The Acts of Andrew. A New Perspective on the Primitive Text

Abstract

The present paper summarises the main conclusions drawn by the author in his monography (2007) on the Acts of Andrew (AA), an Early Christian apocryphal text about which the scholarly literature did not reach so far a consensus regarding basic issues such as how the primitive text looked like and which textual witnesses are likely to preserve it in a better form. Not only author, place and time of composition of the Acts of Andrew are unknown, its literary genre, contents, length, thought and intention are still a matter of conjecture. The author contends that instead of focussing on the questionable reconstruction of Andrew’s apostolic career, one should rather pay head to the message and intention of the primitive text as presented by those textual witnesses that are likely to preserve in their most original state. The paper is organised into 1. AA’s textual situation and possible reconstruction of the primitive Acts; 2. AA’s fragment in ms Vaticanus graecus 808 (V); 3. Message and intention of AA as presented by V; 4: Exposition of AA’s main lines of thought; 5. AA’s plausible time of composition.