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Tag: Irish Apocrypha

  • God's Fine Disciple: An Irish View of Saint John the Apostle

    “Disciple of the Lord,
    ever-angelic John,
    a goodly, handsome-haired man,
    with bright blue eyes,
    red-cheeked and fair of face,
    with gleaming teeth and dark brows,
    red-lipped, white-throated,
    skilful and dextrous,
    with supple lithe fingers,
    fair-sided, light-footed,
    noble, slender and serene,
    distinguished,
    bright with holiness,
    friend of Christians,
    expeller of the dark devil,
    God’s fine disciple”

    ‘Episodes from the Life of John, the Beloved Disciple’ in Maire Herbert and M. McNamara, trans., Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts in Translation (Edinburgh, 1989), 92.

    On December 27 the Irish calendars record what the Martyrology of Gorman describes as ‘The chief feast of John the Apostle’. I have already written about the Irish tradition concerning the apostle John in a post which can be found here. In it you will find some other selections from the Irish apocryphal writings on the Apostle John, writings which draw on common sources but which reflect distinctive Irish embellishments of the text. They are preserved in a 15th-century manuscript, the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum.

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  • Saint John the Apostle and the Early Irish Church

    The Martyrology of Oengus devotes its entire entry for December 27 to
    two of the apostles – Saint John and Saint James. It reads:
     
    D. vi. cal. Ianuarii.
    27. The sound sleep of John in Ephesus
    splendid the bordgal (?)
    -with the ordination of James his brother, who is highest.
    The scholiast adds:
    27. a splendid bordgal, i.e. John’s valour (gal) was in Ephesus a splendid valour, i.e. a valour that went out over the border (bord) quasi dixisset Ephesus was full de operibus eius. his brother is highest, i.e. the greater is sollemnitas etc.
    I haven’t read any specialist commentary on this entry but wonder if the word bordgal was an archaism which the later scholiast did not understand himself and sought to explain.

    There is a body of material concerning the beloved disciple preserved in the Irish sources. In an earlier post on the Irish tradition of the Antichrist, I had mentioned an Apocalypse of Saint John as one of its sources. In the article by Father Martin McNamara that I looked at then, he mentions that the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum preserves a composite Irish text containing episodes from the Beatha Eoin Bruinne, the Life of John the Beloved Disciple (literally John of the Breast), plus fragments of what seems to be an Apocalypse of John. Saint John received this epithet because he reclined on the the breast of Christ at the Last Supper (Jn. 13:25). This composite text was translated from Latin into Irish by an Augustinian friar, Uighisdin Mac Raighin, who died in 1405. It has been translated into English in a volume of texts edited by Father McNamara and Dr. Maire Herbert and so below are some extracts from the Apocalypse and Death of John to mark the feast of the Beloved Disciple, still commemorated on December 27 in the West, although the East celebrates this feast on September 26:

    10. Thereafter John said to his disciples: “go and make a burial-place for me in front of the altar. Cast out the earth far away from it, and make it very deep”. This was done, and he himself went into it and lay readily down on the ground, and stretched up his two hands towards the Creator, saying:
    11. “I thank you, O Creator,
    Christ, the mighty Lord,
    great Heavenly Father,
    gentle soft-spokem brother,
    excellent noble teacher,
    who gently and lovingly
    calls me to your banquet,
    who well understands
    that I desire to go
    to be with you in your kingdom.
    You perceive, O divine kinsman,
    how my heart has loved
    your truth and your word,
    loved to contemplate
    and look on you totally,
    I give you thanks.”
    15. Now I entrust and hand over your people believing in Christ, who have obtained wisdom, true knowledge and sagacity, and have been blessed and baptized. Take me to you, as you promised me in the company of my brethren, Paul, Peter, Matthew, and Thomas, and the other apostles, so that I may partake of the great feast which you have created from the beginning, and which has no end. Open the divine gates and beautifully-draped windows, and the path which is undarkened by the devil, without opposition, without hostile onset. Send your splendid angelic messenger to cherish and protect [me], for you are the almighty Christ, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who lives and flourishes for all eternity”. And all the people answered: “Amen”.
    16. Then a great brightness came upon the people for the space of one hour of the day. Such was the extent of the illumination that it could not be looked on. Everyone threw themselves on the ground. Then there came to them a beautiful fragrance, and perfume of angelic incense.
    17. Thereafter they raised their heads, and looked at the burial-place. They found nothing there in place of the valiant priest, the eloquent judge, the devout helper, the wise preacher, the splendid confessor, the merciful dispenser of forgiveness, red-cheeked and blue-eyed, namely, John, the beloved apostle.. And thus John parted from the final things of this world.
    18. The suffering and afflicted of the nearby district gathered to that place, and they were cured of all their ills.
    19. As for the body of John, it is in a beautiful golden tomb, and at the end of each year, the best youth, who is without defilement or sin, is chosen, and he goes to cut John’s hair and pare his nails, and when he has completed that task, he partakes of the body and sacrifice of Christ, and he himself ascends to heaven on that day.
    Thus John’s body remains without putrefaction or corruption. Indeed, it is as if he were in a deep sleep, and it will be thus until Doomsday.
    M. Herbert and M. McNamara, eds. and trans., Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts in Translation (Edinburgh, 1989), 96-98.

