The Apocryphal New Testament (Hone 1820: Protevangelion, Infancy Gospels, Nicodemus, Paul & Thecla, Apostolic Fathers incl. Hermas)

The Gospel according to the Hebrews . The Gospel of the Ebionites The Gospel according to the Egyptians The Gospel of Philip . The Gospel or Traditions of Matthias . The Gospel of Peter (ancient testimonies) The Gospel of Thomas (ancient testimonies) . The Preaching of Peter .... The Birth of Mary ..... The Lesser Questions of Mary The Ascents of James and other lost books . The Memoria of the Apostles Lists of Apocryphal Books : The Gelasian Decree ..... FRAGMENTS OF GOSPELS, ETC., preserved in manu¬ scripts discovered in recent years : A. Greek Fragments s Fragment of a Gospel . . . . .28 B. Coptic Fragments : The Gospel of Thomas. Greek text A . . . .49 Greek text B . . . . . . . .55 Appendixes to the Gospel of Thomas. I. From the Pistis Sophia . . . . . . .66 II. Miracles of the Dyer, The Children in the Oven, Coptic Lives, &c., of the Virgin ..... 87 Discourse by Evodius ? . . . . . .87 Coptic Narratives of the Ministry and Passion: thirteen Other Appendixes to the Acts of Pilate • . .153 The Vengeance or Avenging of the Saviour . . .159

The Discourse of Theodosius . . . . .198 Greek Narrative, of John the Evangelist . • . 201 of John of Thessalonica ..... 209 of Joseph of Arimathaea ..... 216 Syriac Narratives. 1. The Six (Five) Books . . 219 2, 2 a. Fragmentary Narratives .... 222 8. The History of the Virgin ..... 222 4. Obsequies of the Virgin ..... 224 The Episode of Drusiana.242 Aristodemus : the Poison-cup .... 262 The Acts of Paul • The Episode of Panchares The Story of Thecla The Episode of Hermocrates of Myra The Episode of Sidon The Episode of Tyre The Episode of Frontina . The Correspondence with Corinth (Third Epistle Corinthians) .... The Fight with Beasts at Ephesus . The Prophecies of Cleobius and Myrte The Martyrdom .... Unplaced and Uncertain Fragments . The Acts of Peter .... The Coptic Fragment The Gardener’s Daughter The Vercelli Acts .... The Acts of Andrew .... The Miracles , by Gregory of Tours Detached fragments of the Acts • Fragment of Andrew’s discourse in prison The Martyrdom .... The Acts of Thomas .... i. The Sale, and the Wedding Feast ii. The Palace in Heaven Note by Professor Burkitt iii. The Serpent ....

iv. The Ass’s Colt v. The Devil and the Woman vi. The Youth that murdered the Woman vii. The Captain (Siphor) viii. The Wild Asses ix. Mygdonia the wife of Charisius . The Hymn of the Soul x. The Baptism of Mygdonia xi. Tertia the wife of Misdaeus • xii. Iuzanes the son of Misdaeus The Prayer of Thomas xiii. The Baptism of Iuzanes and the rest (xiv). The Martyrdom The Acts of Philip iv. The daughter of Nicocleides . . . . 442 v. At Nicatera ....... 443 vi. Ireus and Aristarchus ..... 444 vii. Nerkela and Ireus ...... 446 viii. The Leopard and the Kid ..... 446 ix. The Dragon slain ...... 447 xv. The Martyrdom ...... 448 The Acts of Andrew and Matthias (Matthew) . . . 453 Book I. Peter . Book II. Paul . Book III. Andrew . Book VI. (a) James the Less ..... 464 (b) Simon and Jude ..... 464 Acts of John by Prochorus : Syriac History of John Acts of Barnabas , of James the Great , of Thomas . Acts and Passions of Peter and Paul .... Acts of Thaddaeus , of disciples of the Apostles On the Oriental Acts, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic Acts of Andrew and Paul ..... Fragmentary story of Andrew ..... Slavonic Acts of Peter ......

The Letters of Christ and Abgarus .... The Letter of Lentulus ...... The Epistle to the Laodiceans ..... A fragment, perhaps of an Epistle .... The correspondence of Paul and Seneca The Epistle of the Apostles ..... The Apocalypse of Peter ...... A. Ancient Quotations ...... B. The Akhmim Fragment (or Fragment II of the Gospel of Peter) ...... C. The Bodleian Leaf ...... D. The Ethiopic Text ...... E. Appendix. The Sibylline Oracles II, 190-338 A. Text of Verona and Munich MSS. (Wilhelm) . 556 B. Text of Munich and Vienna MSS. (Bihlmeyer) . 559 It is a matter of common knowledge that there exist such things as Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Reve¬ lations—in fact apocryphal representatives of every one of the classes of writings which form the New Testament. Bible dictionaries, encyclopaedias, manuals, and text-books have made the fact familiar. Moreover, without much trouble it is possible for the less incurious to get hold of translations of a good many of these books. But I do not think I am speaking inaccurately when I say that there is at present no one book in existence which will supply the English reader—or for that matter any reader, of Latin, Greek, or Oriental languages—with a comprehensive view of all that is meant by the phrase, ‘ the apocryphal literature of the New Testament’.

The object of the present volume is to give that compre¬ hensive view. It contains fresh versions of all the really important texts, and full summaries, with extracts, of those which do not need to be translated word for word. Further, it attempts to put the reader in possession of the results of the very fruitful researches of the last generation. In those thirty years a great mass of material has been added to the available stock, and, what is not less important, there has been a sifting of what is early from what is late, and an order and chronology of the writings, which is not likely to be seriously disturbed, has been settled. From the historical and the literary point of view, then, it is worth while to present the apocryphal literature of the New Testament afresh; but it is also worth while from the religious point of view. People may still be heard to say, ‘After all, these Apocryphal Gospels and Acts, as you call them, are just as interesting as the old ones. It was only by accident or caprice that they were not put into the New Testament ’. The best answer to such loose talk has always been, and is now, to produce the writings and let them tell their own story. It will very quickly be seen that there is

no question of any one’s having excluded them from the New Testament: they have done that for themselves. Interesting as they are—and I will try to show later why they are interesting—they do not achieve either of the two principal purposes for which they were written, the instilling of true religion and the conveyance of true history. As religious books they were meant to reinforce the existing stock of Christian beliefs: either by revealing new doctrines —usually differing from those which held the field; or by interpreting old ones—again, usually in a fresh sense; or by extolling some special virtue, as chastity or temperance; or by enforcing belief in certain doctrines or events, e. g. the Virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, the second coming, the future state—by the production of evidence which, if true, should be irrefragable. For all these purposes the highest authority is claimed by the writings; they are the work, they tell us, of eyewitnesses of the events, or they report the utterances of the Lord himself. As books of history they aim at supplementing the scanty data (as they seemed) of the Gospels and Acts, and in this they resemble many of the Jewish Midrashim and apocrypha. Like these, they sometimes bear testimony to the currency of a tradition which has other and better evidence to support it, as when the Acts of John assume John’s residence at Ephesus, and the Acts of Peter and Paul the martyrdom of those apostles at Rome.

But, as I have said, they fail of their purpose. Among the prayers and discourses of the apostles in the spurious Acts some utterances may be found which are remarkable and even beautiful: not a few of the stories are notable and imaginative, and have been consecrated and made familiar to us by the genius of mediaeval artists. But the authors do not speak with the voices of Paul or of John, or with the quiet simplicity of the three first Gospels. It is not unfair to say that when they attempt the former tone, they are theatrical, and when they essay the latter, they are jejune. In short, the result of anything like an attentive study of the literature, in bulk and in detail, is an added respect for the sense of the Church Catholic, and for the wisdom of the scholars of Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome : assuredly in this case they were tried money-changers, who proved all things and held fast that which was good. Many a book, like the venerable Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Preaching of Peter, which we should dearly have liked to possess for the light they would throw on primitive Christian history, has perished as a consequence of their unfavourable verdict, and we regret the loss—no one more keenly than myself: but with the verdict that consigned them first to obscurity and then to destruction I cannot quarrel.

But, it may be said, if these writings are good neither as books of history, nor of religion, nor even as literature, why spend time and labour on giving them a vogue which on your own showing they do not deserve? Partly, of course, in order to enable others to form a judgement on them; but that is not the whole case. The truth is that they must not be regarded only from the point of view which they claim for themselves. In almost every other aspect they have a great and enduring interest. If they are not good sources of history in one sense, they are in another. They record the imaginations, hopes, and fears of the men who wrote them; they show what was acceptable to the unlearned Christians of the first ages, what interested them, what they admired, what ideals of conduct they cherished for this life, what they thought they would find in the next. As folk-lore and romance, again, they are precious ; and to the lover and student of mediaeval literature and art they reveal the source of no inconsiderable part of his material and the solution of many a puzzle. They have, indeed, exercised an influence (wholly disproportionate to their intrinsic merits) so great and so widespread, that no one who cares about the history of Christian thought and Christian art can possibly afford to neglect them.

The remainder of this Preface will be devoted to the explanation of several matters : the word apocryphal and my use of it: the misleading character of the last 4 Apocry¬ phal New Testament ’ and the fallacies which dominate it: the contents of the present one : and, lastly, some notice of the writings which are not included in it. First as to the title—the Apocryphal New Testament . The words apocrypha and apocryphal, particularly the latter, have come to mean, oftener than not, in common speech, that which is spurious or untrue. They do not mean that in themselves, nor did they in the minds of those who first applied them to books. They began by being terms of dignity and respect: they have degenerated into terms of something like abuse. An apocryphal book was—originally —one too sacred and secret to be in every one’s hands: it must be reserved for the initiate, the inner circle of believers. But, in order to enlist respect, such books were almost always issued under venerable names which they had no true right to bear. We hear of apocryphal books of Adam, Moses, and so forth. The pretence was that these had lately been brought to light, after ages of concealment by pious disciples. I do not intend to write a history of the gradual degradation of the words: I need only say that the falsity of the attributions was soon recognized: and so (to pass over three centuries of transition), in the parlance of Jerome, who has influenced posterity more than any one else in this matter, apocryphal means spurious, false, to be rejected and, probably, disliked.

The application of the word Apocrypha to that Appendix to the Old Testament which we have in our Bibles is a new departure, due to the reformers of the sixteenth century, and it is not consistent either with the original sense of the word or with Jerome’s usage of it, for that Appendix contains no books of secret lore (unless 2 Esdras be so reckoned), but several books which are not spurious, besides some that are. There is, then, some confusion here, and the existence of that confusion has led scholars in recent years to use the long word pseudepigraphic (= falsely entitled) when they wish to describe a really spurious book, as distinct from those contained in our ‘Apocrypha \ But, though all the writings in the present collection could be called pseudepigrapha, the old word apocrypha is good enough for my purpose, and I employ it here in the sense of false and spurious, even when I am dealing with writings which may contain ancient and truthful elements. This book, then, I call the Apocryphal New Testament . It is not the first of its name. Just over a hundred years ago, in 1820, an Apocryphal New Testament was issued by William Hone, best remembered as the author of the Every¬ day Book , the Year Book , the Table Book , Ancient Mysteries Explained.

Hone’s book has long held the field: it is constantly being reprinted, and it has enjoyed a popularity which is in truth far beyond its deserts. For it is a misleading and an un¬ original book. Misleading, because all its externals suggest that it is a supplement to the New Testament. Printed in double columns, with all the books divided into chapters and verses, with a summary prefixed to each chapter in italic type, with head-lines of the same character on every page, with an * Order of Books’ beginning ‘Mary hath Chapters 8’, it presents the familiar aspect of the English Bible to any one who opens it. Misleading, again, because about half the volume is occupied by the writings of the Apostolic Fathers—the Epistles of Clement of Rome, Barnabas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, and the Shepherd of Hermas— which are not apocryphal. Misleading also in a more serious way, because title-page and preface tell us that it contains the writings which were ‘not included in the New Testament by its compilers’ when it was first ‘collected into a volume’. Unoriginal, because the whole contents of the book except the prefaces are borrowed bodily from two books about a hundred years older than Hone’s. All the apocryphal writings are taken—I think without any acknowledgement —from Jeremiah Jones’s New and Full Method of Settling the Canonical Authority of the New Testament , published in 1736, while the version of the Apostolic Fathers is that of Archbishop Wake—whose footnotes, by the way, record¬ ing various readings of the manuscripts in Greek and Latin, have suffered sadly at the hands of Hone’s, and subse¬ quent, compositors.

