Multipals 04: Tony Burke & Janet Spittler (transcript)

[Music: "Hand on the Needle" by Brent Hagerman.]

Chris Sims: Hello everybody and welcome to Apocrypals. It's the podcast where two non-believers read through the Bible, but try not to be jerks about it. And it's not just us that's trying not to be jerks as we continue our series within a series of Apocrypals: Multipals.

B: That's right. And the Multipals are even-

C: Oh, I guess I should say, my name is Chris Sims. With me as always is Benito Cereno. The other set of footprints, the- What were we? The Master of Time and Space?

B: Oh man. Oh yeah. Yeah. What were those? Lord of Space, Master of Destiny. That's not what it was. I don't remember.

C: I want to say Lord of Space and Master of Time, but I'm pretty sure that's Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.

B: Well, just call us Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. I don't know what- Who is who? It's another one of those-

C: If I gave you Pokemon Diamonds and Pearls.

B: Let me see if I can scroll back, because I'm pretty-

C: This is about as fast as we've ever gone off the rails.

B: Yeah. Yeah. Oh shoot. What text even was that? Was that one of the Mary Mag- Oh, Slayer of Men, Conqueror of Space.

C: That's way cooler.

B: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Impossible to know who's- Chris is the Slayer of Men. We all know.

C: I would take either one of those, honestly.

B: Either one, pretty good.

C: I think I would actually probably rather be the Conqueror of Space, in all honesty, but like-

B: Ooh, interesting.

C: Well, you know, you don't want to- I mean, you kind of do want to be known as the Slayer of Men.

B: Yeah.

C: But There's a stigma.

B: Yeah. The waiter by the river for the blood of his enemies to float by.

C: I am waiting by the riverbank. That is true. That is as close to a religious belief as I hold.

B: As you were saying, yep, another Multipals, and it's more multi than ever before. That's right. The sky is an endless, yawning, ebb and void, because all the stars are here.

C: The sky is full of unseen and unimaginable terrors.

B: That's right.

C: Because all the stars are with us here tonight.

B: That's right. The surface of the earth has been charred to a crisp by the fusing of hydrogen into helium. We have two guests this week. We have with us professors Tony Burke and Janet Spitler, both experts in the field of New Testament Apocrypha, both presidents emeriti of NASCAL, the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature. And yeah, we, you know, they're both names that we've mentioned multiple times in the past, and they're here to talk about Volume 3 of their ongoing collection of New Testament Apocrypha, more non-canonical scriptures. Volume 3, which dropped earlier this year, and to, you know, take some questions from you, the listener. So we had a really great conversation with them, and I hope you all will enjoy it. I think it was a pretty fun one.

C: That's right. I believe I do talk about how rain is boy water in this one too, if you like callbacks.

B: Yeah. And I think people know that we do. We do love a callback.

C: I think we should get right to it.

B: All right, cool.

C: So here we are with the fourth installment of Multipals with Tony Burke and Janet Spitler.

[Music]

B: All right, here we are. Yet another Multipals. Loving this Multipals, Chris. I hope you're feeling good about this series. I think it is turning out great.

C: I'm delighted.

B: And I'm very excited today because we have twice as many pals as usual. We have two guests with us today. We are very honored.

C: The way you said that makes it sound like we don't have friends.

B: Okay. Okay, everyone, Chris has a lot of friends. Chris has so many friends that I'm not even in his top eight friends. We've all talked about this on the show. We know how it goes. I'm just trying to say I'm delighted we have two guests today that is different even from this new format that we're doing. We have two guests. And these two guests are, as we have declared them on the show before, the Nick Fury and the Valentina Allegra de Fontaine of Christian Apocryphal Literature. If NASCAL is SHIELD, that is them. We have professors or doctors, if you prefer, Tony Burke and Janet East-Bittler from NASCAL, but also of their respective educational institutions. Please welcome yourselves to the show.

C: Welcome to the show, I believe is what we do.

B: I did a great job. I did a great job on that sentence. Great job. Janet and Tony, welcome to the show.

Janet Spittler: Thanks.

Tony Burke: Thank you.

B: Both of you are people we have talked about on the show. We have covered works that you have written or edited. Sometimes we have responded to fully deserved criticisms from one or both of you on the show. Some people who have listened since the beginning will recognize your names. But for those who are fully new or may have forgotten or don't memorize everything that happens on the show for some reason, can you please introduce yourselves and who you are and what you do and where you teach and that kind of stuff?

J: Okay. I'm an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. And I did my PhD at the University of Chicago a good long while ago now. And I mostly research and write about apocryphal Christian literature.

T: I teach at York University in Toronto, graduate of University of Toronto, the better Toronto University for most people. And my doctoral work was on the gospel of Thomas, which I think you guys have covered. I also work on cursing and children in antiquity. I'm on Twitter where sometimes I bother you guys about your show. And I have a blog on apocrypha called Apocryphicity, if anyone may have seen that previously.

B: Yeah. And I do recommend that people check out your blog. It's always very informative on the latest news in apocryphal literature and discovery of new texts and debunking of hoax texts and all that kind of stuff. Very useful. It is apocryphicity.ca, is that correct?

T: I think so.

B: Yeah. OK. Sounds right. If I remember correctly, the two of you are each president emeriti of NASCAL. Is that correct? Do I have that correct?

J: That is true.

B: Can you tell our listeners what NASCAL is and why it's not NASCAR, even though Google wants to always auto complete NASCAR when I'm searching for NASCAR stuff?

J: I was in favor of NASCAR. I thought it was good. It's the North American Society of Christian Apocrypha Research. It really works.

T: We'd get lots of hits.

B: Yeah. But yeah. Can you tell us about that organization and what you do and why people might be interested in it and why a general audience might want to visit the website, for example, or check out your books?

T: OK. So since North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocrypha Literature, long name. We formed it about, I think it was in 2015 or so. And really, it's just an organization of scholars and interested people because we do want it to be a wide assortment of people to participate. So scholars and interested people of Christian Apocrypha Literature. There are other organizations around the world, but this one is intended for North American scholars. Not solely, but we're based here in North America.

We just want to get people working together, collaborating in various ways. And the main ways that people collaborate through it is we have what's called the eClavis, which is on the website that's just called nascal.com, which provides a lot of information about a large assortment of apocryphal texts. It's somewhere close to 300 on there, I think, which is almost, it's not completed yet, but we're getting close to it, somewhere close to 250 texts.

So our members participate by basically contributing to these entries, which gives summaries of texts, bibliographies, images, various other things. And it's open access. Anyone can use it as a resource. So that's one way we collaborate together. And we also have a translation series called Early Christian Apocrypha. I think we've done three volumes. We've got a few more on the way. These are just texts that some have appeared before, but some have not. Some need updating. And it gives us another opportunity for scholars in North America to showcase their work.

And of course, there are meetings. We've had a conference several years ago, pre-pandemic. And then once the pandemic hit, we've been doing some online workshops called the First Friday Workshops. And that's, again, open to not just scholars, but other interested people as well. That's one of the mandates of this is we don't want to just work in our somewhat ivory towers. We want to connect with people who are not scholars, but who do share this interest in this literature.

B: Great. Yeah, that is awesome. You know, we on this show have been proponents of some of the texts that you have released. I mean, obviously, we talked about, you know, today we're going to talk about New Testament Apocrypha Volume 3. But in the past, we did, you know, we did a three episode series on Volume 2 when that came out. And we've also covered, I believe it was Brandon Hawke's translation of Pseudo-Matthew. We did that one on the show. That was a NASCAL publication. Is that correct?

T: Yeah.

J: Yeah.

B: And I feel like maybe something else as well. But definitely, I would suggest people check that out. I think especially those kind of the early Christian, is that what it's called? Early Christian Apocrypha? Is that what the series is called? I think those are really interesting because those are worth pursuing for our listeners because they're kind of like a lot of the key texts, right? Like if you're just getting into trying to read Christian Apocrypha, like these are some of the ones you want to know before you dig into some of the deeper cuts. What all is there? There's a couple of infancy gospels. I forget what else. I know there's a series.

