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Wishing You an Apocryphal Christmas

Introduction

Transcript

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Shirley Paulson

Welcome, everybody, and Merry Christmas to you! In fact, have you ever been wished a merry apocryphal Christmas before? This may be your first time, and I’m glad to welcome you to the December 2025 Bible and Beyond discussion.

I am your host, Shirley Paulson, and tonight I am so happy to tell you that Dr. Tony Burke has come back to our Bible and Beyond Discussion to wish us an apocryphal Christmas. So, I don’t know where he keeps digging up these wild, apocryphal tales about early Christians that we’ve never heard of before. But they’re always interesting and thought-provoking, so I’ll be very interested in hearing what’s going on specifically in the Christmas apocryphal world.

If this is your first time getting to know Tony, let me tell you just a little about where he’s coming from. First, I can say he’s from Toronto, where he’s a professor in the Department of Humanities at York University. He’s also co-founder of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature—which means he’s an expert in Christian Apocrypha. And if that’s not enough apocryphal things, his very informative blog is called Apocryphicity. If you’ve never heard of that word before, go look up his blog.

So, before this conversation is over today, I hope everyone will have a good feel for what Tony means with the use of the word—Apocrypha.

Tony, it’s so great to have you with us again tonight. Thanks for being with us.

Tony Burke

Thanks for asking me. It’s always a pleasure.

Shirley Paulson

Great. So here you have built a whole career around this rather provocative, perplexing word ‘apocrypha’, and I think we’d better start there. Could you give us a working definition of Apocrypha, and then what apocryphal Christmas means.

Tony Burke

Sure. I basically define Christian apocrypha as stories. Traditions or some teachings by and about Jesus and his followers, so his apostles and women disciples, and his family, for the most part, that are not in the Bible. So these are mostly narratives, these are stories, these are not sermons, these are not homilies, these are stories, narratives about these characters that we don’t find in the Bible today.

And you mentioned just about where I come from this. I started getting interested in Apocrypha when I was doing my master’s. The text that interested me was a gospel. It’s called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

Some people may have some acquaintance with it. So, that text is about Jesus from the ages of 5 to 12. So it’s this little part of Jesus’ life that kind of fits into the Bible, where there’s nothing really said about it.

And the other main infancy gospel is one we’ll talk about more tonight, and that’s the Protevangelium of James. We’ll talk about that later. But I thought we should set the stage a little bit by making it clear what is in the Bible about Jesus’ birth, about Christmas. Before we say what’s not in the Bible. Sometimes people are struck by how different the accounts in the Bible are. We have two of them. One is in Matthew, one is in Luke.

Matthew begins with the genealogy, tracing Jesus all the way back to Abraham. And we were introduced to Mary and Joseph, who live in Bethlehem. Mary becomes pregnant, and Joseph is told in a dream that the child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. This calms Joseph down. Then, after Jesus is born, the Magi come to visit Jesus in his home in Bethlehem. And Herod the Great tries to kill him because he’s worried about a new king. Once he hears that from the Magi. So the family flee to Egypt, and then they come back to Galilee, but they go to Nazareth, not Bethlehem.

Luke begins with the birth of John the Baptist, who we are told is the cousin of Jesus. Then we meet Mary, who’s in Nazareth, not Bethlehem, and she gets visited by an angel rather than Joseph. They have to go to Bethlehem for a census. And then we have the famous story about there’s no room at the inn, there’s too many people around, so they end up being accommodated in a manger, a place where the animals are. And then we hear the story of shepherds in the field who are told by an angel about this birth

and they come to visit the family in the stable. Then we get a few more stories in Luke, we get the story of Jesus’ presentation at the temple, his circumcision, and then the story of him at the age of 12, astounding the doctors in the temple. And then finally, it finishes up a little bit later on, with another genealogy, this one tracing Jesus all the way back to Adam.

So, what is apocryphal, then, is any tradition or text or iconographies or images that combines… adds to, or in some way develops that material we find in the Bible. And people may not be aware how much these traditions are already combined and enhanced in our everyday lives at this time of year. So if you don’t mind, Shirley, if you could just show that.

Shirley Paulson

Sure. Right, okay, I’m going to share the screen here.

Tony Burke

So this is just a typical nativity scene that I grabbed off the internet. Everyone will probably recognize the basic iconography of the scene, but what you see there is that Matthew and Luke have been combined into one story here. We have the shepherds in the stable and the Magi, but the Magi shouldn’t be at the stable, they should be in Bethlehem, according to Matthew. We have a stable… Well, we’ll talk about the stable later, but we have an ox and an ass in the background which we see all the time in nativity scenes, but it’s not really mentioned in the Bible. It seems to be a fulfillment of Isaiah 1.3, which says, the ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. Also, kind of apocryphal or non-biblical here, the Magi are three. There are three Magi. Traditionally, that’s what it has been, probably because it corresponds to the three gifts, frankincense, gold, and myrrh. But we don’t really know how many magi there are.

And if you really want to make it a bit more apocryphal, you could add the little drummer boy who some people sometimes drop into a nativity scene, or maybe you see TV shows which integrate him.

The little drumer boy is not biblical at all. He actually comes from a song that was composed in 1941, so he’s our most recent addition to the nativity scene. Now, it’s all fair in iconography to combine elements, we’ll look at that in a minute. Like, iconography isn’t necessarily meant to show one scene necessarily in a historical setting. It can combine multiple things.

But most people aren’t aware of that. They see this in the nativity scene, and they think this is the Christmas story. But really, it’s two Christmas stories, and some other elements thrown in as well.