It is, in fact, to speak frankly, a very bad book; and I should be justified in criticizing its composition and particularly its prefaces much more sharply than I do. Only I cannot forget that it was the first book on the New Testament Apocrypha which fell into my hands, and that it then exercised a fascination which has never lost its hold upon me. I feel, therefore, that if I could consign it to a more or less honourable grave by providing a better substitute for it, I should in some sort be paying a debt of gratitude and at the same time doing a service to the reading public. I have said, and I think proved, that Hone’s is a quite unoriginal book: I have also said that it is misleading in several ways, but this latter assertion I have not as yet sufficiently supported. In doing so, I shall attempt to present a truth as well as expose an error. The key-note of the book, the animus of it, comes out in the phrase which I have quoted from its title-page, and which speaks of writings ‘ not included in the New Testament by its compilers*. The words call up a picture of a number of men—probably bishops in mitres-^seated round a table piled with rolls and books. One pile is labelled ‘Gospels', another ‘Epistles’, and so on. The members of this com¬ mittee examine each volume with more or less care: most of them are put aside with gestures of disapproval. Finally a small selection is made, and entrusted to the chairman, who draws up a careful list of its contents, and subsequently, no doubt, hands it over to a publisher with a proper au¬ thorization. In due time the New Testament ‘collected into a volume* is disseminated throughout the Christian world. I really believe that something not very unlike this fable is fairly deducible from Hone’s prefaces.

The fallacy which dominates it is the notion that the writings which comprise our New Testament were ‘collected into a volume * at a given moment by a definite act of the authorities of the Church. Those who have read any modern elementary account of the formation of the Canon are aware that the processes of inclusion and exclusion were gradual: that by the end of the second century we find the Four Gospels in a secure position, and Irenaeus arguing from the analogy of nature that there could be no more and no fewer than four: that the Pauline Epistles are already formed into a collection: that the authority of the Acts is not doubted. Doubt, indeed, really attaches only to some of the lesser Epistles, and the Revelation: and the grounds of doubt are various, the Revelation, for instance, being disliked for its teaching about the millennium or its obscurity, and some of the minor Epistles failing to find recognition from their shortness and relative unimportance. Exceptional (within the Church) is the attitude of a party (so obscure is its history that we are not sure whether it was a group of people or a single writer) who in the second century rejected the Johannine writings in bulk.

The details of all this must be sought in professed histories of the Canon: only the most general statements can find a place here. The point is this, that when Hone or any one else speaks in terms which suggest that our New Testament is the result of a selection made by a council of the Church or any similar body, from among a number of competing books which might just as well have been included in it as not, he is very much astray. Yet, as is usually the case, there is a grain of truth under¬ lying the fallacy. There were a few books which attained a measure of recognition and eventually lost it. Let us say that the best external test of the canonicity of a writing is, whether or not it was read in the public worship of Christian congregations which were in communion with the generality of other Christian congregations. We know that there were such congregations, or churches, all over the ancient world, and that there were others which were not in communion with these, but could be labelled as adherents of some teacher whose doctrine differed from that of the majority—were he Marcion, Valentinus, Montanus, or any other.

Now what books do we find, outside those of the New Testament, which we can be sure were so used by what we will call normal or Catholic Christians? The best evidence we can get, apart from definite statements by early writers (of which there are not many), is that of our oldest manu¬ scripts of the complete Bible, made for public use. One of these, the Codex Sinaiticus, of the fourth century, adds to our books the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. Another, the Codex Alexandrinus, of the fifth century, adds the Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, and what is called his Second Epistle, which is really a sermon by another person unknown. We are definitely told that the First Epistle was read in many churches. Then (turning to some facts we gather from other sources) the ‘Muratorian fragment* (late in the second century?) tells us that the Revelation of Peter was received, not unanimously, at Rome: and a fifth-century Church historian, Sozomen, records that in his time it was read annually on Good Friday in some churches in Palestine. A manuscript at Constantinople, which perhaps was copied from a supplement to a large Bible, gives us, together with the Epistles of Clement, Barnabas, Ignatius, and

Polycarp, another writing called the Teaching (Didache) of the Apostles. This book Eusebius, in the fourth century, classes among those that were not certainly spurious or certainly canonical, but disputed. We cannot say that it was used publicly by any Church. A list of Biblical books in a sixth-century manuscript of the Epistles (Codex Claromontanus, Paris) includes among Biblical books, Barnabas, Hermas, the Revelation of Peter, and the Acts of Paul. But it is impossible to maintain that these Acts enjoyed a reputation equal to that of the other books . 1 So our list is a very short one. We may fairly say that the only books which had a real chance of being included in the Canon of the New Testament were the Epistles of Clement and Barnabas, the Revelation of Peter, and the Shepherd of Hermas; for I do not think we need reckon in the Didache or the Acts of Paul. And we may be thankful that the Church at large finally declared against them; for the first Epistle of Clement is the only one of them which we should have found tolerable now. There was, then, a serious claim for the recognition of four or five books. But when we have said this much, we have by no means exhausted the list of writings for which the same claim was made and was not so seriously entertained: books which in larger or smaller circles were placed on a level with those of our Canon, but were regarded by the Church at large as the Book of Mormon or the writings of Mrs.

Mary Baker G. Eddy are now. Outside the ranks of these, too, there is an immense crowd of smaller writings which claim, indeed, to supplement the Bible in one way or another, but of which it is difficult to say that any one was ever looked upon as ‘ Scripture \ Such are many of the lesser Passion-narratives, or again those of the Death of the Virgin. Documents of this land may be said to shade off gradually into the category of the Lives of the Saints.

Of all these classes is the present collection composed. A brief survey of the arrangement will make this clear. I have placed first the remains of the oldest books, mainly to use the Canonical Acts ; but it is an exception, and an eccentric one in itself—a book called the Supper of (pseudo-)Cyprian, a cento of Bible tags, made perhaps for use in schools. the Secondary Gospels, of none of which do we possess a com¬ plete text, and of one only, the Gospel of Peter, so much as a few pages. With these I have put a selection of the most important Agrapha (a rather clumsy name for the nonBiblical sayings of, and traditions about, our Lord). Notices of lost heretical books, and lists of apocrypha, are collected in the same section. These fragments are followed by the complete texts, among which what have been called Gospels come first: and first among them is a group of Infancy Gospels and stories of the birth of the Virgin. Two of them, the Book of James (or Protevangelium), and the Gospel of Thomas, are second-century books. The first we have with com¬ paratively slight alterations; the second has been drastically expurgated. The short prefatory notices prefixed to the several books give, I hope, enough details to guide the reader.

The later texts are summarized, not translated word for word. This plan I have adopted in order to avoid repetition, and to place the more important books in relief. The reader loses nothing by it, and is spared a vast deal of verbiage. Of the Ministry we have no apocryphal narratives, except some rather late Coptic fragments, which I have classed with the Passion stories. The Passion Gospels or narratives which are really important are two: the fragment of the Gospel of Peter, and the Acts of Pilate (Gospel of Nicodemus). The first is of the second century (about a. d. 150), the other of the fourth. There are old elements, perhaps, in the Report of Pilate. This, and the mass of later texts which deal with the Passion and Resurrection are, as before, summarized. To these I append what is now called the Gospel of Bartholomew, probably a late r&chauffi of a second-century book, a summary of a Coptic Book of Bartholomew, and a version of an heretical book attributed to John. Between Gospels and Acts I place the famous legend of the Death and Assumption of the Virgin, translating the two leading narratives, and summarizing the rest. I cannot regard any of the texts as older than the fourth century, but the nucleus of the story may be—I think must be— at least as old as the third.

Of the Acts it will be useful to say a little more here: The series was begun by the man who called himself Leucius —that being the name (traditional or invented) of a com¬ panion and disciple of St. John. ‘Leucius* writes the Acts of John not later than the middle of the second century, taking the Canonical Acts as his model, but infusing into his work more romantic elements. His presentation of the Person of our Lord, and his use of Gnostic terminology, cannot in my mind be reconciled with the view that he was an orthodox Christian. A generation later, a priest of Asia Minor writes the Acts of Paul, with the object of doing honour to the apostle. His authorship of the book is detected, his book is regarded as an imposture, and he is degraded from his office. So Tertullian tells us , 1 placing the event in his own time. This writer also takes St. Luke’s Acts for his model. There is little imitation of Leucius, but enough to show that he knew the Acts of John. Next, not later than a. d. 200, come the Acts of Peter: orthodox, as are those of Paul, but written by a very close imitator of Leucius. So servile, indeed, is his imitation, that I have tried before now to prove that he was Leucius. I am, however, no longer of that opinion. This author was an Asiatic, probably: at any rate he knew very little about Rome.

The Acts of Andrew and of Thomas both belong to the third century. It is contended (I must refer the reader to the notice prefixed to Thomas) that the latter were composed in Syriac. Imitation of Leucius is very apparent in both books; but while Andrew may be regarded at a pinch as orthodox, Thomas certainly oversteps the line. These five books were collected into a corpus , probably by the Manichaean sect. These, the disciples of Mani, who blended Christianity with the old Magian religion of Persia, teaching that the powers of Good and Evil were coeternal, and that the material world was of the Evil side, welcomed these books, in which asceticism is constantly Tertullian’s story, adds something to it (we know not on what authority), namely, the detail that the priest was convicted ‘in the presence of John’ (‘ apud Ioannem ’). This is not possible historically, but the words stand for something. My conjecture that we ought to read ‘at Iconium* (‘apud Iconium’) has met with some approval, and I believe it may be right. It certainly agrees with all else that we know of the provenance of these Acts. superexalted, and marriage condemned (at least by Leucius) as an institution of the devil. In the fourth century, the Manichaeans upheld these as the true Acts of the Apostles, and most likely rejected the Canonical Acts in their favour. Photius, the learned patriarch of Constantinople at the end of the ninth century, read all five books as the work of Leucius, whose name had by that time come to be attached to the whole. But it is to be kept in mind that though they all came to be lumped together as the work of one heretical author, they are by five different writers, and three out of the five are, speaking somewhat generously, orthodox.

They were followed by a host of legends of the apostles, of which enough is said in the body of this book. The Epistles are few. The famous correspondence of Christ with Abgarus is probably of the third century, the dull Epistle to the Laodiceans may be of the second, the letters of Paul and Seneca, equally poor, are not older than the fourth. But the Epistle of the Apostles, now first appearing in English, is dated by its editor at about a.d. 160, and the ‘Third Epistle to the Corinthians’ (which is part of the Acts of Paul) is also of that date. The Apocalypses are headed by that of Peter, which I would assign to the first quarter of the second century. It has distinct resemblances in language and in matter to the Second Epistle of Peter. For instance, that book alone among the canonical scriptures speaks of the destruc¬ tion of the world by fire; and this is prominent in the Apocalypse of Peter. For the first time, all the remains we have of this early book are brought together. The Apocalypse of Paul follows. Though only of the fourth century, it is extremely interesting as a direct descendant of Peter , and as the parent of innumerable later visions of the next world.

That of Thomas—of uncertain date—appears (in a very ragged guise, it is true) for the first time in English. For the Virgin’s Apocalypse and that of Stephen (a very doubt¬ ful item) summaries are enough. I have excluded, as not sufficiently interesting, the late Apocalypse of John which Tischendorf prints. In translating my texts I have employed a style meant to remind the reader of the Authorized Version of the Bible. In introducing them I have not attempted to record every mention of them which is to be found in Church writers. Where the date and character of a book is sufficiently established, it is not important to know that Augustine or even Eusebius names it. It is only when such writers tell us something that we do not learn from other sources that I quote them. And I have reduced the explanatory notes, the mention of previous editions, and the record of various readings, to an absolute minimum. In so doing I have followed the example set in Hennecke’s recent (1904) German collection of New Testament Apocrypha. The first volume of that excellent work contains only introduc¬ tions and texts: the notes on language, text, and inter¬ pretation fill a second volume as large as the first. But it is for the specialist that this second volume is meant: the first is intended for the general reader, and it is for him that my work also is designed.

Numerous as are the texts which appear here, the collec¬ tion is not an absolutely complete corpus of the apocryphal literature of the New Testament. Several whole groups of writings do not find a place in it: I hope, for sufficient reasons. Of these some notice must now be given. The first class of books which I have found it impossible to include is that of the Gnostic Apocrypha. We have a considerable mass of this literature, all in Coptic. As a rule it is safe to assume that the Coptic is a version from Greek : but in the case of some of these books it may possibly be the original language. The oldest of the extant Gnostic treatises have not yet been published. They are contained in a manuscript of the fifth century at Berlin, which is almost complete. The first of them is a Gospel of Mary, in which the risen Saviour instructs the apostles, and Mary then describes a vision in which she was shown the progress of the ‘gnostic’ (en¬ lightened) soul through the seven planetary spheres. The second is an apocryphon of John, which we know to be earlier than a. d. 180, since Irenaeus used it for his account of a particular school of Gnostics, in Book I, 29-31, of his refutation of heresies. It begins with a dialogue between John and a Pharisee, but quickly merges into Gnostic technicalities.

The third is a Wisdom of Jesus Christ: revelations made after the resurrection to the Twelve and to seven holy women, on a mountain in Galilee. The last thing in the manuscript is an episode from the Acts of Peter, which has been published and will be found in its proper place among the Acts. A manuscript, probably of the fifth century, in the British Museum, called Codex Askewianus from a former owner Askew, contains a bulky work, or works (for not all the treatises of which it is composed are of one date) known as the Pistis Sophia (Faith(ful) Wisdom) from the spiritual being of that name with whose progress through the universe it is largely concerned. This also is in the form of revelations given to the apostles and holy women after the resurrection. It is of the third century, has been more than once edited, and has been translated into English. A very mutilated papyrus manuscript in the Bodleian Library, brought from Egypt by the famous traveller Bruce, and called the Codex Brucianus, contains two Gnostic treatises. One is the Two Books of Jeu (a spiritual being), the other, which is older, has lost its title. These are somewhat earlier in date than the Pistis Sophia . The whole manuscript has been finely edited by C. Schmidt.

