ÁGRAPHON (Greek: “unwritten thing”; plural agrapha). — An isolated saying (λόγιον) of Jesus (during his earthly life), transmitted outside the canonical Gospels.
Whole speeches placed in the mouth of the Savior by apocryphal works are not called a.; for example, the Epistola Apostolorum, in which the risen Jesus speaks at length. In its 2nd ed. (1906), A. Resch adopted a broader conception and, followed by U. Holzmeister and F. Cabrol, called every word cited as divine “Scripture,” of which there is no trace in the canonical books, an a.; hence J. Götzberger, Einleitung in das Alte Test., Freiburg im Br. 1928, p. 398, deals with the “a. of the Old Testament.” This sense of the term is well founded and correct; here, however, the narrower sense is retained, which is the one most commonly accepted.
Besides the one a. in the books of the New Testament other than the Gospels (Act. 10:35), they are found in variants of Gospel manuscripts, in patristic literature (from the Didachè to Ephrem and Chrysostom), in liturgical documents, in fragments of works recently discovered in papyri, in ancient apocryphal books (especially “gospels”), and in rabbinic and Islamic writings. To establish the authenticity of an a., one must assess the authority (antiquity, historical value) and the number of witnesses that cite II. Doctrinal agreement with Gospel teaching is a negative criterion, but one already sufficient to exclude many a. of heretical or fanciful origin. Internal criticism is not, however, enough to establish the authenticity of the more credible a., also because their text is brief and detached from its original context, and therefore often difficult to understand.
Of the approximately 200 a. collected from the six sources mentioned above, the great majority are without value, even apart from those that are unorthodox. Either biblical texts of the Old or New Testament are placed in Jesus’ mouth, revised or adapted, often confused or combined with one another (many are Gospel passages, freely quoted and expanded: some are centos formed in liturgical books, while others may perhaps be formal expressions of popular catechesis that later passed into collections of λόγιον, such as that of Oxyrhynchus); or they are bizarre sayings foreign to Jesus’ preaching, but without doctrinal tendentiousness, whether they rework a Gospel text or whether (at a later date) they were 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 that have not been revealed, without, however, promoting heresies, either by accentuating eschatological conceptions current in Christian circles, or by encouraging ascetic tendencies (virginity, monasticism), or by specifying ecclesiastical organization in order to canonize norms in force or suppress abuses that were spreading. Pious zeal “provoked no less pious frauds” (L. Vaganay), also because, in defending orthodoxy or proper organization, it found itself compelled to use the weapons of the heretics, who systematically resorted to falsification.
The Babylonian Talmud reports two a. (Abodá Zará 16b, 17a; Sabbath 16). Muslim writings (apart from the Qur’an) contain more than 100, generally deriving from vague Gospel reminiscences.
Even when internal criticism detects no suspicious tendencies in tone or expression, very few a. have a text attested by an extremely ancient tradition and by several concordant sources. The a. that seem to be cited by 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. (approximately 70 times, especially among Alexandrian writers), ὁ “γίνεσθε δὲ δόκιμοι τραπεζίται” (“be good bankers”), is almost always accompanied by I Thes. 5:21; Justin, C. Triph. 47:6, attributes to Jesus the saying: “In the state in which I find you, I will judge you”; but of the other twenty citations of this phrase, none attributes it to Jesus, and many attribute it to the “prophet” (that is, to Ez. 18:24-30; 33:12-16, 20). In manuscript D (cf. A. Merk, Novum Test. gr., 4th ed., Rome 1942, pp. 69, 212), Jesus’ saying to the Sabbath-breaker (in place of Lk. 6:5) must be a later invention directed against the Judaizers, modeled on Mk. 3:27, and the addition to Mt. 20:28 is a parallel to Lk. 14:8-10.
The twelve a., perhaps of Gnostic origin (White connects them with the Gospel according to the Hebrews), enjoyed a period of popularity. They were discovered in 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, there 1904), and were added to an a. from a Fayum fragment edited by A. Harnack (1889). In 1907, codex W (5th cent.) was discovered at Akhmim, containing the ending of Mk., called the “Freer Logion” (A. Merk, op. cit., p. 185; cf. C. R. Gregory, Das Freer-Logion, Leipzig 1908), entirely without value. papyrus (v.) discovered in 1934 (ed. H. I. Bell and T. C. Skeat, London 1935) was wrongly hailed as “an unknown Gospel,” or a fifth Gospel; the three fragments (dating from before 150), comprising six episodes, are part of a conglomerate freely compiled from the four canonical Gospels, with the insertion of oral traditions similar to those of codex D, for catechetical purposes in the anti-Jewish polemic (M.-J. Lagrange, Critique textuelle, II, Paris 1935, pp. 633-49).
In the 1st ed., A. Resch 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. Apart from four or five more seriously attested a., though these too are doubtful, the only certain a. is the one cited by Paul in Acts 20:35.
The a. are of minimal importance for knowledge of Jesus’ teaching, since, taken as a whole, they are “the apocryphon par excellence” (L. Vaganay). Nor are they useful for the history of the oral Gospel tradition; not only do they contribute nothing to the solution of the Synoptic problem (as A. Resch, R. Harris, and finally K. Lake claimed, The New Sayings of Jesus and the Synoptic Problem, in The Hibbert Journal, 3 [1904-1905], pp. 332-41), but they do not demonstrate the existence of a primitive oral catechesis legitimately placed at the basis of the canonical Gospels, or of patterns forming in the earliest 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 now vanished. Many a., however, are useful for textual criticism and the history of exegesis, since they are for the most part variants of the sacred text (sometimes inserted into biblical manuscripts) or interpretive glosses; generally, moreover, they reveal the tendencies or doctrines of the circles in which they arose.
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. Zeit- und 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.