was rendered into Latin by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, in the thirteenth century. It is a late production, telling how Jesus was appointed to fill a vacancy in the priesthood; how his pedigree had to be investigated, and how the Virgin was summoned (Joseph being dead) and gave an account of the Conception. All this purports to be taken from the Jewish archives.
A long book, a discussion of Christianity at the Persian court, contains a narrative of signs and wonders which took place in a Persian temple at the birth of Christ, and started the Magi on their journey. It was last edited by Bratke in Texte und Untersuchungen.
A Dispute between Christ and the Devil exists in Greek. Vassiliev prints two forms of it in his Anecdota Graeco-Byzantina. It has some slight affinities with the Gospel of Bartholomew, but it is very late and not very interesting.
A Revelation of Lazarus describing the torments of Hell is perhaps the latest of the apocryphal Apocalypses. I have only seen it in Old French. It occurs in the ‘Calendrier des Bergers’, is described by Nisard in his Histoire de la littérature populaire, and is also to be found, illustrated by paintings of the early part of the sixteenth century, at the west end of the cathedral of Albi.
All Rabbinic and Mohammedan traditions about Jesus are excluded: among the latter is the very lengthy Gospel of Barnabas (well edited by Canon Ragg in 1907) which is a forgery of the fifteenth century at earliest, written in Italian by a renegade from Christianity to Islam.
It is, I hope, obvious that I ought not to have included in an apocryphal New Testament the Christian or Christianized books which bear the names of Old Testament worthies; but I shall be right in recording that there are such books: notably the Vision (perhaps the whole book known as the Ascension) of Isaiah; the two first (and two last) chapters of 4 Esdras (2 Esdras of our Apocrypha); the Apocalypses of Elijah, Daniel, and Zephaniah: two books of Baruch: an Apocalypse of Esdras edited by Tischendorf, and another, in Latin, printed by Mercati: the Apocalypse of Sedrach: probably the lost apocryphal Ezekiel: the Testaments of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Job: and not a few more. Under this heading, too, may be placed many portions of the Sibylline Oracles and the lost Prophecy of Hystaspes.
