 Returning to the show is Dr. Yvon Moroshnikov. Dr. Moroshnikov is a guest researcher at the University of Oslo, where he participates in the project Story, Worlds and Transition, Coptic Apocrypha in changing contexts in the Byzantine and early Islamic periods. His research interests include Coptic philology and dialectology, as well as early Christian studies. He is the author of the Gospel of Thomas in Plato, which is an open resource available on Brill, and has published widely in the field of Coptic Apocrypha literature. So Yvon, welcome back to the show. Hi, glad to be back. I really enjoyed our previous talk and I'm really looking forward to this. Before we get into the Coptic Apocrypha texts themselves, could you elaborate further on what we mean by New Testament Apocrypha? Talking about Apocrypha and specifically New Testament Apocrypha, the definition is always a problem. If you do some research, you'll find a bunch of definitions. So my colleague, Professor Hugo Lukauk, in the Oslo project, they have their own definition. So they define Apocrypha as texts and traditions that expand or develop on the biblical story world. So the idea is that there is a biblical story world, which is different from the story world of, let's say, patristic literature or martyrdom literature. And this story world is somehow fixed because we have a canon and there is a sort of like fan fiction kind of addendum to this corpus, which is the Apocrypha corpus, which tries to expand our knowledge about this so-called biblical story world. We can debate about definitions forever. I personally don't really find this very helpful. I think this definition is good enough. The only possible commentary that it requires is that the word Apocrypha itself, it's a Greek word. It's important to understand that the people who wrote Apocrypha, most of them, probably would disagree with us labelling these texts Apocrypha, because in Egypt, for example, but surely not only in Egypt, at a rather early stage, the word Apocrypha meaning hidden in Greek became associated with some clandestine activity. So Apocrypha texts are those composed by heretics, by people who are outside of the great church, by the enemies of this church. So when we read the most important Coptic writer, Shinuta, Shinuta would always use these words basically in the same sentence, heresy and Apocrypha. But surprisingly, this doesn't mean that this sort of literature did not really prosper in Shinuta's time or in later times. In fact, the monastery, which was founded by Shinuta, the so-called white monastery, is where most of our Apocrypha texts come from. Just the word itself is probably not, as I said, not what they themselves would call it. So they would rather talk about some sort of embellishments, some beautiful additions that by no means problematize the orthodoxy. There is, in fact, this very famous passage, which all my colleagues know and love. It's in this author called Sude Evodius of Rome, which is a completely fictional character, allegedly a bishop of Rome. He never existed really. And this made up character actually, you know, is credited with several works. And one of them is a homily on the Passion of Christ. And it's a very interesting text, apocryphal text, full of remarkable, fantastic details, really fun read. And at some point, the author basically takes the mask off and admits to not actually being Evodius, to being somebody else. And he says, well, surely nobody would judge us for adding this embellishments, this beautiful elements to the Gospel story. Surely we will only be thanked for making the Gospel story even more glorious than it is. That's an important distinction, right? And this is not to say that we don't have texts that actually call themselves apocryphal. So for instance, the Gospel of Thomas is an important exception because it begins with this statement that, you know, these are the secret words that Jesus spoke. And in the Greek text, it actually uses the word apocryphus. And then we have, of course, the text known as the apocryphal of John, where the word apocryphal is actually in the title. So surely not for everybody, this word was non kosher. But like for a past corpus of texts, this is probably not how they would self define how they would see themselves. But again, as I said, I don't think this is really important. We make our own definitions. And we simply, if they help us understand what we're dealing with, they're fine. The one that I gave you, the one of the Oslo team, I think it's good enough. Today, we're talking about some texts that not only are apocryphal, but they're specifically Coptic apocryph. For those in the audience who are unaware, what exactly is the Coptic language? The Coptic language is defined as the last stage in the history of the Egyptian language. So it's basically the same language as the one that's used in the book of the dead. But, you know, languages evolve. So for instance, we can also say that French is basically the same language as Latin. But of course, there is a huge difference. So over the course of its development, the Coptic language, it acquired certain distinct features, which we don't find in the earlier varieties of Egyptian. One thing that immediately is easily recognizable is that Coptic is written down with an alphabetic script. So at some point, somebody realized that it's easier to represent this language using the letters of the Greek alphabet, plus the additional characters from, you know, the earlier stages of the Egyptian. There is a lot of things that we still don't know about all this. Like, for instance, it has been long suggested that the idea to use the Greek script for this, it was an idea invented by Christian missionaries. But in fact, there is research that shows that there are already pre-Christian attempts to write down Egyptian using the Greek alphabet. So this sort of practice has