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Renaissance Attitudes to New Testament Apocryphal Writings: Jacques Lèfevre d'Étaples and His Epigones

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Irena Backus*
Affiliation:
Institutd'Histoire de la Réformation, Université de Genéve

Abstract

The standard medieval view of New Testament Apocrypha was that they were Christian writings (related to matters treated in the canonical books of the Bible), which had to be treated with caution and often dismissed as heretical. A list of the Apocrypha figured in the [Pseudo-]Gelasian Decree. In the Renaissance, for authors such as Lèfevre d'Etaples, Nicholas Gerbel and many others, the term assumed a multiplicity of meanings, both positive and negative. This article shows that although no attempts were made in the early 16th century to bring N. T. Apocrypha together into a corpus, the editors' ambivalent and complex attitude to texts such as the Laodiceans or Paul's Correspondence with Seneca led to their definitive marginalisation and encouraged their subsequent publication (by Fabricius and others) as corpora of dubious writings.

Type
Studies
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1998

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