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  • The Irish Tradition of the Antichrist

    I have been reading a most interesting paper by the Irish Bibilical scholar, Fr Martin McNamara, on the Irish Legend of Antichrist, a tradition which can be traced back over a millennium. In his paper the author examines an earlier work by another Irish scholar, Brian Ó Cuív, who published an edition of a Middle-Irish work called ‘The Conception and Characteristics of Antichrist’ in 1973 (Two Items from Apocryphal Tradition’, Celtica 10, 87-113). Ó Cuív felt this work dated to ca. 1200 and as a background to it, listed practically all the vernacular Irish texts with descriptions of, or reference to, Antichrist. There are six verse compositions and seven prose, and Ó Cuív noted that there was a certain unity of presentation in these texts. In the text which he edited, the Antichrist story contained the following elements:
    (1) Antichrist is the son of his own sister who conceives him when his father, a bishop in Jerusalem, lies with her on the Friday before Easter at the instigation of the devil.
    (2) in appearance Antichrist has a face with one eye
    (3) he has miraculous powers: he can make gold out of grass and anise (?) and wine out of water, he can cause disease and cure the sick, he can create a moon, sun and elements (?), he can do anything that Christ did on earth except restore people to life; he has a thousand fair women in his company.
    Fr McNamara then goes on to examine the verse and prose texts from Ó Cuív’s list. The earliest reference is in The Poems of Blathmac (A.D. 750), who ends his two poems in honour of the Virgin Mary with a mention of the slaying of the Antichrist by the Archangel Michael:
    ‘It is Michael, your son’s warrior, who will take a saintly sword to the body of impious Antichrist who shall be born of a great sin’ (quatrain 259).
    Fr McNamara comments: ‘Even from this brief poetic text we can gather that Blathmac knew of a developed Antichrist legend, a legend that he draws on, rather than give in any detail. Very significantly, Blathmac’s Antichrist tradition also contained the element of his birth ‘of a great sin’. This seems proper to the Irish form of the legend as we shall see in consideration of the next item and in some following’.
    The next item is the Hiberno-Latin Liber de Numeris (ca. A.D. 750) which is extant in a number of manuscripts and believed by scholar Robert McNally to originate from the Hiberno-Latin circles of Bishop Vergilius of Salzburg. The author arranges his subject according to numbers. The number four has him consider the four beasts of the Book of Daniel, in the examination of which he inserts the section on Antichrist. The belief that Antichrist is to come on earth as a mortal and from the tribe of Dan was widespread. The belief that his birth would be the result of an unnatural union was also known. The Liber de Numeris text, however, presents the union as incest:
    ‘Before the judgement he (i.e. Antichrist) will be set loose for a short while so that he may come and dishonestly and illicitly assume flesh to test the saints and deceive his own, and so that with his own and the impious he may perish all the worse later. From the tribe of Dan he, cruel flesh, takes flesh, and a father sinning in his own daughter makes a cursed child… so that his (i.e. Antichrist’s) father appears as his own grandfather and his mother as his sister’.
    Such a presentation of the birth of Antichrist, McNally noted, occurs nowhere else. We now know that it is a specific feature of the Irish Antichrist tradition, which was, it would seem, already known by Blathmac.
    The author then goes on to examine a number of other texts, most of which mention the Antichrist in passing, among them the Martyrology of Oengus which mentions the slaying of Antichrist in the entry for the Feast of St Michael (September 29) and the poems of Máel Ísu Ua Brolcháin and Bécán Bec mac Dé. There is a more substantial reference in a Poem on the End of the World, ascribed to St Colum Cille. It is found in a 16th-century manuscript amongst a collection of poems attributed to the saint. The poem on the end of the world deals with the Antichrist at its conclusion, even though he is not actually named. The text is incomplete and difficult to translate, but Fr McNamara reproduces Ó Cuív’s efforts:
    ‘A macu will come to the world with great strength, a powerful cunning man, a sister of his own will be his mother.
    A daughter will conceive him by her own father like a serpent; very beastlike (?) will be the son who will be born in the city.
    His teeth will form one surface – certain according to my tidings – a host behind ramparts (?); his slender feet will have six toes according to the mysteries.
