Page:The Apocryphal New Testament (1924).djvu/507
(Treptia) and Zuzanes (who goes with his mother to Mygdonia and is converted with her). xiii. Thomas before Misdaeus. xiv. The iron plates. Thomas is put into the bath-furnace for a night: it cannot be heated: he is brought to the temple of the sun, with its gold four-horsed chariot. xv. Virgins enter, singing and playing. Thomas speaks with the demon in the image. The image is melted. Thomas and the rest are imprisoned. (These chapters are an interpolation.) xvi-xxv, epitomize the old Acts. The great prayer of Thomas immediately precedes his death.
Book X of St. Philip, is quite short. i. He goes to Scythia twenty years after the Ascension. ii. Before a statue of Mars: a great dragon comes out from beneath the statue and kills the priest's son and two tribunes, and makes many ill with its venomous breath. Philip banishes the dragon and raises and heals the dead and sick. iii. He teaches them for a year: they break the image, and many thousands are baptized. After ordaining bishop and clergy he returns to Asia, to Hierapolis, where he extinguishes the malignant heresy of the Ebionites, who said that the Son of God was not born as a man, but took his humanity from the Virgin. iv. And he had two daughters who converted many. Seven days before his death he calls the clergy together, exhorts them, and dies, aged 87, and is buried at Hierapolis, and his two daughters after a few years are laid at his right and left. Where many miracles are done by his intercession.
This is wholly divergent from the Greek accounts. Yet some Western texts, notably those current in Ireland, are aware of the story of his crucifixion at Hierapolis, and blend it awkwardly with the Latin legend.
NOTICES OF MINOR ACTS
Besides the Acts we have dealt with, there are others which demand a brief notice.
The Acts of John by Prochorus the deacon is a Greek romance of considerable length: it has been edited in full by Zahn (Acta Joannis). By far the greater part of it is taken up with miracles wrought by John on Patmos. It is not supposed to be earlier than the fifth century at most. Some of the manuscripts have been found to contain large excerpts from the Leucian Acts: the great episodes of Lycomedes, the temple of Artemis, and Drusiana—in fact almost all that we have of the Acts, except the discourse on our Lord's life and passion, and the death of John—have been thus preserved. Prochorus's own stories are not very interesting.
Wright has edited a Syriac history of John, attributed to Eusebius, 'who found it in a Greek book'. ‘The scene is mainly at Ephesus. John takes service at a bath(as he does also in Prochorus), and there is a tale of the death and raising of a young man, Menelaus, which has attracted the attention of a recent anonymous writer on the resurrection—I do not quite know why. There is also a general baptism and