The Apocryphal New Testament (1924)/Passion Gospels/Coptic Narratives of the Ministry and Passion
COPTIC NARRATIVES OF THE MINISTRY AND THE PASSION
There is a large mass of fragments in Coptic (Sahidic), some relating to the Ministry of our Lord and others to his Passion, which demand some notice here.
The largest collections of them (I pass over earlier publications such as those of Zoega and Dulaurier) are in Forbes Robinson's Coptic Apocryphal Gospels, E. Revillout's Apocryphes Coptes, I (Patrologia Orientalis II. 2), P. Lacau's Fragments d’ Apocryphes Coptes (Mémoires de l'Institut Francais d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1904).
The fragments relating to the Life of Christ before the Passion are none of them attributed definitely to any author. They are mostly in homiletic form: the writer addresses his readers or congregation from time to time, directly, and not seldom he makes definite mention of the Gospels.
In one passage which Forbes Robinson humorously makes to serve as a motto to his volume, we read, 'But some one will say to me, Art thou then adding a supplement to the Gospels? Let that beloved one listen attentively and . . .', the fragment ends. Whatever his defence or explanation may have been, he certainly does add a great many supplements to the Gospels. It seems likely (judging from the analogy of other Coptic documents) that he personated, if not an apostle, a disciple of the apostles. The names of Evodius of Antioch and Gamaliel are found attached to similar writings. It would be quite in order for such a person to postulate the existence of the canonical Gospels, and to profess to offer information which was not contained in them.
It is conceivable that some of the narrative matter in these fragments may be taken from earlier books; but the fragments themselves cannot, I think, be earlier in date than the fifth century.
They will not be translated here in full: but a list, and a brief description of their contents, shall be given.
1. Robinson, p. 162. Birth and childhood of John Baptist. Birth of Christ. His star in the form of a wheel, its figure like a cross, letters on it: This is Jesus the Son of God. The wise men see it and come to Herod.
2. Robinson, p. 163. The Feast at Cana. The wine has failed; the parents of the bridegroom complain to Mary, who is their sister, and ask her to approach Christ. She does so. He orders that the water-pots be filled. We (the servants) hasted and filled them.
This, then, belongs to a narrative written by an eyewitness.
3. Revillout no. 1.
Herod accuses Philip to Tiberius.
Tiberius orders him to confiscate all Philip's goods.
Herod does so: Philip knows not the reason.
4. Revillout no. 2. Robinson, p. 168.
This is one of the longest of the fragments. It begins with a passage addressed to the hearers, and quotes John the Evangelist on the feeding of the 5,000: the story is filled out with dialogue, and tells how Judas was the last to receive the bread and 'had no inheritance' in it. Thomas then says that he wishes to see the power of Christ displayed in the raising of the dead from their tombs, not only from the bier, as at Nain. Jesus replies in along and rhetorical address of many clauses, beginning, 'Come with me, Didymus, to the tomb of Lazarus'. Then the raising of Lazarus is told, and the risen man says that when the voice, 'Lazarus, come forth!' sounded in Amente (Hades), Adam knew it and bore witness to it.
We then hear of one Carius, a Roman officer appointed to look after the confiscated lands of Philip (see fragment 3). He came to see Jesus and reported his mighty works to Herod, saying that he ought to be made king. Herod threatened any one who consented thereto with death. Annas and Caiaphas went to Carius and accused Jesus—he is a magician, was born of fornication, breaks the sabbath, has abolished the synagogue of the Jews. Joseph and Nicodemus opposed them.
(Robinson's text ends here: Revillout's (p. 145) continues without break.)
Herod cast Joseph and Nicodemus into prison. Carius threatened the Jews with destruction if any ill befell them. Then Herod got a pound of gold from every one of the chiefs of the Jews and bribed Carius with it not to tell Tiberius. And Carius kept silence.
Joseph escaped to Arimathaea.
Carius sent the apostle John to Tiberius to tell him about Jesus, and the emperor honoured him, and wrote that Jesus should be made king: and as the Gospel (John vi. 15) says, Jesus departed into a mountain alone.
After that he summoned the apostles; and now we have a lengthy blessing of Peter on the mountain, at the end of which Peter sees the seven heavens open, and the Trinity. All the armies of heaven and the very stones of the mountain cry out the trisagios to Peter.
5. Revillout no. 4, p. 151. Robinson, p. 176.
Jesus is comforting the apostles on the mountain. The messengers of Theophilus come to fetch him to make him king. 'My kingdom is not of this world.'
The 'authorities' of Tiberius prevailed the second time concerning Jesus, with Pilate also, to commend Jesus to make him king. Pilate advocated the plan strongly. Herod who was there abused him: 'Thou art a Galilaean foreign Egyptian Pontus!' There was enmity between Pilate and Herod, and Herod bribed the Roman authorities and slandered Jesus. Jesus' address to the apostles, ending 'let us go hence, for Herod seeketh me to kill me'.
