Abstract
In the introductory matter to the Protevangelium of James in his 1924 Apocryphal New Testament, M.R. James noted that “there is as yet no really critical edition of the text, in which all manuscripts and versions are made use of” (38). While the past century has seen a number of “provisional” editions—de Strycker, Hock, and Ehrman/Pleše, to name a few—James’s observation remains true; there is still no critical edition of the Prot. Jas. that takes full stock of the extant manuscript evidence. Two recent volumes from George T. Zervos aim to facilitate achievement of such an edition. I begin my review with Volume 2 because this is the heart of the project and, in my estimation, the more significant piece of it.
It is important to note from the outset that Volume 2 does not contain the comprehensive critical edition of the Prot. Jas. so longed for by scholars of early Christian literature. It isn’t a critical edition in any sense, and Zervos himself notes as much on the first page of the introduction. So what, then, is it? To begin answering that question, we turn to two Duke University dissertations. The first, spanning nearly 1,300 pages and multiple volumes, was defended in 1956 by Boyd Lee Daniels. In this project, Daniels identified 138 Greek manuscripts containing the Prot. Jas., and he was able to examine and collate 81 of them. The second is Zervos’s own dissertation, which he styled as a continuation of the work that Daniels had left unfinished. By the time of Zervos’s defense in 1986, he had succeeded in collating 45 of the remaining 57 manuscripts that were known to Daniels in 1956 but that were, for various reasons, unavailable to him for analysis. Together, then, these two dissertations present detailed manuscript data from 126 Greek manuscripts. No minor feat, to be sure.
This second volume of the two currently under review is essentially a combination and “cleaning up” of the information already present in these dissertations. Zervos has increased the data pool slightly by including nine additional manuscripts, which brings the total to 135. He also notes, however, that there is a total of 170 manuscripts known to contain the Prot. Jas., and while a few of these have unfortunately been destroyed or have gone missing, what this means is that the impressive swath of data presented in Volume 2 is also incomplete. That does not nullify the usefulness of this volume. These dissertations and the data they contain are valuable to scholars of the Prot. Jas., but neither of them is particularly easy to access outside of Duke’s campus. Physical copies of Daniels’s dissertation are not permitted to leave the archives, for example, and interlibrary loan requests are generally fulfilled by means of a limited stash of microfilm copies. Without question, all of this data together in a single binding will be a welcome addition to many shelves.
Volume 2 also contains a lightly edited transcription of the oldest extant copy of Prot. Jas. from the Bodmer V codex, and this is followed by Zervos’s English translation of it. In terms of organization, the transcription and translation are situated a bit strangely within the volume. Because this version of Prot. Jas. in Bodmer V functions as the base text for the collated manuscripts, it would have been helpful to distribute it in larger sections throughout the manuscript data. This would give the volume as a whole a better flow, and it would allow readers who are weighing variant readings to get a better sense of syntax and context without having to flip back and forth between the collated data and the larger Greek text. Volume 2 ends with citation and author indices keyed to both volumes, as well as a “select bibliography.” The bibliography contains many classic and standard works on the Prot. Jas., but it does not include anything that has been published specifically on this apocryphon since 2013. Volume 2 was published in 2022, which makes this gap fairly significant.
Volume 1 is a monograph in the more traditional sense. In it, Zervos argues that the Prot. Jas. “was not the unitary composition of a single author dating to the second half of the second century CE but rather was a composite work largely composed of a very early document . . . which was written as early as the first century CE” (19). Following von Harnack, Zervos titles this document the Genesis Marias. Readers familiar with Zervos’s previous scholarship on Prot. Jas. will find much familiar about the way that he approaches the argument in this book. While certainly creative, his position remains a largely speculative one that has yet to gain any serious traction in broader Prot. Jas. scholarship. There is not space in a short review like this to do justice to the full contours of his argument, but a few comments are in order.
To start, Zervos frames the matter in terms of two positions: either the Prot. Jas. is “a unitary composition of a single author dating to the second half of the second century CE” or it is “a composite work largely composed of a very early document.” The dichotomy presented here is false, and it sets up a convenient (and also easily dismantled) straw man. It is true that many scholars of Prot. Jas. have been inclined over the past few decades to approach this text in its current form as having some level of literary coherence. It is also true that the late second century seems (to many, but not all) to be a reasonable date for it. Yet neither of these claims presupposes that the text was the product of a single author. In fact, that is a position that most recent scholarship on Prot. Jas. would not uphold, based in large part on the manuscript evidence compiled by Daniels and Zervos. There is little doubt that the Prot. Jas. is a composite text, the work of many authorial and editorial hands.
More significantly, though, many of Zervos’s suggestions regarding where the hypothetical Genesis Marias was mangled by a later editor are based not on manuscript evidence, but on alleged literary seams and perceived inconsistencies. To note but one example: Zervos suggests that Mary’s visit to Elizabeth in Prot. Jas. 12 is a sloppy editorial insertion that disrupts the annunciation narrative in the Genesis Marias. In the Prot. Jas., Mary is given red and purple thread to spin, and she hears the voice of the angel when she leaves her spinning to go draw water. She returns to her seat and begins to spin the purple thread, at which point the angel delivers news of her impending pregnancy. When Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, however, Elizabeth is working with red thread as well, and she tosses it aside to greet Mary. Zervos suggests that this reference to Elizabeth’s red thread was, in the Genesis Marias, linked to Mary getting up to draw water before she hears the angelic voice. Why else would Elizabeth have red thread? This detail is actually not all that odd, and in fact it makes quite a bit of sense in the broader narrative of the Prot. Jas. Mary’s red and purple threads in this text correspond with the body of Jesus, which is why the annunciation occurs in the context of her spinning them. Elizabeth’s thread, likewise, corresponds with the body of John the Baptist (with whom she is pregnant when Mary visits her). The red foreshadows Jesus’s and John’s violent deaths, while the purple (often associated with royalty) could signify the former’s superiority to the latter.
These volumes are, in the end, worthwhile additions to the larger corpus of Prot. Jas. scholarship. Volume 2 in particular has the potential of furthering research into the manuscript traditions of this important apocryphon and, in the right hands, it may even help facilitate capture of that elusive chimera that is this text’s critical edition.