While the Pistis Sophia is just readable, the Books of Jeft are not. The revelations they contain are conveyed in mystic diagrams, and numbers, and meaningless collections of letters, and it requires a vast deal of historical imagination and sympathy to put oneself in the place of anybody who could tolerate, let alone reverence, the dreary stuff. A second large group of books omitted here consists of those which deal with Church order and with liturgy. The earliest of these is the Teaching of the Apostles or Didache already mentioned, discovered about forty years ago and repeatedly edited and translated since. Ultimately this short book was incorporated into a large work, the Apostolic Constitutions , in eight books, compiled by an Arian of Palestine in the fourth century. These eight books are compounded, with additions, out of the Didascalia (extant in Syriac and partly in Latin, and of the third century), which underlie Books I-VI of the Constitutions : the Didache and other early material (Book VII): the Church Order of Hippolytus, and additions by the compiler (Book VIII). With these eight books should be reckoned the Canons of the Apostles , in the form of a code of rules.

All these books are occupied with prescribing rules for Church government, and for the order of divine service; and books of the same kind, purporting to emanate from the apostles and (very usually) to be recorded by Clement, were current all over Eastern Christendom: we have them in Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic. One, called the Apostolic Church Order , is couched in a series of speeches each pro¬ nounced by an apostle. This we have in Greek. Another notable member of the group is the Testament of the Lord (Syriac) which is a fairly recent discovery. It differs from the rest in beginning with an apocalyptic portion—a prophecy uttered by Christ—part of which is embodied in another Testament of the Lord which is prefixed, in the Ethiopic version, to the Epistle of the Apostles. The attribution of many of these books to the Lord or the apostles is a very transparent fiction: one hardly knows how seriously the writers themselves expected or wished it to be taken. The same is true of the numerous Liturgies (i. e. Communion offices) which are current under the names of apostles. A third group is known as the Clementine literature. We have, in Greek, Latin, and Syriac, a work in two forms. The setting is derived from secular romance; it is the ancient theme of the members of a family parted from one another by a series of accidents for many years, and in the end reunited: in this case it is Clement’s family. His parents, his brothers, and himself are brought together by the agency of St. Peter. This setting is filled in, and indeed completely overlaid, by the matter which conveys the real purpose of the book, namely, the discourses of Peter; partly his debates with Simon Magus, and partly his unopposed expositions of doctrine.

The body of doctrine thus set forth is not orthodox. It is, in fact, eccentric. At one time it was contended that these books were precious monuments of a condition of the Church in primitive times, when the Twelve were in op¬ position to Paul; it being doubtless the case that Simon Magus in these books is to some extent Paul under a mask. But it is now recognized that the books are not only rather late in date (not earlier than the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century), but also that they do not represent the views of a large school of thought, but of a small and obscure sect. The Greek form of the romance consists of twenty socalled Homilies—the Clementine Homilies, The Latin is a version of another form, expurgated and translated by Rufinus in the fourth century. It is in ten books, and is called the Clementine Recognitions, The Syriac, never yet translated, mingles the two forms together. There are Epitomes and other off-shoots of this literature much later in date, which need not detain us. But with this same Clement’s name are associated certain Revelations made to him by Peter which deserve a passing notice. Of these, again, there are several forms, extant in Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopia, and not yet discriminated nor edited fully. Some of them treat of the whole history of the world from its creation to its end, with prophecies of such late events as the rise and progress of Islam. In one of the Ethiopic recensions the old Apocalypse of Peter was found embedded. Others are wholly devoted to ordinances for Church government.

A fourth group should perhaps just be mentioned, the works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul’s Athenian convert. They consist of treatises on mystical theology, and letters: there is also a long Epistle to Timothy on the deaths of Peter and Paul. None of these are older than the fifth century. The theological treatises have had a great influence on Christian speculation: but they need a great deal of exposition by a specialist to make them intelligible. Mention of a good many later books will be found under various heads in the body of this work. The names of a few which have escaped other notice may be given here. There are Lives of St. John Baptist, by Mark, and by a supposed disciple, Eurippus, which have been edited by F. Nau in the Patrologia Orientalis with a French version. An account of the death of Zacharias, and his being raised in order to be baptized by Christ, along with John, exists in Slavonic, and was translated by Berendts ( Zacharias - Apokryphen), I have summarized it in my Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament, A document called the ‘Priesthood of Jesus’ is given by the twelfth-century lexicographer Suidas, s. v. Jesus . It

was rendered into Latin by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, in the thirteenth century. It is a late production, telling how Jesus was appointed to fill a vacancy in the priest¬ hood; how his pedigree had to be investigated, and how the Virgin was summoned (Joseph being dead) and gave an account of the Conception. All this purports to be taken from the Jewish archives. A long book, a discussion of Christianity at the Persian court, contains a narrative of signs and wonders which took place in a Persian temple at the birth of Christ, and started the Magi on their journey. It was last edited by Bratke in Texte und Untersuchungen. A Dispute between Christ and the Devil exists in Greek. Vassiliev prints two forms of it in his Anecdota Graeco - Byzantina. It has some slight affinities with the Gospel of Bartholomew, but it is very late and not very interesting. A Revelation of Lazarus describing the torments of Hell is perhaps the latest of the apocryphal Apocalypses. I have only seen it in Old French. It occurs in the ‘Calendrier des Bergers ’, is described by Nisard in his Histoire de la litUrature populaire , and is also to be found, illustrated by paintings of the early part of the sixteenth century, at the west end of the cathedral of Albi.

All Rabbinic and Mohammedan traditions about Jesus are excluded: among the latter is the very lengthy Gospel of Barnabas (well edited by Canon Ragg in 1907) which is a forgery of the fifteenth century at earliest, written in Italian by a renegade from Christianity to Islam. It is, I hope, obvious that I ought not to have included in an apocryphal New Testament the Christian or Christian¬ ized books which bear the names of Old Testament worthies; but I shall be right in recording that there are such books: notably the Vision (perhaps the whole book known as the Ascension) of Isaiah ; the two first (and two last) chapters of 4 Esdras (2 Esdras of our Apocrypha); the Apocalypses of Elijah , Daniel, and Zephaniah : two books of Baruch : an Apocalypse of Esdras edited by Tischendorf, and another, in Latin, printed by Mercati: the Apocalypse of Sedrach : probably the lost apocryphal Ezekiel : the Testaments of Abraham , Isaac , Jacob , and Job : and not a few more. Under this heading, too, may be placed many portions of the Sibylline Oracles and the lost Prophecy of Hystaspes. Again I may refer readers to my Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament .

I have not even now enumerated all the writings, printed and unprinted, fragmentary or complete, which might be considered by some one to have a claim to appear in an Apocryphal New Testament. I have rather aimed at showing what manner of books those are which I have set aside, and at suggesting the reasons why they do not figure in this volume. I am greatly indebted to Professor C. H. Turner, F.B.A., who has been so good as to read through the proofs of this book, and to call my attention to a number of doubtful points : he must not be held responsible for the errors which survive. To the Bishop of Ripon, who last year suggested to me the desirability of providing a substitute for Hone’s Apocry¬ phal New Testament , and who has also read through many of the sheets, my cordial thanks are likewise offered ; and to Professor F. C. Burkitt, D.D., F.B.A., for his valuable note on a passage of the Acts of Thomas. 1 1 See p. 378. In this impression two Appendixes have been added by Dr. J. W. B. Barns in which are translated (1) the text published by [Sir] Harold Idris Bell and T. C. Skeat in Frag¬ ments of an Unknown Gospel and in The New Gospel Fragments (both 1935), and (2) some new portions of the Acts of Paul of which the most important is the Hamburg Greek papyrus edited by Schmidt and Schubart as TIPASEIU TIAYAOY (1936).

Bonwetsch, N. Die apokryphen Fragen des Bartholomaus. Gottinger Nachr., Philos.-Philol. Kl. 1897. (Greek and Slavonic). Wilmart, Dom A., and Tisserant, E. Fragments grecs et latins de l’Evangile de Barth61emy. Revue Biblique, 1913. Moricca, U. Un nuovo testo dell* Evangelo di Bartolommeo. (Tbs complete Latin version.) Ibid. 1921-2. Both in Texte und Untersuchungen. Robinson, Forbes. Coptic Apocryphal Gospels. Cambridge, 1896. In Texts and Studies. Revillout, E. Apocryphes coptes. In Patrologia Orientalis, Graffin and Nau. II. fasc. 2, IX. fasc. 2. Lacau, P. Fragments d’Apocryphes coptes. M£m. de l’lnst. Arch^ol. du Caire. 1904. Budge, Sir E. A. Wallis. Coptic Apocrypha. British Museum, 1913, 1914, 1915. (Containing the Book of Bartholomew, Apoc. of Paul, &c.)

Dobschutz, E. von. Christusbilder, 1899. (Texte u. Untersuchungen.) ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN (Tischendorf, C. Apocalypses Apocr., above.) Wright, W. Contributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the N.T 1865. Lewis, Mrs. A. S. Apocrypha Arabica. (Studia Sinaitica XI.) Cambridge, 1902. Budge, Sir E. A. W. History of the B.V.M., &c. 1899. In Luzac’s Semitic Text and Transl. Series. Lipsius, R. A. Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten, 1883. Supple¬ ment, 1890. (4 vols.) Studies of the literature. (Tischendorf, C. Acta Apost. Apocr., 1851, is superseded by) Lipsius, R. A., and Bonnet, Max. Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha. I. Peter, Paul and Thecla, Thaddaeus. 1891. II. 1. (Bonnet.) Andrew, Bartholomew, John, Matthew. 1898. II. 2. Philip, Thomas, Barnabas. 1903. Zahn, Th. Acta Joannis. Erlangen, 1880. (The complete text of Prochorus.) Schmidt, C. Acta Pauli. 1904. The Coptic text, &c. - Die alten Petrusakten. 1903. In Texte und Untersuchungen. Has the Coptic fragment, and an important study of the whole subject. -and Schubart, W. IJPASEIZ TIAYAOY. 1936. New portions of the Vouaux, L. Les Actes de Paul et ses lettres apocryphes. 1913. - Les Actes de Pierre. 1922. Both in Les Apocryphes du N. T. Flamion, J. Les Actes apocryphes de PApdtre Andr£. Louvain, 1911. A study of these Acts.

Wright, W. Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (Syriac). 2 vols. Text and translation. 1871. Budge, Sir E. A. W. Contendings of the Apostles (Ethiopic). 2 vols. Text and translation. 1901. Lewis, Mrs. A. S. The Mythological Acts of the Apostles (Arabic). Horae Semiticae IV. Cambridge, 1904. Dobschutz, E. von. Christusbilder, 1899. (Above,) Vouaux, L. Actes de Paul, above . Guerrier, L. Testament de N.-S. en Galilee. (Epistle of the Apostles, Ethiopic.) In Patrologia Orientalis IX, fasc. 3. 1913. Schmidt, C. Gesprache Jesu mit seinen Jungern, &c. (Epistle of the Apostles.) In Texte u. Unters. 1919. James, M. R. A new text of the Apocalypse of Peter. Journal of Theol. Studies, 1910-11. - Apocrypha Anecdota I (Texts and Studies). Cambridge, 1893. (Apoc. of Paul, Latin, and of the Virgin.) Schmidt, C. Koptisch-gnostische Schriften I. (Pistis Sophia, Books of Jed.) 1905. Schwartze and Petermann’s earlier edition of the Pistis Sophia has a Latin version. The Teaching of the Apostles (Didache), ed. Harnack 1886, Funk 1887, &c. The Apostolic Church Order. Ed. Bickell, Geschichte des Kirchenrechts, 1843. The Didascalia. Bunsen, Analecta Ante-Nicaena. 1854. - Gibson, Mrs. Horae Semiticae I. 1903. - Hauler, E. Fragmenta Veronensia. 1900. The Apostolic Constitutions. Ed. F. X. Funk, 1905.

The Testament of our Lord. Cooper and Maclean, 1902. Clementine Literature. Homilies. Lagarde, 1865. - Recognitions. Gersdorf, 1838. English translations of some of the above will be found in T. & T. Clark’s Ante-Nicene Christian Library. Lives of John Baptist. Ed. F, Nau. Patrologia Orientalis IV, fasc. 5. Gospel of Barnabas. Ed. L. and L. Ragg. Oxford, 1907* Sibylline Oracles. J. Geffcken. Berlin, 1902.