existed prior to the advent of Christian missionaries. There is another argument which I like, which I think is a very strong one, is that in many regional traditions, we have these same figures credited with the discovery of the script. So for instance, we have Mesrop Meshtots in Armenia. We have Ulfela for the Gothic script. We have Cyril and Methodius for the Church Slavonic script. But the Coptic script does not actually have a founding father, which may mean that it's actually not a Christian invention, that it actually is something that was invented, as I said, prior to the advent of Christian missionaries. Unfortunately, we don't have any evidence. But in any case, Coptic is the last stage, as I said, of the Egyptian language. It existed as a multitude of different dialects. So for the first time in the history of Egyptian, the language is written down in a way that allows you to see the vowels. And immediately we can see that words were vocalized differently in different areas of Egypt. And this dialects coexisted in the first millennium. The most influential dialect was the dialect of the south, which is known as the Sahidic dialect from the Arabic word Said, which means south. And eventually, the dominant role was transferred to the dialect of the north, which is known as the Buhari dialect. And this is the dialect that is still used in the Coptic liturgy. So today, you go to a Coptic church in Egypt, in the United States, and some part of the service will be in this dialect of Coptic. But at some point in the Middle Ages, the language sadly became extinct. So at some point, people switched to Arabic. So today, Coptic is a dead language, if indeed there is such a thing as a dead language, which is of course a problem for us, because, you know, people who study manuscripts, we would really love to have some help from a native speaker who could explain to us what this means or, you know, how this phrase works. Unfortunately, we cannot do it. So we all need to rely on manuscripts to explain manuscripts. This is also something that makes it a lot of fun, this kind of research. It's very important just to kind of understand the language in general and, you know, what the possibilities it was used for. This is Egyptian, Demotic, late stage language being transliterated through Greek alphabets and lots of Greek loanwords. So this is reflective, I think, of a very cosmopolitan world. These people are from all over the empire. And this is obviously a remnant of what happened after the conquest of Alexander, you know, the different generals who took over and created what we call the Hellenistic Empire into the Roman Empire. You still have native Demotic speakers and the people up in the higher echelons are Greek speakers, but the normal everyday person is probably native Egyptians. So it's kind of this melding of cultures and there's this clash. And like you mentioned, there are different dialects as well. And this makes things very complicated. When you start to learn Coptic, I think the text that I have by Bentley Leiden is the Cetic Coptic. But as you say, there are tons of different dialects. And those of you who are familiar in Gnostic studies will know that the Naqmadi texts were composed in Coptic. And not only that, but there's also a question of, you know, like Dr. Marosh Naka was saying, that there are different dialects reflected within those texts themselves as well. What are our sources of these Coptic apocryphal texts? You mentioned Shinute, where are we pulling these texts from? As you probably know, the situation with the Coptic manuscript tradition is extremely complicated. For instance, one of the main or maybe the most important source of our manuscript is the so-called White Monastery. And this is where apparently around a thousand codices on parchment, really expensive codices were once housed. But unfortunately, today, we don't have a single complete codex from this repository. So all the manuscripts are in fragments, which means that sometimes we have a choir that is like a certain block of parchment leaves pressed together. Sometimes we have individual leaves. And sometimes we have tiny fragments, which may or may not join other fragments. And all these fragments are housed at different libraries across the world. So we have the largest collection in Paris, in the National Library of France in Paris. There is a large collection in London at the British Library. There is stuff in Moscow, in New York, in Cairo. So basically the work that scholars of Coptic manuscripts do is detective work. You try to track down pieces or fragments of the same codex of the same manuscript. And then from this almost always partially preserved text, you try to squeeze some information. And this would eventually yield some knowledge about this literature. So we have this fragmentary evidence in Coptic. And then we have translations, because as I said, the Coptic Church eventually started using Arabic. And there was a great movement for translating Coptic text into the Arabic language. And today, we have many texts that survive only in fragments in Coptic, but survive completely in Arabic. And then after that, eventually the Ethiopian Church received this tradition and then texts that were translated into Arabic were subsequently translated into ancient Ethiopic. So we have this thing called Coptic Arabic Ethiopic, a literary tradition, literary trajectory. And sometimes it's only with the help of this later translations that we can kind of try and reconstruct the situation that existed in the first millennia, which is reflected in this fragmentary manuscripts. Coptic apocryphal literature is manifold. We have texts of various genres. The people here in Oslo are especially interested in this genre called the apostolic memoirs. So texts that have usually some sort of a framework, some sort of discovery story. So they are ascribed to