Shirley Paulson

So, Tony, it’s interesting that we tend to think of there being one story here. And there’s another little part of the story that I think we always hear about with Mary riding on a donkey. So, is that also… that’s not in the Bible, is it? Where’s that come from?

Tony Burke

Right. No, it’s not there either. It’s kind of assumed, because, you know, according to Luke, they have to get from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census, so they gotta get there some way, right? But we do have a text that specifically or explicitly talks about this journey. And this is a text called The Protevangelium of James, or the Infancy Gospel of James. And this is one of the earliest apocryphal texts written around the late 2nd century. And it’s very, very popular. There are almost 200 manuscripts of this text in Greek alone, and then there’s lots of other languages- very, very widespread. And it’s almost canonical in a sense, in churches of the East. And it’s a bit like this nativity scene. It combines Matthew and Luke into one story, so it harmonizes them.

And then it adds additional stories and elements, just like we’ve been talking about additional elements. So, the text actually begins with Mary’s conception. By her elderly parents, Anna and Joachim. And because they want a child so badly, they promised that if they have a child, they will dedicate the child to the temple, and that’s what they do. When the child reaches 2 years of age, they take it to the temple and she’s raised there fed by angels. At the age of 12, she is removed from the temple and given into the care of an old man named Joseph. So he’s not a young man in this story.

And then follows the Annunciations, the journey to Bethlehem, the birth, etc. But there’s one particularly noteworthy story in this, a noteworthy addition. And this is the story of Salome the Midwife. And how it happens there is a journey of Joseph and Mary and Joseph’s sons, he has sons from a previous marriage.

Going from Nazareth to Bethlehem, so we get that story. But they come close to Bethlehem, and Mary is about to give birth, so Joseph finds a cave and leaves Mary there and goes off in search of a midwife. The midwife, unfortunately, arrives too late, the child is born. But in a miraculous way, uh, which we can talk about a little bit… Well, no, I’ll mention it now. He’s actually born… he comes out of Mary in the form of light, and then coalesces into a human figure.

So, the reason for this is there’s an interest in making Mary a perpetual virgin, meaning she was a virgin before she gave birth to Jesus. And she’s a virgin after, and in every physical way. So, to put it bluntly, her hymen is not broken in the birth process. Jesus comes out like light. With Salome, the midwife, she comes in, and she’s a bit doubtful about this whole idea that Mary is a perpetual virgin. She’s never seen something like that before. So she goes in to test Mary, a gynecological test. And because of her lack of faith, her hand withers, it burns up. And then it’s healed by touching Jesus, but that’s what happens.

Now… This text is so popular in the Christian East, as I mentioned, that it exerted a large influence on Eastern Nativity scenes. And if you could go to the next slide.

This is a typical Eastern nativity scene, and what you’ll see here, first off, is Mary is in a cave, not a manger. As we see in the Protevangelium of James, we still see the ox and ass there, there too.

And to the bottom right, so we see the Magi, we see the shepherds, they’re all there, as we expect, the angel, the star. And to the bottom right, we see Salome there, the midwife, but she’s washing Jesus. I know Jesus is also in the middle in a manger, but he’s, you know, he can be in two places at once in iconography. Like I said, it’s not one static scene.

And then the other very common element is Joseph sitting there looking wistful or exhausted, I’m not sure what he’s doing, or feeling useless in some way. Now, Salome in Protevangelium of James, is not talked about as being a nurse to Jesus, she’s a midwife who checked Mary’s virginal status. But in older versions of this scene, you do see that. So if you can go down to the next slide for me, Shirley…

This is from a very early ivory book cover, so this would have been around a Bible. And it has scenes relating to Mary. And it’s from the… somewhere between the 6th and 8th century, but it shows Salome in the very middle there with a withered hand, she’s holding her hand out.

The rest of it is the other elements of the nativity scene. I think that’s Mary with Jesus, very hard to see. Joseph’s there. Ox and ass each side of the manger. And if you go to the next scene this is another very early one.

What you see here is the Annunciation to Mary on the left, what’s called the test of bitter waters in the middle, where the priests test Mary to see if she’s been adulterous or not. And then you see Mary on the donkey, along with Joseph, being led by an angel.

Now, this is called a pyxis. I think you burn incense in it, if I remember. And on the left, you see the donkey scene again where Mary’s coming on the donkey. And on the right, you see Salome again, holding up her withered hand. So, I think over time, people moved away from the traditional story of Salome, but they kept her in there. Because it’s so much a part of the iconography, but they just make her the nurse rather than someone who gets punished for not believing in the virgin birth.

Shirley Paulson

Wow. So, let me ask you, I don’t know if this relates directly to this or not, but I’m just interested in the fact that we have so many apocryphal varieties going to such great lengths to give us more elaborate stories than we find in the Bible. So, why… Why is that, and why can’t they be happy with what’s in the Bible?

Tony Burke

Okay, first off, there are several reasons for why we get apocryphal text. For one thing the Gospel of John says something to the effect  that there’re lots of other stories about Jesus that cannot be fit in this book. There’s so many. So we know that there were other traditions circulating in even the first few centuries, but even later, writers could feel that they wanted to incorporate it into their own works. So you get canonical ideas mixed with non-canonical ideas.

Another reason why you get these texts is to sometimes fix the story. Like, the Gospels were all composed separately, and then they get brought together over time. And there are inconsistencies in them. The infancy narratives themselves are inconsistent, um, right? Why does Joseph go to Bethlehem? Do the magi come to the house or to the stable? Those kinds of inconsistencies.

