No, this isn’t about the book in the canonical Bible, but rather an apocrypha text. In case you are unaware, there are a handful of texts that have the name of “Apocalypse of John” / “Revelation of John”, and I plan to highlight a few of them in the near future. This particular text I …
Author Archives: bP
The Martyrdom of Zechariah, father of John the Baptist
Being that June 24 is the feast day (nativity, as his death feast day is later) of John the Baptist, I wanted to bring light to this story found in the New Testament Apocrypha Volume 3 edited by Tony Burke. This interesting text makes it’s modern English translation debut thanks to Tony Burke and Sarah …
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The Eremitic Life of Mary Magdalene
Here is a short text involving the life of Mary Magdalene after the resurrection of Christ. It survives in quite a few manuscript copies, all dating from the 10th century onward, however it is believed to originate earlier. This tale is pretty similar to other western legends regarding MM though it does not feature her …
The Life of Mary Magdalene
Recently I acquired all three volumes of the “New Testament Apocrypha: More noncanonical Scriptures”, edited by Tony Burke. These volumes contain rarely seen apocrypha texts, some of which are making their English debut. I noticed volume 2 and 3 had some Mary Magdalene stories. With this post, I am going to talk about the story …
Mary Magdalene: Baptism of water and fire
In a post awhile back I mentioned some newly translated fragments from the oxyrhynchus dig that had been released to the public. These are fragments 5575, 5576 and 5577. 5575 is a Jesus sayings fragment that has similarities to Matthew, Luke and Thomas. 5576 is a gnostic style fragment. 5577 is a dialogue between Mary …
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Talking baby Jesus
The past month or so I have been doing a deep dive into the Quran and really enjoy comparing the aspects of various figures in there with their Christian / Jewish counterparts, particularly that of Jesus / Isa. I had a previous blog post (link HERE) that mentions the crucifixion body swap that appears in …
The Virgin Mary and the Cannibal of Qemer
Now here is something a bit different! Cannibals have made their way into the apocrypha throughout the years (believe it or not!). This particular tale I am sharing with you comes from the Ethiopic tradition and features Our Lady interacting with a cannibal. This story is a well known tale in the Ethiopic apocrypha but …
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Jesus writes a letter to King Abgarus
One of the shortest but very interesting pieces of apocrypha is the correspondence between King Abgarus and Jesus Christ. I find it fascinating that the only claimed writing from Jesus is between him and a King from Osroene. Now upon reading these two letters (one from the King, and the response from JC), you can …
Discourse on the Arch-Angel Gabriel
In the past month I brought you Coptic tales of Michael and Raphael, now here is one on Gabriel! This particular text is LONG! This text comes to us from via Miscellaneous Coptic texts in the dialect of Upper Egypt by E. A. Wallis Budge. This text is complete except it’s ending. Like the other texts, …
Comparing translations of Thomas sayings
I mentioned in previous blog posts on how important it is to check out various translations of texts. Sometimes it is not possible but when there are multiple translations you should definitely do so! Unless you can read the source manuscript (Coptic, Greek, etc…), you are forced to go by modern (or somewhat modern, i.e. …
Culmination of Wisdom 