Beyond the Canon: Why Apocrypha Matters

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson

Well, I think we’re in for an interesting surprise in our conversation today. Our guest, Professor Tobias Nicklas, has recently written a book called The Canon and Beyond. So just from that it sounds like he ought to be on a program called “The Bible and Beyond”. But I learned about him through an even more recent book that he co-authored with Janet Spittler. And this is the one we’re going to talk about today. It’s titled Reading Christian Apocrypha, Tradition, Interpretation, Practice.

So first, let me tell you just a little bit about Dr. Nicklas. He did his doctorate studies on “The Jews in the Gospel of John” at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where he’s also been teaching since 2007. And he’s authored several monographs, edited and co-edited over 30 numerous scholarly conferences, and written numerous scholarly articles. I’m intrigued with the fact that he and some colleagues founded the Center for Advanced Studies Beyond Canon in 2018. So I’m quite pleased to speak with someone else whose heart is in the canon and beyond. Our focus at the moment is on “the beyond”. So welcome, Tobias.

Tobias Nicklas

Thank you very much for inviting me and thank you very much for having me here.

Shirley Paulson

It is going to be a great conversation. I was quite taken when I started reading your book because I’ve been interested in apocryphal Christian writings for some time. But I will say that the farther I got into your book, the more you convinced me of their importance for a broader perspective on Christianity itself. These ancient writers were answering hard questions, just like the writers of the books that did get into the canon. So the first one I want to ask you about is how there were some apocryphal readings that imagined the early life of Jesus in ways that are hard to answer using the canonical writings, such as: How are we really to imagine the divine son of God as a small child?

That’s a hard one.

Tobias Nicklas

Yeah, thank you very much. This is really an important question. I think you referred to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. This is a writing which was for a certain time quite successful, but if we read it today, it’s super strange. So we meet a child—Jesus—a few years old, which is absolutely not the kind of child we would like to have. So he is absolutely not nice to his peers. He even kills people…who are nasty to him. I would never like to be a teacher of this child. This child is arrogant. He’s like a little tyrant. But even if you don’t like the story very much, thinking about the story points us to a question which usually we tend to overlook. The big question is:

From the Gospel of John and from other Gospels we learn Jesus is the Word of God which came to be human. Wow! But what does it mean in concrete terms? What does it mean that the Divine Logos became flesh in a little child in the village, Nazareth, somewhere in the middle of nothing? Is this a super nice child? Is this a perfect child or is it still a human being?

And this text tries to bring together the idea that this child is a creator of the cosmos—a  child, which is able to bring sparrows to life—and at the same time a child which has to learn to really become a human being, careful of others. So even if we may not like the text itself very much, it is a text coming from a different period—from a different world. This is a text which points us to questions which we usually do not ask anymore. And maybe we should start thinking about these questions a little bit deeper.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, that’s what really drew me into your book—that you brought out how there are questions that I never thought about even asking in the canonical writings. And I think that’s a very interesting way to look at the Infancy Gospel of Thomas when on the surface it looks absurd, but it really does answer some very hard questions. So then another question that you raised, and which grabbed my attention, was the effort in both the New Testament and Apocryphal writings to explain what it really means to speak of a God who suffers. Like, what kinds of explanations are there for that big question?

Tobias Nicklas

So this is again another big, big challenge, a challenge which we really have to face. We are used to speak about the crucified Jesus. We are used to having crosses in rooms here in Germany, still also in schools and so on. So we face these things. It’s something we got used to.  But the major point is: this is a person hanging on the cross—a human being hanging on the cross—but at the same time we believe that it is God who suffers with this person? Through this person there is a suffering God with whom we are confronted. And the major point is, and this is a point which came already to be one of the deepest questions for early Christian authors and thinkers—people who had at least studied a little bit of philosophy of the time—is it possible that God suffers? In which way is it possible that God comes so close that the being to own itself can change and can come so close?

So there are texts which try to offer different answers, like for example, the Acts of John which say, “No, no, don’t look to the wooden cross. Don’t look to this figure which is hanging there. There is another real Jesus Christ, the Divine Logos, the Divine Spirit, and he has a cross of light. And this cross of light connects two spheres, an upper world full of grace and love and so on, and the downward material world from which we just have to escape. And all of us who have these little sparks of light in us, have to look into this cross.”