This is on a different level from all the other books we have to deal with. It was a divergent yet not heretical form of our Gospel according to St. Matthew. Even to sketch the controversies which have raged about it is impracticable here. What may be regarded as established is that it existed in either Hebrew or Aramaic, and was used by a Jewish Christian sect who were known as Nazaraeans (Nazarenes), and that it resembled our Matthew closely enough to have been regarded as the original Hebrew of that Gospel. I believe few, if any, would now contend that it was that original. It is generally, and I believe rightly, looked upon as a secondary document. What was the extent of the additions to or omissions from Matthew we do not know: but two considerations must be mentioned bearing on this: (1) The Stichometry of Nicephorus assigns it 2,200 lines, 300 less than Matthew . This figure, if correct, means that a good deal was left out. (2) If the Oxyrhynchus Sayings (see post) are really, as competent scholars think, extracts from it, we must suppose a large quantity of additional matter: for we have but two rather brief fragments of that collection of sayings, and eight out of thirteen sayings are either not represented in the canonical text, or differ widely therefrom.

Jerome, who is our chief source of knowledge about this Gospel, says that he had made a Greek and a Latin version of it. The state¬ ment is wholly rejected by some, and by others thought to be an exaggeration. It is very difficult to accept it as it stands. Perhaps, as Lagrange suggests, the truth may be that Jerome took notes of the text in Greek and Latin. Schmidtke, it should be added, has tried to show that all Jerome’s quotations from it are borrowed from an earlier writer, Apollinaris; but there is no positive evidence for this. If the Oxyrhynchus Sayings do come from Hebrews , they seem to imply the existence of a Greek version before Jerome’s time. This is also implied by the entry in the Stichometry. I will translate the fragments as they appear in the most recent study on the subject, that of the Rev. P£re Lagrange in the Revue Biblique, 1922. He begins by giving the fragments quoted by Epiphanius from what is properly called the Gospel of the Ebionites. Then he gives those of our Gospel, arranging them in the chronological order of the writers and the works in which they are found. This entails some little repeti¬ tion, but is otherwise historically interesting, and sound.

Irenaeus against Heresies , i. 26. 2. But the Ebionites use only that Gospel which is according to Matthew, and repudiate the Apostle Paul, calling him an apostate from the Law. iii. 11. 7. For the Ebionites, who use only that Gospel which is according to Matthew, are convicted out of that very book as not holding right views about the Lord. The Ebionites mentioned here are a more primitive sect than those of whom Epiphanius speaks. See below. Clement of Alexandria ( Stromateis ), i. 9. 45. Even (or also) in the Gospel according to the Hebrews is written the saying , ‘he that wondereth shall reign, and he that reigneth shall rest’. id. (Strom.) v. 14. 96. For those words have the same force as these: He shall not cease from seeking until he find, and having found, he will be amazed, and having been amazed will reign, and having reigned will rest. This is identical with one of the Sayings from Oxyrhynchus: see below. Origen on John , ii. 12. And if any accept the Gospel according to the Hebrews, where the Saviour himself saith, ‘Even now did my mother the Holy Spirit take me by one of mine hairs, and carried me away unto the great mountain Thabor’, he will be perplexed, &c. . . .

On Jeremiah , homily xv. 4. And if any one receive that saying , ‘Even now my mother the Holy Spirit took me and carried me up unto the great mountain Thabor*, and the rest.. .. The description of the Holy Spirit as ‘my mother’ is due to the fact that the Hebrew word for spirit is of the feminine gender. The saying, it is generally thought, refers to the Temptation. Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. iii. 39. 17, speaking of the early writer Papias, says : He has also set forth (or expounded) another story, about a woman accused of many sins before the Lord, which the Gospel according to the Hebrews also contains. It is the obvious, and general, view that this story was that of the woman taken in adultery, which, as is well known, forms no part of the true text of St. John’s Gospel, though it is inserted by most manu¬ scripts at the beginning of the eighth chapter. A few manuscripts place it in St. Luke’s Gospel. The description suggests that Papias’s story, with its mention of many sins, differed from ours in detail. id. iv. 22. 8. Hegesippus made use in his Memoirs of the Gospel according to the Hebrews.

id. iii. 25. 5 (in his list of antilegomena , writings whose canonicity was disputed): And among them some have placed the Gospel according to the Hebrews which is the especial delight of those of the Hebrews who have accepted Christ. iii. 27. 4. (The Ebionites repudiated Paul) and used only the Gospel called according to the Hebrews, making but slight account of the others. Theophany, iv. 12 (preserved in Syriac). As we have found somewhere in the Gospel which the Jews have in the Hebrew tongue, where it is said: I choose for myself them that are good (or well pleasing) s the good are they whom my Father which in heaven giveth (or hath given) me. ibid. (A passage preserved in Greek also.) But since the Gospel written m Hebrew characters which has reached our hands turns the threat not against the man who hid the talent, but against him who had lived riotously (for it told of three servants, one who devoured his master’s substance with harlots and flute-girls, another who multiplied it by trading, and another who hid the talent; and made the one to be accepted, another only rebuked, and another to be shut up in prison), the question occurs to me whether in Matthew, after the conclusion of the speech against the man who did nothing, the threat that follows may refer, not to him, but by epanalepsis (i. e. taking up a former subject again) be said of the first, who ate and drank with the drunken.

Epiphanius, Heresy xxix. 9. 4 (Nazoraeans). They have the Gospel according to Matthew quite complete, in Hebrew: for this Gospel is certainly still preserved among them as it was first written, in Hebrew letters. I do not know if they have even removed the genealogy from Abraham to Christ. Their Gospel was ‘quite complete’ as distinguished from the Ebionite Gospel, which was mutilated. Stichometry of Nicephorus (of uncertain date, but much older than the ninth-century chronicle to which it is attached). Antilegomena of the New Testament: Apocalypse of John, Apocalypse of Peter, Epistle of Barnabas, and Gospel according to the Hebrews, 2,200 lines (300 lines less than the canonical Matthew). Jerome. He is our principal authority in this matter. On Ephesians, v. 4. As also we read in the Hebrew Gospel: ‘And never, saith he, be ye joyful, save when ye behold your brother with love.’ On Micah , vii. 6. (The quotation about the Holy Spirit given above under Origen. Jerome quotes it again several times, not always in full.) Of illustrious men, 2 (on James the Lord’s brother). Also the Gospel called according to the Hebrews, lately trans¬ lated by me into Greek and Latm speech, which Origen often uses, tells, after the resurrection of the Saviour: ‘Now the Lord, when he had given the linen cloth unto the servant of the priest, went unto James and appeared to him (for James had sworn that he would not eat bread from that hour wherein he had drunk the Lord’s cup until he should see him risen again from among them that sleep) ’, and again after a little, ‘ Bring ye, saith the Lord, a table and bread’, and immediately it is added, ‘He took bread

and blessed and brake and gave it unto James the Just and said unto him: My brother, eat thy bread, for the Son of Man is risen from among them that sleep ’. This is a famous passage. One interesting clause is apt to escape notice, about the giving of the shroud to the servant of the (high) priest, which implies that the priests must have been apprised of the resurrection as soon as the apostles. Was the servant of the priest Malchus ? Presumably the servant was at the sepulchre : if so, it was being guarded by the Jews as well as the Roman soldiers (as in the Gospel of Peter). ibid . 3. Further, the Hebrew itself (or original) is preserved to this day in the library at Caesarea which was collected with such care by the martyr Pamphilus. I also had an opportunity of copying it afforded me by the Nazarenes who use the book, at Beroea, a city of Syria. This Beroea is Aleppo. In later years Jerome ceased to regard this Hebrew Gospel as the original Matthew. ibid . 16. Of the Epistle of Ignatius ‘to Poly carp’ (really to Smyrna). In it he also inserts a testimony about the person of Christ, from the Gospel which was lately translated by me; his words are: But I both saw him (this is wrongly quoted) in the flesh after the resurrection, and believe that he is in the flesh : and when he came to Peter and those who were with Peter, he said to them: Lo, feel me and see that I am not a bodiless spirit (demon). And forthwith they touched him and believed.

Ignatius, to the Smyrnaeans, iii. 1, really says: For I know, and I believe that he is in the flesh even after his resurrection. Another citation of these words of Christ is given by Origen as from the Doctrine of Peter: see p. 18. On Matt . ii. Bethlehem of Judaea. This is a mistake of the scribes: for I think it was originally expressed by the Evangelist as we read in the Hebrew, ‘of Judah’, not Judaea. On Matt . vi. 11 (the Lord’s prayer). In the Gospel called according to the Hebrews for ‘supersubstantial’ bread I found mahar , which means ‘of the morrow’, so that the sense is: Our bread of the morrow, that is, of the future, give us this day. The word supersubstantial is meant to render literally the difficult word epiousios which we translate ‘daily’. On Ps. cxxxv. In the Hebrew Gospel according to Matthew it is thus: Our bread of the morrow give us this day; that is, ‘the bread which thou wilt give us in thy kingdom, give us this day’. On Matt. xii. 13. In the Gospel which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use (which I have lately translated into Greek from the Hebrew, and which is called by many (or most) people the original of Matthew), this man who has the withered hand is

described as a mason, who prays for help in such words as these: ‘I was a mason seeking a livelihood with my hands: I pray thee, Jesu, to restore me mine health, that I may not beg meanly for my food.’ The mention of the Ebionites here is gratuitous. Jerome nowhere else speaks of them as using the Gospel, and everything goes to show that, in his time, they did not. Letter to Damasus (20) on Matt. xxi. 9. Matthew, who wrote his Gospel in the Hebrew speech, put it thus: Osanna barrama, i. e. Osanna in the highest. On Matt, xxiii. 35. In the Gospel which the Nazarenes use, for ‘son of Barachias’ I find ‘of Joiada’ written. This reading avoids an historical difficulty, and is doubtless secondary. On Matt, xxvii. 16. This Bar abbas, in the Gospel entitled (written) according to the Hebrews, is interpreted ‘son of their master’ (teacher). By ‘interpreted*, says Lagrange, it is not meant that the Gospel translated the name, but that it used a form of it which suggested the meaning—Bar-rabban. On Matt, xxvii. 51. In the Gospel I so often mention we read that a lintel of the temple of immense size was broken and divided.

Letter to Hedibia (ep. 120) 8. But in the Gospel that is written in Hebrew letters we read, not that the veil of the temple was rent, but that a lintel of the temple of wondrous size fell. This was probably a change made under the influence of Isa. vi. 4, ‘the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried*. On Isa. xi. 2. (The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him) not partially as in the case of other holy men: but, according to the Gospel written in the Hebrew speech, which the Nazarenes read, ‘There shall descend upon him the whole fount of the Holy Spirit’. ... In the Gospel I mentioned above, I find this written: And it came to pass when the Lord was come up out of the water, the whole fount of the Holy Spirit descended and rested upon him, and said unto him: My son, in all the prophets was I waiting for thee that thou shouldst come, and I might rest in thee. For thou art my rest, thou art my first begotten son, that reignest for ever. On Isa. xi. 9, My mother the Holy Spirit.

On Isa., preface to bk. xviii. For when the Apostles thought him to be a spirit, or, in the words of the Gospel which is of the Hebrews which the Nazarenes are wont to read, ‘a bodiless demon’, he said to them (Luke xxiv. 38). On Ezek. xvi. 13. My mother, the Holy Spirit. On Ezek. xviii. 7. And in the Gospel according to the Hebrews which the Nazarenes are accustomed to read, it is placed among the greatest sins ‘if a man have grieved the spirit of his brother’. Dialogue against Pelagius , iii. 2. In the Gospel according to the Hebrews which is indeed in the Chaldaean and Syrian speech but is written in Hebrew letters, which theNazarenes use tothisday, called ‘according to the apostles’, or, as most term it, ‘accord¬ ing to Matthew ’, which also is to be seen in the library of Caesarea, the story tells: Behold, the mother of the Lord and his brethren said unto him: John Baptist baptizeth unto the remission of sins; let us go and be baptized of him. But he said unto them: Wherein (what) have I sinned, that I should go and be baptized of him ? unless peradventure this very thing that I have said is a sin of ignorance.

ibid . And in the same book: If thy brother (saith he) have sinned by a word and made thee amends, seven times in a day receive thou him. Simon his disciple said unto him: Seven times in a day? The Lord answered and said unto him: Yea, I say unto thee, unto seventy times seven times. For in the prophets also, after they were anointed by the Holy Spirit, the word of sin was found. ‘Word of sin’ is Hebraistic for ‘somewhat of sin’: similarly ‘sinned by a word’ means ‘sinned in anything’. Latin version of Origen on Matthew (now called Pseudo-Origen). It is written in a certain Gospel which is called according to the Hebrews (if at least any one care to accept it, not as authori¬ tative, but to throw light on the question before us): The second of the rich men (it saith) said unto him: Master, what good thing can I do and live? He said unto him: O man, fulfil (do) the law and the prophets. He answered him: I have kept them. He said unto him: Go, sell all that thou ownest, and distribute it unto the poor, and come, follow me. But the rich man began to scratch his head, and it pleased him not. And the Lord said unto him: How sayest thou: I have kept the law and the prophets? For it is written in the law: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, and lo, many of thy brethren, sons of Abraham, are clad in filth, dying for hunger, and thine house is full of many good things, and nought at all goeth out of it unto them.

