2015 Calendar of the Pious Union of Transit
by Franco Cardini
Each month the 2016 calendar is accompanied by episodes from the life of Jesus told by the "apocryphal gospels", almost underground rivers that supported the popular faith of the first Christians. The professor. Franco Cardini, professor of Church history, illustrates these "hidden good news" which are not part of the Church's canon. In the next issue, the watercolors illustrating the individual episodes will be illustrated.
The Greek word apokryphos means "hidden": this was how the Christian Churches of the 1st-2nd centuries indicated those Jewish-Christian evangelical texts that were kept secret and which it was deemed appropriate not to divulge. It is obvious that they became, over time, a matter of initiatory tradition and that some considered them bearers of higher and deeper truths, to be drawn from an esoteric level, that is, reserved for those who had access to higher levels of theological or mystical.
And it is understandable how starting from the 4th century, when the various Christian communities finally free from interdictions and persecutions were able to confront each other in those periodic meetings called "councils" and establish a progressive "orthodoxy" (i.e. "correct doctrine"), they emerged as “canonical” (“correct”, according to a kanon, i.e. a "rule") the four most ancient apostolic narratives (of Matthew, Luke, Mark, John) while on the other hand the apocryphal gospels revealed themselves in various ways as bearers of doctrines which instead were agreed to be considered incorrect ("heresies ”). It was then recognized that the content of many evangelical narratives was inspired by Gnostic doctrines, that is, by a syncretistic pagan-Christian knowledge which was summed up in the thesis that the truth and therefore salvation could be reached through rational knowledge, which was naturally however kept secret to the majority to be revealed initiatically to only the elect.
The thesis that the gospels considered apocryphal were wholly or partly false and not divinely inspired already surfaces in the first Fathers of the Church, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian. But it was only with the so-called "Gelasian Decree", of around 490, that the apocryphal gospel was formulated as "of doubtful value" and a list of sixty writings of that type was compiled: not only gospels, but also apostolic acts and epistles as well as apocalyptic writings. It is true, however, that the gospels are the best known and most characteristic of the New Testament apocryphal writings (as there are also Old Testament apocrypha, which we are not concerned with here): they were born from the desire to specify, expand and deepen certain aspects of life and teaching of Jesus and are presented as fabrics of stories, some of which seem plausible, others are more clearly inspired by fantastic or magical contents.
In reality, the Church has never condemned all the apocryphal gospels as false nor declared as false all the episodes reported in them and not also present in the canons: the fact that many are not the narratives that seem to have been handed down orally long before of being fixed in writing, but which could in some way be traced back to the apostolic testimony, calls for prudence. At a popular level, then, there are many elements inspired by the apocryphal tales which have been retained and have passed into popular belief, perhaps through iconography: for example many details connected to the Nativity and the Epiphany or to the Passion (the midwives present at the birth of the Savior, the number and name of the Magi, their royal qualification, the portraits of Christ and so on). The Christian iconic tradition, both Eastern and Western (at least until the sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation) continued to disseminate aspects of apocryphal writing in painted or sculpted evangelical representations. Many apocrypha have been lost in whole or in part: Clement of Alexandria has handed down to us passages from Gospel of the Egyptians, while Eusebius tells us about a Gospel of Peter. We know the title and some information about lost gospels attributed to Matthias, Philip, Andrew, Barnabas). With the entry into the Christian faith of populations other than the Jewish one, the apocryphal gospels ceased to be written in Aramaic: in fact, there are also some in Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Amharic and so on. Among the most famous and authoritative apocrypha, at least the following should be mentioned: Protoevangelium of James, Story of the nativity of Mary (from the 2nd century, which has come down to us in different languages and versions); the so-called Gospels of the Jews, of the Ebionites, of the Nazarenes; the Gospel of Thomas (which has also come down to us in various languages and should not be confused with a text of the same name of clearly Gnostic origin); the Memoirs of Nicodemus, Acts of Pilate; The Story of Joseph the carpenter; the Arabic Gospel of Infancy. Special significance must be attributed to Gospel of Bartholomew, composed in an Egyptian Gnostic environment and containing teachings attributed to Jesus only after the Resurrection).
A sensational discovery revolutionized the world of our knowledge relating to the apocryphal gospels in 1945 when 52 Gnostic writings were discovered in Nag Hammadi near Kenoboskion in Upper Egypt (not far from Luxor), including the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas in the Coptic language of about the middle of the 2nd century or shortly after, the Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Among them, it experienced a moment of particular success in 2006 - when it was published, in May of that year, by the magazine "National Geographic" - a text of Jewish-"Sethian" origin, already written by Irenaeus who had spoken in his writing against the heresies of 180. It is a text violently contrary to the tradition of the apostles, and therefore precisely called The Gospel of Judas.
There are various editions of the apocrypha with Italian traditions: among them a "classic", The apocryphal Gospels edited by Marcello Craveri (Einaudi 1969). Echoes of the apocrypha dedicated to the Virgin Mary can be found in the most beautiful and moving of the suras of the Koran, the Sura of Mary, the XIX, for which you can consult the beautiful book by Ludovico Zamboni, La Sura of Mary in Islamic wisdom (Gruppo Editoriale l'Idea, 2003).