The Christian canon of scripture, known as the New Testament, excluded many of the church's traditional stories about its origins. Although not in the Bible, these popular stories have had a powerful influence on the church's traditions and theology, and a particularly marked effect on visual representations of Christian belief. This book provides a lucid introduction to the relationship between the apocryphal texts and the paintings, mosaics, and sculpture in which they are frequently paralleled, and which have been so significant in transmitting these non-Biblical stories to generations of churchgoers.

The Christian canon of scripture, known as the New Testament, excluded many of the church's traditional stories about its origins. Although not in the Bible, these popular stories have had a powerful influence on the church's traditions and theology, and a particularly marked effect on visual representations of Christian belief. This book provides a lucid introduction to the relationship between the apocryphal texts and the paintings, mosaics, and sculpture in which they are frequently paralleled, and which have been so significant in transmitting these non-Biblical stories to generations of churchgoers.

Since its first appearance in 1980, Documents for the Study of the Gospels has been a welcome and highly regarded sourcebook for the study of the historical environment of the Gospels, introducing religious, philosophical, and literary texts comparable to various aspects of the Gospels and illuminating their genre and the subgenres included in them. In this edition, David R. Cartlidge has added new discoveries (including the Gospel of Mary Magdala and the Gospel of Judas) and previously known texts from the Greco-Roman world that shed light on the Gospels (including Augustus's Res Gestae). He has updated introductions to texts throughout the book in light of contemporary scholarship and illustrated the texts with a rich repertoire of images from the ancient world and from the cultural reception of the Gospels through centuries of Christian interpretation. The result is an inviting and intriguing treasure that will enrich every student's appreciation of the New Testament Gospels and early Christianity.

This collection of freshly translated texts leads to a new appreciation of the richness and variety of the religious world within which Christianity emerged as a powerful new force. Bringing together for the first time under a single cover documents from Jewish, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Syrian, and little-known early Christian sources, the material is arranged to bring out as clearly as possible the ways in which early Christian worship of Jesus Christ as Savior and God both echoed contemporary worship of other savior gods and at the same time stood in sharp contrast to such worship. This revised and enlarged edition contains a new introduction on texts and traditions in late antiquity, a reworked translation of The Gospel of Peter, selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses, plus such documents as Papyrus Egerton 2, Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 840, and The Apocryphon of James. In addition, the table of contents has been expanded to allow easier access to the documents contained herein.