certain champions of the Orthodox faith from the glorious past of the Neophysite Church. And these church fathers are described to come, say to Jerusalem, visit library or house, and then to discover a small book, which would then contain some amazing story about Jesus, about crucifixion or about some events that happened before the creation of mankind, or when angels were battling with each other, when Satan was thrown away from the sky. My colleague of mine, Florian Graz, here in Oslo is writing a dissertation about this topic. It's an extremely interesting thing of this, of what we know about this so far. But as I said, there are many other genres. So I specifically work on apocryphal acts. So on various stories that deal with the disciples of Jesus and how they travel across the known universe and preach the gospel and eventually die as martyrs. Because according to the Coptic tradition, all apostles, with the exception of John, died as martyrs. You mentioned before the kind of fanfiction aspect of apocryphal literature. What would be some of the reasons to compose these texts? Would it be primarily biographical, liturgical, if you could just kind of touch upon that? There are several reasons. And definitely liturgical is, liturgy is the keyword here. Many of the texts that we deal with contain dates. So for instance, as I mentioned, there are stories about the martyrdoms, how apostles die as martyrs, and why these stories are important. Because there's always a date for the death of the apostle. And this is the day on which a certain celebration takes place. So the idea is that there is this annual liturgical circle and their commemoration dates. And on each particular date, we have a certain set of saints or events that are to be celebrated. Therefore, we need a text or corpus of texts that should be used liturgically during this festival. Now, unfortunately, we don't really know much about how this Coptic text war performed. Like for instance, we know that today Coptic monks read a certain set of texts during their meals, right? Like a collective of monks gather together in a refectory and one of them stands in front of them and reads out certain pious literature so that they eat and not forget about God and everything. But we don't really know when this practice emerged. And a colleague of mine at the University of Bergen here in Norway actually is writing a dissertation about this and related topics. And she, as far as I know, wasn't able to find any evidence more ancient than 19th century for this sort of practice. This doesn't mean that it didn't exist, but we don't have any evidence. So as I said, we don't really know exactly how this text war performed. Another of my colleagues, Sam Cook here in Oslo, he is writing a book about the monastery of Saint Macarius in the delta and the Buhari manuscripts from this monastery, also late 1st millennium. And in those manuscripts, we sometimes have marginal notes that say something like, you know, don't read this, this is false or skip this read from here. So we know that sometimes the texts were apparently too long to be performed. So they needed to be bridged or there was something problematic with this text. And so this part should be skipped. But unfortunately, as I said, there's still a lot that we don't know. But basically, the point is that somehow this apocryphal texts were necessary for the liturgical cycle and for liturgical performance during the feast days. So this is one reason. But then of course, the other reason is, I would say curiosity. We read the New Testament and there are many parts, many storylines that are not as detailed as we would want, right? We don't know much about the childhood of Jesus. And that's why we have all this infancy gospels. We don't know much about the fates of the apostles, except for Apostle Paul, who is the main protagonist of the canonical acts of the apostles. So I mean, I think this is perfectly understandable, right? So you have this great heroes of faith and you know surprisingly little about them. So it makes sense to have certain interest in literature that would fill these gaps. I'm talking specifically about the apocryphal acts of the apostles and specifically about the Coptic acts of the apostles or texts that come from Egypt. One thing that I believe we can know for certain now is that one of the main sources of these stories, and those are fantastical stories, like bombastic stories full of miracles, resurrections, completely incredible events. One of the main sources for these stories were the so-called Byzantine apostolic lists. So this is a genre of literature that is still not very well researched. It's very short texts, two or three pages that basically give you a list of the apostles and the disciples of the apostles and some two or three sentences, main facts of their biographies. Like, you know, Apostle Philip, he preached in the country of Phrygia, and then he died a martyr's death in the city of Hierapolis, right? That's it. That's just two sentences. There are also texts that list like the relatives, whether or not an apostle had children or wives or whether or not they had a mundane profession, a vocation, like what they did before they actually started their religious careers. So these texts apparently started to pop up quite early, and when you study Coptic Apocryphal Acts, you very soon realize that the main point is to provide some detail, some story to this very short sentences we find in these apostolic lists. So for instance, as I said, Philip is said to have preached in Phrygia. So now we have this text, relatively long text, which is all dedicated to this, how Philip was casting lots with all the other apostles, how Phrygia was allotted to him, how he was scared to go because he was not confident enough, and how Peter said that he would join him to give him some support and how they travel there, whom