The Reception of Apocryphal Traditions: Bridging Islam and Christianity in the First Millennium

FAIN: FA-55681-11

Cornelia Bernadette Horn
St. Louis University (St. Louis, MO 63103-2097)

This scholarly monograph-in-progress examines the reception history of apocryphal texts in the first millennium C.E. It focuses on the interaction between Christian apocrypha and early Islamic texts. The transmission history of apocrypha includes their reception into Islam and their 'Islamicization,' i.e., the transformation of extra-Biblical stories into an Islamic framework. Thus, one side of this exchange consists of the study of how apocryphal texts were received into the Qur'an and other early Islamic literature. A complementary side investigates how ideas, notions, and images taken from early Islamic writings in turn shaped the development of Christian apocryphal literature, both of newly emerging texts and of texts that were rewritten under the influence of and in response to Islam. This work therefore also involves tracing the influence of the Islamic understanding of apocryphal texts on their Christian reception from the Islamic period onward.