#apocryphal gospel

[nyuiarantes]

A short comic based on a passage in Acts of John, an apocryphal christian writing from the second century CE. I really enjoy the way it's written as a first person account of the travels of Saint John, it's very lovely:

113 O thou who hast kept me until this hour for thyself and untouched by union with a woman: who when in my youth I desired to marry didst appear unto me and say to me: John I have need of thee: who didst prepare for me also a sickness of the body: who when for the third time I would marry didst forthwith prevent me, and then at the third hour of the day saidst unto me on the sea: John, if thou hadst not been mine, I would have suffered thee to marry: who for two years didst blind me, and grant me to mourn and entreat thee: who in the third year didst open the eyes of my mind and also grant me my visible eyes: who when I saw clearly didst ordain that it should be grievous to me to look upon a woman[...] who didst make my love of thee spotless: who didst make my joining unto thee perfect and unbroken: who didst give me undoubting faith in thee, who didst order and make clear my inclination toward thee[...]

[wutheringheightsfilm]

obsessed with the tags on this jesus and joseph artwork here. "what did he do that was so bad to get them removed" according to the infancy gospel of thomas's greek A version he ah... well... curses a boy who then becomes a corpse and kills a boy and blinds that second boy's parents. he does resurrect and cure them later but it's not exactly lord and savior material

[dougielombax]

And then god said “OH NO, I’VE DROPPED MY FORK!!!!!”

From the Gospel of Shit that Didn’t Happen.

[xponentialdesign]

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas

"When this boy, Jesus, was five years old, he was playing at the ford of a rushing stream; he was collecting the flowing water into ponds and made the water instantly pure. He did this with a single command. He then made soft clay and shaped it into twelve sparrows. He did this on the Sabbath day, and many other boys were playing with him.

But when a Jew saw what Jesus was doing while playing on the Sabbath day, he immediately went off and told Joseph, Jesus' father, 'See here, your boy is at the ford of a rushing stream and has taken mud and fashioned twelve birds with it, and so has violated the Sabbath.'

So Joseph went there, and as soon as he spotted him, he shouted, 'Why are you doing what's not lawful to do on the Sabbath?'

But Jesus simply clapped his hands and shouted to the sparrows, 'Be off, fly away, and remember me, you who are now alive!'

And the sparrows took off and went away chirping

[j-man-and-the-j-crew]

!Baddie Alert!

I literally eat pray love Mary Mags. My favorite disciple/apostle if we're being frank! The Jesus narrative would feel a bit more complete if she had a greater role in the gospels. Good thing we have apocrypha! Especially since that whole "she was a prostitute" scandal (which, btw, what we're not gonna do is shame sex work). She deserves to exude power (and trendiness since, after all, she did wear the hair suit before it was cool).

[cruelsister-moved2]

in case you didn't believe me. gender forcibly transed by jesus

[troutfur]

The things I do for fic writing purposes. I'm out here scouring the internet for translations of Christian apocrypha and reviewing the nativity and infancy stories on my own Bible for a fic that is not supposed to be any more complicated than: "What if Leafpool just straight up lied and said her kittens were miraculously conceived?"

[rotzaprachim]

feel strongly about andornatural. as a show. that exists solely in my head and i would love to never ever exist in the real world because i just could not do that to the cast. well it’s called the apocryphal gospels or apocrypha 

[notyourcharlottesweb]

[letterful]

In the Gospel of Luke, neither God nor the Holy Spirit manifests any visible appearance to Mary; it is Gabriel alone who stands and speaks with her during the conception of Jesus. [...] And what a sight he makes. The Gospel of Luke mentions that when Gabriel first spoke to Mary, she was troubled (turbata, “troubled, disturbed, disordered, agitated, excited”) (1:29). And yet, according to the second-century apocryphal Gospel of James, Mary received her daily sustenance from the hand of an angel. Why, then, would the familiar sight of an angel upset her so? According to ancient and medieval exegetes, although angels attended Mary every day, Gabriel must have been the first to appear to her disguised as a man. [...] And not in the likeness of just any man: the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew specifies that Gabriel appeared to Mary as “a young man of indescribable beauty.”

Medieval artists elaborated on this detail with enormous enthusiasm. Artists made the archangel ridiculously attractive, expending on him all their very best hairstyles and outfits. [...] As the only visible and humanoid agent of God’s envoy to the Virgin, Gabriel functions as an attractive showpiece—the Incarnation’s representative male object of desire onto which the medieval erotic gaze transfixed its ardent attention.

