•  
  •  
 

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

orality, social memory, apocryphal acts, New Testament

College

Religious Education

Department

Ancient Scripture

Abstract

The corpus of texts that constitute the New Testament apocrypha is large, to make a gross understatement. It is a vast collection that spans the continents, languages, and centuries of the early Church and rightly so would take a lifetime to master. Originally I set out to see what we can learn about the office of the apostolate as seen through the lens of these acts. As I read I became increasingly interested in the idea of how these texts came into being and compositional issues in general. In the end my paper was still centered on how the apostleship is seen in the apocryphal acts, but in a slightly different way. My main area of investigation was how the aspect of social memory was the driving force in bringing the stories contained in the apocryphal acts from oral tradition and memory to the pen, and thus to us.

Download

Included in

Religion Commons

Share

COinS