I still prefer the real human being hanging on the cross, crying for God and crying for God’s presence, offering this big question: Is God also present in our suffering and in our life and so on? But seeing this as real challenge is something where apocryphal texts can help us to open our perspectives and see that what we think that it has been always the case is not, something which still should be seen as a challenging question.

Shirley Paulson

Yes, my goodness, these are really helpful questions, again that I didn’t even think to ask. But that’s good. Alright, so now I also know that I’m accustomed to reading the canonical writings as if they’re the ones who are telling the true story. So, like consequently, the writings that are not canonical just sort of sound wrong just because they’re not in the canon. But my question at the moment is, then, did these authors want to be like secretive and different? Or why are they known as apocryphal, which refers to being secretive or hidden in some way?

Tobias Nicklas

So first, before I start to answer the question, does it mean that thinking that everything that is in the canon is true or close to the truth? It does not mean that everything outside is simply silly and stupid. Point one.

The second point, of course, we should be very careful making statements about all the authors of the Apocrypha. The world of apocryphal writings is so incredibly rich that we can say some texts are like this, others are like that, and so on. There are some texts which really wanted to offer something like secrets or hidden truth, or least claim that.

So, one of the most well-known of these texts is the so-called Gospel of Thomas. Many people maybe have heard about it. It’s a collection of a little bit more than 100 sayings of Jesus, so-called Jesus Logia, and this starts with the mysterious words: These are the secret, the hidden, and (in Greek) even the apocryphal, sayings which the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down. And now read these texts, find these secrets, find the answers to the questions, and you will have fun. So this is really a text which wants to be for a special audience. Or we have another text like the Gospel of Judas, also starting like that.

So, there is a group of texts which really want to do something very special, partly also Apocalypses and so on. But this does not mean that all these texts are like that. Many were written for a broader audience, were used by a broader audience, and were very, very successful—successfully changing our world perceptions, successfully being influential for people’s piety, for example, what we have around Christmas, all of what we do around Christmas. I speak now of Europe, both the Western Europe or the Eastern Europe, how to deal with medieval Christian Apocrypha. Our ideas about the other world, that is, have to do with texts like the Apocalypse of the Virgin, which we even find in Dostoevsky and others. So many of these texts never wanted to be hidden. Many of them never wanted to be something secret. They were simply retelling stories, opening up new perspectives, answering questions with the help of a Biblical-related worldview.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, so maybe you can explain a little bit about them. Why did they all get lumped together as if they were secretive or hidden or using the word apocryphal? It seems like they all got lumped together that way.

Tobias Nicklas

Yeah, I think in part this is something which has been done in antiquity, not for all of these texts, but for some of them, simply to make distinctions in the kind of power discourses developed to something like finishing up a canon. So, there is the idea that we should have just four gospels, that we should have just one apocalypse and so on. And this idea develops over several centuries. And then we have these kinds of canon lists. And in these canon lists, there are the distinctions between canonical texts, apocryphal texts, some texts which can be used in some circumstances, others less and so on.

And then we have in our modern editions—in our modern introductions to apocrypha—we have the idea that this always has been something like a list of texts or a collection of texts like the canonical writings, but actually there is no such list which could be accepted by everyone. Apocryphal texts are developed far beyond the late antiquity in medieval times. In a certain way I would say texts like or comparable to apocrypha are even developed today or something. If you watch a Jesus movie or something, it always has so many apocryphal elements when you tell Jesus stories. And so these things are going on until our times.

Shirley Paulson

Isn’t that amazing? So sorting out the relationship between these writings outside the canon and those inside is quite complex. It doesn’t look like anybody set out to write something bad on purpose, even though they were condemned by church fathers. One of the apocryphal books, The Acts of John, was condemned, wasn’t it, by the church officials at one point? But you argue that it became successful anyway, right? How did that happen?

Tobias Nicklas

So actually this was an observation by my friend Janet Spittler, who co-wrote this book. So Janet is a fantastic expert on exactly this text. But this is a very good example demonstrating what we want to do with this book. Some of these texts are completely out of what we think of our normal world of biblical studies. The Acts of John is a text which, in its earliest form, is lost. So we have only fragments, and even the edition of the early text, which we have, is putting together fragments and trying to reconstruct what the text looked like at the end of the second century.