[...] Twelfth-century theologians described the Annunciation as a courtly romance, according to the rules of which [...] every lover needs an intermediary [...]. Aelred of Rievaulx identified Gabriel as God’s angelic go-between and bridesman, his paranymphus angelus. Yet as the legend of Tristan and Isolde attests, the courtly necessity of employing an intermediary puts the lover at great risk. When King Mark sent Tristan to woo Isolde on his behalf, Tristan wooed for himself. Small wonder, as the genre of courtly love tends to favor adultery over marriage. We all know how the story of the king, queen, and handsome knight tends to end.

— EMMA MAGGIE SOLBERG, from Virgin Whore.

[totopopopo]

Everybody knows by now I think that harrow’s name comes from the (early) Christian concept of the harrowing of hell.

To summarize briefly, in Christian mythology, when Jesus died on the cross, he descended into the underworld for the three days that he stayed dead. I say the underworld—the word they use is Hades, not Hell, although some translations use the word hell. This pre-dates the Christian conceptions of hell that we are more familiar with—fire and brimstone and punishment etc—and reflects the idea that it was more of a neutral place where everyone went when they died, stemming from other traditions like the Greco Roman hades (obviously, which it took the word from) or the Jewish Sheol. The harrowing of hell refers to what Jesus does when he gets to this place. He descends and he kills death itself (using the cross as a weapon)—the death of death—and he leads ALL of the dead people there up out of the mouth of hades. He frees them from the shackles of death. This is all laid out in the early apocryphal text the gospel according to nicodemus. You should read it it’s fun.

When I say mouth, I mean that literally. In art and literature, even in the gospel of nicodemus, hades was characterized as an actual living creature, and in the harrowing, Jesus kills it and leads the souls out of its gaping mouth. This has lead to some frankly excellent art:

Okay, back to the locked tomb. Why am I bringing this up (other than the fact that I partially wrote my thesis in this so I will talk about it whenever possible)? Well, we know harrow’s name is… significant. We also know that in Alecto, she will find herself in hell. Okay. Where do we see ^ this imagery pop up in the universe of the locked tomb? What place does John call hell? The Soma, under the river. Soma, which means body in Greek. The body that houses the dead in its belly, the body of hades, the living body of hell. And we’ve seen it’s mouth already, a gaping mouth lined with teeth.

EDIT: it was pointed out it’s called the stoma not the soma, but. Stoma means fucking mouth in Greek so…. The point stands. The point very much stands.

Like.. mouth indeed.

I think harrow is gonna go into the stoma. I think harrow is going to kill death—or maybe, in a delicious inversion the likes of which Tamsyn Muir loves so much, she is going to kill necromancy. The death of the death of death. And she’s going to lead out the souls in there. All the people—Augustine? Cassiopea?—and all the fucking planets too.

Idk we’ll fucking see.

[solarflicker]

Judas Iscariot: The Queer Iconoclast's Icon

With queer acceptance on the rise (at least compared to past decades), the experience of coming out of the closet has changed significantly. Coming out is often an occasion that calls for celebration, Pride is a corporate parade celebrated in every state with at least one major city. But for many queer people, particularly in the evangelical American south, coming out remains a traumatic ordeal (this is especially true for transgender youth). Coming out as queer means coming out as a liar and a traitor to everything you were raised to uphold. Within evangelical theology, one cannot embrace queer identity and be a Christian. One cannot belong in their community if one is not a Christian. To embrace your own queerness you must become an apostate in their eyes. To become an apostate is to be effectively excommunicated. With this experience in mind, it is not surprising that many queer people from Christian backgrounds have embraced the figure of Judas Iscariot.

An icon is an image of religious or political significance, and an iconoclast is someone who shatters an icon. For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on icons representing saints and martyrs. The image and the person represented are both referred to as icons. The person depicted in the icon is an aspirational figure that one is meant to be inspired to emulate, a shorthand representation of a person at their idealized best. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, nearly every culture has icons of their own. Familiar queer icons include the likes of Marsha P. Johnson, Leslie Feinberg, and Sappho of Lesbos.) However, being upheld as an icon is not the same as being known as a full person. The icon is an inherently incomplete representation and can never be a complete, nuanced person.

A common experience among queer people, particularly in religious communities, is feeling the need to hide a part of themselves. But no matter how it manifests, queerness is not easy to hide and it only gets more painful over time. Being in the closet is more than simply neglecting to mention a preference. To be in the closet, first a closet must be built. Walls need to be constructed to protect ourselves from people who love us, and the most readily available materials are lies, secrecy, and deceit. While our real selves hide behind the constructed identity, the person we present as is one that meets the hegemonic expectations of cisgender heteronormativity, or at the very least respectable abstinence. The icon is a pretty picture, and we are rewarded with acceptance, but the fear of being outed is a prison. The only way to escape is to shatter that icon. 

