 So what we're going to talk about tonight, Dr. Burke, is the concept of New Testament Apocrypha in general. So for those in our audience unfamiliar, could you elaborate further on what we mean exactly by the term New Testament Apocrypha? These are essentially texts that are like what we find in New Testament, so that they focus on first century figures like Jesus and his pals, the apostles, and his family. And they are additional stories that are not found in the New Testament. But some of them are written before what we call the canon of the New Testament was settled. So they were around in the first few centuries. So some of them were possible candidates to be included in the New Testament. But then these also get composed after that as well. We have Apocrypha composed throughout Christian history. So it's sometimes thought that people stopped writing Apocrypha once the canon was settled, which is around the fourth century or so. And then they just kind of get lost to history. But it's not true at all. People continue to copy them. People continue to write them, play around with them, expand them and so on, combine them together in various ways. It just seems that Christians really like thinking with first century characters, what better way to get new ideas across to a Christian audience than to have, say, Jesus say them or Paul or some other character. So as I said, they like the New Testament. So New Testament in a nutshell has got gospels that are biographies of Jesus, a book of Acts, which talks about the various apostles and their activities after the death of Jesus. Letters, many of them by Paul, and then an Apocalypse at the end, the book of Revelation. In Apocrypha literature, we have texts in all of those genres. So we have additional gospels, additional Acts, Letters, Apocalypses, et cetera. And we talk about various, we talk about some examples of some of these. But you know, the New Testament has 27 texts in Apocrypha literature, there's probably somewhere close to 300. So there's certainly lots of this kind of literature out there, has something special to offer us that that's worth studying. There seems to be this misconception when people hear the term Apocrypha kind of gives it a mysterious kind of bent. So what are the problems that arise when we mislabel these terms, these texts as things like apocryphal or non-canonical, what kind of judgments are we making when we use these terms? The word apocryphal, apocrypha is the plural, apocryphon would be the singular. It just means hidden or secret, or maybe esoteric, you know, like mystical. And we have some texts among the apocrypha that actually use that in their titles. We have an apocryphon of John or apocryphon of James, which just simply means secret book of. These texts were composed with some special teachings that go beyond what everybody else is reading, the riffraff are reading, right? There's nothing wrong with the term apocrypha. But certain people within what became mainstream Christianity did not like these texts, you know, they were the texts that they decided they did not want in their canon. And so they would, they started to use the term apocrypha as a pejorative term. Just imagine these early church writers, we're talking about the second, third century. They're trying to create a kind of a universal faith that something that everyone can kind of agree on. And when you do something which is universal or Catholic, it would be the term being used here. It tends to get simplified. It's something that everyone can kind of understand. So they don't like the idea of these groups that meet kind of extracurricularly, if I pronounce that right, you know, outside the church in their own special groups and have their own special meetings where they talk about secret things and hidden things and analogies and spiritual stuff. So they would label their texts as apocrypha in a pejorative way because these are the secret meetings, the secret groups. And that's how the text, the term has taken on. That's how the text, sorry, that's how the term is used today. When we talk about something that's apocryphal, we mean something that we're not quite sure is true. And that's another sense that we, that because of the pejorative nature of the term, it tends to get become synonymous with fake or forgery. And so you get ended with this sense that what is canonical, it's in the Bible, is true, genuine, and what's not is fake, forgery, apocryphal. And just before I get too far into it, so you use the term non-canonical. And this is a, this is a term that scholars use, which is, which tries to take away that pejorative sense. So let's, let's value laden. We talk about what's in the canon, what's not in the canon, rather than scripture and apocrypha. So non-canonical, canonical. Another thing about this is that dichotomy I was saying about what's in the canon is, is true, what's not in the canon is false. But we have texts within the, the canon, which are in some ways false as well. For example, seven of the 13 letters of Paul in New Testament are believed almost universally by scholars to be genuine. And this is something I enjoy pointing out to my class, that we actually do agree that these things are genuine, virtually everything else in the Bible we think is probably not really written by the people whose names are on them. So the other six, then, of the 13 Pauline letters are written in Paul's name. So there's a certain falseness to that as well. And even the other letters in the New Testament, letters by Peter, letters by John, like James and Jude, we don't think the actual people whose names are on them are actually the writers. So that dichotomy of, you know, in the canon, true and outside of the canon, false, does not really work. But you know, this is not how we like to talk about these texts anyway. We're not, we're not really interested in whether they are really written necessarily by the people whose names are on them. We're more interested in how they function, why were they written, what ideas are they trying to get across, who were they written for, etc. That's, these are the kinds of questions that tend to be more important. I really like what you said in your book, Secret Scriptures Revealed You, said, quote, each text has its own story and its own contribution to make to our understanding of Christian history, right? So when we tend to look at these text and value laden terms in terms of, OK, this is fake inforgery versus this is real because it's in a canonical text, which is our New Testament, we