They came down from the mountain, and met the devil in the form of a fisherman with attendant demons carrying nets and hooks, &c.: and they cast their nets and hooks on the mount.[1] The apostles questioned Jesus about this: John, Philip, and Andrew, in particular. John was sent to speak to the devil and ask him what he was catching. The devil said: 'It is not a wonder to catch fish in the waters: the wonder is in this desert, to catch fish there.' He cast his nets and caught all manner of fish (really men), some by their eyes, others by their lips, &c.
(Here follows a fragment given only by Lacau, p. 108.) Jesus told John to tell the devil to cast his nets again. He did so, and a great smoke rose up, and the devil's power disappeared. John threw a stone at him and he fled, cursing. Bartholomew then asked to be permitted to see 'him whom thou didst create to laugh at him' (Leviathan), and Jesus said that the sight was almost too terrible for human eyes; but the request was granted. A cloud—that of the Transfiguration—appeared in the heaven.
(Here the piece ends.)
And here Revillout would place a few lines which he calls no. 4 bis (p. 189), which paraphrase John vii. 8-11, about Jesus refusing at first to go to the feast, and subsequently going in secret. The only detail worth noting is that (at Jerusalem) Jesus sojourns in the house of Irmeël.
We next have a group of pieces relating to the Passion.
First we place two fragments relating to Judas and his wife.
6. Revillout no. 5, p. 156.
Some speaker tells how Judas used to take his ill-gotten gains home to his wife: sometimes he cheated her of them, and then she mocked him.
She counselled him to betray his Master.
He listened to her as Adam did to Eve, and went and covenanted with the Jews. The prophecy (Zech.) was fulfilled.
He took the money to his wife: he said to her...
7. Lacau, p. 34. Revillout, Suppl. 1, p. 195.
Judas received the thirty pieces.
His wife was foster-mother to the child of Joseph of Arimathaea, which was seven months old. When the money was brought into the house, the child (fell ill or would not stop crying). Joseph was summoned: the child cried out, begging him to take it away 'from this evil beast, for yesterday at the ninth hour they received the price (of blood)'. Joseph took the child away.
Judas went to the priests. They arrested Jesus and took him to Pilate. . . . He was crowned with thorns and crucified, and said: Father forgive them. 8. Revillout no. 6, p. 157. Lacau, p. 33.
Jesus and the apostles at table. The table turned of itself after Jesus had partaken of a dish, to present it to each apostle.
Matthias set a dish on the table in which was a cock, and told Jesus how, when he was killing it, the Jews said: 'The blood of your master shall be shed like that of this cock.' Jesus smiled and answered that it was true; and after some more words, bade the cock come to life and fly away and 'announce the day whereon they will deliver me up'. And it did so.
Here a reference will not be out of place to the Ethiopic 'Book of the Cock' which is read in the Abyssinian Church on Maundy Thursday. It has been translated by Marius Chaîne, in the Revue Sémitique, 1905, p. 276.
The contents are as follows:
After these things Akrosina, the wife of Simon the Pharisee, brought a cock cut up with a knife, put it in a magnificent dish, and set it on the table before our Lord. Jesus said, 'My time is at hand'. He blessed the bread and gave it to Judas. Satan entered into him and he went out—without receiving the blessing of Jesus.
Jesus touched the slain cock and it stood up whole. He bade it follow Judas and see what he did, and return and report it: he endowed it with human speech. It followed Judas home: his wife urged him to betray Jesus. He went to the temple. The dialogue with the Jews is reported, and Paul of Tarsus, 'son of Josue Almason, son of Cadafanâ', a rough man, says, 'Now, thou, deliver him into my hands without error'.
The cock returned to Bethany, and sat before Jesus and wept bitterly, and told all the story. The disciples wept. Jesus dismissed the cock to mount up into the sky for a thousand years.[2]
The fragments 7 and 8 most probably belong to the beginning of the Book of Bartholomew, which has to be noticed hereafter. Certainly this is the case with Revillout no. 12, p- 165 (Lacau 8, p. 34), which narrates the death of Ananias.
9. Revillout no. 10, p. 161. A dialogue between Christ and Pilate expanded from that in St. John. 10. Revillout no. 11, p. 1638. A further piece of a like dialogue, including long speeches of our Lord, and ending with Ecce homo.
The place and order of the two next is uncertain.
11. Revillout no. 13, p. 168. An address of our Lord (to Thomas) reminding him of the signs at the crucifixion, and exhorting him to touch him.
12. Revillout no. 14, p. 169. Mary (the Virgin) at the sepulchre. Jesus appears to her and addresses her, forbidding her to touch him. The scene is assimilated to that of the appearance to Mary Magdalene (as elsewhere in Coptic writings): see above on the 'XXth Discourse of Cyril', pp. 87, 88.
13. Revillout no. 15, p. 170. Lacau, p. 19. Two leaves with a gap of two between them.
This fragment has a definite attribution, to Gamaliel.