T: Yeah. So we've done, yeah, we've discussed, sorry, Protoevangelium of James, Pseudo-Matthew. And we did a book which is more of a study just called Apocryphal Gospels. But the next one in the, it's about to be released is the Doctrine of Addai. And we have one on the ascension of Isaiah coming out, Acts of Paul, a few others. That series is kind of meant to be the main text, like you say, as opposed to the more New Testament Apocrypha series that we'll talk about, which I didn't mention, which is showcasing texts that have been relatively neglected or are completely new.

B: Right. Yeah. Like the texts in these collections, a lot of them are appearing in English for the first time. Is that right?

T: That's right.

B: Which is very cool because it feels like people who look at New Testament Apocrypha tend to focus on a relatively limited scope of texts. Right. There are certain ones that have been studied a lot in the last century or so, you know, 150 years or whatever. But there's so much more, like there's so much more than people realize just because they haven't been translated. Right.

J: I think the reality is that if a text hasn't been translated into a modern language and kind of maybe English, really, it's almost as if it doesn't exist. That goes for scholars as well as for general interested readers. When one of these texts gets published in translation in the more non-canonical scriptures volumes, there are more New Testament Apocrypha volumes. All of a sudden, a bunch of scholarship happens that wasn't happening before, before the text was available in modern translations. And that just makes sense. You know what I mean? Like, it's hard to work with a text if step one is to translate the whole damn thing from Greek or Armenian or whatever.

B: Right. Yeah, for sure. And I feel like a number of the more interesting texts are in languages that are not the ones most prominently studied in American institutions. I feel like, you know, people will do the Latin and Greek ones first, but somewhere the Syriac and Armenian and Slavonic ones are sitting neglected because nobody knows those languages, maybe.

J: Yeah, you know, that's that's true. Armenian, especially. There's tons and tons of texts in Armenian and not a huge number of people who are competent to work on them.

B: Makes sense. That's interesting. So on the topic of like basic ground level Apocrypha, I feel like we've covered a number of those on the show as kind of an introduction. But what would you think of like if people were trying to get into an understanding of New Testament Apocrypha, like what are the essential texts that they should check out, do you think?

T: The ones that usually appear in the collections are, as you said, your kind of your go-to texts. So these collections, we are with the More New Testament Apocrypha series, we're trying to expand on those, not repeat them, but just expand on them. But there's, you know, it's the classic ones of the main infancy gospels like Thomas and James and Matthew, Pseudo-Matthew, the Gospel of Thomas for your Jesus while still wandering around on Earth kind of materials. A whole bunch of Apocryphal Acts, which do tend to get neglected because Jesus doesn't really show up in those very much. But these are all generally part of these collections.

Yeah, so that would be your basic introduction material. And you asked me for a bunch of titles that your listeners could look up. And so something like Bart Ehrman's Lost Scriptures, for example, is a really good English introduction to that material. And it's a bit shorter, so it'll excerpt some of the longer text. So it's a way in rather than having to read through, say, the entire Acts of Thomas, which is really, really long and a little dull, frankly. Any way you can kind of dip your foot into that is great.

But again, scholars who are in the field of Christian Apocrypha, not just New Testament people kind of dabbling. The texts that we tend to get more excited about are these ones that don't get as much interest. Because those, your standard or what you might call like a canon of non-canonical texts, like the ones I mentioned, people are mainly attracted to those because they think they are closer to Jesus and may have some authentic historical Jesus material in them. So that tends to be where the focus is.

But many of us who are in the field, we're not really that interested in the historical Jesus as much as we're interested in what each of these various texts will tell us about the writers or the Christian communities behind them. So it's just as interesting for us to have a- read a 9th century Apocryphal text or a 21st century Apocryphal text as it would be a 3rd or 4th century one, which can lead to a bit of disappointment. I was doing a podcast recently, and every time I was asked a question, it was all about authenticity. Do you think this has anything about Jesus in it that's authentic? Or do you think this historical information is authentic? And I kept on saying, I doubt it. Because that's just the way it is. But I'm not sure about how Janet feels about this, but I'm rather skeptical about even what you find in the New Testament as being authentic. Just because people are using these texts to think with, to deal with transformations in communities. So even our canonical texts are not that interested in history as much as they are as working with the characters in order to get ideas across.

J: Well, I was just going to add there that I think there's a bizarre inverse relationship to how influential and popular a text has been in the history of Christianity, and the likelihood that a contemporary scholar or lay reader has ever heard of it. So that I feel like everybody's heard of the Gospel of Thomas. If I ask my intro New Testament students about apocryphal texts and things they've heard of, they've all heard of the Gospel of Thomas. But this was not a hugely widely circulated text, and I don't think it was a text that really had vast interest or influence over the history of Christianity. But then texts like the Acts of John by Prochorus that I translated for Tony's new volume, or this awesome text called the Letter of Jesus Christ That Fell from Heaven. These sorts of things, nobody's ever heard of them, but those are texts that exist in tons of manuscripts, were translated into a zillion different languages, and actually had an impact on the history of Christianity. But they've just kind of dropped off the map for a lot of contemporary readers.

C: That's something that we've talked about a lot on the show, is that one of our many mottos on the show is, "just because it ain't canon doesn't mean it ain't Bible."

J: Right.

C: And so much of like, you know, saints that are venerated locally, kind of confined to a particular area, or things that were hugely influential texts that are very clearly like written in the 13th century, stuff like that. I love this idea that people are like, oh yes, this will give me a greater understanding of Jesus. When he was a kid, he murdered several boys.

B: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. I mean, on this show, we're typically more interested in how texts inform actual belief and practice than in towing the Orthodox party line, right? And also, there's only a limited extent to which we're interested in pursuing historical Jesus. Like, I remember when I was an undergrad and I first got a copy of the complete gospels from the Jesus seminar, because some people from there came and did a lecture at my school. And that was a major step in what would eventually be the creation of this show. I remember looking through there at all the texts, and I was like, wow, the complete gospels. And then I realized, no, this is only some gospels, because I was looking for the gospel of Nicodemus, which isn't in there.

J: Right.

B: And it turns out it's the complete gospels of the first and second centuries, because they're only looking at ones that have proximity to a historical Jesus, because that's what the Jesus seminar is interested in. And so, like, our views, our interests have gone broader and more far afield from that. And so, I think we're much more on the same page as you in terms of being interested in later texts in a way that, you know, some people wouldn't be because they're looking for possible authenticity or the secret truth of the church that the Pope doesn't want you to know or whatever TikTok conspiracies are going around. But yeah, since we've started talking about New Testament Apocrypha Volume 3, and we've talked about this series collecting some of these lesser known, newer texts, texts more newly discovered, I should say, or more recently translated texts. Let's talk about Volume 3. People who are looking in Volume 3, what can they expect to see there? I know, Janet, you already named a couple. But what are some of the more interesting texts we might find in that volume?

T: I have to try and remember. There's three of them, right? And then you put this thing to bed about maybe over a year ago, then you get asked about it, and you think it's in your head, and it's really not. So, I just, you know, this is one of the great things about the fact that we're on just audio and not video, because I can, you know, look at my computer and I can tell you. So yeah, what's in here? Excellent question.

B: Also, it's like 975 pages. So I don't blame you for not having the contents memorized. And also, I know you had to shuffle some texts around that you were expecting to have in Volume 3 that aren't. So I can imagine it's hard to keep everything straight.