So, what you see with, say, Protevangelium of James is its harmonizing the story, so that it’s one long story, but also fixing the inconsistencies along the way.

Another reason you get these texts is to answer questions that are left by the canonical texts. Mysteries. For example when Herod wants to kill Jesus. All of the infant boys in Bethlehem are killed. What about John the Baptist? What happens to him? He’s not in Bethlehem, he’s in Jerusalem, but still, if he’s going after all of these infants, what happens?

And the very last story in the Protevangelium of James explains that. That Herod’s soldiers come. And John’s mother, Elizabeth, takes him out into the desert, asks God to help her, and a mountain opens, and they go inside, and the mountain closes, and they’re kept safe.

So that answers that question. Another question is all three of these gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, mention that Jesus had brothers and sisters. But as the tradition develops that Mary is a perpetual virgin.

Who are these brothers and sisters? So the Protevangelium of James answers that by saying, well, they are brothers…they are siblings of a previous marriage. Joseph is an old man, he’s had other children. And the last one, I don’t want to take too long for the answer here. The last reason why we get these apocryphal texts is to introduce new dogma.

New ideas, like the perpetual virginity of Mary. Which we see, again, in Protevangelium of James, but also the Immaculate Conception. Which, a lot of people think is the virgin birth, but it’s not. It’s Mary’s birth. Mary was born without sin. So, how do we get that idea? Well, Anna and Joachim are childless. They need help from God to conceive, and they have a miraculous birth in which this very aged couple has this child, and she is considered to be without sin, and we can talk about that a bit more later on.

New texts get written in order to promote these new ideas, or work out these new ideas.

And, one thing I really like about apocryphal literature is how it uses Christian characters and the Christian scene of the first century to think with. How do you work out these problems as they come along? Well, you tell a story. And so it’s, like I said, it’s not sermons, it’s not homilies, it’s characters that people are playing with, and I think that’s what makes it really interesting.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, okay, that’s really helpful to see, like, not just writing up stories to make stories. But that leads me to the next question I want to ask you, then, could you talk a little bit about the theological ideas behind these? Even in the Protevangelium of James, is there any particular theological reason that Jesus is born in a cave instead of the inn, or having a midwife? What are theological issues going on here?

Tony Burke

Yeah, the end is interesting. Our earliest statement about the cave as being the location. It comes from a writer of the 2nd century named Justin Martyr. And he talks about how people know where this cave is, and they visit it. And I think in the West, we’ve come to think of it as a stable, because that’s where people in the West put their animals. But people in the East might put them in caves that are nearby. So when the Gospel of Luke talks about putting the family with the animals, it’s our assumption it’s a stable. But in the East, the assumption would be a cave, and that’s where they came up with the cave.

And again, people seem to be visiting it very, very early in the tradition, and, you know, as traditions go along, there are more and more holy sites for people to visit, but this is a very early one.

Now about the midwife, we have a few early Christian texts.That includes something called a testimonium. About Mary not requiring a midwife and feeling no pain in childbirth. By testimonium. I mean, it’s just a little sentence or so that gets circulated, a statement being made about Mary. We don’t know exactly where it came from, but it pops up in various texts.

But anyway, the testimonium in the statement is… Mary did not require a midwife and felt no pain in childbirth. Now, why would you want to state that? Well the pain of childbirth comes from the story of Genesis, after Adam and Eve disobeyed God and God cursed women with the pain of childbirth.

Now, Mary is considered pure and sinless. She needs to be considered a, you know, a worthy vessel to carry Jesus. Jesus can’t be in just anybody. In her childbirth, she doesn’t need to feel pain. And how does that happen? Well, again, Jesus comes out of Mary as light, and then coalesces into a human. So the midwife functions in Protevangelium of James simply for the virginity test. We don’t need a midwife because that all gets taken care of in this rather supernatural way. So, no midwife, no pain in childbirth.

Shirley Paulson

So, is there, like, a theological message again for Mary’s role, in her motherhood here, or is that… what you’re telling us here. I guess I’m not clear about why Mary would be of such importance in this when Jesus is the key feature but Mary seems to be the key character in the Protevangelium, and so is there a theological reason for that? That’s what I’m wondering about.

Tony Burke

What seems to be happening in the first several centuries is this elevation of Mary, and it comes to a point in the 4th century where she’s actually declared mother of God. And she had a certain amount of honors, and you get lots of texts written about her, and various holy sites, and so on and so forth. So she becomes really esteemed. And there are arguments in Christianity about whether that’s appropriate or not, but it certainly happens.

But one aspect of. her motherhood in this text. I mentioned earlier she is without sin. And, just to go back to this a little bit, humans are tainted by sin because of the story of Genesis, the original sin of Adam and Eve, of disobedience. So, again, Mary has to be this perfect vessel, so she cannot have original sin. Because that sin would then be transferred to Jesus. So she is immaculately conceived, she’s. This is an almost miraculous conception. Actually, in the text, as it happens, Joachim is so upset about not being able to conceive a child with his wife. He goes out into the desert, prays. And when he comes back, his wife is pregnant. So, did he have anything to do with his birth or not? So it’s a bit ambiguous in the text.

But Mary is born without sin, that’s the important part. And there are efforts throughout the text to say more about Mary’s purity. After she’s born, she never touches the ground before she’s taken to the temple. Temples are a holy place so she can walk around there fine. As I mentioned earlier, she’s fed by an angel. She gets nothing impure in her body, she gets divine food. And this sense of divinity… not divinity… I shouldn’t say divinity, the sense of purity of Mary and her immunity to original sin is carried over into traditions about her death.

