The Apocryphal Gospels: Text and Translations. By BART D. EHRMAN and ZLATKO PLEsE.

Oxford University Press has a strong tradition of publishing works on the apocryphal New Testament. Its involvement goes back certainly as early as its collection of translations edited by M. R. James in 1924; this reviewer's own revision of James appeared under their Clarendon imprint in 1993. More recently, OUP has launched the monograph series Oxford Early Christian Gospel Texts. Bart Ehrman himself has included translations of New Testament apocryphal texts in his OUP compendia The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader and After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity. Now he and a colleague from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Zlatko Pleše, have decided to issue a good selection of New Testament apocryphal Gospels in their original languages, correctly alert to the difficulty students may encounter trying to track down a reliable edition of some of them. The current book includes about forty such texts in Greek, Latin, or Coptic. These are Infancy Thomas A plus the alternative beginning in Infancy Thomas C, following Delatte's edition of BdF 355; the Protevangelium of James; Pseudo-Matthew; the ‘J’ compilation (previously known as the Arundel Infancy Gospel), given here only for chapters 59–97, 111–25; the History of Joseph the Carpenter; three Jewish-Christian gospels; the Gospel of the Egyptians and several of the fragmentary texts like P.Oxy 840 that may have originally belonged in a larger Gospel-type work; Gospel of Thomas; Gospel of Peter; the recently discovered Gospel of Judas; various Pilate texts including Acts of Pilate A and B; the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea; the Gospel of Mary (Coptic and Greek fragments); and some less commonly found items like the Dura Europa fragment that possibly comes from the Diatessaron (New Testament majuscule 0212) and the bizarre Greater Questions of Mary (from Epiphanius, Panarion). For the alleged Diatessaron item the editors take the lead of Dieter Lührmann, who included it among his Fragmente apokryph gewordener Evangelien (the Greek texts from which Ehrman and Pleše borrow for several of their fragmentary apocrypha here). They also include a goodly selection of agrapha, knowing full well that these constitute an almost limitless number, as Resch discovered over a century ago.