T: It is. And like I said, like 300 of these bloody texts, right? So keeping them all straight is really tricky. I mentioned that the idea of this series is to publish stuff that's not normally in the compendia. So that gives us a lot of material to work with. And we're also not fussing about trying to arrange them by genre, which we often see. So like you might have a volume of just Gospels and a volume of just Acts. So these three volumes has a bit of everything in them. So in the Gospels section, for example, Volume 3, we have stuff related to the lifespan of Jesus. So things that would be where Jesus is alive and doing stuff like the dialogue of Jesus and the devil. But we also have stories of characters who are in Jesus's life. So there's a life of Mary Magdalene in there. There's two texts I worked on related to John the Baptist, so the Martyrdom of Zechariah and the Decapitation of John. Then we have a bunch of Apocryphal Acts, mostly Acts that are written in the 5th century and later. So the Acts of John by Prochorus that Janet worked on, and the Acts of John in Rome, also by Janet. We have a Martyrdom of Mark, a History of Paul, Acts of Andrew and Philemon, a bunch of others. We have a few epistles, not that many Apocryphal epistles, but a few in there. And a few Apocalypses, which is actually plenty of Apocalypse. So that gives us a lot to work with as well. One other thing that's really kind of wacky is one called the Revelation about the Lord's Prayer. And it's Jesus and Peter in a dialogue where Jesus explains each line in the Lord's Prayer. In a sense, it's not really an apocryphal text, it's more like a discussion of the Lord's Prayer. But it becomes apocryphal because the writer put it in the mouth of Jesus. So it doesn't tell you anything about what Jesus said and did necessarily when he was alive, but it is what you might call apocryphal. It's given an Apocryphal kind of veneer, and so it's included here too. And it's only known in a few manuscripts, so it's a bit of a rarity. So yeah, so lots of stuff in there. I think the things that Janet and I will think are the most interesting are the ones we worked on. Yeah, we know them that much better than the rest of the material.

B: Sure, yeah. Why don't you talk a little bit about some of them? I mean, I can see, yeah, the two John the Baptist ones. I feel like you don't see a lot of texts about John the Baptist. So that's cool that you have two. Yeah, lots of acts here. And what was, well, let me stop and just let you talk about the ones that you individually worked on and why we might be interested in them.

T: There is about five or six, maybe a little bit more, texts about John the Baptist in Apocrypha. There's two, I think, in the first volume, and now there's two in the third. And these have been known for a while. This is one of the ways that we figure out what texts should go in a volume like this. This resource called the Clavis Apocryphorum Novum Testamentum, if I got that right, which lists a whole bunch of Apocrypha. It's produced about 30 years ago now. And you go through there and you can see what's been done and occasionally you see something where it says unedited or unpublished. It's like, OK, what's this? And so the John the Baptist material is mentioned in there. And it was studied about 100 years ago. The sources were mentioned. There's a bit of a summary about the text, but the texts themselves were not published. So these are, I thought, let's work on these. So the two I worked on, one of them was by the co-author Sarah Neal, a former student of mine. The longer one, they're both related to [indisctinct], but the longer one is the Martin of Zechariah. So I'll talk about that one. But both of these are attributed to a disciple, John, named Euripius, who we've no mention of this character anywhere else. So it brings together material on John the Baptist from the New Testament. So we have the baptism of Jesus. We have Herod's birthday party. It talks about John's death. But it also draws on the gospel of James, the Protoevangelium of James. And at the end of that text, we have the story of Herod's soldiers wanting to kill baby John the Baptist because he's after all the babies. John's mother, Elizabeth, takes him and goes out into the desert, comes up to a mountain, prays to God for help, and the mountain opens and they go inside there and the mountain closes. And that's where they remain. And so that story is brought in here as well. And then we get some new stuff. We get the story where John, as a child, gets transported from his wilderness mountain residence to a temple. And Zechariah, who's been killed by Herod's soldiers, gets brought back to life so that he can be baptized and then reburied. So Zechariah couldn't have been baptized because Jesus wasn't alive or was just a baby at the time. So we get that. And then later, John and his mother are taken by Uriel, an angel Uriel, to the temple so that John can be buried with his father. So one of the reasons we can think of why this text was created is if Zechariah is going to be honored appropriately as a saint, he should be baptized. And so how do you baptize a dead person? Well, you raise them back to life and then you do it. And it also it's created, or at least it's in the manuscripts, it's mentioned that it's to be read during the feast day of John the Baptist or the feast day of Zechariah. So you also need something to read for these feast days. And so now you have this text. So every, I can't remember what it is, November 5th or something like that, you get out your big book and you look through it until you find Zechariah or John and you have something to read. But it is this weird kind of combination of canonical material, pseudo-canonical in the sense that Protoevangelium of James was very, very popular. And then new stuff that no one has ever seen before or we don't see anywhere else. One other thing that's in these texts too that I forgot, we have the story of the deaths of the Herods. Herod Antipas who killed John and his wife and daughter, all of them are involved in John's death. And no Christian likes the idea of a villain like this not getting their due. Though historically, apparently Herod and his wife lived quite happily in exile somewhere. So we have Herod's daughter skating on ice, she falls through the ice and then her head gets cut off. And then the head is placed in Herod Antipas' lap. I think he gets struck blind, his wife, can't remember what happens to her, but they all die in grisly ways. Because it's appropriate that they should die. And that story is found in about three or four different John the Baptist texts and several other sources as well. So it's a widely copied and widely known story, but completely unhistorical. But that doesn't matter, right? It's about telling a good story and making sure the villain gets their comeuppance.

J: Yeah, but Tony, can you say a little bit more about how you're skating on the ice and then you get your head cut off?

T: Well, she falls through the ice, the soldiers come along, and I think as the story goes, they try to pull her out. And she's held so tightly by the ice that her head comes right off.

J: Huh. And what's the date, do you think, on that text?

T: I can't remember. The earliest source of that is somewhere between the 5th and the 9th century, I think.

J: Is it Latin?

T: Greek in the John the Baptist texts and Greek in other sources as well.

J: Huh. Because when you said the ice thing, I was like, whoa, where is this thing composed? Where is the place that has... I don't know, we're picturing somebody skating on ice and then getting their head cut off. It's like unimaginable. And then I thought, maybe this is somebody who's never seen ice.

T: Yeah, it's a good question. It's probably composed in Greece, right? Do we have any really cold parts of Greece?

J: I'm sure there's mountains where it's cold, but I can't imagine that skating on ice is a common occurrence.

T: Or walking on ice is probably not actually skating.

J: I mean, sliding on ice.

C: I just want to... You would think you would stop somebody, even if you were stuck in the ice. You would think, before your head was pulled clean off, you'd be like, okay, let's try something else.

J: That is fine. I've never heard anything like that. I was going to say that being swallowed up into stone. Who gets swallowed up into... Is that the family of John the Baptist?

T: Get swallowed up what?

J: In stone, like the mountain.

B: Yeah, it's John and Elizabeth at the end of the Protoevangelium.

J: You had that also with the Thecla narratives. I mean, that's a kind of common trope, you know? But this ice thing is very new to me.

B: Yeah. What I liked about that is that this is a text that draws an explicit connection between John and the Archangel Uriel, which is something that I have found in art, especially the idea of Uriel taking John the Baptist away from the Massacre of the Innocents to meet with the Holy Family on the flight into Egypt. There's a famous Leonardo painting on that topic. But I've been struggling to find an explicit textual reference that connects those two. So it's interesting that this is a text that actually makes an explicit connection between John and Uriel. So that's cool. Yeah, Janet, why don't you talk about the ones you worked on here? You've got a couple of Acts of John, John Thunderson, not Johnny Bapto, as we call them on the show.

J: Right. Okay. Yeah, I didn't know that. That's good. So I did two John texts, two Acts of John texts. One of them is the Acts of John in Rome, and the other one is the Acts of John by Prochorus. And I would put that "by Prochorus" part in the title. Do you know what I mean? It's not like in italics, the Acts of John and then by Prochorus, his author. Prochorus, he's a character in the story.

B: Right.