This is a teaching known as the Dormition of Mary. And when Mary dies. Well, first off, I should back up. The Genesis’ story curses women with pain and childbirth. It also curses humans with death. So, if she’s not part of original sin, she shouldn’t have to die. Well, there’s two ways it’s expressed in the text, because they vary quite a lot.

But in one, she just goes up body and soul into heaven, does not die at all. In other versions, she dies, but her soul and body are reunited in heaven, immediately. So she’s immune to several things. She’s immune to pain and childbirth, and she’s immune to a normal human death. And this is because she’s not tainted by original sin. And then that sin does not get transferred to Jesus.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, that leads me then to Joseph. That’s so interesting to hear about why Mary has to play that particular role theologically, but also what about Joseph, what makes him the father, or the substitute, for Jesus? Why is he important there?

Tony Burke

Well, you need a daddy. Jesus’ paternity in the New Testament is rather ambiguous. Most scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark is the earliest of the New Testament Gospels. And Joseph does not appear there at all. We have brothers and sisters, but we don’t know who the father is, and Jesus is referred to as the son of Mary, which is odd.

Because usually it’s “you are Ben-Joseph, not Ben-Mary, son of Joseph, son of the Father.” So he doesn’t show up at all, which is strange. Matthew and Luke—when they copy Mark and make changes to Mark—they supply Joseph, the carpenter as his father, both in the infancy narratives and in one reference later on in the text. But generally, for the rest of their gospels, Joseph is completely absent. So a tradition kind of developed that he was an older man.

And he was older than Mary, and he died. And so you see that reflected again in the Protevangelium of James as an older man. And that also explains, again, these siblings of Jesus. But you need a Joseph. Really, because you need to connect Jesus with the lineage of David. And I mentioned the two genealogies that Matthew and Luke have. One goes back to Abraham, one goes back to Adam, but they still have David somewhere in there.

And Joseph is a descendant of David. And in a sense, he’s adopting Jesus as his own, because he’s not the father, but that makes Jesus adopted into the lineage of David. It’s a bit silly in a sense, because he’s not the real father, so why does it really matter anyway? He comes directly from God. But Christians are always very intense in this early period to connect Jesus with what they see as prophecies in the Hebrew Bible. The Messiah should come from the line of David. The Messiah is also supposed to be the product of a virgin birth. So, how do you reconcile those two things? Well, you get the Davidic lineage from Joseph, who is his adopted father.

Now, we don’t see a lot of Joseph in other apocryphal texts… certainly in the Protevangelium of James, he shows up. He doesn’t do a lot more than we see in the canonical Gospels. He also shows up in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the text I worked on.

And here, Joseph is in the unenviable position of trying to teach Jesus right and wrong. So if anyone has a toddler, they know that sometimes these toddlers can be problems…temper tantrums! But imagine a child living the power of God, and bad things can happen. So Joseph has to try and teach him—and bring him to teachers to learn. It’s pretty difficult for Joseph to do.

And then the last text we have, really, with Joseph is called “The History of Joseph the Carpenter.” And this text is about Joseph’s death, basically. So we have this death scene. When Jesus returns from wherever he is, and he comes home, and Joseph has this very emotional death scene. So it’s really interesting for that. We also sometimes see some iconography of Joseph with the young Jesus.

I was in Germany last year, and I saw a few examples of this. So you just see these scenes of Joseph. In the carpenter’s shop with Jesus there, or holding Jesus’s hand as they walk along. So those are not biblical either. But they’re just these idyllic scenes of a perfect kind of father-son relationship.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, how are we going to do this, Tony? I want to make sure we see the different slides that you have. We’ve got a few more minutes before everybody else gets the microphone to ask you questions, so… Do you want to walk us through the rest of the slides you have?

Tony Burke

Yeah, let’s do that fairly quickly. Alright, I’ve talked about these two infancy gospels already, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Protevangelium of James.

The other most well-known infancy gospel is called the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and it’s called Pseudo-Matthew because there’s this tradition that it was written by Matthew. But we don’t think it was. So, Pseudo-Matthew. And it began as an expansion of the Protevangelium James into Latin. So, it translates, but then adds some extra things to it. And because it’s Latin, it brings the stories from the East to the West. And it’s also very, very popular in the West. There are hundreds of manuscripts of this text.

And the stories show up in iconography, and so I just wanted to show a couple of images of these. This is from a 14^th-century manuscript, and this is a French version of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, so French translation. What you have in the top left-hand corner there is a nativity scene, like, with some aspects we’ve seen already. There’s the ox and ass looming over the manger, there’s Joseph looking a bit bored or something. On the right, we get the beginning of some stories that are only in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. So we have, you know, all the Protevangelium of James stuff.

And then we have some unique stuff. And here is this a story from the flight to Egypt, and you have Joseph leading Mary on the donkey and holding Jesus, and it’s hot, and they’re tired, and they come to a cave. And they want to rest, but out of the cave comes some dragons. And fortunately, Jesus is there, he’s got superpowers. And he’s able to basically tell the dragons to go away, and so it leaves the family alone.

And in the bottom left-hand corner is another story from the flight story. In this part, Mary, again, is tired, and she’s hungry, and she sits down beneath a date palm tree. Jesus is about a week old? I don’t know how old he is, but he speaks, and he orders the date palm tree to bend down and give Mary some of its fruit.

