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The North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL) is pleased to announce the publication of the first two volumes in its series Early Christian Apocrypha: The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary, by Brandon W. Hawk (vol. 7) and The Protevangelium of James, by Lily C. Vuong (vol. 8). The series is offered as part of the Westar Tools and Translations published by Cascade Books and continues the work of Julian V. Hills, who edited the first six volumes of the series for Polebridge Press. The Early Christian Apocrypha series features fresh new translations of major apocryphal texts that survive from the early period of the Christian church.

The books can be ordered from Wipf & Stock, Amazon, and other online sellers. For more information on the series and the individual volumes (including 20-page previews) visit https://www.nasscal.com/early-christian-apocrypha-series/.

We are a little more than a week away from the deadline for submitting paper proposals for the SBL’s Christian Apocrypha program unit (Tuesday, March 1st, at 11:59PM EST). If you have not submitted to this section before, please consider doing so! If you are uncertain about whether your proposal fits, feel free to contact Brent Landau, the program unit chair, at bclandau”AT”utexas”DOT”edu.

The link with the SBL’s paper proposal requirements is here. You’ll need to login to the site to submit your proposal.

Here’s the Christian Apocrypha call for papers. The unit would be very grateful for papers exploring the ways in which digital humanities can improve the study of the Christian Apocrypha, and for papers on any topic within the field of Christian Apocrypha.

The Christian Apocrypha program unit will run four sessions at the 2016 Annual Meetings. The first is a book review panel dedicated to Philip Jenkins’s The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels; panelists are invited. The second session is a joint session with the Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies program unit, pertaining to the ways in which digital humanities is impacting the study of the Christian Apocrypha; although some presenters will be invited, we strongly encourage scholars interested in participating to contact the program unit chair and/or submit an abstract. The third session will tentatively focus on violence in the Christian Apocrypha; submissions of abstracts on this theme are welcome. The fourth and final session will be open to submission of any abstracts pertaining to the study of the Christian Apocrypha, broadly conceived; members of the steering committee, however, are particularly interested in papers exploring healing in the Christian Apocrypha, the artistic/iconographic representation of apocryphal narratives, or discussions of Christian Apocrypha found in patristic sources.

Sad news for the field of Christian Apocrypha studies–and for the study of ancient Christianity more generally–as word spread yesterday that Professor Helmut Koester had died at his home in Lexington, Mass. at the age of 89. An obituary was posted by his Lutheran church in Cambridge.

There is much that could be said (and many great stories that could be shared) about Professor Koester, but for the field of Christian Apocrypha studies, his signature achievement is nothing less than giving birth to the study of the Christian Apocrypha in North America. During his teaching career at Harvard Divinity School, which spanned an amazing 55 years, he mentored a great many scholars of the CA. In addition, his close collaboration with James Robinson (the two of whom co-wrote the enormously influential Trajectories Through Early Christianity) helped to establish Claremont in California as the other center of CA studies in the US. Koester’s theories about the Gospel of Peter, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the Egerton Gospel, and other CA texts are daring and provocative, though certainly controversial.

The following paragraph, from Brent Landau’s article, “The ‘Harvard School’ of the Christian Apocrypha,” sums up the unparalleled place in CA studies occupied by Koester:

“Suffice it to say that Koester’s theories have not commanded universal assent; indeed there are even many scholars who I would associate with the Harvard School who have serious misgivings about one or more of these theories. As such, Ulrich Luz, in his review of Koester’s Ancient Christian Gospels said, with an obvious mix of admiration and disagreement, that the book “is not so much an introduction into the Gospels as it is an introduction to Koester, and as such, it definitely has its great merits.” I would frame it slightly differently: even if Koester is ultimately proven wrong in many of his theories, he is brilliantly, spectacularly wrong.” (p.68 of Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: the Christian Apocrypha in North American Perspectives)