J: And the narrator of the story. And I got interested in these things because a long time ago, I promised to, or signed a contract to write a commentary on the early Acts of John, which I'm still working on. And as part of researching the early Acts of John, I mean, this is a text that if you read it, like in the Ehrman source book that Tony mentioned early on, I mean, it feels like a more or less cohesive text. Like it picks up a little bit in the middle of things, but it more or less reads like a cohesive narrative. But it's actually a text that has been totally reconstructed by contemporary scholars. And I think they did a good job. I mean, I think that this is our best approximation of what the early text looked like, but it doesn't exist like that in any manuscripts. And so I wanted to get a handle on like what the pieces are, where they came from and how it was put together in the way that we have it now in contemporary editions. And most of the texts that we now think of as the early Acts of John had been at a later point incorporated into this other text called the Acts of John by Prochorus, which I didn't know anything about. And there was no published English translation that I could find. And so I just started translating it and working on it. And then Tony asked me to do it for the book. And sort of likewise, the Acts of John in Rome. This is another text that its textual tradition is kind of entangled with that early Acts of John. But these are basically texts that were more successful, I guess, than the early Acts. I mean, these are texts that are represented in many more manuscripts than that early text and that are part of this could maybe say a Johannine library of sources or a Johannine body of literature all dealing with John the Apostle. And yeah, I mean, in a way, I would say this is an instance where things get more interesting as you get later than the early material.

B: Are there any narrative highlights that we should look out for in these texts?

J: I think the Acts of John in Rome is pretty fun. He literally goes to Rome and he goes on trial before the emperor, which emperor depends on which manuscript you're reading. So that's kind of a cool text in both of these texts. I mean, so John is somebody who's not martyred. Right. But there's actually a canonical source that seems to imply that John will be martyred. And so I think that there was maybe an impulse to create some quasi-, you know, martyrdom accounts for John. And you get some of that in these texts where he's forced to drink poison but doesn't die. That's a fun scene at the end of the Acts of John in Rome. And there are more texts that are also related in part of this sort of cluster stories like the [sounds like "Ortutis"] Iohannis. This is where you have John being boiled in oil, which is another common story that doesn't occur in any of the other places. Lots of narrative fun. Most of the Acts of John by Prochorus takes place on Patmos, where John writes not revelation, but the gospel of John. He has many more adventures in that place than an island of that size could actually accommodate in reality.

B: And if I remember correctly, I believe Tony, in the introduction to this volume, calls the Acts of John by Prochorus the crown jewel of this volume, I believe.

J: The crown jewel of Christian literature more broadly, right?

B: Yeah, clearly.

J: It's a fun text. It might be. I've also heard it referred to as tedious. I think it's a good time. I think there's lots of good stories in there.

B: Nice. And I will point out that earlier, mentioning that the Acts of Thomas is very long and kind of boring is a really good way to make sure that Chris will never let us cover it on this show. It is definitely of the most famous Acts of the Apostles. What's his name? The ones attributed to Lucius Carinus. That's the one we haven't done. And it's because it's long and allegedly boring.

J: Yeah, but there's only one manuscript, I think, that includes actually all of those Acts of Thomas. So for most people in history reading the Acts of Thomas, they were actually only reading some sections, usually just the first couple and then the last one. So if you want to skip that middle material, you would not be the first people in history to do so.

B: Right. We just need to find an abridged version.

J: There you go.

B: Great. That's awesome.

T: Can I just add one thing on Prochorus for a second?

B: Oh, yeah.

T: One of the reasons I like it so much is because of one kind of artifact related to it. This is something I think Janet mentioned to me that's probably the only way I would have known about it. But there's a church on Patmos, a monastery, a church within a monastery, which is decorated with images from this text. And you can see it on the NASCAL website if you go to the Acts of John by Prochorus and then follow the links. So, yeah, this old chapel painted with various scenes from it. And it shows you, again, that sense that we like to often talk about in our field is that just even though these texts are not official, they're not canonical, they had this huge influence in various ways. And this is a church that wants people to come and visit. It wants pilgrims. So it will celebrate John's connection to Patmos. And where do we see it most? Well, in this text. We have all of these activities of John while he was there. So you can go there today, it's still around, and you go in this church and you'll see it decorated with various scenes. And there's lots of churches with scenes from apocryphal texts in them. It's not the only one. Most people will probably walk into these things and, well, often the images are really high up in these churches, right? So it's hard to see what they are anyway. But just to kind of assume they're canonical stories. But they're not. I don't know if a lot of these churches that have the images really make it apparent in their literature that you get at the door or whatever about what exactly these images are and where they come from. So that's, I guess, one of the reasons why what Janet and I do is useful, because we'll point these kinds of things out. So it's a great text. Jewel of the Crown, in part, because it's such a long text and it's so important. And I was so happy that Janet would do it for this. You know, I kept thinking along the way, she should really just do a book of this. Why waste it on my volume? But she never gave up. Despite also my bugging about various editorial things. And so I was really happy to have it in there. And I say that about everyone who's contributed to these volumes. Like, I'm just the editor. Lots of people worked on this, contributed texts. And all three of the volumes wouldn't be here without having a lot of colleagues and friends who are willing to put their work in these things.

J: Can I just jump in and add one other thing about Prochorus? So not only do these images occur within churches, but they also occur within Bibles. So Bibles often have, they would include a little biography sometimes of the evangelists at the beginning of each gospel. And then also, you know, very often like author portraits, right, of the evangelists. And you've probably seen images like this, of images of John writing his gospel. And there's kind of two main types. One of them is John composing his gospel in Ephesus. But then the other main type shows John and there's like maybe a mountain or a cave sort of behind him. And then there's this little dude seated at his feet writing while he dictates. And that's Prochorus. And this image of John dictating the gospel of John to his disciple Prochorus, I mean, it's literally an illustration of this scene from this apocryphal text, but it appears in, you know, dozens of biblical manuscripts. So there's a very, I mean, that's just like a really clear example of how these texts are non-canonical or apocryphal. But there they are, like right inside the canon. This distinction between apocryphal and canonical, it doesn't reflect the true situation of the history of these texts within the history of Christianity.

B: Yeah, for sure. And I feel like another really common image of John the Apostle is you see him with the cup with the snake in it.

J: Yeah, exactly.

B: Representing the poisoning, which is obviously not in canon Bible. I know you mentioned that account. Does that occur in one of the texts that you did for this volume?

J: Yeah, that's from the Acts of John in Rome.

B: In Rome, okay.

J: And then also you see him often boiling in oil, and that is from the Latin adaptation, the [Sounds like 'orto tici'] Iohannus.

B: Okay, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what we mean when we say just because it's not canon doesn't mean it's not Bible because it's what ends up in the art, in the architecture, in the general belief. Right. And so people from a modern perspective don't understand the degree to which even their post-Reformation understanding of Christianity, they don't know how much of it is informed still by tradition that comes from outside of canonical scriptures. And that's, you know, one of the things we try to highlight on this show. And I and also obviously clearly a lot of your work points in that direction as well. What was the other one, Janet, that you mentioned the other text? You said it was a letter.

J: Oh, the Letter of Jesus Christ that Fell from Heaven.

B: Yeah. Wait, is that in here?

J: No.

T: It's in volume one.

J: Yeah.

B: Oh, okay, okay, okay. It's a letter of Jesus Christ.

J: Written by Jesus Christ himself.

B: Right. That feels extremely rare that you have a text attributed to Jesus himself.

J: Yeah. So this is my favorite text. I love this text. I worked on it recently. I have an essay on it. It's coming out in a book this summer. It's a classic example of a text that nobody has ever heard of, including New Testament scholars. But that was so incredibly popular that it was translated into essentially any European language you can name. It was translated into that language. It was still printed on broadsides in the United States in like the 19th century. It was published in American newspapers like through the 20th century, like the first half of the 20th century. And it's an ancient text. It was probably, although I'm not totally sure, but probably composed in Latin and around the sixth century CE, probably mainly in Spain, or at least that's where our first evidence of it occurs. But then very soon after translated into Greek and then just like boom exploded and was everywhere. And it's a letter that is a letter written by Jesus. And it's mostly, speaking of tedious, it's mostly about like the correct observance of Sunday.

B: Oh.