    A sour resolute man, a scourge from hell, what I say is true, a black hard deceiver with a grey blush protruding from his brow.
    He makes (recte will make) gold from biestings of the plain what is more gloomy?’
    Fr McNamara now goes on to examine another strand of the Antichrist tradition represented in the Irish sources – its connection to apocryphal works attributed to St John, the Beloved Disciple. I was surprised to learn that texts bearing on the Antichrist and with the Antichrist legend were still being copied in Irish manuscripts as late as the 19th century. One of these is preserved in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy and was the work of a father and son team. The father, Micheál Mac Peadair Uí Longáin, began compiling his manuscript in the 18th century. It includes an item on the coming of the Last Judgement given as a response to a query of St John the Evangelist concerning the end of the world. This appears to end incomplete with the phrase ‘… at that time Enoch the son of Methusalem will go forth in his human body from the places of the great light of Paradise to encounter the Antichrist”. After this sentence Micheál Óg Ó Longáin, the scribe’s son, has appended a text on Antichrist, under the heading Sgel Ainntechrisd, “The Story of Antichrist”. This is followed by the colophon:
    ‘It is now 50 years since my father wrote the beginning of this story of Antichrist, and it is now in the year 1816 that I myself have finished it in Cork, having drawn it from an old vellum book that was written 900 years ago”.
    Professor Gerard Murphy was of the opinion that the “ancient vellum book” from which Micheál Óg copied was the Book of Lismore, even though his father’s text of the Last Judgement is very different to that found in the Book of Lismore.
    Sources and Development of the Irish Legend
    Having looked at the Irish texts originally identified by Ó Cuív, Fr McNamara attempts to examine whether they can be related to other known apocalyptic texts in order to identify possible origins. The Irish versions of the Legend which are based around texts relating to St John may originate in the apocryphal Apocalypse of John, although more research is needed to establish the relationships between Irish and eastern material.
    Apart from the notion that Antichrist is the result of incest, another feature of Irish texts is the treatment of the physical features of Antichrist, or the Antichrist physiognomy. Bernard McGinn, who published a study in 2000 called ‘Antichrist – Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil’, has traced the development of the tradition from the beginning. He sees the Antichrist physiognomy as the second most important theme of the period of development (AD 100-500), but notes that it is very much an eastern tradition, indeed it is curious that the Antichrist physiognomies had so little effect on Latin Antichrist beliefs. Almost every important apocalyptic revealer was eventually credited with providing a physical description of Antichrist. McGinn gives a chart detailing 14 examples and of these most are eastern with 2 Latin and 2 Irish (Leabhar Breac and Book of Lismore).
    The classic western text on Antichrist comes from around AD 950 in De ortu et tempore Antichristi of Adso, later abbot of Montier-en-Den. The Irish tradition does not belong to this. It is independent of it. As McGinn writes (97-8)
    ‘Antichrist physiognomies accompanied by unusual legendary accretions belonged to the Eastern imagination at this time (950-1000). Yet they became prevalent in one place in western Europe – Ireland, at least from the tenth century on. The native imagination, coupled with the Irish preceliction for apocalyptic literature suspect in other parts of Latin Christendom, seems to have much to do with this unexpected turn of events’.
    Conclusion
    Fr McNamara concludes by saying:
    In this essay I have given the relevant texts and outlined the state of research on the Irish Antichrist Legend as best I can. The time now seems ripe for a thorough examination of this material, through critical editions of all the Irish texts, accompanied with an attempt to situate these in the general history of the Antichrist Legend, at the same time tracing development within the Irish tradition itself over the eleven hundred years between the earliest (ca. AD 750) and latest texts.
    Source: Martin McNamara, ‘The Irish Legend of Antichrist’ in F. Garcia Martinez and G. P.Luttikuizen eds., Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome: Studies in Ancient Cultural Interaction in honour of A. Hilhorst (Brill, 2003), 201-219.

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