Niorstigningar Saga Read online

  of the surviving manuscripts. Modern English translations of the edited texts

  are also provided.

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  Abbreviations

  A Book of Miracles

  A Book of Miracles: MS no. 645 4to of the Arna-

  Magnæan Collection in the University Library

  of Copenhagen, ed. Anne Holtsmark

  AB

  Analecta Bollandiana

  AM

  Den Arnamagnæanske Samling/Stofnun Árna

  Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum

  BAV

  Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

  BdA

  Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal

  Biskupa sögur

  Biskupa sögur, vol. 2, ed. Ásdís Egilsdóttir

  BL

  British Library

  BM

  Bibliothèque municipale

  BnF

  Bibliothèque nationale de France

  BNM

  Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana

  Bodl

  Bodleian Library

  BStB

  Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

  CCC

  Corpus Christi College

  CCSA

  Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum

  CCSL

  Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

  CSAE

  Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England

  DBL

  Dansk biografisk Lexikon tillige omfattende Norge for

  tidsrummet 1537– 1814, ed. Carl F. Bricka

  DI

  Diplomatarium Islandicum. Íslenzkt fornbréfasafn,

  ed. Jón Sigurðsson et al.

  DKB

  Det Kongelige Bibliotek

  EIMF

  Early Icelandic Manuscripts in Facsimile

  GkS

  Gamle kongelige Samling

  xviii Abbreviations

  HAB

  Herzog August Bibliothek

  Heilagra manna

  Heilagra manna søgur. Fortællinger og legender om

  sögur

  hellige mænd og kvinder, ed. Carl R. Unger

  Helgensagaer

  AM 623 4to: Helgensagaer, ed. Finnur Jónsson

  Isländska

  Isländska handskriften No. 645 4to i den

  handskriften 645 Arnamagnæanska samlingen på universitetsbiblioteket i

  København i diplomatariskt aftryck, ed. Ludvig Larsson

  ÍH

  Íslenzk handrit. Icelandic Manuscripts, series in folio,

  quarto and octavo

  ÍÆ

  Íslenzkar æviskrár frá landnámstímum til ársloka 1940

  ( 1948– 1976), ed. Páll Eggert Ólason, Jón Guðnason,

  and Ólafur Þ. Kristjánsson

  JÁM

  Jarðabók Árna Magnússonar og Páls Vídalíns

  JS

  Jón Sigurðsson Collection

  Kb

  Kungliga biblioteket

  KLNM

  Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for nordisk middelalder

  MiAg

  Miscellanea Agostiniana, ed. Germain Morin

  MRTS

  Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies

  MS

  Maríu saga. Legender om Jomfru Maria og hendes

  jertegn, ed. Carl R. Unger

  NkS

  Ny kongelige Samling

  ONP

  Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog. A Dictionary

  of Old Norse Prose

  PG

  Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca,

  ed. Jacques-Paul Migne et al.

  PL

  Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina,

  ed. Jacques-Paul Migne et al.

  PLS

  Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina

  Supplementum, ed. Adalbert Hamman et al.

  Postola sögur

  Postola sögur. Legendariske fortællinger om

  apostlernes liv, deres kamp for kristendommens

  udbredelse samt deres martyrdød, ed. Carl R. Unger

  SÁM

  Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi

  SPK

  Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz

  StB

  Stiftsbibliothek

  SSFS

  Samlingar utgivna av Svenska Fornskriftsällskapet

  SUGNL

  Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur

  TC

  Trinity College

  TNL

  The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of

  the History of the North Germanic Languages,

  ed. Oskar Bandle et al.

  Abbreviations xix

  TONIS

  Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series

  Two Old English Two Old English Apocrypha and their Manuscript Source.