And he turned and said unto Simon his disciple who was sitting by him: Simon, son of Joanna, it is easier for a camel to enter in by a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. It is probable that this extract was found by the translator of Origen’s commentary in some work of Jerome. It seems to be agreed that it was not in Origen’s own commentary. Some manuscripts of the Gospels have marginal notes recording readings of ‘the Jewish’ Gospel, by which our Gospel is evidently meant. Some of these were published by Tischendorf, others more recently by Schmidtke. According to the latter these notes were originally made between 370 and 500 by some one who did his work at Jerusalem. Matt. iv. 5. The Jewish copy has not ‘ unto the holy city ’ but ‘in Jerusalem’. Matt. v. 22. The word ‘without cause’ is not inserted in some copies, nor in the Jewish. Matt. vii. 5. The Jewish has here: If ye be in my bosom and do not the will of my Father which is in heaven, out of my bosom will I cast you away. (The ‘Second Epistle of Clement’, iv. 5, has: The Lord said: If ye be with me gathered together in my bosom and do not my commandments, I will cast you away and say unto you: Depart from me; I know you not whence ye are, ye workers of wickedness.)

Matt. x. 16. The Jewish has ‘(wise) more than serpents’ instead of ‘as serpents’. Matt. xi. 12. (The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence.) The Jewish has: ‘is ravished (or plundered).’ Matt. xi. 25. (I thank thee (lit. confess unto thee), O Father.) The Jewish: ‘I give thee thanks.’ Matt. xii. 40 b . The Jewish has not: three days and three nights (in the heart of the earth). Matt. xv. 5. The Jewish: Corban by which ye shall be profited by us. Probably it is meant that the verse ran : But ye say to your father and mother: Corban, &c. Matt. xvi. 2, 3. Omitted by ‘the Jewish’ (as by many extant manuscripts). Matt. xvi. 17. The Jewish: (Simon) son of John. Matt, xviii. 22. The Jewish has, immediately after the seventy times seven: For in the prophets, after they were anointed with the Holy Spirit, there was found in them a word (matter) of sin. This shows the identity of ‘the Jewish’ with Jerome’s gospel. Matt. xxvi. 74. The Jewish: and he denied and swore and cursed. Matt, xxvii. 65. The Jewish: And he delivered unto them armed men, that they might sit over against the cave and keep it day and night. _

A commentary on Isaiah (liii. 12) by Haimo of Auxerre (c. 850) has this apropos of the word ‘Father forgive them’: For, as is contained in the Gospel of the Nazarenes, at this word of the Lord many thousands of Jews that stood round about the Cross believed. A marginal note (thirteenth century) on a copy of the versified Bible called the Aurora (by Petrus de Riga), in a manuscript at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (one of a number of remarkable notes) is: At the cleansing of the Temple : In the books of the Gospels which the Nazarenes use it is read that rays issued from his eyes whereby they were terrified and put to flight. Jerome on Matt . xxi. 12 says that the people whom Jesus drove out did not resist him: ‘For a certain fiery and starry light shone (radiated) from his eyes and the majesty of Godhead gleamed in his face.’ When I published the note, I took it that it was a reminiscence of Jerome’s words: ray and radiate occur in both. But Dr. Zahn was of opinion that it might really represent something in the old Gospel: so I include it, though with hesitation.

One other mention of this Gospel has to be added. In Budge’s Miscellaneous Coptic Texts is a Discourse on Mary by Cyril of Jerusalem. Cyril (Pseudo-Cyril) relates that he had to send for a monk of Maioma of Gaza who was teaching false doctrine. Called on for an account of his belief the monk (p.637, Eng. trans.) said: It is written in the Gospel to the Hebrews that when Christ wished to come upon the earth to men, the Good Father called a mighty power in the heavens which was called Michael, and committed Christ to the care thereof. And the power came down into the world and it was called Mary, and Christ was in her womb seven months. Afterwards she gave birth to him, and he increased in stature, and he chose the apostles,... 4 was crucified, and taken up by the Father ’. Cyril asked: Where in the Four Gospels is it said that the holy Virgin Mary the mother of God is a force? The monk said: In the Gospel to the Hebrews. Then, said Cyril, there are five Gospels? Where is the fifth? The monk said: It is the Gospel that was written to the Hebrews. (Cyril convinced him of his error and burned the books. No more is told of the Gospel, which, whatever it may have been, was certainly not the book we have been dealing with, but a writing of pronouncedly heretical (Docetic?) views. The last sentence of the monk’s account of Christ, which I did not quote in full just now, is perhaps worth recording.) ‘After they had raised him up on the cross, the Father took him up into heaven unto himself.’ This, with its omission of all mention of the resurrection, might be construed as heretical: on the other hand, it may be merely a case of extreme compression of the narrative.

All our knowledge of this is derived from Epiphanius, and he uses very confusing language about it (as about many other things). The passages are as follows : all occur in his work against Heresies—no. xxx. And they (the Ebionites) receive the Gospel according to Matthew. For this they too, like the followers of Cerinthus and Merinthus, use to the exclusion of others. And they call it according to the Hebrews, as the truth is, that Matthew alone of New Testament writers made his exposition and preaching of the Gospel in Hebrew and in Hebrew letters. Epiphanius goes on to say that he had heard of Hebrew versions of John and Acts kept privately in the treasuries (Geniza ?) at Tiberias, and continues : In the Gospel they have, called according to Matthew, but not wholly complete, but falsified and mutilated (they call it the Hebrew Gospel ), it is contained that ‘There was a certain man named Jesus, and he was about thirty years old, who chose us. And coming unto Capernaum he entered into the house of Simon who was surnamed Peter, and opened his mouth and said: As I passed by the lake of Tiberias, I chose John and James the sons of Zebedee, and Simon and Andrew and <Philip and Bartholomew, James the son of Alphaeus and Thomas) Thaddaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the Iscariot: and thee, Matthew, as thou satest at the receipt of custom I called, and thou followedst me. You therefore I will to be twelve apostles for a testimony unto (of) Israel.

John was baptizing, and there went out unto him Pharisees and were baptized, and all Jerusalem. And John had raiment of camel’s hair and a leathern girdle about his loins: and his meat (it saith) was wild honey, whereof the taste is the taste of manna, as a cake dipped in oil. That, forsooth, they may pervert the word of truth into a lie and for locusts put a cake dipped in honey (sic). These Ebionites were vegetarians and objected to the idea of eating locusts. A locust in Greek is akris, and the word they used for cake is enkris , so the change is slight. We shall meet with this tendency again. And the beginning of their Gospel says that: It came to pass in the days of Herod the king of Judaea <when Caiaphas was high priest) that there came <a certain man) John <by name), baptizing with the baptism of repentance in the river Jordan, who was said to be of the lineage of Aaron the priest, child of Zacharias and Elisabeth, and all went out unto him. The borrowing from St. Luke is very evident here. He goes on: And after a good deal more it continues that:

After the people were baptized, Jesus also came and was baptized by John; and as he came up from the water, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Holy Ghost in the likeness of a dove that descended and entered into him: and a voice from heaven saying: Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased: and again: This day have I begotten thee. And straightway there shone about the place a great light. Which when John saw (it saith) he saith unto him: Who art thou, Lord? and again there was a voice from heaven saying unto him: This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. And then (it saith) John fell down before him and said: I beseech thee, Lord, baptize thou me. But he prevented him saying: Suffer it (or let it go): for thus it behoveth that all things should be fulfilled. And on this account they say that Jesus was begotten of the seed of a man, and was chosen; and so by the choice of God he was called the Son of God from the Christ that came into him from above in the likeness of a dove. And they deny that he was begotten of God the Father, but say that he was created, as one of the archangels, yet greater, and that he is Lord of angels and of all things made by the Almighty, and that he came and taught, as the Gospel (so called) current among them contains, that, ‘I came to destroy the sacrifices, and if ye cease not from sacrificing, the wrath of God will not cease from you’.

(With reference to the Passover and the evasion of the idea that Jesus partook of flesh:) They have changed the saying, as is plain to all from the combination of phrases, and have made the disciples say: Where wilt thou that we make ready for thee to eat the Passover ? and him, forsooth, say: Have I desired with desire to eat this flesh of the Passover with you ? These fragments show clearly that the Gospel was designed to sup¬ port a particular set of views. They enable us also to distinguish it from the Gospel according to the Hebrews, for, among other things, the accounts of the Baptism in the two are quite different. Epiphanius is only confusing the issue when he talks of it as the Hebrew Gospel— or rather, the Ebionites may be guilty of the confusion, for he attributes the name to them. The Gospel according to the Twelve, or ‘of the Twelve’, mentioned by Origen (Ambrose and Jerome) is identified by Zahn with the Ebionite Gospel. He makes a good case for the identification. If the two are not identical, it can only be said that we know nothing of the Gospel according to the Twelve.

Revillout, indeed, claims the title for certain Coptic fragments of narratives of the Passion which are described in their proper place in this collection: but no one has been found to follow his lead* Origen, in his first Homily on Luke, speaks of those who ‘took in hand’ or ‘attempted’ to write gospels (as Luke says in his prologue). These, he says, came to the task rashly, without the needful gifts of grace, unlike Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke himself. Such were those who composed the Gospel which is written ‘according to the Egyptians’ and the Gospel entitled ‘of the Twelve’. Apart from this there are but few mentions of the book. A series of passages from Clement of Alexandria is our chief source of knowledge. They are as follows: Clem. Alex. Strom, iii. 9. 64. Whence it is with reason that after the Word had told about the End, Salome saith: Until when shall men continue to die? (Now the Scripture speaks of man in two senses, the one that is seen, and the soul: and again, of him that is in a state of salvation, and him that is not: and sin is called the death of the soul) and it is advisedly that the Lord makes answer: So long as women bear children .

66. And why do not they who walk by anything rather than the true rule of the Gospel go on to quote the rest of that which was said to Salome: for when she had said, ‘I have done well, then, in not bearing children ?’ (as if childbearing were not the right thing to accept) the Lord answers and says: Every plant eat thou, but that which hath bitterness eat not. iii. 13. 92. When Salome inquired when the things concerning which she asked should be known, the Lord said: When ye have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one and the male with the female is neither male nor female. In the first place, then, we have not this saying in the four Gospels that have been delivered to us, but in that according to the Egyptians. (The so-called Second Epistle of Clement has this, in a slightly different form, c. xii. 2 : For the Lord himself being asked by some one when his king¬ dom should come, said: WTien the two shall be one, and the outside (that which is without) as the inside (that which is within), and the male with the female neither male nor female.)

There are allusions to the saying in the Apocryphal Acts, see pp. 335, 429, 450. iii. 6. 45. The Lord said to Salome when she inquired: How long shall death prevail? ‘As long as ye women bear children \ not because life is an ill, and the creation evil: but as showing the sequence of nature: for in all cases birth is followed by decay. Excerpts from Theodotus , 67. And when the Saviour says to Salome that there shall be death as long as women bear children , he did not say it as abusing birth, for that is necessary for the salvation of believers. Strom, iii. 9. 63. But those who set themselves against God’s creation because of continence, which has a fair-sounding name, quote also those words which were spoken to Salome, of which I made mention before. They are contained, I think (or I take it) in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. For they say that ‘the Saviour himself said: I came to destroy the works of the female’. By female he means lust: by works , birth and decay. Hippolytus against Heresies , v. 7. (The Naassenes) say that the soul is very hard to find and to perceive; for it does not continue in the same fashion or shape or in one emotion so that one can either describe it or comprehend it in essence. And they have these various changes of the soul , set forth in the Gospel entitled according to the Egyptians.

Epiphanius, Heresy lxii. 2 (Sabellians). Their whole deceit (error) and the strength of it they draw from some apocryphal books, especially from what is called the Egyptian Gospel, to which some have given that name. For in it many suchlike things are recorded (or attributed) as from the person of the Saviour, said in a corner, purporting that he showed his disciples that the same person was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All this goes to show that this Gospel was a secondary work with a distinct doctrinal tendency. It resembles the later Gnostic books such as the Pistis Sophia in assigning an important role in the dialogues with Christ to the female disciples. One mention and citation of this occurs in Epiphanius, Heresy xxvi. 13. Speaking of the * Gnostics ’ of Egypt in his time (fourth century) he says s They produce a Gospel forged in the name of Philip the holy disciple, which says: The Lord revealed unto me what the soul must say as it goeth up into heaven, and how it must answer each of the Powers above. ‘I have taken knowledge (it saith) of myself, and have gathered myself together out of every quarter and have not begotten (sown) children unto the Ruler, but have rooted out his roots and gathered together the members that were scattered abroad. And I know thee who thou art, for I (it saith) am of them that are from above.’

