ABSTRACT
Once ... a woman brought me in her hands a picture of two men in the guise of philosophers and let fall the statement that they were Paul and the Savior - I do not know where she had had this from or learned such a thing. With the view that she nor others might be given offence, I took it away from her and kept it in my house, as I thought it improper that such things ever be exhibited to others, lest we appear, like idol worshipers, to carry our God around in an image. It is said that Simon the sorcerer is worshipped by godless heretics painted in lifeless material. I have also seen myself the man who bears the name of madness [Mani] [painted] on an image and escorted by Manichees. To us such things are forbidden. For, in confessing the Lord God, Our Savior, we make ready to see Him as God, and we ourselves cleanse our hearts that we may see Him after we have been cleansed. 22
In recent developments in iconography and art history, an outcry has arisen against what Leo Steinberg calls 'textism, [which] as I define it is an interdictory stance, hostile to any interpretation that seems to come out of nowhere because it comes out of pictures, as if pictures alone did not constitute a respectable provenance.'28 Steinberg's comment is an immediate response to one of his hypotheses, a response that demanded that he have texts to back up what he interpreted a number of paintings to express. 29
The term apocrypha (secret, hidden) breathes on the texts of early Christian apocrypha36 an air of the clandestine or of the forbidden. In contemporary publication, certain mass-market books containing early Christian apocrypha sell well to a kind of theological pruriency; there are hints that the Christian apocrypha are texts that the church concealed or suppressed to guard the faithful against theological corruption. 37 This conception is often heightened by the publications' employment of old translations in what appears to be quasi-biblical language. In the wider theological world, however, it is more accurate to say that the churches have focused attention on the canonical writings and that this concentration has resulted in the church's ignoring the Christian apocrypha rather than on its suppressing them. In addition, the church's by-passing of these materials has been historically and theologically buttressed by judgments which declared the texts to be late or pseudonymous or heretical or marginal; such declarations were by far the more prevalent after the Reformation. The title of a book published in the last third of the nineteenth century sums up the problem: 'Canonical Histories and Apocryphal Legends Relating to the New Testament.'38
