oa What Is a Christian Apocryphal Text and How Does It Work? Some Observations on Apocryphal Hermeneutics

The new trend in the study of Christian apocryphal texts is to include among them not only the traditional ‘New Testament apocrypha’, but also other texts written later than the first centuries of our era, or clearly reworked in the Middle Ages. Behind this wider choice stands the opinion of Éric Junod and Jean-Claude Picard that there is no temporal limit for the rise of apocryphal texts. Using the evidence provided by some modern ‘strange new Gospels’, I argue that the process of producing apocryphal narratives is the outcome of a creative exegesis that is still at work in many cultural contexts.