By Chance Bonar
On May 1–2, 2026, the University of Virginia’s Departments of Religious Studies and Classics hosted NASSCAL’s conference on New Research on Apocryphal Christian Literature. Occurring some years after the last (very successful!) NASSCAL conference hosted at UVA on “The Material of Christian Apocrypha,” the 2026 conference was a robust gathering of international scholars of apocryphal Christian literature from graduate student to seasoned professor.
The organizers—Janet Spittler, Inger Kuin, and myself—hoped to bring together a range of scholars without imposing a particular theme upon the conference that would have forced people to bend or contrive their meaningful research to fit it. Instead, we simply asked for what new things people were working on, so that we could showcase the interesting and innovative ways that scholars of Christian apocrypha have been pushing the boundaries of our field and deepening our understanding of well-known and little-known texts.
We are grateful to all of the scholars who shared their work and their company with us over the weekend: Cecilia Antonelli, Mikail Berg, Adam Bremer-McCollum, Lydia Bremer-McCollum, Tony Burke, Acacia Chan, Andrew Crislip, Gio DiRusso, Ismo Dunderberg, Stephen Hopkins, Triantafilos Kantartzis, Hugo Lundhaug, Ian Mills, Ivan Miroshnikov, Jean-Michel Roessli, Julia Snyder, Peter Toth, and Claudio Zamagni.
There’s not room or time to comment on each individual paper, but I want to highlight some of my favorite insights from the conference for others interested in Christian apocrypha who may not have been able to attend. A full schedule of the conference is available HERE.
DAY 1
Lydia Bremer-McCollum opened the conference with a paper on the Egerton Gospel fragments (BL Egerton Papyrus 2), a codex leaf from an unknown gospel text. Lydia walked us through the importance of considering how the papyrus fragment of this text has been deployed by scholars since its publication in 1935 to protect the edges of the canonized Gospels. Scholars, she argued, often used their feelings to determine whether a newly discovered text was more “orthodox” or “heretical.” The Egerton Gospel is a wonderful test case to expose how scholars’ presuppositions affect how they (pre)determine the social and theological location of ancient Christian texts, depending on whether they feel that it’s “historical” enough to resemble the canonical Gospels or “heretical” enough to be produced by a Valentinian or Sethian. Lydia’s work aims to remind us that many apocrypha are used by modern scholars to construct an orthodoxy/heresy binary, but that Christians in the ancient Mediterranean likely had a very different on-the-ground reality of these texts as they circulated.
Adam Bremer-McCollum’s paper took us to Turfan in the region of Xinjiang, where a plethora of texts and art have radically changed our understanding of interreligious and intercultural dialogue on the Silk Road. Among the Christian texts found at Turfan (alongside Buddhist and Manichaean literature), Adam introduced us to an Old Turkic fragment of a narrative about Paul and Thecla written in Old Uyghur, in which Paul is presented as an arhant preaching the doctrine of the Buddhas. Adam’s paper demonstrated not only just how far some narratives from the Acts of Paul and Thecla had spread eastward by the medieval period, but also how much more there is to learn about Christian-Manichaean-Buddhist interactions across central Asia.
Mikail Berg’s presentation on race and conflict in the Syriac Acts of Thomas opened with Kendrick Lamar’s m.A.A.d city—likely the first time that the Balz Philosophical Library at UVA had been graced with Lamar’s music—and encouraged us to think about what it means for narrative characters to ask “where are you from?” or “who are your people?” and how the response to that question shapes the subsequent interaction. Pulling from a range of Greek, Sanskrit, and Syriac sources, Mikail sought to demonstrate that characters in the Acts of Thomas had, at times, already made assumptions about perceived differences between themselves and other characters, and that asking these types of questions was intended to gauge the potential for conflict. His work raised questions for audience members about how intercultural interaction is depicted in apocryphal acts that involve sending the apostles to non-eastern-Mediterranean lands.
Peter Toth’s paper on the Letter by the Apostle James on Unleavened Bread not only introduced us to a new Middle Byzantine apocryphal text, but also walked us through his process of discovering this text through creative Pinakes search parameters—particularly since it is, at times, attributed to Clement and thus disguised in searchable databases as an apocryphal text attributed to an apostle. Peter offered us an overview of the text’s defence of using leavened bread and a particular type of knife for the Eucharist, and demonstrated that it was likely a product of the Great Schism of 1054 over (among many other things) Eucharistic differences. What fascinated the audience most was the appeal to apostolic authority at a time when texts by the church fathers were often the go-to justification for theological and social practice.