  Apocrypha

  The Gospel of Nicodemus and the Avenging of the Saviour,

  ed. James E. Cross

  UB

  Universitetsbiblioteket

  UL

  University Library

  ÖNB

  Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

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  Niðrstigningar saga

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  1 The Latin Evangelium Nicodemi

  in Medieval Europe

  In spite of being one of the most influential religious narratives on devotional

  and secular literature and on the visual arts of the Middle Ages, as well as pos-

  sibly representing the best known New Testament apocryphon along with the

  Gospel of the Pseudo-Matthew, much of the earliest textual history of the

  Evangelium Nicodemi has yet to be written.1

  The intrinsic composite nature of its most common and best known textual

  form throughout medieval and modern times seems to have resulted from the

  merging and conflation of two separate narratives, the Acta Pilati (“Acts of

  Pilate”) and the Descensus Christi ad inferos (“Christ’s Descent into Hell”).

  These texts seem to have originated and circulated independently for an unas-

  certained time before being combined together – sometime between Late

  Antiquity and the High Middle Ages – to form a single pseudoepigraphical gos-

  pel depicting the history of Christ’s Passion and his legendary Harrowing of

  Hell. In one of the concluding lines of the text, the composition of the original

  Hebrew gospel is allegedly ascribed to Nicodemus, the Pharisee and covert dis-

  ciple of Christ, who, according to John 19:32–42, assisted Joseph of Arimathea

  in the atonement and entombment of Christ’s corpse.2 On account of this attribu-

  tion, the text came to be known in the Low Middle Ages and early modern times

  as Evangelium Nicodemi (“The Gospel of Nicodemus”), although its first title in

  manuscripts ranging from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries is Gesta Pilati

  (“Deeds of Pilate”).3

  The text of the so-called Acta Pilati constitutes the first sixteen chapters

  of the Evangelium Nicodemi and relates to the events leading to the Cruci-

  fixion and to the wondrous outcomes, which took place in Galilee. The nar-

  rative starts with Christ’s Trial before Pilate, continues with his Crucifixion,

  Entomb ment, and Resurrection before moving on to his apparition to the

  4 Niðrstigningar saga

  disciples in Galilee, and ends with Christ’s miraculous liberation of Joseph

  of Arimathea from his imprisonment. The original text of the Acta Pilati was

  in all probability composed in Greek between the second and the fourth centu-

  ries and translated remarkably early into Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Coptic,

  Georgian, and Syriac.4 In his editi
on of the Greek text, which is regrettably

  transmitted exclusively in later manuscripts dating from the twelfth century,

  Constantin von Tischendorf identified two main recensions: a shorter ver-

  sion, designated as Greek A and transmitted in fifteen manuscripts, and a

  longer redaction, Greek B, which survives today in some thirty codices.5

  Tischendorf also demonstrated that Greek B was only subsequently ampli-

  fied with additional narrative material and that, therefore, Greek A must rep-

  resent the oldest redaction of the two.6

  A typical text of Greek A opens with a prologue dating Christ’s Passion to

  the years of the Emperor Tiberius (†AD 37), which is at times preceded by an

  additional prologue attributing the discovery of the Hebrew apocryphon and

  its subsequent translation into Greek to a certain Ananias, a praetorian guard

  in Jerusalem during the reign of the Emperor Theodosius II, nicknamed the

  Calligrapher († AD 450).7

  The first extant Latin translation of the Acta Pilati survives in the so-called

  Codex Vindobonensis (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. lat. 563, ff. 122–77), a voluminous

  manuscript composed of six codicological units, palimpsested with various

  patristic texts at the Benedictine Abbey of Neuwiller-lès-Saverne in Alsace dur-

  ing the first half of the eleventh century.8 The scriptio inferior of section four

  contains remarkably old texts, such as the oldest surviving fragments of the

  Latin Infancy Gospel of Thomas and portions of the Gospel of Matthew from

  the Vetus Latina. In the same section are also extant chapters I–VI, IX–X, and

  XIII–XVI of the Latin Acta Pilati, which make up two-fifths of the entire text.9

  Elias A. Lowe has dated the Latin uncial of section four to the fifth century and

  suggested as a possible place of composition an unidentified scriptorium in

  northern Italy.10 The text of the Acta Pilati in the Vienna palimpsest is clearly

  derived from Greek A, as it maintains the prologue of the first type, where the

  newly converted Praetorian Guard (here transliterated as Aeneas) is mentioned

  as the discoverer and first translator of the pseudo gospel, and the prologue of

  the second type, which dates Christ’s Passion to the nineteenth year of rule of

  the Emperor Tiberius.