they encounter in the way, what they find when they arrive, and so forth. So ultimately, the idea is that there is this kind of skeleton provided by the lists, and there was apparently some Coptic writer who thought that this is great stuff. I should just add details to this story, add some flesh to this skeleton. So yes, the second reason for the composition of this text is definitely curiosity and just general kind of interest in what happened to these great heroes of the past. But I'm sure there are other reasons too. I guess it all depends on each particular text and in-depth analysis of every single text would probably provide more kind of reasons. But I think these two are key, if we talk about this whole corpus in general. For me, just before we move on, when you were discussing the liturgical and the curiosity aspects, my personal favorite figure of apocryphal fan fiction that comes from basically one sentence in the canonical text is the Good Bandit, right? You have all these amazing, insane stories about how this guy helped Jesus and Mary and his dad when they were crossly good to Egypt. I was so amazed by this. I think just an example from pop culture, for those of you who are comic book fans out there, think of a character who just even after 80 years, like Batman, Batman appears in a 10-page story, a 1939 throwaway story. Who knows if he'll be back again. And he amasses what we could term a canon over the years. And people who are later the kind of scribes or the authors who are creating these stories and creating the art are curious about like little throwaway lines or sentences or scenes or panels in these stories. And they create entire mini series or tech about it. So kind of think of it that way. That's how I do at least. So let's get into the text themselves, Yvonne. You've worked extensively on these apocryphal acts. So tell us more about your research. So these two texts are, I think, really nice examples of this sort of literature. So I think they both were composed originally in Coptic. They both draw inspiration from this Byzantine apostolic lists. And I would say from other Byzantine texts, like there is this extremely popular early apocryphal text known as the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals, which was translated into all possible languages and was extremely popular across the Christian world in the first millennium. And this text clearly made a significant impact on Coptic apocryphal acts. And I mean, for everybody listening, I would strongly recommend this as some sort of an introduction to this sort of literature, because it's in a sense really good literary work full of very nice details with a very thought through structure. So basically the Acts of Andrew and Matthias describe how Andrew and Matthias get separated. At some point, the two apostles get separated and Matthias goes to the City of the Cannibals, which is, we don't know where it is. It's completely a fairy tale. Like there are no real geography connected to this. Yeah, but they had cannibals there. So that's all we need to know. Yeah, it's a city, because we do have this sort of stuff in antique geography, that there are Egyptians, there are Nubians, Indians, whatever. And then further, if you keep going in that direction, then you'll find dog people and cannibal people and self-eating people, like all sorts of weird creatures. Yeah, not to our boy Herodotus. Yeah, so there's this City of the Cannibals, and the cannibals are really evil. And they capture Matthias and they want to eat him. But, of course, Matthias prays to God and God saves him and releases him from prison. And then Andrew comes and together they perform all sorts of miracles and commit a little genocide of the cannibals. So kill the most evil ones, then they rest convert. So it's a fantastic story, which was composed in Greek and was very soon translated into Coptic. And I think it kind of provided a modal for many of these later texts that were composed in Coptic initial. So the Acts of Andrew and Philemon is basically, well, either a prequel or a sequel. It's not entirely clear, but it's a text that is very clearly aware of this Acts in the City of the Cannibals and is constantly alluding to various events described in this text. So the main characters here are Andrew, which is one of the most popular apostles in Egypt, and Philemon. Now, we don't really know who this guy is. He is described as a little boy, a child, who has a beautiful voice, a voice that has this miraculous power so he can basically make even the most evil. The person who is, you know, dedicated pagan, this voice can make them immediately repent and convert to Christianity. What I argue in my work is that in all likelihood, this Philemon is to be identified with this little boy mentioned in the Gospel of John. So there is this episode about the multiplication of a fish and bread. In the Gospel of John, Andrew finds a boy, and this boy brings the, you know, two fishes and a bread, and then Jesus multiplies this stuff. And that's all. It's just like one verse in the Gospel mentioned in a boy and some connection to Andrew. So apparently this was enough. And in later texts, in Coptic texts, we find some sort of a paraphrase of this story. And in this paraphrase, which is part of a work ascribed to Cyril of Jerusalem. So in this paraphrase, the boy is explicitly called Philemon. And it is explicitly said that he has this sweet voice. So in all likelihood, this is the same boy. And the idea would be that after the miracle, the boy decided to go along. So he went with the apostles, with Andrew specifically, and became Andrew's disciple. And then together Andrew and Philemon went to Asia Minor to preach the Gospels. So yeah, this is indeed like one of these very typical features of this literature, right? That even an unnamed character from the Bible, which is mentioned in a single