J: Sometimes in English scholarship, it's called the Sunday letter. So it goes by a bunch of different names. It depends on what type of scholarship you're reading. But I think it must be one of the most successful or maybe even the longest sort of, I don't know what the right word is, like independently circulating non-canonical text in history. And again, it's something that I feel like nobody has ever heard of. I don't get it. Although I hadn't heard of it until a couple of years ago.

C: That's of everything? That's what you're, if you're Jesus, that's what you're going to write the letter about.

J: Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's a little bit disappointing, but maybe that's part of its sort of perpetual appeal. There's also some hellfire and damnation in there. It's also probably the first chain letter in history. It literally says, you know, like you have to copy the letter and continue circulating it, and then you'll be blessed. And if you don't, you'll be cursed. And various iterations of the letter say things like, if you take this letter and you make a copy and you hang it in your house, then you'll be protected from house fires. And if there was a woman in your house who was having a hard time in childbirth, you touch it to her stomach and she will immediately deliver and promises all sorts of miraculous stuff like that. It was super popular with soldiers, including up until the American Civil War and similarly timed wars in Germany. A lot of soldiers would carry it like tucked into their pocket. It has this wild history, but it is, I mean, throughout and through all of its adaptations, it's very much recognizable as this one letter, this Letter of Jesus Christ That Fell From Heaven and depending on the version, it either fell in Rome or maybe it fell in Jerusalem or hilariously, the German versions say it fell in Germany, in German. Yeah, it's awesome.

B: Wow. That is not what I was expecting it to be because prior to this conversation we had just one minute ago, the only text I knew of that was attributed to having been written by Jesus was also a letter, but it was in regards to the image of Edessa.

J: Yeah, the Adler correspondence.

B: Yeah, and so I was expecting it to be related to that and then it turns out to be something completely different.

J: So, it is something completely different, but interestingly, a lot of these broadsides that were printed will include both the correspondence with Jesus in Abgar and this letter that fell from heaven and then they'll often also include the letter of Lentulus. This is in the English language tradition of this letter, but at various points in history, it does get combined with the Abgar correspondence and I think by the sort of basic principle of letters of Jesus go together.

B: Wow. That's so interesting. Okay. Wow. That's really cool. Yeah, and then just looking at the table of contents here from Volume 3, there's definitely some titles that catch my attention. Obviously a dialogue of Jesus and the devil. There's no way it's as interesting as it sounds from the title, but The Hospitality and Perfume of the Bandit, is that a St. Dismas story or is that something else?

T: Yeah, it is. Mark Bilby's done one of these, I think in each of the three volumes. This is a bit like you guys at Comic buffs, like Superboy stories. It's like Superman as a child. It's like Infant's Gospel of Thomas the same way. So we have lots of these stories of characters from the gospels who appear earlier in history. So this is a story of the bandit encountering Jesus when Jesus was younger and sometimes stories of the bandit are the bandit as a young man encountering Jesus as a young man. So that kind of way of trying to bring history back or introduce some foreshadowing. So you have lots of these little traditions of the bandit usually encountering Jesus and his family in Egypt and he gets blessed by Jesus. And so this validates why he's the good bandit later on and why he's going to be worthy of going up to paradise.

B: That's cool. We have definitely not this text, but some other texts we've looked at that has talked about that tradition of Dismas and Guestas meeting the Holy Family on the road. And we even covered another one where it was explained that they were the ones that stole the gold frankincense and myrrh and that's why Jesus didn't have them when he was a grown up. So we have the Eremitic life of Mary Magdalene. We love a Sasquatch Mary. So I have to assume it's from her Sasquatch period.

C: Her Sasquatch era?

B: Yeah, her Sasquatch era. And of course, look at all of these acts. Boy, who's ready for the adventures of Andrew and Philemon? And people are champing at the bit for those two to finally team up.

T: This is from a group of popular acts that's very popular in Egypt and Ethiopia. They're all connected there. And so you often have these team ups, like you're saying. So Andrew and Philemon, we have Andrew and Peter, various other ones. Andrew and Peter is the one who's also there with them along the way. These various combinations of these apostles, generally they do the same thing in every text. They go to a city, usually Jesus kind of whisks them there. They talk to someone outside the city about what's going on inside. Usually there's a pagan god who everyone is worshipping, shouldn't be. So then apostles go into the town and they have a battle with the priests of the pagan god and show that Jesus is mightier and eventually construct a church and ordain a clergy and then they go wandering on their way. Very, very stereotypical. So talking about, you know, we shouldn't keep saying these texts are tedious, but you know, you read Acts of Thomas, it's really long and part of the tedium is seeing the same thing happen again and again. But imagine reading these 12 or so texts about the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles that are circulating, as I said, in Egypt. And the same thing keeps happening in every one. Literally, like you just, it's actually one actually. I can't remember which one it is, but it's this exact same story with different apostles. Exact same story. So there's a lot of recycling and reusing in these texts. So I think it's still interesting, but I can see how people can find this stuff a bit, you know, a bit silly after a while. And thinking also about Janet's mention about the letter on Sunday, part of the reason many people aren't aware of these texts is there's a certain snobbery in academia that the kind of the gatekeepers, particularly of, say a century ago, they studied the texts that they find the most interesting or the most sophisticated. So people mostly just made fun of the letter on Sunday and then just cast it aside. Even in the Gospel of Thomas, part of what I did on my work on it is to show how most scholars really insult this text and say how stupid it is and how unsophisticated it is. It's only in the past 20 years or so that people have started to look at it a bit with more fresh eyes and try not to be so arrogant about what is worthy literature and what is unworthy literature. And one of the things I often say about this kind of dichotomy of sophisticated and unsophisticated, people will say somthing like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is dumb because all these things in it. But some of the things that they say are dumb, the Jesus of the New Testament or the apostles in the New Testament do it as well. But we're just so used to those stories that we just kind of pass over them and move on to the next one. But Jesus, you know, disappears. He curses, the apostles curse. There's lots of weirdness in the New Testament as well.

J: Yeah, I think it really is a matter of taste, do you know what I mean? As opposed to like the presence of theological content. Because I mean, like the infancy Gospel of Thomas is a great example because there's tons of, I think, actually quite sophisticated, you know, Christological thinking going on in that text. But I think it's not to the taste of a lot of scholars, you know, 50 or 100 years ago. Maybe actually one other thing I'll say too, speaking of tedious, we've been watching, my daughter's 10 and we've been watching the X-Files with her from the beginning. And talking about like the repetition of tropes and, you know, like the same thing over and over. And we've watched three episodes and the answer to all of them was like ghosts, you know, I feel like sometimes we're reading these texts in a context in which or in a sort of rapid succession in a way that they weren't originally consumed, you know, and that gives the impression of tedium where I think it would have been much less apparent, probably in the original context.

B: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that for sure. Certainly on this show, we will take the quote unquote dumb ones any day. Give us Andrew and Matthias in the land of the cannibals. We want it.

C: Those are the best.

J: Yeah, absolutely.

B: that's what I'm sayin Those are the best ones.

C: Yeah.

B: We want the talking dogs. We want the 18 foot tall talking lions. We want the seals getting struck by lightning. We want all that stuff.

C: Lions that do not fornicate.

B: That's right. Voluntarily celibate lions who run off into the woods to worship the Lord. That's what we want.

J: Right.

B: That's what we want on the show.

C: I am curious though. Because we've talked about a lot of, we talked with Dan McClellan about doing some debunking of people's like weird, like, this is what this is actually saying stuff. We talked to Aaron a little bit about that. I've seen a bunch of it on Tik Tok because now that's the Tik Tok that I'm on. And it like, as people who study Apocrypha, like what sticks out to you as the thing where it's like, if I hear this one more time, I'm going to explode. Because I recently saw a Tik Tok where someone was talking about the secrets, how the book of Enoch actually like reveals everything. And I was like, the book of Enoch also says rain is a boy. So I don't know if that's where we're getting our information about in the world.

B: Yeah, that's super popular. It's canon in some churches. It's quoted in the New Testament, whatever. But yes, that's a great question.

C: Yeah.

