Acts, Spurious [APOCRYPHA]. This term has been applied to several ancient writings pretended to have been composed by, or to supply historical facts respecting our Blessed Savior and his disciples, or other individuals whose actions are recorded in the Holy Scriptures. Some of these writings are still extant; others are only known to have existed, by the accounts of them which are to be met with in ancient authors.
Such, for example, is the beautiful sentiment cited by St. Paul (Acts 20:35), It is more blessed to give than to receive, which some have supposed to be taken from some lost apocryphal book. But the probability is that St. Paul received the passage by tradition from the other apostles. Various other sayings, ascribed to Christ by early writers, which are alleged to be derived from apocryphal gospels, are in all probability nothing more than loose quotations from the Scriptures, which were very common among the apostolic fathers.
The most remarkable of the apocrypha, Acts ascribed to our Lord is the letter which he is said to have written to Agbarus, king of Edessa, in answer to a request from that monarch that he would come to heal a disease under which he labored. Some few historians have maintained the genuineness of these letters, but most writers, including the great majority of Roman Catholic divines, reject them as spurious; and there is good reason to believe that the whole chapter of Eusebius which contains these documents is itself an interpolation.
Acts of the Apostles, Spurious
Of these several are extant, others are lost, or only fragments of them are come down to us.
The following is a catalogue of the principal spurious Acts still extant:
The Creed of the Apostles
The Epistles of Barnabas, Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp
The Recognitions of Clement, or the Travels of Peter
The Shepherd of Hermas
The Acts of Pilate (spurious), or the Gospel of Nicodemus
The Acts of Paul, or the Martyrdom of Thecla
Abdias's History of the Twelve Apostles
The Constitutions of the Apostles
The Canons of the Apostles
The Liturgies of the Apostles
St. Paul's Epistle to the Laodiceans
St. Paul's Letters to Seneca
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John Kitto was an English biblical scholar of Cornish descent.Born in Plymouth, John Kitto was a sickly child, son of a Cornish stonemason. The drunkenness of his father and the poverty of his family meant that much of his childhood was spent in the workhouse. He had no more than three years of erratic and interrupted education. At the age of twelve John Kitto fell on his head from a rooftop, and became totally and permanently deaf. As a young man he suffered further tragedies, disappointments and much loneliness. His height was 4 ft 8 in, and his accident left him with an impaired sense of balance. He found consolation in browsing at bookstalls and reading any books that came his way.
From these hardships he was rescued by friends who became aware of his mental abilities and encouraged him to write topical articles for local newspapers, arranging eventually for him to work as an assistant in a local library. Here he continued to educate himself.
One of his benefactors was the Exeter dentist Anthony Norris Groves, who in 1824 offered him employment as a dental assistant. Living with the Groves family, Kitto was profoundly influenced by the practical Christian faith of his employer. In 1829 he accompanied Groves on his pioneering mission to Baghdad and served as tutor to Groves's two sons. In 1833 Kitto returned to England via Constantinople, accompanied by another member of the Groves mission, Francis William Newman. Shortly afterwards he married, and in due course had several children.
A London publisher asked Kitto to write up his travel journals for a series of articles in the Penny Magazine, a publication read at that time by a million people in Britain, reprinted in America and translated into French, German and Dutch. Other writing projects followed as readers enquired about his experiences in the East amidst people living in circumstances closely resembling those of Bible times.
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