tend to lose that richness and to understand that these are real communities and real writers responding to real things in their environment, right? It springs me to another question that I have. Apocryphal strictly, is it related to just literature in the written word? You know, it can be ubiquitous in literature and drama and art as well, correct? Yeah, that's one of the areas that people in the field like me are really interested in, like the things that are beyond literature, but we tend not to have the skills required that we would like to work on it. So we're we're always anxious to or eager to talk to people who are art historians or or or drama historians or whatever. But we can talk about some examples. Text influence other aspects of life. We have lots of examples of artifacts, material artifacts, again, throughout the centuries that connect to apocryphal texts. Some of the earliest, for example, are things like things involved in pilgrimage are a good example. So you would go to a particular holy site, say a church where Mary is said to have sat down on her way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. There was a church that was constructed there. And there's a story about this, which is it's connected to a text called the infancy gospel of James. And so there's that church there and people will go to that church. And I know they're all longer exists. So we can't exactly say exactly what happened there, but we can imagine. And they would they would, you know, enjoy the presence of being the presence of this church and they may be able to pick up some pilgrim souvenirs and souvenirs would include images related to what was there, right? And so I can imagine it could be some steam from the infancy gospel of James, where, for example, the way that the Annunciation, where the Angel Gabriel talk to announces to Mary that she's going to give birth. Infancy gospel, James version includes this element where Mary is spinning. Yarn to help create the temple veil, the curtain in the temple. And that's only in the infancy gospel of James, but we have lots and lots and lots of images and antiquity, pilgrim souvenirs, various ivories, you know, decorative things with that particular image. And one of the interesting things about that is it shows you how something from an apocryphal text can influence that what becomes the typical way to show that scene, even though it's not in the canon, but most people, I think, throughout medieval period wouldn't really know the difference between what's in and what's out. They just because most people are illiterate, they don't have a clear sense of what what text is what text, but they know images so they can see that image. So there's lots of things like that, but also church decorations. So even say that church I was just talking about there would have been decorated with images of Mary's a journey from Bethlehem to sorry, from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, as it's told in infancy gospel of James. We have lots of images, again, connected with the same text of the nativity scene and and these again, throughout the centuries, even still today, very common in the in the Greek world where infancy gospel of James was very popular, but the nativity scene there includes a character called Salome who was a midwife and she's only talked about an apocryphal text. So is that church decoration? Is this a church dedicated to John the evangelist on Patmos, which many people know as the location where the book of Revelation is said to have been written. So John of Patmos is right to the book of Revelation and tradition tends to associate him with the Apostle John. Well, you go to this church on Patmos today and it's fully decorated with scenes from a text called the Acts of John by Procrest, which talks about John's various activities. It's very, very long in both Ephesus, which is in Turkey and Patmos, not canonical. Yet this church, modern church, certainly the paintings are older, but it's still standing today, fully decorated with images from an apocryphal text and drama. You're talking about plays. They were these what we call mystery plays that were performed throughout the medieval period by trade guilds. So, you know, various people would get together and put on a play for the people of the village. And they would tell basically the creation of the world or the history of the world from creation to the last judgment and, of course, would draw on canonical stories, but also non-canonical stories, including the story of when Jesus in between his death and his resurrection, where he goes down to hell and liberates all of the older saints. So, you know, Adam and Enoch and David, all these people who are heroes of Hebrew Bible and Old Testament stories, but they never got to meet Jesus. So how did they get saved? Well, Jesus has to go down to hell and introduce himself and bring them up into heaven, essentially. That's not in the Bible, but it is in a text called the Gospel of Nicodemus. And so again, they're drawing on these stories that become very, very popular, very well known, but people don't realize that they're not biblical. Because there's that, you know, that boundary between the two things is is is porous and not exactly clear throughout the centuries. Fascinating. They're they're really playing with the dynamic of the world around them and they're kind of internalizing it. They're creating something new. So I just find that very fascinating. It's kind of like comic books today, right? Like you have a character that was created by these essentially blue color guys, right, just going to work, doing a job. I got to come up with a story today. People read it, they internalize it, they enjoy it and they create their own stories through that, whether becoming a comic book, you know, writer, artists themselves or, you know, and internalizing the stories that they see on TV, because comics aren't just like the medium comics themselves, right? They're like the cartoons, they're the the books you see at the store, you know, all the toys and everything. And people just kind of internalize all this. And some of it becomes, you know, for lack of a better term, canonical for them. So, you know, it's kind of like a first century version of fan fiction, almost interesting. That is becoming an area that people talk about apocrypha in the way I always have a bit of a problem with it and I've become a bit known for being a bit of a commudgion on this. And as a fan of comic books and science fiction and so on, I'm