Some years back, I published a lot at this site on the general subject of Alternative Scriptures, and their rediscovery in modern times. I found a lot to say that was new and counter-intuitive, and the whole subject really cried out to be a book. At the time, I was focused on other topics, but my recent work on the 1890s really makes me think that the time has come to develop that. I will use my next couple of posts to expand on those ideas, but at every point, I will be harking back to those original posts with their extensive quotations, bibliographies and so on, and it would be helpful to follow those links as you go What follows here will be a bare bones summary.This bare bones summary is a long and salutary reminder that a number of formerly lost apocryphal scriptures had come to the attention of scholars and the public even back in the nineteenth century and certainly by the early twentieth. Long before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Coptic Gnostic Library and the Dead Sea Scrolls. For early Christianity, notably the Pistis Sophia and the Greek fragments of the at-the-time unidentified Gospel of Thomas. For the Old Testament, notably the texts collected by Charles in his Pseudepigrapha volume.[...]
Such collections go back much earlier, of course. Johann Albert Fabricius published the foundational volumes of apocryphal scriptures in the early 1700s. But either side of the turn of the twentieth century was another period of considerable activity.
I look forward to hearing more about Professor Jenkins's work on this new book.
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