A very leading Gnostic doctrine was that the soul contained sparks of the Divine, which were dispersed about among the world of matter, and must be collected, destined as they were some day to be removed out of the influence of matter and taken up into the higher world. This is enunciated here. In the Pistis Sophia Philip is one of the disciples who are specially ordered to write the revelations uttered by Christ. Origen on Luke ( Horn . 1) says that he knows of a Gospel according to Matthias. Ambrose and Jerome, it seems, repeat his statement. Eusebius also mentions the book: none of these give more than the bare name. In the Gelasian Decree it is condemned, which need not mean that it was known to the condemner. It also occurs in the Greek ‘List of the Sixty Books’. It is possible that this book was identical with the Traditions of Matthias, a writing of which Clement of Alexandria speaks in the following passages: Strom . ii. 9. 45. The beginning (of truth) is to wonder at things, as Plato says in the Theaetetus , and Matthias in the Traditions, advising us: Wonder thou at the things that are before thee: making this the first step to further knowledge.

iii. 4. 26. (The Gnostics) say that Matthias also taught thus: that we should fight with the flesh and abuse it, not yielding to it at all for licentious pleasure, but should make the soul grow by faith and knowledge. vii. 13.82. They say that in the Traditions Matthias the apostle said that on every occasion, if the neighbour of a chosen one sin, the chosen one hath sinned: for had he behaved himself as the word enjoins, the neighbour also would have been ashamed of his way of life, so as not to sin. This, too, is thought by Zahn to be traceable to the same source: Strom . iv. 6. 35. It is said that Zacchaeus (or, as some say, Matthias), the chief publican, when he had heard the Lord, who condescended to come to him, said: Behold, the half of my goods I give in alms, Lord: and if I have defrauded any man of ought, I restore it fourfold. Whereupon also the Saviour said: The Son of man is come to-day and hath found that which was lost. Hippolytus tells us that the heretics Basilides and Isidorus (his son) asserted that Matthias had spoken unto them certain secret words which he had heard from the Saviour, being taught by him apart.

The two fragments which we possess of the text of this book will be found among the Passion narratives and the Apocalypses respectively. Here I place the notices of it that are found in the Church writers. There are but three. Origen on Matthew , x. 17. (They of Nazareth thought that Jesus) was the son of Joseph and Mary: but the brothers of Jesus some (founding on a tradition of the Gospel entitled according to Peter or of the Book of James) say were sons of Joseph by a former wife who had lived with him before Mary. The Book of James is the so-called Protevangelium, given below. Eusebius, Eccl . Hist. vi. 12, treating of Serapion, bishop of Antioch about a.d. 190, says: There is another treatise composed by him about the Gospel called ‘according to Peter’, which he drew up to expose the false statements contained in it, for the benefit of some members of the church at Rhossus, who by the means of the aforesaid book had succumbed to unorthodox doctrines. Of this it will be well to adduce some passages in which he states his view of the book, writing thus: For we, brethren, accept Peter and the other apostles as we would Christ, but, as experienced men, we repudiate what is

falsely written under their name, knowing that we have not had any such things delivered to us. For I, when I was with you, supposed that all of you adhered to the right faith, and, not having gone through the Gospel which they produced under the name or Peter, I said: If this is all that seems to cause you scruples, let it be read. But now that I have learned from what has been told me, that somewhat of heresy was nesting in their mind (lit. their mind had its lair in a certain heresy), I will take care to come to you again: so, brethren, expect me soon. But you, who have comprehended of what manner of heresy Marcion ( Gr. Marcianus) was, and how he contradicted himself, not understanding what he uttered, will learn the truth from what has been written to you (in this treatise). For we have been enabled to borrow this very Gospel from others who used it, namely, the successors of those who were its authors (lit. began it) whom we call Docetae (Seemers)—for most of their notions belong to that school—and to go through it, and to find that most of it is of the right teaching (word) of the Saviour, but some things are adventitious; a list of which we have drawn up for you.

Eusebius (iii. 3. 2) also names the Gospel (with the Acts, Apocalypse, and Preaching of Peter) as a writing not handed down among the ‘ Catholic ’ Scriptures, and not used as testimony by ancient or modern church writers. (This, as regards the Apoca¬ lypse and Preaching, is an exaggeration.) Theodoret (of heretical Fables , ii. 2) says: ‘ The Nazaraeans are Jews who know Christ as a righteous man, and use the Gospel called “ according to Peter * V (What we know of the Gospel and of the Nazarenes forbids us to give credence to this statement.)

The Infancy Gospel current under the name of Thomas is also given below. The ancient testimonies, as in the case of Peter , are placed here. We are not absolutely certain that our Gospel of Thomas is a form of the older one, though the one quotation we have of the latter coincides curiously with the subject of the former. I have, myself, very little doubt that our Gospel is the skeleton of the old one— the stories retained and the unorthodox discourses cut out. 1 Origen says (Horn. 1 on Luke): There is also current the Gospel according to Thomas. and tales of the childhood of Krishna and of Buddha have been cited, which have a colourable resemblance to some of those in the Gospel, The thesis is not proved, but I have sometimes thought that the name given to Thomas in the Latin version, ‘Ismaelite’, might be the Hippolytus against Heresies , v. 7. The Naassenes speak of a nature of man at once hidden and manifesting itself, which they say is within man, and is the kingdom of heaven that is sought after: and they deliver this concerning it, expressly, in the Gospel entitled according to Thomas, in these words: He that seeketh me will find me in children from seven years old and upwards : for there am I manifested, who am hidden in the fourteenth age (aeon).

Our Gospel of Thomas tells of the acts of Jesus at five, six, and eight years of age: the naming of the age may originally have been significant. The fragment seems to indicate that the years from seven to fourteen were a period of mystic importance. Cyril of Jerusalem (a.d. 348) speaks of this book as a Manichaean production. Very likely the Manichaeans used it, but it was older than their sect. He says ( Catech . iv. 36): And of the New Testament read the four Gospels only. The others are apocryphal (pseudepigraphic) and harmful. The Manichaeans also wrote a Gospel according to Thomas, which, though coloured with the fragrance of a gospel-name, corrupts the souls of the simpler. ib. vi. 31. Let no one read the Gospel according to Thomas, for it is not by one of the twelve apostles, but by one of the three wicked disciples of Manes. Eusebius names it among undoubtedly spurious books. The Stichometry of Nicephorus assigns it 1,300 lines. Irenaeus (i. 13. 1) says that the Marcosian sect support their doctrines by a vast number of apocryphal writings. 4 They adduce, too, this false invention, that when the Lord as a child was learning the alphabet, and his te?*her said, as the custom is: Say Alpha; he answered: Alpha. But when the teacher bade him say Beta, the Lord answered: First tell thou me what Alpha is, and then will I tell thee what Beta is. And this they interpret as meaning that he alone knew the unknown mystery , which he manifested in the form of Alpha.’

It seems probable from Irenaeus’s language that the Marcosians took original reading, and that if so, it might be interpreted as suggesting a connexion with the further East. The case stands thus. The Greek text A calls the writer ‘Thomas the Israelite the Philosopher *. Greek B, ‘the holy apostle Thomas’. Latin,‘Thomas the Israelite (or Ismaelite) the apostle of the Lord’. ‘Israelite’ is a curious and pointless designation, if the apostle is meant, and a very easy corruption of Ismaelite. ‘Philosopher* is a strikingly unusual description. The combination of Ismaelite and Philosopher would serve to convey the idea of an Eastern sage. From a somewhat different point of view, it is not to be forgotten that Thomas the apostle was connected with India by a tradition probably a good deal older than the Acts of Thomas. this from an apocryphal writing. I have not much doubt that that was the Gospel of Thomas. The story occurs in text A, c. vi, and in all Infancy Gospels in some form. It is also told shortly in the Epistle of the Apostles, c. 4 s see p. 486.

Again our principal source of knowledge is Clement of Alexandria, who makes a series of quotations from it. Clement of Alexandria, Strom, i. 29. 182. And in the Preaching of Peter you may find the Lord called ‘Law and Word’. Twice again he quotes this phrase. vi. 5. 39. But that the most approved of the Greeks do not know God by direct knowledge, but indirectly, Peter says in his Preaching: Know ye then that there is one God who made the beginning of all things and hath power over their end; and: The invisible who seeth all things, uncontainable, who containeth all, having need of nought, of whom all things stand in need and for whose sake they exist, incomprehensible, perpetual, incorruptible, uncreated, who made all things by the word of his power. . . . that is, the Son. 1 Then he goes on : This God worship ye, not after the manner of the Greeks . • • showing that we and the good (approved) Greeks worship the same God, though not according to perfect knowledge for they had not learned the tradition of the Son. ‘Do not’, he says, ‘worship’—he does not say ‘the God whom the Greeks worship’, but ‘not after the manner of the Greeks’: he would change the method of worship of God, not proclaim another God. What, then, is meant by ‘ not after the manner of the Greeks ’ ? Peter himself will explain, for he continues:

Carried away by ignorance and not knowing God as we do, according to the perfect knowledge, but shaping those things over which he gave them power, for their use, even wood and stones, brass and iron, gold and silver (forgetting) their material and proper use, they set up things subservient to their existence and worship them; and what things God hath given them for food, the fowls of the air and the creatures that swim in the sea and creep upon the earth, wild beasts and fourfooted cattle of the field, weasels too and mice, cats and dogs and apes ; yea, their own eatables do they sacrifice as offerings to eatable gods , and offering dead things to the dead

1 In vi. 7. 58 he repeats a clause of this: For there is in very deed one God, who made the beginning of all things: meaning his first begotten Son; thus Peter writes, understanding rightly the words: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The words In the beginning were interpreted as meaning ‘ By the Son as to gods, they show ingratitude to God, by these practices denying that he exists. . . . He will continue again in this fashion: Neither worship ye him as do the Jews, for they, who suppose that they alone know God, do not know him, serving angels and archangels, the month and the moon: and if no moon be seen, they do not celebrate what is called the first sabbath, nor keep the new moon, nor the days of unleavened bread, nor the feast (of tabernacles?), nor the great day (of atonement). Then he adds the finale (colophon) of what is required: So then do ye, learning in a holy and righteous sort that which we deliver unto you, observe it, worshipping God through Christ in a new way. For we have found in the Scriptures, how the Lord saith: Behold, I make with you a new covenant, not as the cove¬ nant with your fathers in mount Horeb. He hath made a new one with us: for the ways of the Greeks and Jews are old, but we are they that worship him in a new way in a third generation (or race), even Christians. 1

Shortly after this he cites Paul ‘in addition to the Preaching of Peter’ as referring to the Sibyl and Hystaspes. The passage is given below as a possible fragment of the Acts of Paul. After his quotation from Paul, Clement continues : Therefore Peter says that the Lord said to the apostles: If then any of Israel will repent, to believe in God through my name, his sins shall be forgiven him: (and) after twelve years go ye out into the world, lest any say: We did not hear. In the next chapter (vi. 6) he has : For example, in the Preaching of Peter the Lord says: I chose out you twelve, judging you to be disciples worthy of me, whom the Lord willed, and thinking you faithful apostles; sending you unto the world to preach the Gospel to men throughout the world, that they should know that there is one God; to declare by faith in me [the Christ] what shall be, that they that have heard and believed may be saved, and that they which have not believed may hear and bear witness, not having any defence so as to say ‘We did not hear’. 1 Origen on John , xiii. 17, has part of the above passages:

It is too much to set forth now the quotations of Heracleon taken from the book entitled The Preaching of Peter and dwell on them, inquiring about the book whether it is genuine or spurious or compounded of both elements : so we willingly post¬ pone that, and only note that according to him (Heracleon) Peter taught that we must not worship as do the Greeks, receiving the things of matter, and serving stocks and stones: nor worship God as do the Jews, since they, who suppose that they alone know God, are ignorant of him, and serve angels and the month and the moon. After a few lines : And to all reasonable souls it hath been said above s Whatsoever things any of you did in ignorance, not knowing God clearly, all his sins shall be forgiven him. vi. 15. 128. Peter in the Preaching, speaking of the apostles, says: But we having opened the books of the prophets which we had, found, sometimes expressed by parables, sometimes by riddles, and sometimes directly (authentically) and in so many words naming Jesus Christ, both his coming and his death and the cross and all the other torments which the Jews inflicted on him, and his resurrection and assumption into the heavens before Jerusalem was founded (MS. judged), even all these things as they had been written, what he must suffer and what shall be after him. When, therefore, we took knowledge of these things, we believed in God through that which had been written of him.

And a little after he adds that the prophecies came by Divine providence, in these terms: For we know that God commanded them in very deed, and without the Scripture we say nothing. The character of the heathen worship, with its mention of weasels, cats, &c., and the fact that our authorities are all Alexandrine, point to the Egyptian origin and currency of the Preaching. We see also that it was an orthodox book. Origen even faces the possibility of its being genuine in whole or in part. The earliest of the Greek apologists for Christianity whose work we have, Aristides, takes a very similar line to the Preaching, and is thought to have used it. A Syriac Preaching of Simon Cephas in the city of Rome (to be found in Cureton’s Syriac Documents) has nothing in common with our book. Its gist is, briefly, this: A great assembly gathers to hear Peter. He speaks to them of the life and death of Jesus, and the call of the apostles, exhorts them to shun idolatry: reverts to the signs at the crucifixion, and the report of Pilate to Caesar and the senate, and warns them against Simon Magus. We then have the incident of the dead man raised by Peter after Simon had failed. Peter’s episcopate of twenty-five years, his martyrdom and that of Paul, Nero’s death, and a famine which ensued after many years, are shortly told..