B: What misunderstandings are your pet peeves in regard to Apocrypha literature and such?

J: I don't know. I mean, 10 years ago, the Dan Brown stuff probably would have gotten on my nerves more. But college kids today have not seen that movie. So that has sort of fallen into the background. For me, I think the honest misconception that a lot of students come in with, or people come in with, is the idea that these texts were part of some great competition for inclusion into the canon, which is just simply not true. I mean, maybe there are some of these texts that could have, maybe should have gotten into the canon, like Shepard of Hermas, something like that. But a lot of these texts were, I mean, these are not authors who have any sense of canon. Or maybe these are authors writing after the canon has long been closed. I mean, the idea that these texts are in some sort of, I don't know, like competitive relationship with canonical texts is just false and just a basic misunderstanding of what's going on here.

T: Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, it's that was part of the Dan Brown stuff, but it's kind of still there. You still get people doing that kind of thing. These kind of people who are kind of searchers. Probably if I was going to reduce it to another one, maybe anything to do with Jesus being married. But particularly with one of the things I've noticed, we just not just with sometimes within our own discipline with scholars, is this, again, a bit of a snobbery about texts like, say, the Gospel of Jesus' Wife or Secret Mark, where we know the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a forgery. We know who did it. We know everything about it. But one of the things that Janet and I were involved with was a symposium at York where we talked about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife. But we looked at it as an apocryphal text. Even if it was written yesterday, it still is apocryphal. What a lot of people today, when they see something that's called a forgery, a modern forgery, they just want to get rid of it. They think, let's not get fooled by this thing. Let's just show how it's a forgery and then we can just make fun of it for the rest of the time or just forget about it entirely. But it still, for us, captures those reasons why people create apocryphal texts to tell new stories with these same old characters, but dealing with a contemporary problem. I had the same issue with Secret Gospel of Mark, which I think is authentic, or at least wasn't created by Morton Smith, who personally published it. It's the same sense of trying to dismiss something. There's a certain indignation that scholars have about these texts. There's something about them that they don't like and they're happy to declare it a forgery and then they don't want to talk about it anymore. Even if Morton Smith created it in the 1940s, it's an apocryphal text about the 1940s or 50s, whatever, about that time period by the author who wrote it. That is interesting. And so when people bring these things up, or say they bring up something like the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, they'll say, oh, this is just like that stupid Secret Mark thing. And it's again calling this thing stupid or dismissing it in some other way. But even all of these things are worthy of study in their own particular ways.

B: Those were great answers. Thank you very much. I think kind of by the same token, a thing you see a lot is the idea that a lot of apocryphal texts were actively suppressed by the church, which I mean, maybe is the case in some texts, but largely, no, it's just like things were popular and then they weren't popular.

T: That's right. Or popular in some areas and not other areas, too, right?

J: Yeah, and I mean, there are some that are straight up condemned, you know, like the Early Acts of John, at the Second Council of Nicaea. So I mean, there are certainly, you know, isolated moments where some texts are declared not cool for some groups of Christians. But by and large, that's not the story of apocryphal literature.

B: Right.

C: I wish that was the term. I wish the Pope came out and was like, hey, this one, not cool.

J: Right. Yeah.

B: He's got like knuckle dusters, brass knuckles on each hand. One says cool, one says not cool, and he stamps them with his fist. I don't know that, just imagining. All right, let's see. So I do want to get to some of our listener questions because we've got some pretty good ones. But normally, when we have scholars on, I do a lightning round of questions on particular topics and things. But a lot of them are kind of questions for Old Testament scholars. So and we already, you kind of already mentioned Secret Mark. So I guess, well, real quick, Secret Mark, real, hoax, or doesn't matter, I guess.

T: I'll go first, because I already mentioned that, Janet. I think Smith really found it in the back of a book. I don't know who wrote it, or what century it was written in, but it was not Warren Smith. So what does that mean? Does it matter? Sure. Everything matters. It's everything's worthy of study and working with. I love talking to my students about it when we talk about the Gospel of Mark. It's a fun text, no matter who wrote it and when it's written. Janet, what do you think?

J: I think I basically agree with you. I think that if it was really a hoax pulled by Morton Smith, he was playing just an exceedingly long game. You know what I mean? Like, that to me, seems a little bit beyond belief. But I guess to me, I think it doesn't matter is the ultimate answer, because the text is ruined. Do you know what I mean? Like, you can't write and publish scholarship on it, because there's enough doubt about its authenticity that even if you could get like a journal to publish an article on it, it just, I think it's just a huge bummer, because you just can't. It's toxic. It's radioactive, this text. And so you really can't do scholarship on it.

B: Yeah, thank you. And for the record, I believe that secret Mark is real, real gay. Okay. One last lightning round question, then. Where do you stand on the synoptic problem? Janet first.

J: Oh, huh? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, my basic sense is that sometimes people want to apply Occam's razor, you know, the idea that the simpler, more straightforward explanation is going to be the more likely. And I feel like there's absolutely no reason why. I mean, all of my experience with the ancient world and manuscripts and texts suggests that the most complicated and ridiculous scenario is the most likely. So I tend to come down, I mean, the four source hypothesis, fine, you know, teach as well. I think that, I just don't think we know what these texts looked like in the first century CE. Do you know what I mean? Like, to make any firm argument, you have to know exactly, I mean, we're talking about real detail oriented things here. And I feel like you have to know exactly what the text was that people were reading in the first century CE. And I just don't think we have that. So I would be reluctant to draw strong conclusions. We don't have enough information. That's my take.

B: Okay, thank you for that cop-out. Just kidding. I'm just kidding. Tony, what do you think?

T: I see Janet's point. When I teach it, though, to students, I tend to focus on certain things, which are a bit undeniable that Mark is probably written first. And that anything that's not in Mark, Matthew and Luke generally don't agree on except for the sayings material. So the beginning and end, the prologue and epilogue, why are they so different from one another? Anything in between is tricky. And a lot of scholars just think about manuscripts. Scholars will get hung up on particular words that show that Matthew knew Luke or something like that. And without thinking of the fact that we don't have the orthocopies, right? So there's corruption between manuscripts. A scribe will be writing out his verse of Matthew and would throw in a word from Luke because he knows that story well. So I think we have to be very careful not to go into too much minutiae and look at this larger picture of what are the fundamental large parts where we see these kinds of relationships and can try to narrow it down. But yeah, it's an excellent point that manuscripts and writing was a very messy experience. And if you look at anything contemporary, like say you're putting together a manual for a modern company, that manual has gone through so many hands over time. So it's unrecognizable when it's published or news form from when it was made originally. So if we think about texts in antiquity that way, it can be really hard to really map how these things relate to one another. So yeah, simple answers help get things across well to students. But yeah, getting hung up on words here and there, I think is really a big waste of one's time.

J: I think that, I mean, one thing I'll point out is that if Matthew, Mark, and Luke were not canonical texts, if these were apocryphal texts, we would call them three recensions of one document, of one work. And then also that what I think is so super interesting about having those is Francois Bovant, this Harvard scholar who died a few years ago, who is a wonderful person and a wonderful scholar, he said, and I'm going to get this kind of wrong, but he said something to the effect of the canonical gospels were, that is like were in the first century when they were written, what the apocryphal acts never ceased to be. So what's interesting to me is looking at the kind of adaptations, and I totally agree with Tony, like Mark was written first, Matthew and Luke afterwards, and what their relationship is to each other is a little bit less clear to me. But they were working with the gospel of Mark in exactly the same way that the author of Acts of John by Prochorus was working with the earlier Acts of John. You know what I mean? So like these are examples of authors with Christian texts who are using sources, adapting those sources, changing things they don't like, keeping things they did like, slapping a new ending on there, like all of that kind of stuff. This is how early Christian texts were written. So it's awesome that all three of those are in the canon because they're sort of a testament to how early Christian narratives worked.

B: Yeah.

T: It's almost like having infancy gospel of James, Thomas, and Pseudo-Matthew as your three canonical gospels.

J: Exactly. Yeah.