verse, all of a sudden gets his own story and his own kind of narrative. Indeed, the story is pretty exciting. As I said, it's happening in Asia Minor. It has two parts. The first part is about the conversion of people in the city of Lidda. And the second part is apparently somewhere in Lycaonia. The second part is much longer. It begins with two boys whom Satan makes fight each other. And then one of the boys dies. And the father of the boy that apparently killed the other boy is accused of crime. And he runs to Andrew and asks Andrew to intervene and instead Andrew sends Philemon. So this little boy comes to the rescue of another boy who killed the third boy. Then Philemon is captured. He is being tortured and he summons birds. And this is my favorite part of this story. So there is this kind of a beauty contest for the birds. And the first bird to come is a sparrow. And a sparrow volunteers to like do whatever Philemon says and to send the message. But apparently Philemon does not trust sparrows because they're too sexually active. And Philemon is afraid that if this male sparrow sees a female sparrow he would immediately forget all about his mission and would just procreate. Which is again something that you find in antiquity a lot. There is this whole idea that there are animals who are somehow moral and have certain ethical qualities. And then there are animals who have this excessive sexual behavior and therefore should not be for imitated. So apparently according to this text sparrows are like this. Then there is a crow. And again Philemon is not happy. Because apparently in the days of Noah a crow did not do what it was supposed to do. Did not come back with the message. And then finally there is a dove. A female dove. And the dove is good enough for the task. So then the dove comes and addresses a multitude of people who are mourning the death of the child. And then there is another nice detail because the dove of course can speak. And everybody is amazed and it says that well this is exactly the language that animals and people spoke before the transgression. This is again something that we do find in Byzantine literature and in late antique literature that before transgression before the fall Adam and Eve could speak animal language and all the animals spoke the same language. And this was somehow an ability that people lost after the fall. So the story goes on and on. And the boy is resurrected and everybody is happy. But Satan goes on and tries to still intervene with what's happening. So he captures he goes inside the wife of the governor. And the wife kills her own son. So this is like yet another child in the story. And the apostles come to see what happened. And when they see the woman they see also a small well in the text it says an Ethiopian. So an Ethiopian held by the woman by his heir and trying to escape and not capable to escape. So it turns out that this is one of the demons sent by sacred. And the demon successfully entered the woman and made her kill her child. But then somehow miraculously the woman captured the demon. And the demon is in the Coptic text is portrayed as an Ethiopian because this was apparently a very common thing in this late antique tradition to in Egypt specifically to portray demons as either black or Ethiopian. David Brachy actually in his work thinks that this motif is also connected to excessive sexuality which often is the case although here it's probably not. And then there is this whole discussion between the demon and Andrew. And finally the demon is cast into hell and the boy again is resurrected and everybody's happy. The end. So this is kind of a very typical story for this Coptic apocryphal literature. So it's as I said it's full of miracles. It's full of specifically of resurrections sometimes. And this is also a specifically Coptic feature. There is dismemberment like not only a child is murdered but the child is also cut into pieces. And then of course the apostles come and piece those bodies together and they bring them back to life and everybody's happy. These stories clearly are based on certain Byzantine traditions or the pre-existing Byzantine traditions but they also have a lot of kind of local flavor. So as I said like certain details and certain vocabulary he immediately marks this text as specifically coming from Coptic Egypt. The stories are extremely fun. If you want to learn more you will definitely find more stuff like this in the volumes edited by Tony Burke. A lot of the motifs you just mentioned for this text are found in lots and lots of these other apocryphal texts. Just getting on the dismemberment part. Like I know there's like so many insane traditions about the head of John the Baptist. This thing just like levitates goes around and preaches years after he was like beheaded. I love all these malleable stories. They were just talking about the talking dove. I have to go back and read this more because if there's one thing you know I love the acts of Peter and Paul. I love that talking baby. I love that talking dog. The epic rap battles between Simon of Samaria and Peter. All these fantastic tales. When I was talking to Dr. Burke about New Testament apocrypha I really likened these texts and not just the apocryphal acts but also the monastic bioe things like that. It's almost like the Marvel comics. Think of how rich and kaleidoscopic it would have been. You don't know anything about Jesus? Well you have the infancy gospel of Thomas where he turns clay pigeons into real pigeons or whatever and then he kills his teachers and kids who bummed into him on the school bus. You know so it's just all these rich traditions. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this aspect of your research actually came from our first discussion when we were talking about gospel of Thomas because just the nature of gospel of Thomas just how the texts were constructed in the Coptic versus the Greek sources and these sayings, these logia, right? It's kind of similar to how malleable some of these traditions in these apocryphal acts are. You mentioned that you'll find a narrative situation in one text that will be appropriated to another text. So just getting into how adaptable these things are just touch upon how they could be adapted to different scenarios depending on the motivations of the writer and what the text is actually going to be used for whether it be liturgical, instructive, etc. That's very true that these traditions and these texts they were basically like clay and people could make different forms, different figures from them and this was not in any way considered to be like disrespectful of the tradition which is amazing. As far as I know and this is not just my opinion the Coptic literature can be divided into two main corpora. So there is one corpus of texts that have the highest possible reputation like the Bible or the works of Shinuta or the works of some other church fathers and these texts were not meant to be messed around like they were supposed to be transmitted in the form they are. Although even that does not always hold like sometimes we do find that even in the biblical texts there are some remarkable changes but generally speaking this kind of textual corpus was more or less stable when it comes to textual transmission and then there is this other literature which was very fluid and prone to a constant change and sometimes we cannot really know why people would change certain detail but clearly this was not a problem for them this was something that was done again and again. To give you an example this text that I translated for Tony Berg's volume The Preaching of Philip there is this amazing episode when Philip and Peter come to Frigia which is apparently a city rather than a country and there is a city wall and a gate and there is a pillar on top of the gate and this probably reflects some actual architectural tradition of the time so the apostles pray and the gate with the tower somehow becomes alive-ish and they bend down so that the top of the pillar touches the earth so that then this person who is not named in the text but who accompanies the apostles can get on top of the pillar after which the pillar again becomes erect and from on top of this pillar this unnamed man preaches to the entire city invites everybody to repent and to convert to Christianity so very interesting a very original story what is interesting is that there is this one manuscript of the Acts of Andrew and Philemon which has an additional act which has a story that we don't find in any other manuscript of this text in which has the very same episode but here instead of Peter and Philip we have Andrew and Philemon and instead of unnamed man we have a dog so in this version of the story Andrew and Philemon pray to God the pillar bends down and then the dog goes on top of the pillar and the dog preaches to the people of the city and asks them to repent so very clearly there is a literary connection here that we're very clearly somebody read the story in the preaching of Philip and decided to make this story about Andrew and Philemon and why is that? to be honest I don't know I have a theory which might be true it might not be true the theory goes like this in the beginning of the narrative about Andrew and Philemon for some reason we are told that the name of the father of Philemon was Philip and that's all that doesn't say anything else so is it possible that somebody thought that well this Philip must be Philip the apostle and if Philemon is the son of Philip then why wouldn't he perform the same miracle that his father performed you know like father like son and this kind of creates some sort of like a mirror image so that you know the Philemon allegedly the son of Philip repeats what his father did in in some other area I'm not kind of married to this suggestion and it's real difficult to say whether this was the reason but I think this is plausible because in the Coptic tradition we do find this tendency not only to name the unnamed people like we know that the boy from the Gospel of John is Philemon but also to make them all somehow related to each other and again in many texts we discover that they're basically this like dynasties of saints one text that I've explored in the past is the so-called Forth Book of the Maccabees the text that is in the Greek Bible and in this text we have a priest named Eleazar and we have a woman and her seven sons and they all die as martyrs and nowhere in the Greek text does it say that they're in any way related to each other in the Coptic tradition they are a family so the priest Eleazar is the husband of the woman and the father of their seven sons and this is actually in the Coptic text of the Forth Book of the Maccabees so there's this tendency to make everybody related which you also find in various martyrdom narratives which also can be kind of connected with each other by means of genealogy so I would very tentatively suspect that maybe something like this happens here so this is one example of this sort of textual fluidity when a story that is assigned to one apostle becomes assigned to somebody else and of course there are many other examples like sometimes the genre is changed right so for instance we have this text known as the martyrdom of Matthew it begins with Matthew you know coming to a certain place to preach and then very soon dying a martyr and then in some codex a scribe was tasked with copying only texts that contain the apostolic preachings so texts that tell the story that precedes the martyrdom so what did he do he added a sort of kind of long preface telling about how all the apostles gathered together and received their allotted territories and then he removed the part where Matthew actually dies so the same story