Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Review of Burke and Landau, MNTA1

READING ACTS BLOG: Book Review: Tony Burke and Brent Landau, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1 (Phil Long).
Burke, Tony and Brent Landau eds. New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1: More Noncanonical Scriptures. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2016. 635 pp. Hb; $75. Link to Eerdmans

In his forward to this new collection of Christian apocrypha, J. K. Elliott asks “When is enough, enough?” Well he may ask, since he edited the seven hundred page The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1994). To quote Jordan Belfort from Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, “More is never enough.” This new collection edited by Burke and Landau is the first volume of a new series of non-canonical writings which promises to greatly expand the number of apocryphal texts available to students of the early church. Volume one collects thirty texts newly translated with introductions by experts in this literature. A second volume is planned and Burke hopes the project can be expanded to include a third and fourth volume.

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"More is never enough." I like that. I haven't mentioned this before, but I recently began a year of research leave and I am hard at work on volume two of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (MOTP2). We're planning on stopping with the second volume. Future generations can take it from there. But meanwhile, I look forward to many other volumes of MNTA.

For my four-part review of MNTA1, start here and, as usual, follow the links. Cross-file under New Testament Apocrypha Watch.

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