B: Yes. Great answer. And great chance for the two of you to stake your claim before we have Mark Goodacre on the show to say something completely different.

T: Don't listen to that guy.

B: Fingers crossed. I think we're going to have him on in the fall. But all right, let's do some listener questions from our Discord. Let's see. This one is from our user named Samwise who asks, which canon Bible text has the biggest apocrypha energy and which apocryphal text has the biggest canon Bible energy? Just in terms of vibes.

J: Okay. So which canonical text has the most apocryphal energy?

B: Yeah. Which one feels the most like a work of apocrypha and which apocrypha feels the most like a canonical text?

J: Okay. I don't know what your apocryphal vibe is. I mean, Revelation is pretty nutso, right? I mean, it's pretty wild that that's in there.

C: I have said that very thing.

J: Yeah. And you know, many generations of Christians agreed with us, right? This was not popular text, especially in the East for a very long time. That's my take on a canonical text that should be apocryphal probably.

B: Yeah. That feels like the straight play answer. Yeah.

J: Vice versa. I think for most Catholic and Orthodox Christianities, I think the Proto-Evangelium of James is quasi-canonical, right? I mean, the traditions there are so crucial for...

B: Oh, certainly. Yeah. Your stuff on, you know, Saint Anne and all that stuff is going to be coming from there.

J: Yeah.

B: So much of the Mary material as well.

J: Totally. I mean, if you were picking versions, I would maybe say the Nativity of Mary feels very canonical to me. Yeah. I don't know. That's my answer. What do you say, Tony?

T: The Gospel of John.

J: Oh, okay.

B: Ooh.

T: There's a good article I used to give to my students. I don't remember who wrote it, but some time ago, that if we think of the synoptic Gospels as kind of a canonical Jesus, the Gospel of John is nothing like them. And if it wasn't in the canon, it would be like an apocryphal Gospel.

J: It would be like, what is this Gnostic nonsense?

T: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So that would be for that. As a canonical, I would have said Infancy James too, but just to be contrarian in the sense of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The last story in it is taken from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is presented as, yes, he's doing some cursings, but we have lots of stories in the Acts of the Apostles where curses happen, so it's not all that strange. And I like to point out where Jesus in the canonical Gospels, he curses the fig tree for no good reason, and he does a bunch of woes and woe on the rich, blah, blah, blah, curse on Jerusalem in there. So when I talk about the text, I try to show how it's really not that different, but our sensibilities, our modern sensibilities don't like the idea of a Jesus who would smite people. Jesus is the guy who bounces children on his lap, not the ones who curse them in the marketplace. But I think people in antiquity would have seen something quite recognizable in that text.

B: Great. Next question from user Tricornking. He asked several questions, but I choose this one. He asked if you have read any Bible-related comics or any that you think might count as a sort of modern apocrypha. Two examples that he thought of are the recent comics Judas by Jeff Loveness and The Harrowing of Hell by Evan Dahm. I don't know if either of you have read either of those.

J: No, sorry.

T: I have a copy of Evan Dahm's Gospel of Nicodemus. It's kind of fun. Very little connection to the text, but with the larger issue of Jesus going down to hell and liberating people. Really nice art. There was a comic out by DC some years ago called Testament, which retold Hebrew Bible stories. There's a graphic novel of the Gospel of Mark, which is quite fun, called Marked. It's a bit old now.

J: I use the Perpetua graphic novel in class sometimes.

B: Ooh, who is that by? Do you know offhand?

J: No, I'd have to look at the syllabus.

B: No, it's fine. It's the Perpetua and Felicitas martyrdom or something else?

J: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's it. It's a graphic novel. It's nice. It's exciting. It's interesting because it is a specific interpretation of the text very much. You can really see, especially in the images, how, especially in terms of gender and so on, how Perpetua is imagined. But yeah, that's a good one that I use with students.

T: I've assigned graphic novels too, and I often find the students aren't quite sure what to do with them. I think they're more comfortable with text, but then you throw images in there and it confuses them to some extent. They're not in the sense that if they were assigned a film, I think they're okay with that, but comics freak some people out.

B: Yeah, definitely. Chris and I can understand the experience of people being freaked out by the very idea of comics, yes. Let me do one last listener question because I think this is a good one. This is from the Lassa. Sorry if that is not how your name is pronounced. The question is, is there anything in the Apocryphal Text that you think the consensus scholarship is very wrong about, like dating, the original language, religious tradition, et cetera?

J: Oh.

B: Anything where you disagree with the consensus view?

J: Hmm. I mean, as opposed to a lot of New Testament scholarship, I think that there's not so many of us working on this vast body of texts so that I feel like if somebody knows something about it, you're just happy. Let me see. What's something... I don't know. Actually, I just came back from an Infancy Gospel of Thomas conference and I feel like there are different takes on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in terms of who it was written for, the intended audience, some basic interpretive elements of that text. That's not something where the consensus is wrong, but that's someplace where I feel like some people are wrong.

T: But not me, though.

J: No, clearly not you, Tony.

T: That is a good example, though, of a text that people are coming at with different points of view. But consensus, yeah, it is tricky because sometimes we have one person working on it, the consensus is one. And then we have lots and lots and lots of people working on the Gospel of Thomas. That tends to be a... it's derivative or it's early. And then you have some kind of range in between. But it's hard to really call that as consensus. It's really just a spectrum of ideas.

J: Yeah, and there are some places where scholarship, you know, like 100, 150 years ago, thought a lot of texts were Gnostic and they were just wrong about that. I mean, I think scholarship has really shifted on a couple of questions, but that's not the same thing as what this person is asking about.

T: I did some work on what you could call conservative versus liberal perspectives on apocryphal texts. This is due to all the bother over the Da Vinci Code. So he had a bunch of these books out written for a Christian audience saying, don't get worried about the Dan Brown stuff. These texts are actually really awful. Believe in Jesus. Yadda, yadda, yadda. So there is that kind of a pull sometimes in scholarship. But it's generally the people who are outside the field saying the stuff is late, wrong, worthless. Whereas people in the field are saying, no, no, no, no. Yes, we don't think it's historical or it says stuff about Jesus or whatever, but it's got its value in its own particular ways. So that's not really within the field. And then you have the people who work on the New Testament who just kind of, I guess, you know, dabble a little bit here and there. Sorry, I'm not answering the question quite as well as the person who wrote it would like.

J: It's a cooperative field, not a contentious field, I would say. I feel like there's in apocryphal Christian literature, there's more work than we know what to do with. It's very much a team sport and not polemical, I think.

T: Right. No one's trying to necessarily argue for the rightness of the text. There are divine oracles from above, though you get a couple of weird ones here and there. So yeah, and thinking about what Janet said, it's a very collegial group we have. I think people who connect with us tend to feel that way. It's good to be in a group of scholars who are some pretty nice people.

B: All right. I think those were good answers. Don't feel bad about yourselves. I think those answers were good. So we're a little tight on time here. So I know, Tony, you did send me a link of recommended texts. I will send that on to one of our Wiki editors to get it put up on our Wiki so our listeners can find it there. And Janet, if you want to send a list as well, you can also do that and I'll get it put up. Since we're almost out of time, we want Chris to ask our traditional final question, please.

C: What do the two of you individually think is the best Wolverine costume?

J: No, you're going to have to go first, Tony. I really have no idea.

B: I know Tony has an opinion on this.

T: I do. John Byrne's costume. John Byrne said, what kind of Wolverine is yellow and blue? And so he made one that's kind of orange and brown.

B: Okay.

T: That works.

B: That was Dan McClellan's answer.

C: So that's two votes for yellow and brown.

T: Yeah.

C: Brown and tan.

B: That's right. All right. All right, Janet, you have stalled. Now we need to know your answer.

J: I'm not really familiar with all of the options here. I remember the yellow guy because he was a cartoon on TV. Also, right? Yeah, I'm sorry. I really, I have no, I would need to do some research and look at some texts. That's fine. I did send you this question in advance. You had time to prepare.

