AGRAPHON (Greek: "Unwritten Thing"; plural Agrapha). - An isolated saying (λόγιον) of Jesus (in his earthly life), transmitted outside the canonical Gospels.
Not called a. are the entire discourses put into the mouth of the Savior by apocrypha, as, for example, the Epistola Apostolorum in which the risen Jesus speaks at length. A. Resch in his 2nd ed. (1906) adopts a broader conception and, followed by U. Holzmeister and F. Cabrol, calls a. every word cited as divine "Scripture," of which there is no trace in the canonical books; whence J. Götzberger, Einleitung in das Alte Test., Freiburg im Br. 1928, p. 398, deals with the "a. of the Old Testament." This acceptation of the term is well-founded and correct; but the restricted sense is maintained here, which is the one most commonly admitted.
Besides the single a. in the books of the New Testament distinct from the Gospels (Act. 10, 35), others are found in variants of the manuscripts of the Gospels, in patristic literature (from the Didachè to Ephrem and Chrysostom), in liturgical documents, in fragments of works in the papyri recently discovered, in ancient apocryphal books (especially "gospels"), in rabbinic and Islamic writings. To ascertain the authenticity of an a. one must sift the authority (antiquity, historical value) and the number of witnesses that adduce it. Doctrinal concordance with evangelical teaching is a negative criterion, but already sufficient to discard many a. of heretical or fanciful origin. Internal criticism, however, is not enough to establish the authenticity of the most reliable a., also because their text is brief, torn from its primitive context, and therefore often difficult to understand.
Of the approximately 200 a. gathered from the 6 sources set out above, the great majority is without value, even setting aside those that are scarcely orthodox. Either they put into Jesus' mouth biblical texts of the Old or New Testament, retouched or adapted, often confused or combined with one another (many are evangelical passages, freely cited and amplified: in part centos formed in liturgical books, in part perhaps formulas of popular catechesis that later passed into collections of λόγια, such as that of Oxyrhynchus); or they are bizarre sayings foreign to Jesus' preaching, but without doctrinal tendentiousness, whether they rework an evangelical text, or (more belatedly) are arbitrarily coined (e.g., in Augustine, Contra adversarios legis et prophet., II, 4, 14; PL 42, 647). Other a. deliberately insinuate doctrinal or disciplinary elements not revealed, without however favoring heresies, or accentuating eschatological conceptions that had come into vogue in Christian circles, or encouraging ascetic tendencies (virginity, monasticism), or specifying ecclesiastical organization for the purpose of canonizing norms in force or repressing creeping abuses. Pious zeal "provoked frauds no less pious" (L. Vaganay), also because, having to defend orthodoxy or right order, it found itself constrained to use the weapons of the heretics, who resorted systematically to falsehood.
The Babylonian Talmúd reports two a. (Abodá Zará 16b, 17a; Sabbath 16). Muslim writings (outside the Koran) have over 100, generally due to vague evangelical reminiscences.
Even when internal criticism detects no suspect tendencies in tone or expression, very few are the a. whose text is attested by a most ancient tradition and by several concordant sources. The a. that seem to cite Ep. Burnahoe 7, 11; Justin, I Apol. 15, 8; Origen, In Matth. 13, 2 and In Ierem. 20, 3, are adaptations of biblical texts. The most frequently attested a. (about 70 times, especially in the Alexandrian writers) ὁ «γίνεσθε δὲ δόκιμοι τραπεζίται» ("be good bankers") almost always accompanied by I Thes. 5, 21; Justin, C. Triph. 47, 6, attributes to Jesus the saying: "In whatever state I shall find you, in that I shall judge you"; but of the other twenty citations of this phrase, none attributes it to Jesus, many to the "prophet" (that is, to Ez. 18, 24-30; 33, 12-16, 20). In codex D (cf. A. Merk, Novum Test. gr., 4th ed., Rome 1942, pp. 69, 212) the phrase of Jesus to the Sabbath-breaker (in place of Lk. 6, 5) must be a later invention against the Judaizers, modeled on Mk. 3, 27, and the addition to Mt. 20, 28 is a parallel to Lk. 14, 8-10.