And then the last story, again, this is also joining the flight story, and here’s a story of Jesus coming to a pagan temple, so, you know, Greco-Roman gods, or Egyptian gods. And usually the story goes that he enters the temple, and the idols—the statues—fall down, and shatter, showing that the true God has entered. In this depiction, though, you see the demons leaving at the back of the temple. And it was the belief that the statues of the gods of other religions were inhabited by demons.

So, you have these variations of this kind of story where either the idols shatter or the demons leave them. And so that’s what we get here. So it’s interesting, he gets these additional stories that are told in this other version of the Infancy Gospel of James. And we also have some manuscripts of this.

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew that also includes the infancy gospel of Thomas. So here’s that, again, that effort to kind of bring all the stories together in one.

I have time for one more image, Shirley, can we do that?

Shirley Paulson

Yes

Tony Burke

This is less widely known. It comes from a text called the “Tibertine Sybil.”

You may have heard of Sybils before. They’re like Greek and Roman prophets or oracle figures. This is, again, a very, very popular text. There are about 130 manuscripts of this text in Latin.

And in the story, the Oracle of Sybil prophesied events about Christian history up to the time of Charlemagne in the 8th or 9th century. So here we have a pagan prophet talking about Jesus. And in one section, the Sybil addresses the citizens of Rome on the Aventine Hill in Rome, and predicts the coming of Jesus, the birth of Jesus, during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. And this is presented in art fairly commonly. In this image here, you see the Sybil pointing up, and Augustus beside her, and she’s pointing up at an image of Mary with the child Jesus.

So she’s showing him that this birth is going to happen. It’s going to be the end of the Roman Empire, essentially. And I don’t have an image of this, but one of the more interesting depictions of this is on an altar that’s in the Arakowelli Church in Rome—very hard church to find. I tried, but I couldn’t find it. In this church, you can see today there’s an altar. And it’s got the image of Mary and Jesus in that circle there, the mandola.

And also, Augustus is there too. It has an inscription on it, and it says, Caesar Octavian—that’s another name for Augustus—erected this altar when the offspring of heaven was revealed to him.

So, this tradition has it that this is the place where this happened.

And he erected this altar, and now this church has now been built around it. And again, you can go see that today, if you, hopefully, find someone who can help you find it.

Shirley Paulson

Oh my goodness. Oh, okay, well, thank you so much for that. Let me see here. So it is really about time for everyone else to join the conversation, and you can get your questions ready.

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Shirley Paulson

So, while you’re thinking about your questions, I’m wondering, Tony, if you might just talk to us a little bit about your overall thought about these apocryphal texts. Are they just too much of an academic thing to have any personal reaction to them, or how do you feel about them?

Tony Burke

It’s kind of one of the things that students always ask their Bible professors about. What do you believe? And, you know, I grew up Catholic, but I’m more of an atheist these days. But what interests me about biblical texts and the non-biblical texts is I just love stories, and I’m interested in the way people use stories to deal with problems with changes in their life, and ways to try and explain their own particular existence.  You know—what’s going to happen to me when I die? Where do I come from? How am I related to the divine world, etc, etc.

So I don’t have those beliefs, but I’m interested in how people use stories to do that. Well, we’ve been talking about how we see apochrypha in our modern day—like the nativity scenes that we’re seeing all the time, but also people are continually, even today, writing apocrypha, in a sense, by making these adaptations of the Bible.

So, any Jesus film you see out there has got apocryphal elements in it, because the biblical stories have these gaps, right? And you have to fill them in with something. An easy thing is, if you’re going to do a film about Jesus, what does he look like? The Bible doesn’t tell us that. So that’s something you’re adding to it. And there have been a few movies about Mary, mother of Jesus, that draw upon the Protevangelium of James. Because it’s a really good source for filling in, but also the directors will fill in some stuff themselves.

And just out this year is a film called “The Carpenter’s Son,” starring Nicolas Cage, I’m not sure if it’s any good. It’s got Nicholas Cage in it, so probably not. But it’s an adaptation of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where Jesus, as a child, is hurting people. So it’s kind of a horror story. I’m sure he plays very fast and loose with the story. But, you know, people are still interested in telling new stories. And some people may feel uncomfortable with that, and so I think it’s probably helpful to get a good sense of what is canonical and what’s non-canonical. And if you want to kind of build a fence around the canonical stuff, so you have a good sense of it…of what should be scripture, and then just kind of enjoy what people are doing with the stories, and how they’re adapting them and using them to deal with new situations, new ideas, without hopefully feeling threatened by the fact that people are doing this. And I hope I get that across to my students when I teach this material.

I don’t think the apocryphal stuff has any particular historical value over canonical text. For example, I don’t think they tell us anything historical about Jesus and his family and so on. But they have the interest in telling us about Christians, and about what they thought, and what they experienced at different times in Christian history.

Shirley Paulson

And I think that’s what my takeaway from all this, Tony, is that your point here is that we’re understanding the way Christians thought, and that even though they have stories to tell, you still can sort of see what they’re thinking, and what things meant as it progressed through history. So that’s a very interesting point.

All right, so Sara has a question. Ready to go, Sara?

Sarah Barnacle

Well, the first part of it is probably a little bit silly. I’m wondering if a t-shirt saying, “What would Jesus do?” It fits in with this material. And all of a sudden, that popped into my mind—Christian nationalism. And is that another aspect of this? Feeling like we’ve got to do more with that story than the Bible does? I don’t know if I’m asking too much in that kind of a question, but it just popped into my head.