The text must have been quite successful in some circles in late antiquity, but at the end of the eighth century, the Second Council of Nicaea—(so, not the first one which we celebrate now in 325)—condemned this book. It even was supposed to be burned. So now we think about something like a witch’s hunt where people look for copies of the book and burn the book and so on. Of course, we could organize something like that. So maybe we cannot know exactly what happened, but parts of the book survived, simply with other titles.

So, The Death of John simply was given a new title, so that the chapters about the death of John—some chapters about the miracles of John—simply survived in new way. The text was rewritten, we had new Acts of John writings, emerging at the same time in Rome and not just in Ephesus. And one writing which is in our modern studies of Apocrypha and almost unknown, was super successful in Byzantine times. This is the text, The Acts of John, by Prochorus. We have dozens and dozens of manuscripts and this text must have been read widely. And in this text we have the idea that John has a certain secretary, Prochorus.

And this text is written in a time when John, the author of the gospel, is merging into John, the author of Revelation! And this idea is so much, I would even call it part of, becomes part of, let’s say, the Bible in our heads or Bible in the heads of these people—that it became the image. And if you go to Orthodox churches today or read late medieval manuscripts of the Bible from the East, you very often have the image of the evangelist John dictating his gospel or Revelation to Prochorus on Patmos. So the point is, the apocryphal text makes its comeback into the church space and even into the books of the Bible.

So the most forbidden text comes back, at least in ideas. And many of these texts have comparable journeys. And some of the texts which are completely forgotten today had their comebacks in the Middle Ages or in later times, even today.

Shirley Paulson

That’s really extraordinary. So, suddenly now we’re thinking about John, the one who wrote the Gospel of John is now writing the Gospel of John in Patmos where we think the Book of Revelation was written by another John. So this is all kind of crazy, but I get it.

So another wonderful topic in your book is about the apostles. People always want to know what happened to them and how do we know what happened to them. So, do we learn more about their lives from these apocryphal writings?

Tobias Nicklas

This is a difficult question. If you want to ask about the historical apostles, I would say in many cases, this is very, very difficult. But maybe this is not the most important question. The most important question is, “How some figures develop into very important remembered figures, ideal figures, and symbolic figures who were important for the identities and the development of certain churches and communities.

And there is a second point now, also with our change of paradigm which we propose in our book. So normal studies on Apostle stories or Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles usually focus on the so-called Big Five: the Big Five ancient apocryphal acts: Acts of Paul, Acts of Peter, Acts of John, Acts of Andrew, Acts of Thomas.

And then we get the feeling these are quite marginal texts from the second, third century, most of them only preserved in fragments and so on. So something on the fringes. But if you open up the doors and go beyond the fourth century, we find out that these texts were very, very influential in different ways. A little bit like I told you with the Acts of John, but you could do comparable stories with all of these writings.

The Acts of Thomas have been rewritten until the 19th century. So this is an early third century text. It has been formed into new forms and more new forms, partly being read in the liturgies, and partly influencing imagery. And if you go beyond the fourth century, there are emerging dozens of more apocryphal acts. Every church, every regional church, wants to have his or its new apostle—its apostolic figure which is related to them, which is really still present or understood as present, miracle working, preserving these people and so on.

For example, the big churches of antiquity cannot do without the apostle stories. If you go to Rome today and visit the Forum Romanum, visit the Carcer Mamertinum (where Peter was imprisoned) and all these places, you will have tour guides who will tell you about Peter who suffered here and suffered there, and was here and there, and Paul was here and there. All this is an apocryphal landscape of memories. If you go to Istanbul, you will hear comparable stories. If you go to Alexandria, you have stories about Mark. If you go to Ephesus, you will hear stories about John. And these figures and the memories of these figures create something like, I call it “landscapes of memories”, where we really can try to imagine the past. And the idea is that these figures are still there, are still present with their holiness, and even in parts, their miraculous powers, which you can visit. And in parts, to say it a with a little smile, to make money with people for pilgrimage.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, okay, so here’s where you’re really opening up my thought quite a bit on this—I’m hearing that we’re seeing “apocryphal” is not just canon versus something else, but rather the reality of what’s going on in the life of the church as it keeps on evolving. And they’re using these stories in a way to keep on being adapted to a new life. Am I hearing that correctly?

