Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Literature in Christian Transmission

From about the second century onwards Christians wrote, read and copied a great deal that never went into the New Testament and was never quite meant to. Some of it fills gaps the gospels leave: the Protevangelium of James supplies Mary's parents, her childhood in the Temple and the birth in a cave, and almost everything later Christians believed about her early life comes from it rather than from scripture. Some of it carries the apostles into adventures - Andrew among cannibals, Philip at Hierapolis, Thomas in India - in narratives that read like Greek romances and often carry a strongly ascetic charge. And a third body is not Christian in origin at all: the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Life of Adam and Eve, the Testament of Abraham are Jewish works that survive because Christian scribes kept copying them, sometimes with Christian passages worked in, after Judaism itself had let them go. And it kept being written. The Dormition narratives that gave the church the Assumption, the tour-of-hell apocalypses that shaped medieval visions of the afterlife, Pseudo-Matthew and its Carolingian abridgement that carried Mary's childhood into the Latin West - these run to the ninth century and beyond. What holds all of it together is not a community or a doctrine. It is a fact about transmission: this is the literature the church read for centuries and never canonised.