Citation: Falkenberg, René. 2022. Apocryphal Gospel Titles in Coptic. Religions 13: 796. htps:doi.org 10.3390rel13090796 Academic Editor: Garrick V. Allen Received: 2 August 2022 Accepted: 24 August 2022 Published: 29 August 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional afl iations. Copyright: 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Atribution (CC BY) license (htps: creativecommons.orglicensesby 4.0). religions Article Apocryphal Gospel Titles in Coptic René Falkenberg School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark; rfcas.au.dk Abstract: During the 2nd5th centuries, the usual format of the canonical gospel title is The Gospel According to [person]. While becoming wellestablished in this period, the title is reused and trans formed when naming the apocryphal gospels. In order to study the meaning of the emerging canon ical and apocryphal gospel titles, the claims of these titles will be analysed to determine who each title presents as the gospels source (often a divine fgure) and who is implied to be that gospels au thor (often a human person). By revisiting wellknown apocryphal gospels, and expanding on their number, new insights are achieved regarding the role of titles, authors, and apocryphal gospels. Re sults concern, for instance, the long recension of the Apocryphon of John, whose title comes to display a prominent gospel title; the Gospel of Judas, of which the author may be the infamous Judas himself; and the Gospel of Truth, which may not be an apocryphal gospel at all. Keywords: apocrypha; gospel title; authorship; Nag Hammadi; Coptic literature; Late Antiquity 1. Introduction Apocryphal gospels are defned as extracanonical texts that, by entailing the title of Gospel, somehow relate to the four canonical gospels according to Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. In Coptic, the usual suspects of apocryphal gospels are the Gospel of Truth (Gos. Truth), the Gospel According to Thomas (Gos. Thom.), the Gospel According to Philip (Gos. Phil.), the Gospel of the Egyptians (Gos. Egyp.), the Gospel According to Mary (Gos. Mary), and the Gospel of Judas (Gos. Judas). Yet, when scanning the scene of Coptic literature for texts explicitly entitled Gospel until c. 500 CE, we are able to retrieve more examples, such as the Gospel ascribed to Mani (Gos. Mani) and the Gospel of the Lots of Mary (Gos. Lots Mary), which scholars do not usually consider to be apocryphal gospels. Nevertheless, they are included here as they both bear ⲡⲉⲩⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲓⲟⲛ titles, and as the present study focuses on the meaning of this specifc title. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly in this context, we also include the long recension of the Apocryphon of John (Ap. John). 1 Earlier studies on canonical gospel titles are primarily related to the Greek and Coptic titles of the New Testament writings (e.g., Buzi 2004; Gathercole 2013; Allen 2022) as well as the semantics of the canonical gospel title in Greek (e.g., Larsen 2018), but hardly in relation to apocryphal gospels. The current contribution seeks to fulfl such a desideratum. While building on these earlier analyses of the canonical gospel title, the present study focuses, mainly, on the canonical and the apocryphal gospel titles in Coptic. We are not going to focus much on the meaning of the texts, nor on the dating of their original compositions; instead, the focus will be on their titles as they are transmited in the Coptic manuscripts. The aim is to reach a clearer picture of how each gospel presents its title (format and content) in connection with its source of authority and its means of textual production until the middle of the frst millennium. After having established the current method of analysis, the selected apocryphal gospels will be studied in two separate groups. The frst includes texts where titles at test a clear dependency on the canonical gospel title (Ap. John, Gos. Thom., Gos. Phil., Gos. Mary, and Gos. Judas); the second group consists of texts of a less clear afliation (Gos. Egyp. and Gos. Mani), sometimes atesting an occurrence of ⲡⲉⲩⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲓⲟⲛ so peculiar that we may question whether it is meant to be a gospel title at all (Gos. Lots Mary and Gos. Truth). Religions 2022, 13, 796. https:doi.org10.3390rel13090796 https:www.mdpi.comjournalreligions