The third time I produced both a scholarly and a trade book on the same topic was a completely different situation from the other two I have described.   One thing that was similar was that in this instance yet again I had no idea, initially, of producing a trade version, but planned simply to publish a work of scholarship.  Only later did I realize that a trade version could be very useful.

This scholarly book – trade book combination involved an edition of the apocryphal Gospels.  To explain how the books came to be imagined I need to provide a bit of background.   Actually, a lot of background.  This will take a couple of posts.

It all started with a completely different project altogether, unrelated to the apocrypha.

In the mid 1990s I was teaching the very same graduate course that I’m teaching this semester, a PhD seminar on the group of authors known as the “Apostolic Fathers.”   Sometimes non-experts use this term in a broad sense to refer to the writings of early church fathers, but in fact the term refers to a very specific group of writers – ten of them by the most generous count  — who were all of the proto-orthodox persuasion (meaning that their works were later taken to be forerunners of the “orthodox” understanding of Christianity that emerged as victorious in the various struggles over the proper understanding of the Christian religion sometime in, say, the late third century) who were writing soon after (or in a couple of cases, in the latest stages of) the New Testament tradition – that is, around the beginning of the second century CE (a couple date to the end of the second century).  These include the following, some of which you may have heard of before:  1 and 2 Clement, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, the letter of Polycarp, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the letter of Barnabas, the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter to Diognetus, and the fragments of Papias (and possibly of Quadratus).   These authors all wrote in Greek, although in a couple of cases, for some small portions, we have only Latin translations.

When I was teaching this seminar, in the mid 1990s, we were using the Greek-English edition of these works produced in 1912 by a brilliant scholar of Christian antiquity named Kirsopp Lake, who taught at Harvard; his two-volume edition was in the Loeb Classical Library published by Harvard University Press.   The Loeb Classical Library comprises many, many ancient Greek and Latin texts in bilingual editions – that is, on the left side of the page can be found the Greek or Latin original language and on the right side an English translation.  Students of the classics make abundant use of these editions.

So in my seminar that year, my students were complaining…

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