Word: apocrypha
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...variety with which it’s applied, makes it clear that Roth is still capable of telling a story that engages the intellect. A particularly graphic sex scene between Axler, Pegeen and a woman the couple picks up takes on the metaphorical power of Greek drama or Freudian apocrypha; “There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though… Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what...
...hard to talk about Andrew Bird without mentioning “The Mysterious Production of Eggs,” his 2005 opus. It may be an equally difficult task to top that album, even for its brilliant creator.Despite the evolution Bird demonstrates in his latest, “Armchair Apocrypha,” the album is just not as captivating as its immediate predecessor. Listening to Bird’s subtle stylings and soaring, intellectual, rustic chamber pop, it seems impossible that he could have ever been a part of the ultra-swinging Squirrel Nut Zippers. He has transformed from...
...Other Apocrypha speculated marvelously on the "flight into Egypt." In one version, dragons along the Nile bend their knee to the baby, and palm trees bow to offer dates. Another features a robber who will turn out to be the "good thief" crucified with Jesus. The flight made Joseph an early favorite of the Egyptian Coptic Church, which mapped a detailed itinerary reaching as far north as Dimyana, near the Mediterranean, and south far past the pyramids down to Deir al-Muharraq. The Coptic History of Joseph the Carpenter provided one of the first descriptions of his death...
Doctrinally, however, the Apocrypha were a dead end in the Western church. Their creativity was a liability. The 4th century church father Jerome called them "deliria." Although Eastern Orthodoxy continues to accept Joseph's prior marriage and children, in the West, Jerome doubly secured Mary's virginity by proposing that Joseph too was a virgin and that Jesus' siblings were cousins, a view still held by most Roman Catholics. (Protestants eventually decided that Joseph and Mary did have additional children.) Church fathers debated earnestly over whether Mary and Joseph's union could actually be called a marriage (yes) and whether...
...dynamic clerics thought it sounded enough like Joseph, Mary and Jesus to propose the carpenter as the paternal model for what would eventually be called the nuclear family--and for much, much more. Unlike the writers of the Apocrypha, they did not add to the biblical story, but they concentrated fiercely on the implications of the Egyptian exile and Jesus' unknown life in Nazareth prior to his ministry. Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris in the late 1300s, thought a 90-year-old Joseph ridiculous in light of the rigors of travel in Egypt and recalibrated...