and his seed arose the branch that will bear the Flower, the Lord and Redeemer of all…

Anna was sterile and barren, but not childless in God’s eyes. For from all eternity, she was predestined to be the mother of the chaste Virgin, from whom the Creator was to come forth in the form of a servant.

Unsullied Lamb, who alone, from your womb, gave Christ the wool of our nature, we all celebrate your birth from Anna with songs.

The Illusive Reader

Six months ago, if you would have asked me about the topic of my dissertation, I would have told you that it was a study of the Protevangelium of James. My answer today would be largely the same. If you would have asked me (six months ago) to describe for you the identity of the reader in my study of Prot. Jas., however, I would have looked at you like you were insane: I am the reader, right? Wrong.

To be sure, the question of the reader has always been in the back of my mind: interpretation of ancient texts demands an ancient perspective, after all. If one approaches Prot. Jas. (or the Bible) in terms of one’s modern sensibilities, the result is likely anachronism, at least from a historical-critical point of view. This is of course not to say that modern readers cannot rightly interpret ancient texts. Rather, it is to say that modern readers must make judgments about what an ancient text can and cannot say on its own terms. Recently, however, the issue has become fuzzier (at least in the context of my project).

Without going into too much detail, my project involves the ways in which Prot. Jas. affects the imaginations and hermeneutical sensibilities of its readers. This involves discernment of various echoes in the text, as well as the new meaning engendered by those echoes. In short, my project focuses on what is going on between Prot. Jas. and, say, the Gospel of Luke.

The specific identity of the reader in the context of this project has proven to be quite important, and increasingly more complicated. Namely, to claim that there is an echo in this or that text implies the presence of a reader who is able to hear said echo without recourse to a lexicon or electronic database of ancient texts…clearly, I am not that reader.

I have several options with respect to how I’m going to frame what I mean by reader:

1. Implied Reader (Wolfgang Iser)
2. Informed Reader (Stanley Fish)
3. Intended Reader (Erwin Wolff)
4. Model Reader (Umberto Eco)
5. Super Reader (Michael Riffaterre)
6. Authorial Audience (Wayne Booth)

My task is to figure out what the differences are between these different readers, many of whom do not exist and never have existed in any objective sense, as well as why those differences actually matter to my project. As this project continues to unfold, I’m hoping to dedicate some posts in the near future to each of these readers. We shall see.

Stigmata and Christian Apocryphal Literature

I spent the majority of yesterday composing a written statement for a fellowship application. Part of this process involved reflecting on the past 10 years of my life – where I’ve been, what I’ve done, what I’ve studied, and how all of those things have contributed to my present research interests. Self-reflection can be fun, and it forces you to remember things that you’ve long since forgotten.

As I was trying to come up with an answer regarding why I chose to study Christian apocryphal literature, I decided it might be helpful to think about the first time I even heard about Christian apocryphal literature. The answer, which I did not include in my written statement (because it’s stupid), made me chuckle.

During my senior year of high school, I watched a movie called Stigmata. It had just been released. The movie tells the story of a young woman who becomes possessed by the spirit of a dead stigmatic priest. The young woman receives the stigmata, speaks in foreign tongues, and leads an investigator from the Vatican on a wild goose chase to find a lost gospel that the Church was attempting to suppress. The “lost gospel” in Stigmata is none other than the Gospel of Thomas, discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. At one point in the movie, a priest describes it as “an Aramaic scroll from the 1st century, discovered near the cave of the dead sea scrolls outside Jerusalem. Alameida [the dead stigmatic priest] and I concluded that it is a gospel of Jesus Christ. In his own words: Aramaic.” At the end of the movie, the following text pops up: “In 1945 a scroll was discovered in Nag Hammadi, which is described as ‘the secret sayings of the living Jesus.’ This scroll, the Gospel of St. Thomas, has been claimed by scholars around the world to be the closest record we have of the words of the historical Jesus.”

In retrospect, it’s not a good movie, but my young mind was absolutely enthralled at the time. I remember talking with a friend of mine afterward about how something needs to be done about the Church’s attempts to suppress truth like this…we were both really concerned.

I chuckled to myself as I recalled this experience, as it truly is the first time I became aware that there were “gospels” outside of the New Testament. Like many uninformed viewers of the movie, I assumed in my ignorance that what Stigmata claimed about the Gospel of Thomas was true, and I continued to assume that it was true until I heard otherwise (and I seem to recall embarrassing myself in an undergraduate NT course). Of course, there is little truth in what Stigmata claims about Thomas: it is a codex, not a scroll; it is written in Coptic, not Aramaic; it is from the second century, not the first; it was not found near the Dead Sea (Nag Hammadi is over 200 miles removed); some scholars (you know who you are) consider it to be “the closest record we have of the words of the historical Jesus,” but they are a minority. What’s more, the Dead Sea Scrolls were not isolated to one cave, but were spread out among among eleven!

I suppose this memory is useful, if only to remind us about how much garbage there is floating around about the “lost gospels.”

Anyway, hope you enjoyed my rant for the day.

Contemporary Jesus Novels as Christian Apocrypha?

In his contribution to The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity, Stephen Shoemaker takes issue with Wilhelm Schneemelcher’s definition of what constitutes the corpus of Christian Apocrypha (CA). Schneemelcher maintains that the category of CA incorporates literature that was penned with the intention of being included in the canon, and therefore any text written after the end of the fourth century (Schneemelcher’s date for the closure of the canon) is not considered CA.

Shoemaker finds Schneemelcher’s definition to be far too narrow, and I think rightly so. As an alternative, Shoemaker suggests Éric Junod’s definition of CA, which I quote here:

Anonymous or pseudepigraphical texts of Christian origin which maintain a connection with the books of the New Testament as well as the Old Testament because they are devoted to events described or mentioned in these books, or because they are devoted to events that take place in the expansion of events described or mentioned in these books, because they focus on persons appearing in these books, or because their literary genre is related to those of the biblical writings.

I find Junod’s definition of CA more appealing than Schneemelcher’s. That said, I do wonder if, in an attempt to counteract a definition that is clearly too narrow, Junod has consequently created one that is too broad.

With Junod’s definition, could we not include some contemporary Jesus novels under the rubric of CA? One would need to fudge slightly on the whole “anonymous or pseudepigraphical” bit, but not too far. Gerd Theissen’s Shadow of the Galilean could be considered pseudepigraphical in that it is written by Theissen but from the perspective of Andreas. Likewise, Christopher Moore’s Lamb, or perhaps even Bruce Longenecker’s Lost Letters of Pergamum could be classified as CA if we’re willing to open the floodgate as wide as Junod and Shoemaker propose.

This is not necessarily a bad thing…more of an observation. I’d love to hear your opinion if you have one.