  If some important omissions relate the first surviving witnesses of the

  Evangelium Nicodemi to the Vienna palimpsest, their greatest departure from

  it is represented by their inclusion of the Descensus Christi ad inferos. Its

  omission in the Vienna palimpsest remains yet unclarified. A Greek version

  of the Descensus may have already been in circulation as far back as the

  The Latin Evangelium Nicodemi in Medieval Europe 5

  second century, since numerous Greek homilists (most eminently Eusebius of

  Alexandria) were acquainted with the same theme of catabasis. Never theless,

  none of their homilies seem to be specifically indebted to the text of the

  Descensus.11 It is consequently possible that the Vienna palimpsest never in-

  cluded a Latin translation of the Descensus Christi ad inferos.

  From the fifth century onwards, the text of the Latin Acta Pilati must have

  undergone substantial revisions under the hand of learned scribes and copy-

  ists, who were interested in additional apocryphal details concerning the life

  of Christ. Its most noteworthy acquisition may well be represented by the

  Descensus Christi ad inferos, which comprises the last eleven chapters of

  Evangelium Nicodemi. Its text was in all probability appended to the Acta

  Pilati as a sequel narrative to the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, provid-

  ing it with the glorious and wondrous events of Christ’s immediate afterlife,

  namely, his Descent and Harrowing of Hell.

  The narrative of the Descensus starts with the encounter of the Jews and

  Joseph of Arimathea with Carinus and Leucius, the two sons of Simeon the

  Elder, who were long dead and in terrible pain, dwelling in the darkness of

  Hell before being liberated by Christ. They begin relating with fear their

  experience and testifying that on the very day Christ was crucified, a great

  light illuminated the whole realm of Hell, announcing Christ’s imminent

  and much awaited arrival. At the sight of this divine light, the patriarchs and

  prophets who had been long imprisoned in Hell – most notably, John the

  Baptist, David, Micah, Habakkuk, and Isaiah – rejoiced greatly and began

  recalling the words and psalms they pronounced when alive on earth, pre-

  dicting the coming of the Messiah. Inferus (a personification of Hell) dis-

  putes Christ’s divinity with Satan and warns his old companion of the

  immense and almighty powers of Christ. After this debate, in a hasty passage,

  Christ descends into Hell, defeats Satan, and frees the souls of the righteous

  from the bondage of sin. Starting with Adam, Christ delivers the patriarchs

  and prophets to the archangel Michael, who finally guides them to the eter-

  nal bliss of Paradise.

  All known medieval manuscripts transmitting the Latin Evangelium

  Nicodemi have been catalogued by Zbigniew Izydorczyk, who counts a total

  of 436 medieval codices, including the Vienna palimpsest.12 Besides Latin A

  and Latin B, Izydorczyk has identified two more recensions, labelled as Latin

  C and Latin T, based on common features of lexicon, style, and literary mo-

  tifs. It should be noted that these exclusively represent the main possible

  subgroups of Latin manuscripts, as there still exist a remarkable number of

  hybrid compilations into which two or more textual typologies of the pseudo

  gospel were conflated.13

  6 Niðrstigningar saga

  Latin A

  The most extensively diffused version of the Latin Evangelium Nicodemi was

  undoubtedly Latin A, which numbers today roughly 387 codices out of the

  436, making up to almost nine-tenths of the entire tradition. Latin A conse-

  quently represents the Majority Text within the surviving manuscripts, a no-

  menclature borrowed from Biblical philology.14 Previous research regarded the

  so-called Codex Einsidlensis (Einsiedeln, StB, 326, ff. 11r–29v), a manuscript

  produced in Fulda in the tenth century and edited by Hack C. Kim, hereafter

  referred to by the letter K, as the best representative witness of Latin A. To fa-