like the text that was initially a martyrdom was by this kind of very rude procedure simply converted to preaching which doesn't end with martyrdom ends with triumph so this sort of attitude towards texts as something that can be transformed you know in accordance to the needs of the audience the needs of the scribe the needs of the donor who actually paid for the production of the codex this is very typical for this sort of literature and that's why it's so interesting to compare texts with each other because sometimes you can find a very small detail that is different and then you just start thinking about like why would somebody want to change that for instance again in the preaching of Philip we have this man preaching from on top of the pillar and there is a thunderstorm and everybody is terrified and there are lightning bolts and everybody is trying to hide and then in one manuscript it says that and many men and women you know died this day then the other manuscript instead says like many people were terrified and many pregnant women lost their children like lost the fruit of their wounds so why this change so one possibility is that somebody was reading this narrative and felt that well maybe that's too much like you know the apostles come to a city and just starting killing people without giving them a chance to actually repent and so instead of just saying that many people died that day it changed it to like you know many unborn fetuses died that day and somehow this is not as horrible because you know this is just something that happens a lot in the you know pre-modern society that you know pregnant women lose their children this is kind of something that is not as horrifying as it is today so this sort of details they are endless I'm actually planning to produce a study an article about this phenomenon of textual fluidity in Coptic Apogryphal acts to produce some sort of a catalog of things that can happen and it's actually I think easy to look into this stuff if you again consult this volumes by Tony Burke because Tony is very fond of basically synoptic charts and tables and comparative tools so very often when you have a text in volume not necessarily Coptic text there would be several columns which allow you to compare different versions of the text and then you can play with it and you can think why would a text be performed differently in different manuscripts so that's some exercise that I encourage everybody to do I think that's a lot of fun this question in general was something I was talking to Dr. Burke about as well it's kind of tied in with the value judgments that we have when we say something is apocryphal versus something is canonical we lose sight of the fact this has been going on as long as these texts have been around even as far back as the composition of the Illidan Odyssey in 7th century BCE is reacting against these shared materials and traditions and creating almost like the first post-modern text you find the same thing in the New Testament canonical gospels so to speak you have Mark, Matthew, Luke and then you have John and you think of John almost as the oh brother were thou of the traditional texts in those three synoptics John is creating kind of his own understanding correcting things that he sees kind of maybe deficient in those texts and I think a lot of the problem with people being so reticent to kind of look at these texts on their own terms is that we have those value judgments when we say these words like oh this is apocryphal or non-canonical therefore it's not true whereas something that's in the canon we have modern conceptions of what those are versus maybe in the ancient world just as you've been saying the whole time like these texts were considered fluid they were considered adaptable to different situations depending on the needs of the audience and the writer why do you think these optic apocryphal acts have been so neglected and steady up until recently there are two reasons first is that we have the Nakama De Library and for decades people learned Coptic only to read the text from Nakama De which is understandable because these texts are amazing and they pose a lot of questions and they do require a certain training to work with them so I know that for several times the Congress of Coptic Studies which is like the main event in our field which happens only once in four years would be dedicated entirely to Nakama De stuff because you know why would you do Coptic studies if you don't work on Nakama De this is like the most brilliant corpus of texts there is so everything else was kind of considered to be late uninteresting orthodox boring liturgical whatever which is of course not true this stuff is exciting and also if you look at it you wouldn't see any Chinese wall between the so-called Gnostic texts the Nakama De texts you know Pistis Sophia and Slater Apocryphal texts for instance there is one thing that is immediately striking and that's how both the Scarper are indebted to magic so you know people who read Nakama De texts they very soon would find the so-called Vokis Magikai Nomina Barbara various sequences of meaningless words that in the manuscript would be marked with the Suprilean years indicating that they have certain power that these are words that can make things happen right and when we look into this later Coptic Apocrypha when we even look into texts that narrate the story of Jesus we find very similar stuff for instance my colleague Roxanne Belanger-Serazin who is also working here at the University of Oslo she is an expert in magic she drew my attention to this manuscript of the Acts of Pilate which is about the last day of Jesus Christ and in this text in one of the manuscripts which comes from the White Monastery Jesus on the Cross basically utters just a long sequence of this Nomina Barbara of this Vokis Magikai in this manuscript the words are marked