Tony Burke

I’m not sure exactly what you’re getting at. Where do you see the Christian nationalism?

Sara Barnacle

Well, I guess you’re talking about people. Creating stories to fill in the gaps of the canonical gospels. And there seemed to be a… like you say, a number of things that have happened, all the movies and there were some, I think, fiction books that probably do the same thing. And artwork that may do some of the same thing. And it’s just that the airwaves seem so full of the pros and cons about Christian nationalism. I wonder if it’s like,… I don’t want to say ‘a perversion’ exactly, but it is sort of an exploration, I think, of how much power is involved, and in using Jesus as a…I don’t know…a symbol.

Tony Burke

Yeah. I think it’s often said that the Bible can be used for good or ill. I think the apocryphal process can be also used for good or ill. You can be supplying things in there for bad reasons. You don’t see a lot of that. But you see some problems of biblical interpretation connected to what you’re saying about modern political things.

When there was the crisis about illegal immigration, which is still an ongoing issue. Several years ago, people started to put up nativity scenes, in which that would be behind cages—talking about how Joseph and Mary and Jesus were refugees in the flight story, and so people are using that to show, “Look, Jesus!… the Holy Family were also refugees! Do you want to put them in cages, too?

And you would get the more right-leaning people reacting, saying, “No, they weren’t immigrants, and no, they weren’t refugees, and so on.” So people are using the stories in modern political arenas as well, both for good and bad, depending on your own particular perspective. It always seems that the the right don’t quite understand the fact that Jesus was a person who welcomed the stranger, who welcomed the marginalized. That seems to not register in their Christian belief, unfortunately.

Yeah, so there is… certainly there’s that danger of creating new traditions that could be harmful, as well as just expressions of one’s piety.

Sara Barnacle

It’s sort of in the opposite direction. Now it’s making me remember that oh, I don’t know, 5 or 6 years ago, someone asked me to do a presentation about the Nativity scenes with fresh scenes that people have. And I didn’t know much about it, but I just started with good ol’ Google and getting pictures. And around the world, every little culture, every big culture has done that in their own way, you know, their own costumes, their own skin colors, their own musical instruments, their own animals from there,part of the world. And it was supposed to be a 20-minute show. And I stopped after about half an hour, and asked people if they had enough, and they said, “No, keep on going. I think it lasted about an hour and 20 minutes. There were just so many different… and I didn’t show everything that I had! That story has just been pivotal all the way around the world.

Tony Burke

Mm-hmm. I no longer go to a Catholic church, but my wife goes to a United Church, which I like, it’s very welcoming. And every year they do a nativity play. And they’ve been doing it for quite a while, and the person who’s been presenting it recently in the past 4 years or so, has said, “You know, I’m kind of out of ideas, if anyone has any suggestions.” And I keep telling my wife, Tell them to do the Infancy Gospel of James! Provangelion!

Uh, maybe you have to be very sensitive about the Salome part of it, but you know, you can make it a learning experience. Like, here’s what this other take on the story is, and it’s very popular in the East, and we still see it in these negativity scenes. I think it could be really interesting. It might be confusing for some people. Maybe the children.

But, you know, here’s a different way of looking at it, and a non-harmful way of looking at it, too, right?

Shirley Paulson

And Sara, you also asked a different question in the chat, where you asked, “Did you feel that Mary was only 12 when the birth happened?—When she gave birth to Jesus?

Tony Burke

This is one of the ways that we kind of fill in stuff that we don’t know, that the Bible doesn’t tell us. We try to think about what would be typical in the time period. And the Bible tells us that Mary was betrothed to Joseph, she wasn’t yet married, not yet living with him. And we do know from other sources that it would be typical for that to happen at a fairly young age. I think as young as 5 even, but it’s just a plan at some point that this marriage will happen. So the Bible doesn’t say anything about her age. But she could be around the age of 12 when a betrothal happened. That doesn’t mean she conceived at that age, though. That’s a bit young.

But we don’t know. There’s no reference to ages at all in the text. But again, it’s just about trying to figure out, well, what would the typical thing be? And certainly women did marry younger than the men did. The men would usually be in their early 20s, and the women would be somewhere in their mid-teens when actually, they join for homes. And so, yeah, they did have children in their teenage years, but more the later teenage years than the early teenage years. But betrothal could happen at a fairly young age.

Shirley Paulson

Toto, you… I see your hand up, go ahead.

Toto Tay

No, I’m gonna go a different direction, Okay, I gotta ask, “Is this the same Salome, or do they say this is the same Salome that we find in, like, Thomas or the Gospels. Uh, no, no, it’s in the Gospel of Thomas, so little of Mary shows up.

Tony Burke

Another text called The Gospel of the Egyptians. She seems to be a disciple of Jesus. Um, it’s probably not the same character. We also have a Salome who is the daughter of Herod the Great. So, it’s a fairly common name. I tend to think of the gospels as being a bit like reading Shakespeare. There’s lots of Elizabeths, lots of Henrys. So we also have lots of Marys, and a couple of Josephs, and a couple of Salomes as well. Um, and there is a tendency sometimes to try and conflate these characters.

I remember reading a Bible some years ago. And sometimes Bibles have these, like, extra indices and stuff like indices. And, so I was looking at the back of it, and it’s got a cast of characters for the Bible. I looked up John for some reason, or just flicking through, and I noticed “John,” and that Bible said John was an apostle. He was also John the Baptist, he was also the John of the Book of Revelation. So, there’s this tendency to conflate.