  cilitate the comparison of the texts, edited and unedited Latin and vernacular

  versions of the apocryphon will be assigned the chapters and paragraph num-

  bers employed by Kim in his edition of K.15

  One of the main characteristics of the Majority Text is the omission of the

  first prologue, mentioning Aeneas as the occasional, fortuitous discoverer of

  the pseudo gospel; another, on the other hand, is the inclusion of the prologue

  of the second type, dating Christ’s Passion to the years of the Emperor Tiberius,

  identical to that transmitted in the Vienna palimpsest:

  Factum est in anno XVIII imperatoris Tyberii Caesaris, imperatoris Romanorum,

  et Herodis filii Herodis imperatoris Galileae, anno XVIIII principatus eius, VIII

  Kal. Aprilis, quod est XXV dies mensis Martii, consolatu Rufini et Rubellionis,

  in anno quarto ducentesimae secundae Olympiadis, sub principatu sacerdotum

  Iudaeorum Ioseph et Caifae, et quanta
post crucem et passionem Domini historia-

  tus est Nichodemus, acta a principibus sacerdotum et reliquis Iudaeis, mandauit

  ipse Nichodemus litteris ebraicis.16

  (It happened in the eighteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius, ruler of the Romans,

  and of Herod, son of Herod, ruler of Galilee, in the nineteenth year of his rule,

  on the eighth calends of April, which is the twenty-fifth day of March, in the

  consulate of Rufinus and Rubellio, in the fourth year of the two hundred and

  second Olympiad, under the rule of the Jewish priests Joseph and Caiaphas, that

  Nicodemus recorded what happened after the Crucifixion and Passion of the Lord,

  and what was done by the high priests and the rest of the Jews. Nicodemus wrote

  it himself in the Hebrew script.)17

  Besides the prologue, the most noteworthy characteristic of the Majority

  Text is, as mentioned above, its inclusion of the Descensus Christi ad inferos,

  which is altogether missing from the Vienna palimpsest, as well as in the earli-

  est Greek manuscripts, and consequently in all Oriental recensions derived

  directly from the Greek text. All of these texts transmit the Acta Pilati.

  The Latin Evangelium Nicodemi in Medieval Europe 7

  Izydorczyk suggests the fifth century as a reasonable terminus post quem for

  the merging of the two texts. Before this time, he maintains, the Majority Text

  could not have acquired the two interpolated sections central in the develop-

  ment of its plot – the Latin Vita Adae et Evae and the pseudo-Augustinian

  Sermo CLX De Pascha II – since neither of them were yet available.18

  The Old Testament apocryphon Vita Adae et Evae, which relates Seth’s leg-

  endary journey to Paradise in search of the Oil of Mercy, is woven into the end

  of paragraph XIX.1, where Michael’s prophecy of the coming of the Messiah

  is reported almost verbatim.19

  Nullo modo poteris ex eo accipere nisi in nouissimis temporibus quando conple-

  ti fuerint V milia et D anni. Tunc ueniet super terram amantissimus Dei Filius

  Christus qui faciet resurgere corpus Adae et conresuscitare corpora mortuorum ac

  sanare omnem infirmitatem. Et ipse ueniens in Iordane baptizabitur. Cum autem

  egressus fuerit de aqua Iordanis, tunc de oleo misericordiae suae unguet omnes

  credentes in se, et erit oleum illud misericordiae in generationem qui nascendi

  sunt ex aqua et spiritu in uitam aeternam. Amen. Tunc descendens in terram aman-

  tissimus Dei Filius Christus.20

  (In no way can you receive [the Oil of Mercy] from Him until future times, when

  5,500 years shall be completed. Then shall come upon earth the beloved Christ,