The first night ended with dinner at Orzo in Charlottesville, where lamb, salmon, and Spanish wine roamed and flowed freely.
DAY 2
Our second day, after starting with pastries from our local bakery Cou Cou Rachou, was a Coptophile panel dedicated to emotions, the cross, and death (in that order). Andrew Crislip’s presentation in particular walked us through three texts: the Berlin-Strasbourg Apocryphon, the Homily on the Life of Jesus and His Love for the Apostles, and the Book of Bartholomew. Andrew asked us to consider the roles of grief, joy, and laughter in these narratives, as well as when those emotions were expected to be deployed or how they ought to be directed. While we colloquially know the scene leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion as the Passion, what does did it mean to late ancient Coptic-reading Christians to experience passions when narrating the Passion?
We had lunch from Roots, our local salad shop, and sat in UVA’s famous McIntire Amphitheatre (which is confusingly and misleadingly named, since it is in fact just a theatre and not an amphitheatre; clearly the Classics Department was not consulted, despite overlooking it).
Our afternoon session included new work by Triantafillos Kantartzis, who offered an analysis of the Acts of Pilate through literary theorist Gérard Genette’s concept of focalization. In doing so, Traintafillos asked us to consider what character is imagined to be the narrator of this text (as well as other canonical and apocryphal passion narratives), what knowledge or access they do or do not have to the interactions between Jesus and Pilate, and why early Christians would be invested in producing multiple POVs of the same story. This paper, in combination with Lydia Bremer McCollum’s work on materiality and Ivan Miroshnikov’s analysis of which Jesus (there were multiple!) died on the cross, made me think of the Old English Dream of the Rood and its narration of the crucifixion from the perspective of the cross itself. I hope that scholars of Christian apocrypha keep exploring how both human and non-human actors are imagined by apocryphal writers to offer unique vantage points in the growing storyworld of Jesus and the apostles.
Our final panel offered a range of new ways forward in the study of Christian apocrypha through what media we examine, what technology we use, and what visions we have for the future of the field. Gio DiRusso’s analysis of the Arabic Apocalypse of Peter challenged the metaphor of “textual fluidity” and offered an alternative developed in part through computational methods that allow scholars (more adept than I am with coding) to determine with more precision exactly where a text is fixed or fluid. Gio demonstrated that not every section of the AAoP was subject to notable change between manuscripts, but that certain sections were more variable than others. Gio’s forthcoming dissertation on “modular textuality,” as well as Ian Mills’s forthcoming work on “textual viscosity” (which was hinted at in his recent JECS article on Marcion as a textual critic) are promising avenues to nuance our New Philological understandings of textual fluidity in apocryphal manuscript traditions.
Jean-Michel Roessli took us on a tour of late medieval and early modern Europe to answer a straightforward question: since there were originally ten sibyls according to Varro and Lactantius, why do we see twelve sibyls in late medieval European art? As Jean-Michel introduced us to the objects that these sibyls were often portrayed as carrying and the symbolism behind each of them—as well as how the twelve sibyls began to function as a mirror for twelve biblical prophets or patriarchs in European art—I became curious about the inclusion of Sibylla Europa and Sibylla Agrippina (sometimes known as Sibylla Aegyptia). Since most of the Sibyls were geographically associated with Italy, Greece, and western Asia, were these Sibylline locations chosen to further expand the influence of oracular women into central Europe and Africa?
Finally, Acacia Chan offered the audience an overview of her ethnographic research on Christian apocrypha scholars and their hopes and fears for the future of the field. Especially since her work focuses on the potential interactions or overlaps between apocrypha studies and fan fiction studies, she encouraged us to consider why folks from either field might be uncomfortable with being affiliated with the other: fan fic scholars because religion (broadly and often uncritically construed) is a phenomenon that many fans and celebrities don’t want to be associated with or don’t imagine that the actions of fans and celebrities conform to, and scholars of apocrypha out of concern for being perceived as doing unserious research at a time when virtually all humanistic scholarship is on the chopping block. Acacia pointed out that, based on her ethnographic data, scholars of Christian apocrypha are generally optimistic about the growing number of collaborations and the expansion of the field to include a plethora of languages, geographic locations, time periods, and skill sets. While the field of papyrology first coined amicitia papyrologum to describe the close-knit networks and willingness to share resources across institutional and geographical boundaries, scholars in our own field seem to believe we’re approaching an amicitia apocryphorum.
Our conference ended with Caribbean food from Pearl Island Catering at Janet Spittler’s house, so conference participants could unwind and gawk at her impressive garden.
