The Apostles Peter, Paul, John, Thomas and Philip with their companions in late antiquity. Edited by Tobias Nicklas, Janet E. Spittler, and Jan N. Bremmer,. (Studies in Early Christian Apocrypha, 17.) Pp. xiv + 340 incl. 7 colour and black-and-white ills and 2 tables. Leuven: Peeters, 2021. €74 (paper). 978 90 429 4553 1

The Apostles Peter, Paul, John, Thomas and Philip with their companions in late antiquity. Edited by Tobias Nicklas, Janet E. Spittler and Jan N. Bremmer. (Studies in Early Christian Apocrypha, 17.) Pp. xiv + 340 incl. 7 colour and black-and-white ills and 2 tables. Leuven: Peeters, 2021. €74 (paper). 978 90 429 4553 1

The mysterious biographies of the Apostles that characterise the corpus of apocryphal Acts continue to interest scholars who stagger around the innate historical challenges and fanciful texts that comprise it. This book claims to be the first modern collection of studies on the reception of the Apostles and their companions developed from the early and medieval eras, centring on manuscripts but intersecting with the canonical Acts, social environments and liturgy. The names of the editors are immediately recognisable by those familiar with scholarship around early Christian apocryphal texts, offering the promise of quality research and reflection for anyone specifically interested in source and literary criticism of these early legends.

The lead chapter by Tobias Nicklas considers the nature of story, including its attempt to give reason to Christian identity. The active writing and editing of various Acts of the Apostles up through the fourth century sought ‘to transport the characteristic attitudes [of triumph] back to the very beginnings of the Christian movement’ (p. 2). Four theses for Nicklas guide the enterprise marking the authors in this volume: contemporary experiences were projected into foundational stories, contemporary identities were associated with ancient place, contemporary space became associated with...