There's More To It: What Early Apocrypha Can Tell Us about Christianity, The Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminars at the National Humanities Center

There's More To It: What Early Apocrypha Can Tell Us about Christianity

The early Christian apocrypha include Gospels that describe the life and teachings of Jesus, Acts that narrate the activities and adventures of his disciples after his death, epistles forged in the names of his apostles, and apocalypses that provide authoritative accounts of the end of the age or the fate of the soul after death. How and why were these texts left out of the biblical canon? Had they been included, how would they change our understanding of the roots of Christianity? Do they preserve "authentic" traditions from the life of Jesus? Can they shed light on the battles over the formation of Christian orthodoxy? Might they alter our understanding of such fundamental matters as the person and nature of Christ and the grounds of salvation? Can they tell us anything about the Christian church's relationship with the Jewish and "pagan" worlds and to the violent opposition it sometimes encountered? And what should we make of the forged texts? Why did their authors choose to write under the name of another? Was that an acceptable practice in the ancient world?

"There's More To It" will address these and other questions by studying a wide range of the Christian apocryphal texts. It will explore them individually as literary products of early Christianity and, through them, will probe such topics as the quest for the historical Jesus, the internecine conflicts of the early Christian movement, the development of Christian doctrine, the use of literary forgery in the ancient world, the formation of the Scriptural canon, and the ways early Christians defended their beliefs. Finally, the seminar will examine the impact of the early Christian apocrypha on the broader culture, especially as represented in art work of later periods, including the illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages.

The seminar should interest scholars in biblical studies, classics, ancient and late antique history, theology, church history, Gnosticism and other Christian "heresies," art history, and, generally, religion.

Bart D. Ehrman
James A. Gray Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He came to UNC in 1988 after four years of teaching at Rutgers University.

A leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity, Professor Ehrman is the author of more than twenty books, including three New York Times bestsellers: Misquoting Jesus, God's Problem, and Jesus Interrupted. His work has been featured in Time, the New Yorker, the Washington Post and other print media, and he has appeared on NBC's Dateline, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, The History Channel, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, the BBC, major NPR shows, and other top media outlets. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Professor Ehrman has served as President of the Southeast Region of the Society of Biblical literature, chair of the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society, book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, and editor of the monograph series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers. He currently serves as co-editor of the series New Testament Tools and Studies and on several other editorial boards for monographs in the field.