Very little is known about Judas Iscariot within biblical canon. He seems to have been largely erased from the narrative outside of his famous betrayal kiss. The authors of the gospels did not see his experiences as relevant to the story, despite the magnitude of his role. To them he was nothing outside of a traitor. In popular culture his name is synonymous with betrayal, and his portrayal in biblical art is unflattering at best. Judas’s erasure is similar to what many queer people who are disowned by their family experience. Their picture is taken down from the wall and Judas’s story is unwritten. The life and love they shared with their family, everything about them that was inoffensive before is irrelevant. Judas is erased and so are they. All that remains is his icon, an image of a cold, heartless man who hated God and betrayed an innocent man.

One can easily speculate about Judas. It seems unlikely that he spent years in Jesus’s ministry scowling in the shadows and plotting his demise. He could not have truly betrayed Jesus if Jesus did not trust and love him. Some apocryphal literature suggests that Jesus was closer to him than the other disciples and personally asked him to turn him in so that his mission could be completed. In this interpretation, Judas’s betrayal is an act of sacrifice and devotion, sealed with a kiss. And people think he deserved to suffer in hell forever for it. Modern retellings are often more sympathetic to Judas. Many are told by secular artists (Jesus Christ Superstar, The Last Temptation of the Christ, Judas (Boom! Comics)), but notably The Chosen, which is created by an evangelical studio, has taken humanizing approach to his character. Through this media he has been given a new image and become a completely different icon.

A queer relationship with spirituality and religion is often complex and deeply painful. Progressive theology can be healing and while I am not Christian myself I do enjoy engaging with it, but it doesn’t change the fact that this year at Pride, three different people told me that I deserve to burn in hell as they held a Bible in the air. I went to a Christian college and I had friends who were afraid of losing their scholarships if they were outed. I attended a protest against banning books at my local library and was called a groomer to my face. These are people that shop at the same grocery stores that I do and ask me what church I attend when I am in line at McDonald’s. One man openly sneered and turned away when I answered I was attending an Episcopalian church at the time. The people around me have made it abundantly clear that queer people are not welcome in their heaven. If Judas is in hell, he will find good company.

[dougielombax]

The Gospel of Shit That Didn’t Happen.

[counter-culture-christian]

I will no longer accept any denomination of which their doctrine/theology doesn't align with the scripture of the Holy Bible (apocryphal books excluded). They will not be considered part of Christianity nor Christianity itself. There is only the Christianity of the Holy Bible, anything other than that is of the synagogue of Satan. Many of which the members of said denominations identify as their denominations and not as Christian, this already setting themselves apart from Christianity. Forsaking the doctrines and Gospel of the Bible, for a different one, a different Jesus. They debate for the sake of their denominations and not the sake of Christ Jesus; defending it passionately and incorrectly. These types think that you are merely hating, merely wishing to destroy their denominations when in fact you genuinely intend to share the truth of God's Word. They zealously defend their perverted doctrines with scripture which is taken out of context. I will not entertain lies, delusions. I stand with and for the true Christ Jesus of which true Christianity came from.

[tuulikki]

One of the most astonishing things about the Quran is how it inherits beliefs that were bouncing around apocryphal traditions. Look at the Surah Maryam (the Surah about the Virgin Mary):

This is Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew content! Somehow this folktale about the Virgin Mary was in such significant circulation that it ended up all over the place! And it was so strongly present in popular culture that it actually ended up in the Quran.

And when I say it’s astonishing that this ended up in the Quran, what I really mean is that it seems odd that popular discourse on religion don’t talk about these obvious proofs of a dynamic, creative cultural exchange between Christian apocryphal traditions and the imaginative multicultural context that produced Islam. People are out here inventing weird shit about Jesus being based on Osiris or whatever 🙄 when the actual connections are so much cooler and frankly beautiful?

And those of you raised in or adjacent to Christianity may recognise The Cherry Tree Carol, albeit starring a more Levantine-probable tree. (@hymnsofheresy, @linnealurks, @beggars-opera, & @voluptuarian I’m tagging you because I think I’ve seen you all Cherry Tree Carol posting over the years? But I have no sense at all if the broad context is well-known.)

[cruelsister-moved2]

for all its criminally insane takes the great weaver of kashmir truly understood the fact that catholicism is only good when fuelled by a deep, unshakeable homosexuality and its cause can only be furthered still by the addition of copious, almost unsustainable amounts of autism