The 12 a. had years of vogue, of perhaps gnostic origin (White connects them to the Gospel according to the Hebrews), discovered on two Oxyrhynchus papyri in 1887 and 1903 (ed.: B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, Λόγος Ἰωρῶν, Sayings of Our Lord, London 1897; New Sayings of Jesus and Fragments of a lost Gospel, ibid. 1904), which were added to an a. from a Fayum fragment edited by A. Harnack (1889). In 1907 at Akhmim was discovered cod. W (5th cent.) with the ending of Mk. called the "Freer logion" (A. Merk, op. cit., p. 185; cf. C. R. Gregory, Das Freer-Logion, Leipzig 1908), without any value whatsoever. The Egerton papyrus (v.) discovered in 1934 (ed. H. I. Bell and T. C. Skeat, London 1935) was wrongly hailed as "an unknown Gospel" or a 5th Gospel: the three fragments (earlier than 150) with 6 episodes that compose it are part of a conglomerate freely compiled from the 4 canonical Gospels, with the insertion of oral traditions similar to those of cod. D, for catechetical purposes in the anti-Jewish polemic (M.-J. Lagrange, Critique textuelle, II, Paris 1935, pp. 633-49).
A. Resch in the 1st ed. considered 74 a. authentic (out of 177 enumerated); in the 2nd, he reduced these to 36. Meanwhile, J. H. Ropes had lowered the number to 14. Besides 4 or 5 a. more seriously attested, but also doubtful, the only certain a. is the one cited by Paul in Acts 20, 35.
The a. have minimal importance for knowledge of Jesus' teaching, since they are, on the whole, "the apocryphon par excellence" (L. Vaganay). Nor are they of use for the history of the oral evangelical tradition; not only do they not contribute to the solution of the synoptic question (as A. Resch, R. Harris, and finally K. Lake, The New Sayings of Jesus and the Synoptic Problem, in The Hibbert Journal, 3 [1904-1905], pp. 332-41, claimed), but they do not demonstrate the existence of a primitive oral catechesis, legitimately placed at the basis of the canonical gospels, or of schemata forming in the first Christian preaching (as the Formgeschichtliche Methode supposes), since the a. that have come down to us do not go back to apostolic times. The enthusiasm aroused by A. Resch for the a. has by now vanished. Many a., however, are useful for textual criticism and for the history of exegesis, being for the most part variants of the sacred text (sometimes inserted in biblical codices) or interpretative glosses; generally, moreover, they reveal tendencies or doctrines of the circles in which they were produced.
Bibliography6 works
II) Trattazioni: J. C. Körner, De sermonibus Christi ἀγόφους, Lipsia 1776 (introduisse il termine «agraphon» nel senso oggi invalso); J. H. Ropes, Die Sprüche Jesu, die in den kanonischen Evangelien nicht überliefert sind (Texte u. Untersuch., XIV, 11), Lipsia 1896; id., in Dict. of the Bible, vol. extra (1904), coll. 343-52; F. Cabrol, s. v. in DACL. I (1907), coll. 979-84; B. Pisk, Paralignomena: Remains of Gospels and Sayings of Christ, Chicago 1908; A. Uckley, Worte Jesu, die nicht in der Bibel stehen (Bibl. Zeitund Streiffragen, VII, 11), Berlino 1911; E. Hennecke, in Realenz für prot. Theol. u. Kirche, XXIII (1913), pp. 16-25; id., Versprengte Herrmovete, in Neustadt, Apokryphen, 2ª ed., Tübingen 1924, pp. 32-39; O. Bardenhewer, Geschichte der altkirchlichen Literatur, I, 2ª ed., Friburgo in Br. 1913, pp. 519-43; U. Holmeister, Unbeachtete patriotische Agrapha, in Zeitschr. für kathol. Theol., 38 (1914), pp. 113-43; 39 (1915), pp. 98-118, 801-803; E. Jacquier, Les sentences du Seigneur extracomuniques (Les Agrapha), in Revue Bibl., 27 (1918), pp. 93-135 (l'autore ammette 1 a. autentici, 26 probabili, 15 dubbi); id., La Parole di Dieu, Parigi 1929, pp. 62-82; H. G. E. White, The Sayings of Jesus from Oxyrhynchos, Cambridge 1920; id., The Oxyrhynchos sayings of Jesus, in Journ. of Bibl. Lit., 63 (1946), pp. 175-83; L. G. de Fonseca, Agrapha, in Verbum Domini, 2 (1922), pp. 300-309; E. Besson, Les Logia agrapha, Bihorei-lez-Rouen 1923 (ammette 68 a. autentici); E. Buonaiuti, Detti extracanonici di Gesù, Roma 1925; L. Vaganay, Agrapha, in DBL, I (1928), coll. 159-98; id., L'évangile de Pierre, Parigi 1930, pp. 148, 150, 181, 184 sp.; D. Merežkovskii, Gesù sconosciuto, trad. ital., Firenze 1933, pp. 84-95 (da eccessiva importanza agli a.); J. J. Gomez, Logia o dichos del Señor extraevangelico, Murcia 1935; P. Chimielli, Vita di Gesù, Firenze 1930, pp. 565-81; P. Parker, The Second Saying from Oxyrhynchos, in Angl. Theol. Review, 22 (1940), pp. 195-98.