open to this idea. But what I don't like about it is it creates something which is a, it separates something which is official, like canon, canonical text, versus something that's not official and is in some way not as good, right? It's fan fiction, it's unprofessional, et cetera. And I just don't like the kind of a qualitative divide between canonical text and non-canonical text. No, that's a good point. Yeah, especially since it's the non-canonical texts are not in all instances playing in the world of the canonical texts. Sometimes they've developed alongside early ones anyway. I do like this idea of the multiple iterations. So you can have various acts of John, for example, or acts of Paul. You can have your regular established world, and then you can have your parallel world, your multiverses. And they can all operate together. People can read between them and enjoy their particular worlds in different ways. Certainly there'd be efforts to try and make some cohesion out of these worlds. And this is what we get in comics too, right? Every six years or so, there's some kind of crisis in which they try to bring them all back together again. So certainly some of these analogies kind of work well for thinking how these texts were created and how they might interact with one another and how people, readers, might kind of take in what's in the text. As long as you're not saying one is necessarily better than the other in some way, that's the part that I bristle at, I guess. Oh, no, I absolutely agree with you on that part. I use fanfiction because it's a term. It's kind of like Gnosticism. I don't like the term Gnosticism, but I have to use it right. So it's kind of like some people certainly use fanfiction in a pejorative sense when they talk about that. For me, it's just there's no other term, I think, that besides Dr. Litt was dynamic cultural interaction that really captures what's going on there. I think people are, like I said, they're internalizing it. They have a connection to it and they make it a part of them. And then they in turn give that back to the culture. So I'm just going back to this issue of what's in and versus what's out. Some people talk about the Gospel of John as almost like the first apocryphal Gospel. And so we can think of it in this term as the first kind of fanfiction. If we think that the Snoppy Gospels were earlier and generally most people do. John comes along and says, you know, I'm working the characters I'm OK with, but I'm going to throw most of that out and create something new. So working within the world, right, of those texts, we're using the characters, using some of the concepts, but something that's very different. And if the Gospel of John was not in the canon, was not selected for it, and we just kind of looked at this separately from it, we'd say this is nothing like what the Jesus we have in the New Testament. This is something quite different, but it is in. So it's canonical, but it's cool. But that difference between the Snoptics and John has led to that kind of idea of this is almost like an apocryphal text or a fanfiction text because it's it's it's it's really taking these ideas. And and moving them in a completely different direction. Gospel of John really is like you can kind of look at Gospel of John is almost like the the first reboot of the Gospel story. Like you have a set of typology of what the story is. And then John is like, I don't know, maybe I'll do my own little spin on that. And it's almost like if night Shyamalan decided to remake Citizen Kane or something, you know, knows what would come out come out of that. Or I don't know if you read Kingdom Come, D.C., you know, you have those stories in that lore. But like when they do that story, like you take all the concepts and you turn them on their head, you know, it's just another person in that cultural discussion, creating their own kind of answer to these questions that everybody's dealing with. So and in your situation, right, that's that's really what apocrypha is about. Something has changed or something is different for one group than another group. So they take the story, they take the characters and use them in order to get get something of their experience out there or get some have the author uses these characters to try to address a new situation. And that's, you know, comics will do that for have to mean doing that for about a century. We reinterpret these characters for new situations. And it tends to be, you know, early comics were very black and white in their way of looking at good and evil. But we've been in an increasingly complicated world. And so the stories get more complicated. The characters are new, more nuanced. We have like we have these these gray characters like the Punisher of Wolverine who who will will will kill. And whereas Superman would never have done that, right. So so that's in a way why you can maybe get a Jesus that does something in a fifth century text that the Jesus of the first century would never have done because it's a new new world. It's almost like like what we're doing here with the apocryphal texts, like I tend to take the same kind of approach there that I do to comic books. I I find value in all these stories on all these voices and the apocryphal and the canonical texts and all these stories from antiquity. And I do the same thing with comic books. I can read a golden age Superman, like action comics one through seven. But I'm not going to mistake that or appreciate it the same way. I'm going to appreciate Mark Millar's Red Sun or All Star Superman by Grant Morrison. Right. It's going to be different, different appreciations, depending on context and, you know, the different dimensions that they're kind of playing with brings us back to back around and probably to my probably one of the most important questions I have for you. You talk a lot about transmission, recension, history, things like this. Why exactly is transmission and recension history important? And especially regarding to these texts and what is the importance of establishing a proper, scholarly, critical addition? You have this problem in the pseudopigraphy, right? You have something like Joseph and Asaneth or Testament of Solomon, right? Where you have so many different manuscripts and recensions and not everything agrees, right? And what we read in Charles Worth isn't necessarily what's in the manuscripts, right? It's like we put all this together to make it make sense, you know? So it's kind of the same apocryphal literature, right? So I don't