{d) The History of Joseph the Carpenter. — One of the latest developments of the legends relating to the Infancy of Jesus is represented by the History of Joseph the Carpenter, which purports to be the story, told by Jesus to the disciples on the Mount of Olives, of the life and death of Joseph. It is a genuinely native product of Egyptian piety, not earlier tlian the 4th century. At several points it recalls the 'Testament' literature, and probably it belongs to that category rather than to the Gospel category. Sahidic, Bohairic, and Arabic versions (cf. Haase, pp. 61-66) are extant.
(e) Unidentified fragments. — The four Sahidic fragments upon the life of the Virgin Mary, pub- lished by Forbes Robinson {TS, iv. 2 [1S96], p. 2ff.), maintain her virginity after the Birth of Jesus, but abjure the ideas which afterwards developed into the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception ('Cursed is he who shall say that the Virgin was not born as we are') and the Assump- tion ('Cursed is he who shall say that the Virgin was taken up into the heavens in her body. But she died like all men, and was conceived by man's seed as we are'). The outline of the fragments generally resembles the story of the Protevangelium Jacobi and pseudo-Matthew, with some curious idiosyncrasies. Joachim her father was formerly called Cleopas (according to Codex B of pseudo- Matthew 32, Anna married Cleopas after the death of Joachim) ; he and Zechariah were brothers, and Anna was the sister of Elizabeth ; a white dove ( = Mary) flies to Anna in a vision; Mary in the temple ' never washed in a bath ' (a favourite ascetic feature of the Egyptian nuns), nor did she use perfumes ; she conceived ' by the hearing of her ears,' and she is the Mary who visits the tomb and receives the commission of Mt 28'" (cf. Albertz in SK [1913] 483 f., on this point); she works miracles of healing after the Resurrection, but modestly forbids the apostles to record them ; when she dies, her soul leaps into the arms of her Son. It is doubtful, however, if these fragments originally belonged to a Gospel at all. Probably they are part of the debris of the Mary litera- ture (cf. Haase, p. 77 f.) which developed out of the legends represented by Gospels like the Prot- evangelium Jacobi, where the main interest is really in Mary rather than in Jesus. It is through the channel of such religious fiction, from the Protevangelium Jacobi to the so-called Transitus Marise, formed in part by local legends and pagan views on the relation between sex and religion, that the mythology of the early Church flowed over into art and literature. Painters like Titian
and Perugino, poems like the Byzantine Christtis Patiens, and stories like the Golden Legend, were as indebted to this source as the calendar of the Roman Ciiurch's festivals.*
II. General Gospels, covering tee entire LIFE AND MINISTRY OF Jesus. — (a) The Jewish Christian Gospels (the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Nazarenes, the Gospel of the Twelve, the Gospel of the Ebionites).
Spectal Literature. — The quotations from and the Patristic allusions to the Gospel according to the Hebrews, together with the Gospel of the Ebionites, are collected, with critical studies.t by E. W. B. Nicholson (Gospel ace. to the Hebrews, London, 1879), Zahn (Gesch. des Kanons, ii. 642-723), R. Handmann {TUv. 3, ISSS), J. H. Ropes {TU xiv. 2, 1S96, p. 77 f.), A. Meyer (in Hennecke's Neutest. Apok.), and A. Schmidtke (' Neue Frag^. u. Untersuchungen zu den judenchristl. Evangelien,' TU xxxvii. 1, 1911) ; cf. also Waitz s important study, ' Das Evangelium der zwolf Apostel' in ^A'Tir (1912, p. 338 f., 1913, pp. 38 f., 117 f.). In the light of Schmidtke's and Waltz's re- searches, it is no longer possible to treat the Gospel according to the Hebrews without handling the Gospel of the Nazarenes and the Gospel of the Ebionites, since the quotations usually assigned to the first are disputed. In the following section, therefore, these tlxree Gospels will be discussed together.
The general problem may be stated thus. Four 'Jewish Christian' Gospels are mentioned and quoted in the literature of the early Church : the Gospel of the Hebrews (HG), the Gospel of the Nazarenes (NG), the Gospel of the Ebionites (EG), and the Gospel of the Twelve, i.e. of the Twelve Apostles (TG). J Were there really four Gospels of this kind? Or are some of these titles no more than ditt'erent descriptions of the same Gospel ? This is a problem which goes back to the 5th century. Jerome apparently held HG = TG, and this equation has been accepted by critics like Hilgenfeld, Cassels [Supernat. Bel., 1874-77, pt. ii. ch. iii), Lipsius, and Resch, with varying defini- tions of its age and content. One of the notable features in Schmidtke's recent monograph is that he not only challenges the ordinary equation of HG = NG in recent criticism, but reconstructs an HG which absorbs practically all the material assigned to TG, so that HG becomes equal to EG, as Nicholson had already argued. The usual identification § of EG = TG (Hilgenfeld, Zahn, Harnack, etc.) is combined by Waitz with a re- fusal to equate HG and NG.
Of these four, TG is mentioned much less often than HG ; our first knowledge of it is of a Gospel bearing tliis title {i.e. with the twelve apostles as its authors or authorities) which is mentioned by Origen next to the Gospel of the Egyptians (see above, p. 479). We hear of NG first in Jerome, and for EG we are mainly indebted to Epiphanius. But we do not know to what extent these titles were interchangeable, and whether diff"erent writers meant the same work when they mentioned HG or TG, for example. The most hopeful method of arriving at some solution of the problem is to ap- proach it along the line of the allusions to Jewish Christians in the early writers of the Church.