(9 votes, average: 4.78 out of 5)
Loading...Yesterday I said a few things about the Gospel of Nicodemus; here is the opening section of it. As you’ll see the author does his best to convince his readers that this is an authentic account (even though it was written over three centuries after Nicodemus would have been dead). And then comes one of its intriguing passages: despite everyone’s best efforts, the Roman standards (bearing the emblem of the emperor himself – thought, of course, to be a god) bow down to Jesus during his trial. Terrific account!
This is my translation from the Greek version of the book, found in The Other Gospels.
The Gospel of Nicodemus
Public Records about our Lord Jesus Christ, Composed Under Pontius Pilate
I, Ananias, a member of the procurator’s bodyguard, well versed in the law, came to know our Lord Jesus Christ from the divine Scriptures, coming to him by faith and being deemed worthy of holy baptism. I searched out the public records composed at that time, in the days of our master Jesus Christ, which the Jews set down under Pontius Pilate. These public records I found written in Hebrew, and with God’s good pleasure I have translated them into Greek so that all who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ might know them. This I did in the seventeenth year of our master, the emperor Flavius Theodotius, the sixth year of Flavius Valentinianus, in the ninth indiction.[1]
All you who read these records and who copy them into other books, remember me and pray for me, that God may be merciful to me and have mercy on the sins I have committed against him.
Peace be to those who read and those who hear, along with their households. Amen.
These things took place in the fifteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar, emperor of the Romans, and in the nineteenth year of the rule of Herod, king of Galilee, eight days before the Kalends of April — that is, on the twenty-fifth of March, during the consulate of Rufus and Rubellionus, in the fourth year of the two hundred second Olympiad, when Joseph Caiaphas was the high priest of the Jews.
Nicodemus related all the things that happened after the crucifixion and suffering of our Lord and delivered them over to the high priests and the other Jews. The same Nicodemus compiled these writings in the Hebrew tongue.
The Jewish Leaders Accuse Jesus
1 The chief priests and scribes called a meeting of the council — Annas, Caiaphas, Semes, Dathaes, Gamalial, Judas, Levi, Nephthalim, Alexander, Jairus, and the other Jews — and they came to Pilate, accusing Jesus of many deeds: “We know that …
I guess that is the standard response to being in the presence of Jesus.
I don’t think anyone would have much trouble today discounting this gospel as fiction. The question I have now is one of continuity vs discontinuity: are we to believe that the canonical gospels are absolutely veridical, with no trace of fiction or invention in them, and that there never was any degree of pious fiction writing EXCEPT outside of the canonical gospels? It seems more likely that ALL of the gospels, in varying degrees, contain fiction. And if that’s the case, there are no entirely reliable or trustworthy gospels. ALL of them contain fantasy. And that’s not to say that everything is fantasy. But it does mean that none of them are entirely truthful. And we can’t escape the problem of deciding what’s true and what is made-up, even in the canonical gospels.
As you know for years on the blog, critical scholars have long said that material in the canonical Gospels is also non-historical.
I don’t understand why you say the author is trying to convince the reader of its authenticity even though it was written three centuries after Nicodemus was dead. He says he is merely translating what was written down in Hebrew as a public record by the Jews at the time of Jesus death during the reign of Tiberius Caesar and King Herod of Galilee. Of course their would be public records of events like this and recorded by the scribes as they occurred. This author is simply translating those records from Hebrew into Greek as he states.
The sincerity of his prayer to God tells us that this is not a man who would make up stories of this nature. Ken
It’s a common ploy among forgers to engage in this kind of translation practice; that way the reader can explain why no one has seen this Gospel before, even though it was written 300 years earlier. There are many, many such forgeries from antiquity. I don’t think one can gauge authenticity on the basis of what an author writes as his prayer, any more tahn you can automatically trust someone being tried for a crime who says “I swear by God I’m telling the truth!” They may be, or they may not be. But that’s the *question*.
Don’t know if you caught the Nova episodes about the development of the alphabet, writing and printing, but it suggested that as the Roman empire was fragmenting papyrus was harder to get, and parchment was harder to produce and more expensive. Also, parchment apparently is a “slower” writing medium than papyrus. So, around the time the church was taking over the empire, there was a reduction in writing and copying. I can see this being a reason some of the early writings were lost: they had to limit what they reproduced, so the more orthodox and revered texts got priority. Still, it’s a real tribute to ancient ingenuity that papyrus and parchment documents have survived for many centuries! Amazing that we have legible scraps going back 1900 years. (Also, the printing press may have taken hold because Gutenberg was smart enough to print the Bible, a guaranteed best-seller!)
The story of the standards worship of Jesus is clearly based on two early dreams Joseph had, where his brothers were to bow down and pay homage to Joseph as king.
«We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.»
«I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me»
Joseph’s brothers hated him after these dreams.
The Gospel of Nicodemus: «The elders of the Jews took twelve powerful and strong men, six to hold each standard, and they stationed them before the governor’s judgment seat»(…)«again the standards bowed down and worshiped Jesus»
This gospel story appealed to me as a Roman military history buff. Pilate commanded auxiliaries, not legionaries so no eagle standards. His cohort would normally have had 6 centuries (although auxiliary cohorts were occasionally beefed up) and each one would have had its own standard (signum), which could have had Roman religious mystical symbols, offensive to Jews. The cohort probably had a special standard but we are not sure what that would have been and military units of all descriptions often carried images of the emperor (imago) – probably only one per unit. Standards were carried by Roman soldiers, usually junior officers, not by temple guards or Jews, who wouldn’t have wanted to touch them anyway. In the later Empire, these standards were replaced by ‘dragons’ (draco) – a sort of wind sock in the form of a dragon, which could emit eerie noises in windy conditions, and flags (vexillum) often with Christian iconography (from Constantine’s time onwards). Eagles and other pagan standards were abandoned. A later writer would probably have known about earlier Roman insignia etc, just as we know what American and British troops would have looked like in the 18th century.