know if you could just go into that briefly and the importance of it for studying these things. This is something which is what people in my field do all the time. You can have people who work in New Testament who never look at a manuscript because they have the nice critical addition that they can use. And then that's translated into English or whatever language they're working in. With apocryphal texts, we tend to change quite a lot over time. New Testament manuscripts, New Testament texts do as well. To a certain extent, we have variations in the manuscripts. And there are certainly people who work in work with New Testament texts and manuscript forms to try and determine what the right readings are and so on. But the types of changes that we find in most New Testament manuscripts are rather small apocryphal texts because they never became considered scripture, never really had the kind of an institutional control that you find with canonical texts. So they can go into they can take on a variety of forms over time. Things get added to them or taken away from them or texts get combined together. They just change a lot. So what you want to do, well, you have to figure out what you want to do with the material. And the tendency used to be that you what you want to do is find the original text. So early apocryphal scholars would go to various monasteries in the east, so Western scholars into the east and find manuscripts and bring them back and then compare them and try to figure out what the original readings were. And then you'd find some copies in archaeological sites, which are closer to the when they would have been composed. And, you know, then they come up with with the constructive critical edition and come up with some theories. What did this text mean to its original readers and its original author? But the manuscripts can only take you so far back. So those earlier efforts to create critical editions, most of the manuscripts were relatively recent, so 15th century, 16th century. But as you get, you find more manuscripts and earlier manuscripts, you find that the text is quite different. And so it's really cautious about what you want to achieve. Can you actually say a 15th century manuscript reflects its the original text, which was composed in the second century? Probably not. What about you find one from the 10th century? Well, better. What is that still the 10th century? Probably not. So it's always this this problem where you could come up with this great theory about this text based on the critical edition you've created. But a new manuscript could be discovered tomorrow, an earlier one, which is far different from the one you're working on. Gaffer, in a sense, by trying to figure trying to be, I guess, more realistic about your options. If you have a 10th century manuscript of a particular text, then what does it tell us about the 10th century context of that text? Right. That's so much on a much safer ground. I'm not that I don't think I don't think you should abandon the idea of trying to get to original text, but I think you have to be really cautious about about about what you're going to say about it. Because again, you know, the whole apple cart could be upset with it with a new manuscript. And this is the as I said, this is the work that we all kind of do. And it's one of the most exciting aspects of our work, because we get to play with these these manuscripts, so handwritten text, sometimes in person. We can go to the libraries and see them ourselves. But many of them today are digitized. We can get to get to work with them at home on our computers, which is great. But each one of these has its own particular personality and its own quirks. And and it can be a lot of fun to work with. Get an apocrypha person more excited than to see a manuscript. And see that particularity is involved with it. But and just in thinking about my own work, I my doctoral thesis was on the infancy gospel of Thomas. And when that was when I was first working on it, it was the the critical edition of the time was based on 15th and 16th century manuscripts. But I knew there was more out there. And I thought you spend a lot of time just to just to make a point here. Like you I've read that and you spend a lot of time talking about the the recensions and the the manuscript tradition at the very beginning, very, very technical, very detailed. So check that out if you want to learn more. But Dr. Burke, sorry, please continue. I won't believe the point too much. But I knew there were other manuscripts out there. And so I thought I'd better get them all together. If I'm going to say anything substantial by this text. And so the main contribution to that was finding this manuscript from the 11th century, which gets us closer to the original. And then I worked later on on Syriac manuscripts, some of which were from the fifth or sixth century, we get this closer still. And so you try and put all these things together and and then see see what we can say about the text as a result. Much for that. And this has been an absolute pleasure for me. Dr. Burke, did you want to plug anything before we go tonight? The series I edit called New Testament Apocrypha, more non-canonical scriptures. Yes, we have a new volume coming out very soon. Apparently, my copies are in the mail. So volume three is out and all three of them you can take a look at on my website, which is just Tony Burke dot C.A. And you can see the contents and the introductions are there as well. So you can read those. I helped create an organization called Nascow, the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature. So this is all the Apocrypha nerds in their society where we work together and hopefully gather together sometimes to work on things. But we have a website called Nascow dot com. And one of the projects we work on is something called E. Clavis, and it's it's a great big bibliographical resource for text. So you can go to you can look at any one of these. Well, there's now two hundred and fifty entries on it. So what does more to come? So pick one of these two hundred and fifty texts and you'll get a summary. You'll get links to scholarship, links to manuscript images and etc. So they're a great little introduction to to to the to the text. And it's open access and it's free to free to use. And so those are the the two main projects that I think your listeners would be interested in. It's been an honor. Thank you very much for letting your time and your expertise. And you have a great evening. Thank you.