with the Suprilean years clearly resembling what in magical papyri would be magical words of power and this is a manuscript produced in the White Monastery in the same monastery that was producing the manuscripts of Shinuta so in the stronghold of Orthodoxy so somehow certain traditions remained and I can even say that you know in order to try to understand the Nakama literature better we certainly cannot ignore this later texts even though they are liturgical whatever this means so this is one thing that historically the Nakamadi was just too big of a phenomenon to allow people to see anything else but I think today we are slowly growing to appreciate the Nakamadi literature spark of Coptic literature and again I must say that here at the University of Oslo the project working on this stuff is doing excellent work a collective effort and that's important that actually the best scholarship is the scholarship done in a team or at least in consultation in dialogue with others so it's a collective work brilliant colleagues who have been contributing a lot to the field and actually the place where I'm at now the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo is a nice demonstration of this because here there is an entire European Research Council funded project dedicated specifically to Coptic Apocrypha I also want to mention Dylan Burns who here has been also very active in pointing out these important connections between Nakamadi literature and the magical literature and the other thing is as I said the state of survival the fact that the manuscripts we have are in fragments so like in my edition of The Preaching of Philip I brought together fragments from I think five different collections and this is kind of the simple case like sometimes you have fragments from various different collections with one tiny fragment from Paris joining another tiny fragment from London and like together you try to make sense of them and to make sense of them you need to consult the Arabic evidence and Ethiopic evidence wherever so this is usually a very complicated task this makes it somehow difficult to access this data and that's why because we didn't have proper editions and we still for many texts don't have proper editions these texts are not as well known as they should be but I hope that this situation will change soon and that this literature will eventually be integrated into what we know about late antique Christianity because this is an important part of late antique spirituality in general I would say I think this is like why is it so exciting to work in this field because today these walls are finally falling and you know New Testament people are learning to appreciate Nakhamadi people and Nakhamadi people are learning to appreciate magic people and there is this constant exchange of ideas my colleague Korshidozu is now going to edit a volume of Coptic Magical Texts and to my great surprise one of these magical texts that he edited there actually mentions Philemon if I remember correctly it's a it's a spell that is actually related to like singing voice so somebody probably in connection to church service performs this spell to acquire good voice and he addresses some sort of deity or demon and says that well I want to have a sweet voice like that of Philemon so I mean again all these people all these texts they existed in the same kind of environment and they were constantly sharing ideas with each other and whatnot magic influenced apocryphal literature apocryphal literature influenced magic and only when we consider all this stuff as a one beautiful world of ideas we would really learn to appreciate it the common denominator for me whether it be apocalyptic literature whether it be these apocryphal acts texts any of these things it comes from a kind of scribal milieu, right? these were very learned people constantly glossing things when you're writing stuff down you were mentioning Philemon's voice and I was reminded of my awesome discussion with Dr. Collins I didn't get apocalypse of Abraham in there for time but just the concept of the sweet voice the angel Yael he's the singer of the most high gods so he's like got the sweetest voice he has this song and I can imagine certain people appropriating this song maybe in their magical experiences because they give you the actual lyrics and everything so the unsung heroes of anything we read whether that be our Nag Hammadi volumes whether that be our Old Testament pseudopigrapha volumes or even our collective Greek novels or Homer they rely on these texts this receptives these authoritative texts by these people who go out to like remote monasteries and like dumps dumpsters and put these things together and have to go to museums so you really are the all of you not just you Dr. Maroshnikov but all of your colleagues all the people working on this Dylan Burns our rock star is you know all of you are just doing amazing work and I just want to thank you for that there are some volumes forthcoming so there will be a volume called Para Biblica Coptica which is a volume I'm editing so it will hopefully appear this year already in Germany in a Morsebeck publishing house so it will be dedicated specifically to Coptic Apocrypha and here in Oslo Hugo Lunghauk and his colleagues are also preparing a volume on Coptic Apocrypha which will be a volume of studies and as far as I understand there is also a volume of translations in the works so hopefully your hunger for Coptic Apocrypha will be quenched thanks to these publications and yeah as I said the volumes by Tony Burke are also extremely nice introduction to the topic Dr. Moroshnikov this has been amazing I want to thank you I think this is an amazing initiative I really enjoy it for the second time and I really hope that you continue doing this was a lot of fun so this is a roundabout way but Yvonne telling everybody to go learn Coptic