In the Clementine Recognitions, &c., a great deal is said about books of Preachings of Peter: but these are to a great extent imaginary, and, if ever they existed, must have belonged to the same peculiar school of thought as the rest of that literature. There are certain other fragments of a ‘Teaching of Peter’ which may be another name for the Preaching. Opinion is divided. Probably the first, from Origen, is from the Preaching. The others are of a different complexion. Origen on First Principles i, prologue 8. But if any would pro¬ duce to us from that book which is called The Doctrine of Peter, the passage where the Saviour is represented as saying (lit. seems to say) to the disciples: I am not a bodiless spirit (demon): he must be answered in the first place that that book is not reckoned among the books of the church: (and then) it must be shown that the writing is neither by Peter nor by any one else who was inspired by the spirit of God. The quotation agrees with one from the Gospel according to the Hebrews. See p. 4. Gregory of Nazianzus, ep. 10. ‘A soul in trouble is near unto God’, saith Peter somewhere—a marvellous utterance.

(John of Damascus), Sacred Parallels , A. 12: Of Peter: Wretched that I am, I remembered not that God seeth the mind and observeth the voice of the soul. Allying myself with sin, I said unto myself: God is merciful, and will bear with thee: and because i was not immediately smitten, I ceased not, but rather despised pardon, and exhausted the long-suffering of God. ibid. From the Teaching of Peter: Rich is he that hath mercy on many, and he that, imitating God, giveth of that he hath. For God hath given all things unto all, of his own creatures. Understand then, ye rich, that ye ought to minister, for ye have received more than ye yourselves need. Learn that others lack the things ye have in superfluity. Be ashamed to keep things that belong to others. Imitate the fairness (equality) of God, and no man will be poor. Oecumenius on James , v. 16. And that happens to us which blessed Peter says: One building and one pulling down I they gain nought but their labour. Three such are quoted or described by Epiphanius which may be properly reckoned as New Testament Apocrypha. I exclude the Gospel of Eve and such books as the prophecies of Parchor and other mythical persons, and the book of Elxai.

First is a book called the Birth of Mary. Epiphanius, Heresy xxvi. 12. (The Gnostics have a book which they call the Birth (or Descent) of Mary, in which are horrible and deadly things.) For they say that the reason of Zacharias being slain in the Temple was this, because, say they, he saw a vision and in his fear, as he was about to tell the vision, his mouth was stopped. For, say they, he saw at the hour of incense, as he was burning incense, a man standing there who had the form of an ass. And when he went out, they say, and would have said: Woe unto you ! what (or whom) do ye worship? he that was seen of him within the Temple shut his mouth, that he might not be able to speak. And when his mouth was opened, so that he could speak, then he revealed it to them and they slew him. And thus, say they, died

Zacharias. For on this account the priest was commanded by the lawgiver himself to wear bells, that when he enters in to do his priestly office, he whom they worship may hear the sound of the bells and hide himself, that the likeness of his shape may not be detected. This is the vulgarest expression of the hatred of the Old Covenant of which Marcion was the noblest exponent. I need not dwell here upon the prevalence of the belief among heathens that Jews and Christians worshipped a deity in the form of an ass. The Palatine graffito of the crucified figure with an ass’s head will occur to many readers. Another Gospel (?) of similar tendency was that which was used by the nameless ‘Adversary of the Law and the Prophets’ whom Augustine refutes, and from which the following is quoted: The apostles having asked the Lord what they were to think about the Jewish prophets, who were thought in the past to have foretold his coming, he was troubled that they even yet had such thoughts, and answered: Ye have given up (let go) the living one who is before your eyes, and talk idly of the dead.

Epiphanius in Her. xxvi. 8 quotes the Lesser Questions of Mary: but I must be excused from repeating the passage. In Her. xxx. 16 he tells of a book used by the Ebionites called the Ascents of James : Certain supposititious Ascents, and Discourses, so called, do they produce in the Ascents of James, representing him as speaking against the Temple and the sacrifices, and the fire on the altar; and many other things full of empty sound. And there, too, they are not ashamed to indict Paul, with forged discourses full of the malice and error of their false apostles: calling him a man of Tarsus (which he confesses and does not deny), but asserting that he came of the Greeks; taking their occasion from the place, because of the words truthfully spoken by him: I am a man of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city; they then say that he was a Greek, the child of a Greek mother and a Greek father, and that he went up to Jerusalem and remained there some time, and desired to take the daughter of the high priest to wife, and on that account became a proselyte and was circumcised, and when he failed to secure the maiden he was enraged, and wrote against circumcision and against the sabbath and the Law.

The book, as Lightfoot (Galatians , 330, n. 2) says, ‘was so called doubtless as describing the ascents of James up the Temple stairs, whence he harangued the people’. Relics of it may probably be discerned in the latter chapters of the first book of the Clementine Recognitions. Lightfoot also suggests, very ingeniously (l.c. 367, n. 1), that the account of the death of James, quoted by Eusebius from Hegesippus, in which James is cast down from the pinnacle of the Temple, ‘was the grand finale of these ascents’. In the Recognitions he addresses the people from the Temple steps, and is thrown down and left for dead by the enemy (Paul); in Hegesippus he speaks from the pinnacle, ‘is hurled from the still loftier station, and this time his death is made sure’. It is an attractive conjecture. Epiphanius mentions some other heretical apocrypha: a Gospel of Judas Iscariot (Irenaeus also speaks of this) and an heretical Ascension (Anabaticon) of Paul, used by the Caianites or Cainites. They are mere names to us. We also hear of ‘Gospels’ of heresiarchs—Basilides, Valentinus, and others: but these we cannot think of as real Gospels. They are—if they are not mere ghost-books—the treatises in which these teachers set forth their views, and they were nicknamed Gospels. The Gospel of Marcion is of a different class: it was an edition of Luke, from which all that went counter to Marcion’s views was removed. He made a similar text of the Pauline Epistles.

From a Latin writer, Orosius, comes our only fragment of another heretical apocryphon, the Memoria (? Memoirs) of the Apostles. It was current among the Priscillianists who had their head-quarters in Spain in the fourth century. It was evidently a dualist book, no doubt Manichaean in origin. Orosius, Admonition of the errors of the Priscillianists and Origenists. Priscillian delivered that the names of the Patriarchs are members (parts) of the soul: for that Ruben was in the head, Levi in the heart, Juda in the heart, Benjamin in the thighs, and the like. In the members of the body, on the other hand, the heavenly signs are arranged, viz. the Ram in the head, the Bull in the neck, the Twins in the arms, the Crab in the heart, &c. He would have it understood that the darkness is eternal, and that out of it the ruler of this world came forth. He confirms this from a book called the Memoria of the Apostles, where the Saviour is represented as being questioned privately by the disciples, and explaining that in the parable of the Gospel which says: A sower went forth to sow his seed , the sower was not good: asserting, that had he been good, he would not have been careless, nor cast the seed by the wayside or on stony places or untilled ground: willing it to be understood that this (the ruler of the world?) was the sower, who scattered the souls he had caught into various bodies, as he pleased. In the same book much is said of the principle of moist things, and the principle of fire : he would have it under¬ stood that all good things happen in this world, not by the power of God, but by contrivance (art).

(The cause of rain is then expounded in a manner best not repeated.) _ In the Gelasian Decree ‘Of Books to be received and not to be received* are the titles of many Apocryphal books. The date and source of this Decree are matters of dispute, but it cannot be later than the sixth century. Many of the titles that occur in it are derived from the works of Church writers, especially Jerome: the books had not been seen by the author of the Decree. Its list of New Testament Apocrypha is remarkable alike for omissions and insertions. It runs thus: The Itinerary under the name of the apostle Peter which is called of Saint Clement, nine books. (=* the Clementine Recognitions: in ten books.) Acts under the name of Andrew the apostle. ,, ,, Thomas „ »> jj Peter ,, (These will be found in their place in this collection.) Gospel under the name of Matthias (see p. 12). (Both the above occur in the Greek list of the Sixty Books, but the existence of a Gospel of Barnabas is most doubtful. The extant book under that name (ed. Ragg, 1907) is in Italian, a forgery of the late fifteenth or sixteenth century, by a renegade from Christianity to Islam.)

Gospel under the name of James the Less. (Probably the Protevangelium: but a lesson on the Circumcision of Christ (printed by Bannister in Journal of Theol. Studies , 1908, p. 417), in a fragment of a tenth-century service book in an Irish hand, is headed: Lesson of the Gospel according to James son of Alphaeus. It is hardly worth translating.) Gospel under the name of Peter the Apostle (fragments exist). Gospel under the name of Thomas which the Manichaeans use (extant). Gospel under the name of Bartholomew (extant). Gospels under the name of Andrew (non-existent: a confusion with the Acts). Gospels which Lucianus falsified. (These are recensions of the text of the canonical gospels, of which we know little.) Book concerning the Infancy of the Saviour (Pseudo-Matthew’s Gospel). Book concerning the birth of the Saviour, and Mary, or the midwife (the same as the last, or the Protevangelium). The book called of the Shepherd (of Hermas). All the books which Leucius the disciple of the devil made. (Leucius is really the name attached to the Acts of John only : the entry is quite a vague one). The book called the Foundation. (Writings attributed to Manes, founder of the Manichaean sect.)

I omit, in what follows, the titles of Old Testament Apocrypha and patristic writings. The book called the Acts of Thecla and Paul (an episode from the Acts of Paul, current separately). The Revelation called of Paul (extant). „ „ Thomas (extant). » „ Stephen (see under Apocalypses). The book called the Passing of Saint Mary (probably PseudoMelito’s narrative). The book called the Lots of the Apostles (a system of divination). The book called Lusa apostolorum (an unexplained title). The book called Canons of the Apostles (extant, but not given in this collection). Epistle of Jesus to Abgarus. Epistle of Abgarus to Jesus (extant). I may append to this the portions of the leading Greek lists of biblical books which mention New Testament Apocrypha. a. The List of the Sixty Books It is as old as the seventh century. The Sixty Books are those of the Bible. Then follow lists of those ‘outside the sixty’ (nine) and of ‘such as are Apocryphal’. Nos. 1-14 of these are Old Testament. 15. History of James ( «= Protevangelium). 16. Apocalypse of Peter. 17. Travels and Teachings of the Apostles (the Apocryphal 18. Epistle of Barnabas. 19. Acts of Paul. 20. Apocalypse of Paul.

21. Teaching (Didascalia) of Clement (Apostolic Consti¬ 22. Teaching of Ignatius ( - his letters). 23. Teaching of Poly carp ( - his letter). 24. Gospel according to Barnabas (see p. 22). 25. Gospel according to Matthias (see p. 12). 6. Stichometry of Nicephorus Thought to have been drawn up in Jerusalem: possibly as old as the fourth century: appended ultimately to the ninth-century Chronography of Nicephorus. Such of the New Testament books as are disputed . 1. Apocalypse of John lines 1,400 2. Apocalypse of Peter „ 300 3. Epistle of Barnabas „ 1,360 4. Gospel according to the Hebrews „ 2,200 Such of the New Testament as are Apocryphal . 1. Travels of Paul ( = Acts) lines 3,600 2. Travels of Peter „ 2,750 3. Travels of John ( = Acts) lines 2,600 4. Travels of Thomas ,, 1,600 5. Gospel according to Thomas „ 1300 6. Teaching (Didache) of the Apostles ,, 200 7. Of Clement (two Epistles) „ 2,600 8. Of Ignatius, Polycarp, and Hermas. c. The Synopsis of Scripture ‘ of Athanasius’, Extant in but one manuscript, at Eton. In the list of Old Testament Apocrypha it is identical with the last, only it does not give the number of lines. In the New Testament list it is confused, calling the obviously apocryphal books ‘disputed’ only, and omitting the real ‘antilegomena’. Thus:

Of the New Testament again these are disputed. Travels of Peter, Travels of John, Travels of Thomas, Gospel according to Thomas, Teaching of the Apostles, Clementine writings : out of which the truer and inspired portions have been selected and paraphrased. A. GREEK FRAGMENTS (See also Appendix I) This is a piece of papyrus of the third (?) century, in the Archduke Rainer’s collection of papyri at Vienna: first published in 1885. There have been many attempts (as in all these cases) at restoring the missing words and letters. The first line remains quite doubtful. What may be regarded as certain is; all ye in this night shall be offended according to the scripture: I will smite the shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered. And when Peter said: Even if all, not I, the Lord t said: The cock shall twice crow and thou ( said: Before the cock crow twice to-day \ first shalt thrice deny me (thou shalt thrice deny me. It is not certain that this is a fragment of a Gospel: it may be, and is by many held to be, a somewhat abridged quotation made by a preacher or commentator. It omits, for instance, the clause: After I am risen I will go before you into Galilee. If the preacher or expositor wished to emphasize Peter’s denial, he might easily pass over these words. On the other hand the first editor of it, and others, have thought that the omission was a mark of early date.