Tobias Nicklas

Yeah, this is something which is happening on many different levels. And this is a way how these texts, or I would say traditions, because it is also about images, about performance and so on, still shape cultures. I would go even so far to say that parts of the conflicts of our time today have to do with these memories. Go to the Caucasus and try to understand what is happening between the different religions.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, that’s so interesting.

Tobias Nicklas

The landscape of Christian memories we have in Slovenia versus what you find in Georgia, versus what you find in the Islamic traditions. Go to the Near East, and go to the Near East together first with a Jewish taxi driver, and then with a Christian taxi driver, and then with an Arabic taxi driver. Through the same port, what kind of stories they tell you about the countryside. Some of the stories are, of course, about the very distant past and some of them say, “Okay, this is a place where Abraham was, this is the place.” “No, this is a place where Muhammad was, this is the place.” I would even go so far as to say that some of the texts are important for what is happening now between Russia and Ukraine—the idea that Russia is something like the chosen country, goes back to the medieval popular writings which in a hidden way come back. The topic is much broader than the original.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, that’s really interesting. Okay, it is huge, yeah. So now of great interest to us, we’ve talked a lot about Thecla—and many times on our podcast here—in the Acts of Paul and Thecla several times, and she’s a fascinating character. But you argue that her story was actually quite important for the development of Christianity, and she wasn’t important just because she was female. Tell us more about why her story was so important in other ways.

Tobias Nicklas

Yeah, first and foremost, yes, you are completely right. Thecla is absolutely fascinating and I think she should have a real big comeback in Christian discourse. We tend to think that she is something like a marginal character, but I think she is not a marginal character. She has been marginalized for centuries and mainly also just the last centuries.

Second, if you want to understand how important Thecla was, you should not concentrate on the Greek Acts of Paul and Thecla only. You have to be aware, there is a whole library of Thecla texts in antiquity. Usually when we read the usual introductions to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, we hear this is an apocryphal writing which was condemned by Tertullian. That’s it. But this text was extremely successful. It was translated into Syriac, into Ethiopian, into Latin, and so on. And it was present there. And besides that, we have fascinating material. So not texts, but pieces from material culture which show that the devotion of Thecla was so widespread and important that it really, that Thecla was for a certain time number two of the most important women remembered in the church!

She was so important that even an emperor like Zeno the Isaurian, so a Byzantine emperor, claimed that Thecla was the one who told him, who prophesied him. So the heavenly Thecla of course, who prophesied to him that he would be emperor, that she was seen on the side of emperors. She was understood as a person who is the protector of the region where she came from. She was understood as a miracle worker and so on.

But for us today, I think the most important point is that again, she could be understood as a kind of a symbol. The ancient symbol is that she was a virgin. This sounds not very attractive, but we can translate this symbol in modern times. In our modern times this means she is a woman which does not fulfill the roles which were expected in her world, in her culture as a woman. She is an independent woman. She is an intellectual woman. She is a teaching woman. She is a woman who can take over leadership roles. And there is a whole history of women in antiquity and the Middle Ages whose lives were formed or described according to Thecla.

Many, many women were understood as being something like a new Thecla. So, for example, Macrina. We usually tend to speak about the great Cappadocian fathers, so Basil of Caesarea, and so on. So, they were so important for the development of church doctrine. But there was a woman together with them, Macrina. And Macrina was an intellectual on the same level. And Macrina was understanding herself as a kind of a new Thecla. She had a hidden name, ‘Thecla,’ during her baptism and so on. And she is only one example of intellectual women who became in part deacons, who were in correspondence with some of the great authors of the church like John Chrysostom and others, who were like Thecla-formed women.

And in a certain way, if you look into this tradition, it would be wonderful to go back to these traditions, to translate it into modern times and to open up space for these kind of intellectual, courageous, wonderful women in our churches. I think we need them. But this should not be done by a white old man like me alone. We need women to do this.

Shirley Paulson

Well, thank you for this lovely conversation from a white man who’s explaining these things. But honestly, what you’re doing is you’re helping me to see that the story of Thecla is so much bigger than I have known it to be. And that’s fascinating.

