The presence of Christian apocryphal material attests to the vast diversity in early Christianity. Eric Vanden Eykel presents the inaugural volume in the series Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark, entitled, “But Their Faces Were AllLooking Up”: Author and Reader in the Protevangelium of James. As one reads this volume, they will be presented with the normal sea of early Christian literature but geared with different literary and critical tools—so much so that they will see the same literary world through a much-different set of lenses.
The central aim of Vanden Eykel’s research is twofold. First, he sets out to determine how the Protevangelium of James [PJ] “might have been understood by a hypothetical second century reader.” And, second, he sets out “to explore how the reader’s knowledge of other texts may have influenced his or her interpretation of...
