Abdias scriptor vitarum sanctorum apostolorum? The ‘Collection of Pseudo-Abdias’ reconsidered

Abstract

Ever since the mid-sixteenth century, scholarship has been familiar with the title ‘Collection of Pseudo-Abdias’ to indicate an early medieval collection of Latin apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. It was the Austrian philologist Wolfgang Lazius who invented the idea of a coherent and fixed collection, criticized by later scholars but never fully abandoned. In the present article, the validity of the concept of a uniform collection attributable to one author is put on trial by a detailed investigation of the manuscripts. It turns out that the Latin apocryphal Acts, referred to here with the title Virtutes apostolorum, is a much more fluid and variable transmission than Lazius’s approach suggests. A representative corpus of twenty-five manuscripts, dated between the late eighth and the thirteenth century, shows variety both in the choice of texts and in the order of the apostles. The medieval transmission was much more flexible than is made visible by Lazius’s 1552 edition, which was highly influential and has affected the understanding of the transmission until the present day. A return to the manuscripts allows for a necessary reconsideration and a renewed approach to the second life the apocryphal Acts had in the Latin Middle Ages.