B: All right, Chris, put her down as the yellow guy from cartoon.

C: Yellow guy from cartoon.

T: You can ask Janet. I know she's used Batman as an example. You could ask her who her favorite movie Batman is.

B: Okay. Favorite movie Batman.

J: I also don't have a favorite. I use it as a, is there a right answer to that question?

T: No.

C: I mean, there are several wrong answers to that question.

B: Some are more right than others.

J: I like Batman as an example. Although again, kids these days, you can't count on an 18 year old to be familiar with any of the things that they were familiar with 10 years ago, which makes sense. But I like Batman because there's like a different tone, you know, like a very different tone between the different Batmans. And that to me is a nice way of understanding the various tones in the various depictions of Jesus, yada, yada, yada.

C: That is the literal premise of this show.

B: Yes, that is very much the frame through which we explain the gospel. It was very similar, not Batman specifically, but we, anyway, we've reached the end of our time here. Thank you so much for being here with us before you say goodbye. Why don't you briefly tell our listeners where they can find you online, social media, website, whatever.

J: I'm sort of on Twitter. Not really. So don't probably look for me there. You know, my university has a website and my email address is on there. And so, yeah, no, I'm not present at all online, hopefully, although I think I am one of the few Janet Spittlers on earth. There's another one who is a massage therapist, maybe like 20 years older than I am. But if you use Google Janet Spittler, you will find my contact info, I'm sure.

B: Tony, I know you're online.

T: Yeah, on the Twitter. I'm on threads too, just kind of, I got on there just to piss off Elon Musk, but I'm not really playing around with it very much. Got the blog, Apocryphicity. We also have a Facebook page for NASCAL as well as the website for NASCAL. So you can certainly join and look at that. There is another Tony Burke who apparently, I think he's a politician in Australia. I'm not that guy. And that's it, I think.

B: All right. Thank you once more to our excellent guests, Tony Burke and Janet Spittler for taking the time to come and talk to us about NASCAL and about New Testament Apocrypha: More Non-canonical Scriptures, Volume 3. Thank you so much for coming on. It's a pleasure to talk to you voice to voice after years of Twitter conversations and emails. So thank you so much for coming on. Maybe you can rejoin us again someday, maybe when Volume 4 hits.

J: Sounds like a plan.

C: What a fun time we spend with people we have talked about on the show before.

B: Absolutely. I assume just a wonderful time had by all parties involved, us, them, the people listening, bystanders who felt unexpected benefits of auras, perhaps some kind of electromagnetic field bringing greater happiness, even to people who are not aware of the podcast and so on.

C: That's the twist. We're going to come out of the Multipalsseries and right into audio Reiki healing.

B: Yeah, exactly. People don't even know their auras will be healed like the ozone layer following the banning of CFCs.

C: It's always fun when someone's like, well, what happened to the hole in the ozone layer or what happened with Y2K? It's like, well, a lot of people worked really hard.

B: People worked really hard and there was a lot of government regulation on certain things. Anyway, hey.

C: Hey.

B: Thank you everyone for listening to the show. If you like this show, and I hope you do, I hope your aura has been healed. You can help us out and help us keep the show going by supporting us online. The number one best way to do that is by going to ko-fi.com slash apocrypals, K-O-F-I.com slash apocrypals. And you can leave donations one time or recurring in any amount that you would like. And thank you to everyone who has done that, especially a very recent Hundo Club member. Thank you very much for that. We appreciate it. We appreciate all of you. It is how we are able to keep the show going. It's how we're able to pay editorial deacon Lucas Brown. But if you can't help us financially, please feel free to find us online, spread the word. You can find us, we're in the various places. Actually, you know what? The best thing to do, go to the wiki, go to apocrypals.wiki. It'll have the link to all of our social media, including the link to the Discord invite. That's gotta be the easiest way because people are always like, how do I get to the Discord? Well, go to apocrypals.wiki. There's a link to all of our social medias, including our X profile.

C: No, no, no, no. I refuse.

B: Yeah.

C: I'm not calling it that and no one should call it that.

B: No, no one should call it that. Please don't. We haven't set up a Blue Sky account yet, but I actually just got a new invite and maybe I'll give it to myself to start an Apocrypals Blue Sky. We'll see.

C: I have a Blue Sky account, but don't go look for it because I didn't realize you can't make like a private account on Blue Sky. And look, everybody following me on Blue Sky is a treasure, absolute treasure, but I just don't, you know, I just don't want to. Not anymore.

B: Meanwhile, you can, you're more than welcome to follow me on Blue Sky, Benito Cereno at whatever the main one is, bluesky.social or whatever. I don't know. Benito Cereno, one word. You can find me. Please. Yeah. Leave us a rating and review.

C: I feel like the best argument for us doing this show weekly, like we did back when neither of us had a real job, is that when it takes us some time, we do forget how to intro and outro the show.

B: It's absolutely the case. Yep. Definitely that mouth muscle memory is not there anymore. It doesn't matter. People don't listen to this part of the show. I know it.

C: They should listen to this part of the show though. It's good.

B: There's often new and fresh jokes and compelling observations like the ones we're making right now.

C: I was thinking that we could do some bonus content.

B: Yeah.

C: But I don't know how to do that on the Ko-Fi. Like I know I'm doing it on Patreon because there's a lot of bonus content for the other podcast that I do that goes up there.

B: It is a thing we can do. Yep.

C: I think I kind of just want to do like bonus content that we somehow released to the discord.

B: Yeah.

C: Because I do think people deserve to hear from our lost episode, me talking about how I hate John Lennon for like 15 minutes while trying to get people to give me money.

B: Yeah. Unfortunate that there's a lot of good material in that lost episode unrelated to the text.

C: Yeah.

B: Alas, nothing can be done. Anyway, boy, totally lost the flow.

C: Hey Benito.

B: Hey Chris.

C: Before we get out of here, do you want to let people know that it is the most magical time of the year?

B: That's right. Approximate week is coming up.

C: Approximate week is probably now as you hear this

B: It's now, it will probably be happening now. And we do have plans. We will, at least for the sake of approximate week, be returning to our standard format and talking about a text with just, just the two of us. Like the song says, we can make it if we try just the two of us, the Didache and I. And oh yeah, thank you to Madison from the discord who sent very cool approximate week gift that I think I have Chris's as well. And I think I'm supposed to pass on to him, but right now I have them both. So otherwise Chris should probably, I'm guessing check his discord DMs more often. Cause I think other people are offering him gifts as well.

C: Oh wow. Yeah. I forget that it's on my computer because if I have it open, my anxiety means I will only look at it.

B: Yeah.

C: It's an endless source of stress in my life.

B: I do know the renegade dope dog, Brad has been trying to contact you about your car's extended warranty, AKA sending you a birthday gift. So you might hit him up anyway. Yeah. Hey, we're it's approximate week has come in or it's here or has passed or what. I don't know how fast Lucas is going to edit this, but next time we'll be back with the Didache standard format. We'll be talking about celebration of our own birth in the approximate week of time that occurred between them.

C: That's what we're going to be doing next time. But that brings multipalls number four to an end. We'll be back with something else very soon. I don't know if you know about the Didache folks, but it's a weighty text. There's it's pretty, pretty extreme how much we've been reading for that.

B: That's why it's taken so long.

C: That's why it's taken so long.

B: Yeah.

C: Also the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out. And look, I'm not sure that any force in this world could have made me do anything but play that video game.

B: Yeah. I mean, look, fair enough. Those light routes aren't going to light themselves.

C: Exactly. Thank you. See, you get it.

B: I get it.

C: You get it.

B: I get it.

C: See you next time, everybody. Until then, for being this arena, I've been Chris Sims. Don't forget Black Lives Matter.

B: Trans rights are human rights.

C: As are abortion rights.

B: Drag is not a crime.

C: And Cops? Well, they're not your friends.

B: But solidarity forever.

C: And ever. And Benito.

B: Yes, Chris.

C: Peace be with you.

B: And also with you!

[Music]