The word for crow is literally cry cuckoo . These are on two papyri found at Oxyrhynchus by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt in excavations carried out for the Graeco-Roman branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The first was found in 1897: it is a leaf of a papyrus book, of the third century. It is numbered, apparently, ‘11’. The second was found in 1903: it is a piece of a papyrus roll, also of the third century, but a little later in date than the other. It has a title or prologue. Both are mutilated. The latest editor, Professor H. G. Evelyn White (The Sayings of Jesus from Oxyrhynchus, Cambridge, 1920), has shown good cause for believing both fragments to belong to the same collection of Sayings. He makes the second precede the first (as I said, it has a title), and believes that the Sayings are extracts from the Gospel according to the Hebrews. I shall follow his order in translating the Sayings s but I must refrain from quoting all his very ingenious restorations. As a rule I shall only give the practically certain supplements. Prologue. These are the (...) words which Jesus that liveth and (...) spake to ( . . . ) and to Thomas. And he said: (Whosoever heareth) these words shall not taste (of death).

i. Let not him that seeketh cease (seeking till he) find, and when he findeth (he shall marvel, and) having marvelled he shall reign, and (having reigned) he shall rest. (Quoted by Clement of Alexandria as from the Gospel according to the Hebrews : see p. 2.) ii. ( . . . ) saith (Who are they that) draw us ( . . • . . . ) the kingdom that is in heaven (....) the fowls of the heaven whatsoever is under the earth the fish of the sea. (These are they that draw) you; and the kingdom (of heaven) is within you: (and whosoever) knoweth (...) shall find it ( . . . ) know yourselves ( . . . ) ye are ( . . . ) of the Father ( . . . ) ye shall know your¬ selves to be in ( . . . ). And ye are the city (?) (of God (See below for suggested restorations.) iii. A man shall not hesitate ( having found?) to ask of ( concerning the place of ( for (ye shall find r) that many (first shall be last and) the last first and they shall (

iv. Jesus saith ( before thy face and (that which is hidden) from thee shall be revealed (to thee: for there is nothing) hid that shall not be manifested and buried that (shall not be found or raised up) v. his disciples) question him (and) say: How shall we fast (and how shall we ) and how (shall we ) and what shall we observe ( ). Jesus saith ( ) Do not do ( ) of the truth ( ) blessed is he ( vi. And then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote which is in thy brother’s eye. vii. Jesus saith: If ye fast not from the world ye shall not find the kingdom of God, and if ye keep not Sabbath for the whole week, ye shall not see the Father. viii. Jesus saith: I stood in the midst of the world, and in flesh appeared I unto them: and I found all men drunken, and none did I find thirsting among them and my soul is afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their heart and see not . . . (bottom of the column gone) ix. col. 2. poverty

x. (Jesus saith) Wheresoever there are (two, they are not without) God: and where there is one alone I say I am with him. Lift up the stone and there shalt thou find me: cleave the wood, and I am there. xi. Jesus saith: A prophet is not acceptable in his own country, nor doth a physician do cures upon them that know him. xii. Jesus saith: A city built upon the top of an high mountain and established can neither fall nor be hidden. xiii. Jesus saith: Thou hearest with(in) thy (one) ear (but the other thou hast closed). ... It is not practicable to give the numerous attempts at restoration which have been made. For these I refer the reader to Evelyn White’s excellent edition. But by way of a specimen I will give Evelyn White’s and Lagrange’s suggestions for Saying II, which is one of the most puzzling of them all. Lagrange’s appeared in the Revue Biblique, 1922, p. 432. Evelyn White would restore thus: Judas) saith: (Who then are they that draw us, (and when shall come the kingdom that is in heaven? (Jesus saith:) The fowls of the heaven (and of the beasts what -ever is beneath the earth (or upon the earth, and) the fishes of the sea, (these are they that draw you: and the kingdom (of heaven) is within you: (and whosoever) knoweth (himself) shall find (it: and having found it) ye shall know yourselves, (that) ye are (sons and heirs) of the Father the (Almighty, and)

shall know yourselves (that ye are) in (God and God in you). And ye are the (City of God). Judas the interrogator is ‘not Iscariot’. (Judas) saith: (Who then are they that draw us (unto heaven above, if the kingdom (is) in heaven ? (Jesus saith) The fowls of the heaven, (the beasts and if 5 there be anything beneath the earth (or upon the earth, and the fishes of the sea (are they that) draw you (unto God) and the kingdom (of heaven) is within you (and whosoever) knoweth (God) shall find it: (for if ye know him) 10 ye shall know yourselves (and shall know that) ye are (sons) of the Father that is (perfect: and likewise) ye shall know yourselves (to be citizens in heaven). And ye are the city (of God) or (that which affrighteth Satan). He gives an alternative for lines 8-10: is within you (and whosoever) knoweth (himself) shall find it. (Take pains therefore) to know yourselves, &c. Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 655. This is a broken leaf of a papyrus roll of the third century. Very little of the second column—only the beginnings of words—remains. (Take no thought) from morning until evening nor from evening to morning, either for your food, what ye shall eat, nor for your raiment, what ye shall put on. Much better are ye than the lilies which do not card nor spin . . . having one gar¬ ment, what . . . and ye, who can add unto your stat¬ ure ? He shall give you your rai¬ ment. His disciples say unto him When wilt thou be manifest unto us and when shall we see thee ? He saith:

When ye have put off your raiment and are not ashamed. (Cf. the Gospel according to the Egyptians.) Col. 2. The sense of the lower part only can be made out with certainty. He said The key of knowledge have ye hidden: yourselves ye entered not in, and to them that were coming in ye opened not . . • . . (after two lines) The other little pieces of the leaf give no sense.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri , Part V, 1908. A leaf of a parchment book of the third century, almost complete, first, before he doeth wrong he excuseth himself (or falleth into error). But take ye heed lest haply ye also suffer like things with them. For not only among the living do evildoers among men receive (retribution), but they endure also a punishment and great torment. 1 And he took them with him and led them to the cleansing-place itself (or holy place) and walked in the Temple. And there came near a Pharisee, an high priest, Levi (?) by name, and met them and said unto the Saviour: Who hath given thee leave to tread this holy place and to look upon these holy vessels, without thy first bathing thyself, and without thy disciples having washed their feet, but unclean as thou art hast thou walked in this Temple, which is a clean place, wherein no man walketh but one that hath bathed himself and changed his clothes, nor presumeth to look upon these holy vessels ? And straightway (the Saviour) stood with his disciples and answered him: Art thou then clean, that art here in the Temple ? He said unto him: I am clean, for I have bathed myself in the pool of David, and when I had gone down into it by the one ladder (stair), I came up by the other: and I have put on white and clean raiment, and then did I come, and have looked upon these holy vessels.

The Saviour answered him and said: Woe unto you, ye blind, that see not! Thou hast bathed thyself in these waters that are poured forth, into which, night and day, dogs and swine are cast: and after thou hadst washed thyself didst scour thine outer skin, which the harlots also and flutegirls anoint and bathe and scour and beautify to (arouse) desire in men, 2 but within it is (or they are) filled with scorpions and

1 The above is mainly Zahn’s rendering. Swete’s is: ‘beforehand he useth every device to injure first (unlike the righteous, who—see Wisdom xviii. 2—do not retaliate when they are injured first).... For evildoers do not receive retribution among animals only (animals that do harm are punished here and now) but hereafter also undergo torment,’ &c. * I am reminded of an addition in the Septuagint to the text of 1 Kings xxii. 88: They washed ( Ahab's ) chariot at the fountain of Samaria: and the swine and the dogs licked up the blood, and the harlots washed themselves in the blood, according to the word of the Lord which he spake. all evil. But I and my disciples, of whom thou sayest, that we are not washed, have been washed in living waters which came down from (God out^Of heaven). But woe unto them that (wash the outside , but within 'are unclean , is Dr. Swete’s suggested supplement). The writer seems to show gross ignorance of Jewish matters in assuming that swine could be suffered in the neighbourhood of the Temple, and in other ways. Yet some have defended him on this score. We have no clue to the identity of the book from which the frag¬ ment comes. If it were not that Jesus is here spoken of as ‘the Saviour ’, not 4 the Lord ’, I should suggest the Gospel of Peter. 4 Saviour ’ is the common word in the Gnostic literature. The Gospel of the Egyptians is an obvious possibility: but all is uncertain. At least, the leaf is not from the Gospel according to the Hebrews: and it approaches the style of the Synoptists more nearly than do the next fragments.

1. A fragmentary papyrus of the fourth or fifth century at Strasburg, edited by A. Jacoby in 1900. I follow the rendering in Hennecke’s Apokr . a, N.T ., which seems better than Jacoby’s. [front] that he may be known by his (hospitality to strangers) and be praised for his fruit: for . . . . . . Amen. Give me now thy (strength) O Father, that (they) with me may endure the world. Amen. (I have) received the crown (or sceptre) of the kingdom. I am become king through thee, Father. Thou wilt subject all things unto me. (Amen.) Through whom shall (the last) enemy be destroyed? Through (Christ). Through whom shall the sting of death be (destroyed) ? (Through the) only-begotten. Amen. Unto whom belongeth the dominion ? (Unto the Son.) Amen. M Now when he had ended all the (song of praise to his ) he turned himself to us and said (unto us): The hour is come when I shall be taken from you. The spirit (is) willing, but the flesh is weak: (stay) and watch with me. But we the apostles wept, saying: He answered and said unto us: Fear not (because of) the destruction (of the body) but (fear) much more . . . the power of (darkness). Remember all (that I) have said unto you: (If) they have persecuted me, (they will) persecute you also. . . . (Ye) rejoice because I (have overcome the world).

unto you: If ye say unto this mountain Lift thyself and be cast into the sea without having doubted in your soul, it shall happen unto you . . . as one of them was convinced whose name was Simon, and who said: O Lord verily great are the works which thou doest. For we have never heard, nor have we seen [2nd page] ever a man that hath raised the dead, save thee. The Lord said unto him: Ye shall pray for the works, which I myself shall do . . . But the other works will I do straightway. For these I do for the sake of (?) a momentary sal¬ vation in time, in these places where they are, that they may believe on him who hath sent me. Simon said unto him: O Lord, command me, that I may speak. He said unto him: Speak, Peter. For from that day he did call them by name. He said: What then is this work which is greater than these . . . except the raising of the dead and the feeding of such a multitude ? The Lord said unto him: There is somewhat that is greater

than this, and blessed are they, that have believed with their whole heart. But Philip lifted up his voice in wrath saying: What manner of thing is this, that thou wilt teach us? But he said unto him: Thou This again is not very instructive. The burden of it is, ‘Greater works than these will I do ’. There is nothing in it which goes outside the sphere of the canonical Gospels, save Philip’s anger. We shall see that in the Acts of Philip his proneness to wrath is emphasized. Another fragment of the same . [front] (that I) may reveal unto you all my glory and show you all your strength and the mystery of your apostleship. . . . [back] Our eyes penetrated through all places. We beheld the glory of his Godhead and all the glory of his dominion. He clothed us with the power of (our) apostleship. We gain little from this. The scene is evidently the garden of Gethsemane. Our Lord utters a hymn to the Father: a faint resem¬ blance to that in the Acts of John is perceptible. In it are clear reminiscences of 1 Cor. xv. Further reminiscences of St. John’s Gospel occur just after this. The second fragment implies a vision of the glorified Christ seen by the apostles. The writing of which these are fragments cannot have been a very early production. The apostles speak in the first person plural: but we need not infer that the book was a Gospel or the Gospel according to the Twelve (though this is Revillout’s view). As in other cases (e.g. the Gospel of Peter) a single apostle would most likely have figured as the author in some other part of it.

2. Bound up with the fifth-century manuscript which contains the Pistis Sophia is a slightly later leaf on which is the end of a book that may have been a Gospel. It has echoes of the last twelve verses of St. Mark. the righteous man. They went forth by threes to the four regions of the heaven and preached the gospel of the kingdom in the whole world, Christ working with them by the word of strengthening and the signs and wonders which accompanied them. And so have men learned of the kingdom of God in all the earth and in the whole world of Israel for a testimony for all nations that are from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof. 3. 1 Similarly the remains of the ancient manuscript of the Acts of Paul include a single leaf of a Gospel narrative: . . . the works . • . they wondered greatly and pondered in their hearts. He said unto them: Why marvel ye that I raise the dead, or that I make the lame to go, or that I cleanse the lepers or raise up the sick, or that I have healed the palsied and the possessed, or that I have parted a few loaves and satisfied many, or that I have walked on the sea or that I have commanded the winds ? If ye believe this and are convinced, then are ye great. For verily I say

1 See Appendix II. By this curious name, which means ‘unwritten things’, it is usual to designate sayings and traditions of Christ which are not recorded in our Gospels, and are not capable of being traced to their source. But collectors of them—especially Resch—have swept into their net all manner of fragments which do not come under the original definition. Many of these appear in other parts of this volume: but there is a residue for which a place must be found here. I distinguish two classes. First, those which are found as additions to the text of our Gospels, in manuscripts of the Gospels; second, those which are quoted by other writers. 1. At Matt. xx. 28, Codex Bezae (D of the Gospels, at Cam¬ bridge) and some Latin and Syriac authorities add: But ye seek (or seek ye) to increase from smallness and from the greater to become less. And when ye go in and are invited to dine, do not recline in the prominent place lest haply one more illustrious than thou come in, and he that bade thee to dinner say to thee: Go yet lower down; and thou shalt be put to shame. But if thou recline in the lesser place, and a lesser man come in, he that bade thee to dinner will say to thee: Get thee yet higher up; and this will be profitable to thee.