Assessing the Apocrypha

The Acts of Philip is at once a major witness to the Philip tradition and a doctrinally unreceived, heterodox text. This file sets out how an Orthodox reader holds such a source: the encratite theology that the Church never received; the place of the Acts in the family of apocryphal Acts; what the text is genuinely good for; and the discipline — reported with its provenance and character named, neither suppressed nor endorsed — that the repository methodology requires.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Encratite Character

The doctrinal reason the Church never received the Acts of Philip is its thoroughgoing encratism — the teaching of enkrateia, a radical sexual continence, as essential to salvation. In the Acts, the apostle’s chief work is repeatedly to summon converts to abandon marriage and the marriage-bed for a virginal, ascetic life; the conversions that break marriages are presented as the height of the gospel, and the wrath they provoke is the cause of the martyrdom (Bovon and Matthews, The Acts of Philip, 2012, introduction). The encratite frame reaches even into the sacraments: the community of the Acts celebrates a Eucharist of vegetables and water in place of bread and wine, and practices a strict vegetarianism (Bovon and Matthews, 2012). This is not the asceticism the Church blesses — the continence freely embraced as a gift within an order that also honors marriage as holy — but the heterodox doctrine that marriage and the ordinary goods of the body are themselves obstacles to salvation, the very error the Great Church resisted in the encratite and gnostic currents of the early centuries (see St. Irenaeus of Lyons). On these grounds the Acts are unreceived: not Scripture, and not sound doctrine.

A Member of a Family

The Acts of Philip does not stand alone; it belongs to the apocryphal Acts of apostles, the body of second-to-fifth-century narratives — the Acts of John, of Peter, of Paul, of Andrew, of Thomas, and others — that circulated outside the canon (Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, 1993, introduction). These works share a genre and often a theology: romance-like travelogues of apostolic wonder and martyrdom, frequently encratite, sometimes gnostic-tinged, composed for edification and entertainment. Reading the Acts of Philip against this family clarifies what it is. It is a comparatively late member (fourth-century, where the Acts of Thomas and the others are second- or third-century), and one of the more fantastical (the talking leopard and kid, the dragon-cult of Ophiorhyme, the she-serpent cast into the abyss; see The Acts of Philip). The Church’s discernment toward the whole family — to sift the durable memory of an apostle’s mission and death from the heterodox theology and the romance that carried it — is the discernment to apply here.

What the Acts Are Good For

Read with this discernment, the Acts have real and definite uses. They are the fullest narrative source for the developed Philip-tradition: the Hierapolis mission, the companions Bartholomew and Mariamne, the struggle against the serpent-cult, and the manner of the martyrdom all reach the synaxaria and the iconography from or through the Acts (see The Companions and The Martyrdom). They are an invaluable window onto fourth-century Asian Christianity — its asceticism, its sacramental practice, its hymnody, and above all the prominence of women like Mariamne in encratite circles, a feature that has made the Acts a focus of modern scholarship (Bovon and Matthews, 2012). And they preserve, in the serpent-city of Ophiorhyme, an apocryphal memory genuinely keyed to the real religious landscape of Hierapolis — the Plutonion and its underworld cult (Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 2013; see The Mission). The text is, in short, indispensable to the study of the Philip tradition even where it is worthless as history or doctrine.

How the Church Received — and Did Not Receive — the Acts

The discipline the tradition exercised is itself instructive. The Church did not receive the Acts of Philip into the canon, and did not adopt its encratite theology, its sacramental practice, or its wonders as her teaching. But neither did she simply discard the text: elements of the narrative — an apostle who labored and died at Hierapolis, in the company of Bartholomew, by crucifixion — passed into the broader tradition, sifted from the heterodox frame that produced them. The synaxaria and the iconography carry the memory of the martyred apostle of Hierapolis while leaving behind the talking animals, the vegetable Eucharist, and the rejection of marriage that the Acts preach. An Orthodox reader holds the Acts in the same way: as the earliest extended narrative of Philip’s eastern mission, valuable to the historian and the careful reader who knows what it is, but reported and assessed — never treated as Scripture, never as history, never as sound doctrine (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

This is exactly the kind of source the repository methodology exists to handle. The Acts of Philip is named for what it is — fourth-century, encratite, apocryphal — its provenance and character are stated, its useful witness is acknowledged, and its theology and wonders are neither suppressed nor endorsed. The reader who wants the secure Philip turns to the Gospel of John (Sections 02–03) and to the early Hierapolis notice (Section 04); the reader who wants the developed tradition finds it here, with its grade plainly marked.

See Also

References

  • Bovon, François, and Christopher R. Matthews. The Acts of Philip: A New Translation. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012. (The encratite character; the vegetable-and-water Eucharist; the place of the Acts among the apocryphal Acts; Mariamne and women’s roles.)
  • Bovon, François, Bertrand Bouvier, and Frédéric Amsler, eds. Acta Philippi: Textus and Commentarius. Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 11–12. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.
  • Elliott, J. K., ed. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. (Introduction to the apocryphal Acts as a family.)
  • Huttner, Ulrich. Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley. Leiden: Brill, 2013. (The Hierapolis background of Ophiorhyme.)