But we need to be conscious of the fact that these are separate texts with separate cast of characters sometimes, and so trying to resist combining them all, unless there’s a good reason to do so.

I’ve never seen a text which explicitly connects these Salomes, so I wouldn’t assume. If we see no evidence that someone has done so, then there’s no reason to believe that these are the same character.

Shirley Paulson

That’s a great question, thank you, Toto. So, I want to go back to that point you were making about the East versus West, when we have Mary being emphasized in the east, and so forth. What I’m curious about is, as you see the progression of thought going on beyond—say the 4th century or so, do you see changes in the Christmas story that kind of keep moving in a certain way, or does everybody just have different thoughts that keep throwing them in there and then they go away, or… What happens afterwards? Is it all big free-for-all?

Tony Burke

I think it mostly kind of settles. So you get the Provangelium stuff going on in the East, you get that similar materials being passed along in the West, with the Gospel Pseudo-Matthew, just kind of translating and enhancing it. It doesn’t take on quite the level of almost-scriptural in the West as it does in the East. But it still filters down into sermons, into artwork, and so on, still becomes part of what’s in the air about Jesus’ birth. You do see some other texts that talk about other aspects of the infancy and the birth story. You get some expansions of the Magi, for example. There’s a text called “The Revelation of the Magi” that was published a few years ago by my colleague in the US, Brent Landau. And in this text—it’s somewhat mysterious—we only have one manuscript of it. And it’s in Syriac from the 8th century. Parts are really difficult to read, so it wasn’t a very widespread text. But it, again, fills in some of those details. We learned that these magi are from a place in the east called Shir. So we get where they’re from. We’re told that the word ‘magi’ comes from the practice of praying in silence—which is not something that people really did in antiquity, so that’s a bit new. But also magi—the word magi—has nothing to do with that. But a ‘magi’ is too close to magic for some people’s sensibility, so let’s explain it another way.

And we find out there’s actually 12 of them, not 3. And how do they know? How do the magi know to come to Bethlehem? How do they know that a star is important? And we’re told in this text that they are actually descendants of Seth, who is the third child of Adam and Eve, and that Adam gave Seth this prediction that one day this child will be born who will save humanity, and this gets passed down and passed down, and it moves over to the East, to the land of Shir, with Seth and his descendants.

So when the star appears to them. they already know. It’s like, “Oh, this is the star that we’ve been told about, and one other interesting thing about it, the star is actually Jesus himself. So the star appears to them, and then changes into the child Jesus and he speaks. And then he becomes a star again, leads them to Bethlehem. And then the star becomes Jesus in the manger. So, really interesting tradition, but not widely known, not widespread.

But it shows you that people are continuing to work with the stories. Though the birth story itself is fairly static, as far as I’m aware, but again, all these little things to just keep adding to it. Let’s say more about the Magi, let’s say more about the star, let’s say more about other things like that.

Shirley Paulson

That’s interesting, okay, so Diana, go ahead, and then Dick, you’re next.

Diana Austin

This whole thing about the elevation of Mary in the eastern part of the empire, or Eastern Europe, has a lot to do with who was ruling. Uh, this, you know, the Byzantine Empire, and there was, in this early… in the early days.

One historian has said that there was like, the 2 people came to the throne, it was a brother and sister.

 Tony Burke

Okay.

 Diana Austin

And the… priest or the man who was in charge of the church didn’t want her to be participating in the service, because she was a woman. And she said, well, Jesus’ mother was very important, and, you know, she definitely was part of the, you know, the story of Jesus coming. You know, it was a virgin birth, so I therefore… women can be pure, can be holy, etc. And that had a lot to do with the emphasis on the Virgin Mary in the Eastern Orthodox church.

Basically, because this sort of thing that was taking place among the, you know, major principles of who was running the empire there.

Tony Burke

Um, I haven’t heard about that, um… There’s a scholar named Stephen Shoemaker who does an awful lot of work on “Dormitian traditions,” and Ally Kateusz, who, I think—Shirley, you’ve had on your show—does some work on that, too. And… The earliest, uh, well, for a long time, people have thought that this elevation of Mary was a bit of a late tradition, like 6th century or 5th century.

But it appears that it’s earlier than we previously thought, maybe 4th or even 3rd century. So these things are going back a bit earlier than we expected, and it seems to grow out of Jerusalem,

among a group of… a group in the church that does elevate women, that Ally Kateusz will particularly talk about this, as this text really represents: a group in which women play a really important role liturgically, they are priestly figures in this group.

Um, and so it’s really interesting that both the group elevates women over other mainstream Christianity, giving them more opportunities, more leadership opportunities—but also elevates Mary and has those two things interact with one another. Showing  Mary’s in the position of kind of a priestly figure.

And so, really, again, it’s showing how these apocryphal texts work with, um… trying to, um, reflect new ideas, new situations, the particular situations of particular churches in different places, and sometimes it causes problems, and other Christian groups don’t like it, and so they’ll forbid that text, or change the text.

And so, this is one of the areas where it’s a big dynamic in the field right now, of trying to figure out exactly when these traditions started.

And, uh, again, it seems to be going… it seems to be that they’re earlier than we previously thought.

And the consensus, again, is that this shows a group that really seems to elevate women and, you know, what a great tradition that is.

Shirley Paulson

That’s fascinating.

Diana Austin

But this one case, in terms of the royal family and the East, it was descendants of Constantine, so it was really pretty early in the… you know, like, the fourth or 5th century.