Quickly, I want to get into one other thing here before we need to close up. Your book surprised me also by showing me the value of the writings as late as the medieval period here. I’ve always focused so much on looking for the origins of things that I haven’t placed too much value on things that happened so much later. But you have an example from the medieval vision of Tnugdal (I don’t even know how to pronounce that correctly) that does say a lot for modern people to think about. Can you tell us a little bit about why that’s valuable and how do you pronounce it?

Tobias Nicklas

Alright. So first and foremost there are lots of texts from medieval times. So, the Golden Legend, for example, which was more important than the Bible in many cases. So Tnukdal or Tnugdal… so the manuscripts give him a different name. You can choose what kind of name you want to have. Tnukdal is a medieval knight warrior from Ireland. And the story comes from my hometown, Regensburg. Regensburg had a Scottish monastery—still has a wonderful Scottish monastery with Irish monks there. One of these Irish monks, known only by his name, Marcus of Regensburg, wrote in the early 13th century a so-called vision of Tnukdal. So he sends an Irish, quite evil, aggressive warrior—Superman guy—with his battle axe in his hands. He sent this guy, at least in a literary manner, to hell. And his text became super successful. It was one of the most successful texts of medieval times at all, but today it’s forgotten.

The text offers us something like an otherworldly journey, a description of hell and heaven, which we have dozens of these texts. But the text has, at least in my reading, two opportunities, two levels of reading. You can read it as an educating, edifying text on how to behave in a proper manner, like many of these things. But you can also read it as a text where a so-called powerless monk makes fun of the one who seems to be in power. He describes this man, Tnukdal, who is trying to get back a horse from some of the neighbors, and the guy has, as I told you, his battle axe in his hands and wants to kill the other one. And at this time, he falls into some kind of sleep, and in the text, within a moment, this superhero man transforms into a naked soul, fearsome in hell because there are demons around, and he’s trembling.

And different from other otherworldly journeys, this Tnukdal has not just to visit the places of hell and see what the sinners are, how these sinners are punished. He has to go through some of these punishments. And in some cases, you have a feeling that Marcus of Regensburg, some monk, has a certain real knight or real knights in his mind. And sometimes you have the feeling he smiles about this guy who has to go through all these punishments.

My favorite scene is that Tnukdal has to cross a bridge. This bridge is just a few centimeters broad. It’s full of nails. He doesn’t have shoes. He has a guardian angel who jumps over the bridge. Under the bridge is a lake of fire with demons and dragons and so on. And Tnukdal has to cross the bridge with his naked feet. And the angel says you should come now. But maybe, dear guy, you have stolen a cow, so please take this cow with you over the bridge. So he and the cow cross bridge, and in the middle of the bridge—as they go step by step, in the middle of the bridge, what is coming? Traffic from the other side! It’s almost like a comedy. And in this very moment the narrator comes with a comment and says, quoting the Bible, “And, woe to you who laugh, because he will be weeping in the future.” So he tells us, nobody should steal from others. You can read it as an edifying text; but you can also read it as a text from someone who seems to be powerless, who suffers from all these kinds of noble people and their cruelty, and he simply writes a text that can make fun of them.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, so you’re just telling me that the Bible keeps on living and living and living—or it’s not just the Bible. It’s beyond. It’s all the things that keep on going. So just really quickly, I wonder if you could tell us in your own words the importance of the shift in your perspective that your book is bringing. Instead of focusing on the origins, as I’ve done for so long, you’re saying that each layer of history is important. So how would you put this in your own words?

Tobias Nicklas

Okay, quickly, every source is important because every source is telling an important story about different worlds. This makes our idea of the past much more vivid, much more colorful, much more fascinating. Every source has to do with human beings, and I’m interested in the stories and the lives of human beings. And this book is an invitation to people to go on discovery tours to find these stories.

Shirley Paulson

Excellent. I am so grateful that I met you and your book, and also of course your co-author with Janet Spittler. But I think this is a fascinating new way of opening our minds outside the Bible to see how it even fits with the Bible in so many amazing ways. Thank you so much for this conversation. I really, really enjoyed getting to know about this. Thank you.

Tobias Nicklas

Thank you. Bye. Have a good day.