It is a narrative connected with the resurrection.
We find Pilate examining four soldiers as to their statement that the body of Jesus was stolen. One (the second: the testimony of the first is gone) says the eleven apostles took the body ; the third says, Joseph and Nicodemus; the fourth, 'we were asleep'. They are imprisoned, and Pilate goes with the centurion and the priests to the tomb and finds the grave-clothes. He says, 'If the body had been stolen, these would have been taken too'. They say, 'These grave-clothes belong to some one else'. Pilate remembers the words of Jesus, 'Great wonders must happen in my tomb', and goes in, and weeps over the shroud. Then he turns to the centurion, who had but one eye, having lost the other in battle.
Here is a gap, in which no doubt the centurion's eye is healed by touching the grave clothes, and he is converted. Also it is clear that Joseph and Nicodemus are sent for, and that the Jews point out to Pilate that in a well in the garden there is the body of a crucified man.
The other leaf begins with a dialogue between Pilate and the centurion. Then all go to the well. 'I, Gamaliel, followed them also among the band.' They see the body, and the Jews cry, 'Behold the sorcerer'.... Pilate asks Joseph and Nicodemus whether this is the body of Jesus. They answer, the grave-clothes are his, but the body is that of the thief who was crucified with him. The Jews are angry and wish to throw Joseph and Nicodemus into the well. . . . Pilate remembers the words of Jesus, 'The dead shall rise again in my tomb', and says to the Jews, 'You believe that this is truly the Nazarene'. They say, 'Yes'. 'Then', says Pilate, 'it is but right to lay his body in his own tomb.'...
Here the leaf ends; but we can see that when the body is laid in Jesus' tomb it will revive and declare the truth.
A detached sheet of an Ethiopic MS. which was in private hands in 1892 (see Newbery House Magazine, 1892, p. 641), contains a like story in another form.
Here we have the Jews explaining to Pilate that the sweet odour of the sepulchre is due to the spices put on the body by Joseph, and to the flowers in the garden. Pilate rebukes them, and they retort that he has no business to come to the sepulchre. He addresses the centurion. After a gap is a prayer of Pilate's, in which he asks pardon for having put 'another body in the place where they put thy body'. At the end of the prayer a voice comes from the mouth of the dead bidding Pilate remove the stone that he (the dead) may come out.
An Arabic Life of Pilate, noticed by De Sacy, extant in manuscript at Paris (Arab. 160), seems likely to contain the whole story, of which we here have fragments. It purports to have been written by Gamaliel and Annas (or Ananias). Migne, Dict. des Apocr. I. 1101.
This, I believe, completes the list of the fragments of this character which have been published up to date. Nearly all of them are put together by Revillout under the title of the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles. But we have seen that at least one (13) is from a narrative under Gamaliel's name; and it is also pretty clear that not all the rest can belong to a single writing.
Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5 must go together: they are from the 'homiletic' book. 1 is the least certainly pertinent.
These pieces have an element which links them together in the motif of the intrigues to make Jesus a king. Their late date is apparent in the long rhetorical speeches, and in the tremendous exaltation of St. Peter.
No. 2 is by an eyewitness, assigned by Baumstark to Gamaliel.
No. 6 may belong to Gamaliel.
Nos. 7, 8 to Bartholomew.
Nos. 9, 10, with their interest in Pilate, are probably from Gamaliel.
Nos. 11, 12 uncertain. Baumstark refers them to Gamaliel.
No. 13, Gamaliel.
Baumstark's article referred to here is in the Revue Biblique Internationale for 1906, p. 245. He would refer nos. 2, 8, 4, 5 to Gamaliel, as well as the later ones.
Other Coptic documents will come up for notice when we deal with the Gospel of Bartholomew, the Death of the Virgin, and the Acts of the Apostles: and also with the Apocalypses. It may be as well, however, to register here the statement or warning that the Copts were tireless in producing embroideries upon the Biblical stories, and perhaps in rewriting older documents to suit their own taste. Only fresh discoveries of older texts can enable us to decide how much, if any, of the details which these later fragments supply, is really archaic.
- ↑ Compare with this the Gospel of Bartholomew, iv. 44.
- ↑ By way of a curiosity another Ethiopic narrative of the Passion may find mention here. It is noticed in Dillmann's catalogue of the Ethiopic MSS. in the British Museum (no. 40, Add. 16, 254) under the name of Liber Vivificans (Dirsan Mahyawi), and contains the story of the Passion written by the Evangelists and by three Virgins, Berzeda, Mathilda, and Elisabeth, to whom the Lord revealed his Passion. Another copy, apparently, is in the D'Abbadie MS. 29. The 'three Virgins' are evidently SS. Birgitta of Sweden (fourteenth century), Mechtildis (twelfth or thirteenth century), and Elisabeth of Schönau (twelfth century), all of whom had revelations about the Passion. How their writings made their way to Abyssinia it would be curious and interesting to ascertain.