Tony Burke

Yeah. I’d have to look into that myself, I’m not aware of it. I know of other legendary stuff related to the creation of these stories, but I’m not aware of that, but I’ll check into it, thank you.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, thank you, Diana. And, Dick, you’re next.

Dick Paulson

Alright, I’ll make this one quick. The historian William Manchester hypothesizes that the Western church was interested in converting a lot of pagan religions.

And those pagan religions needed a goddess, had a goddess and were reluctant to give up their goddesses.

Tony Burke

Yeah.

Dick Paulson

And so the idea of the Virgin Mary became the “goddess Mary” to help make their conversions. Are you familiar with William Manchester, who wrote this book, A World Lit Only by Fire?

Tony Burke

It sounds familiar…But the point you’re making, I certainly would agree with, yeah. And we… I sometimes think about this: the Christianization of the empire was like putting a new coat of paint on something, and it’s almost literally what they did. Sometimes they would tear down the temples and build new ones. Sometimes they would just literally give it a fresh coat of paint—Christianize it. And sometimes that’s…pragmatic? Why destroy a perfectly good building? Sometimes it’s a way of attracting these people to convert, or… helping them in the conversion process if it’s forced.

It’s the same place you’ve always been to, but you just… now we worship Jesus here instead of Murduk or whoever. And yeah, Mary works well to put her in the place of the goddess figure. I think people create gods who are very much like them. Um, so… polytheistic religions, they tend to have families of gods, and their dynamics are sometimes, you know, very much like toxic families. And you see that also with this. Various gods who are related to things like travel… like war… like conception. And you get these saints who all get these jobs as well.

Um, so this is something, you know, retained by Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, but not so much Protestantism. But yeah, I see that, how that really works. It’s almost a layering of Christianity over on top of what’s already there.

And the layering occurs even before Christianity—when Rome was expanding. It would take over these Greek lands. And it would layer its gods over on top of the Greek gods. You have a Zeus. Well, we have a Jupiter, etc. And it all works quite well. So, Christianity, I think, does that over time as well. Sometimes there’s reactions to it, like in Protestantism, where they want to just leave all that behind. They want to diminish this elevation of Mary, but certainly we see it throughout the Christian centuries, for sure.

Shirley Paulson

Interesting question, thank you. So, Diane, we have time for one short question from you, and then we’ll close it out.

Diane Williamson

This is just a quick one. It’s just hypothetical, really. Was there actually a star that appeared at that time, and then disciplined? Do we know about that, astronomically speaking? Or, I’ve often thought this was possibly just a vision for those who saw it. Because…in the same way that the shepherds apparently saw angels speaking to them, and it says that they were terrified of these angels until they realized what it was.

I’m just wondering if anybody else thinks maybe that star was a vision.

Tony Burke

Was there really a star? Let’s do that first. Um, certainly what earlier scholars, who were more still connected to faith—we would call them more theologians—they would try to find evidence for what they see in the Bible. So they would look for Noah’s Ark, they would look for, discussions of the Red Sea parting,… things like that. And so, you have to start in the Christian tradition.

So they would try to find some information that would suggest that there was a celestial phenomena at that time, like some kind of a Venus crossing—I don’t know, Mercury or something, I don’t know.

And those have kind of failed, but I think that’s really trying to go in the wrong direction. I think what you have in biblical texts is a lot of what we might call legendary material—things that we shouldn’t expect to find historically. I’ll give you another example. When Jesus died on the cross, there was an eclipse. So here we have another celestial phenomenon. Do we have any record of an eclipse around that time?

I don’t think so. But the writers are just trying to show how the divine world and the earthly world are kind of coming together in some way. So they have God directing events, or showing signs of events happening.

And another thing I could quickly say about this, we have lots of stories of other figures in the ancient world who have miraculous births. And sometimes these stories also include celestial phenomena showing the sign of it. So it becomes kind of a motif. And when you see this motif happening so often, you start to think, well, this can’t possibly be true. Not every person is a combination of human and divine. Not every person who’s special gets a star or some other sign in the heavens. So it’s a motif, it’s a way of showing the divine world and the earthly world coming together in some special way.

So, and as a biblical scholar who’s trained to be more objective, and try to think of natural explanations instead of supernatural ones. My tendency is to go towards “this is a literary motif, not something that actually, really happened.”

Shirley Paulson

Well, okay, Tony, so I think what’s fun here is that right after you here, we’re going to have Karen Hagen stay with us, who’s going to talk to us about how to find the faith part of the story. So we’re glad that Karen with us tonight. But this has been so helpful for us, Tony, to really think about the stories, why the stories became so important. How they became built upon, and I think you’ve given us a lot to think about. I really do appreciate your giving us an apocryphal Christmas. So I want to thank you so much for being with us tonight.

Tony Burke

You’re welcome.

Shirley Paulson

And I also want to say this was the December, 2025 Bible and Beyond discussion, titled, “Wishing You an Apocryphal Christmas,” with our guest scholar, Tony Burke.

These Bible and Beyond Discussions are led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of one or more early Christian texts, as we’ve done. For the last half hour, participants have a chance to ask their own questions. And we usually meet on the fourth Monday of the month from 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern.

So, now, let me tell you who’s coming next month. We have Professor Lance Jenott, who’s going to take us deeper into the Gospel of Judas to see how it might give us more insights on the disciples of Jesus, and that’ll be on the fourth Monday, which will be January 26th.

So, now please join me in giving a special thanks to Tony for opening up the world of the apocryphal Christmases with us. Thank you so much for being with us.

Tony Burke

Thank you, everyone.