Getting a head start on tamping down the sceptical panic-mongering slated for next Easter, several months ahead of time:
christiancadre.blogspot.com/2013 … ckham.html
Might as well post it up here, too, so if people get worried about the marketing foofaraw next year (or whatever year they manage to finally get it printed – it’s been attempted since 2010), and do a search on the site, they’ll see it’s already been accounted for long ago.
In brief, Joseph and Aseneth was a popular Jewish (possibly Jewish-Christian) 1st century poetic romance, which remained popular with both Jews and Christians for several centuries afterward (even up to today among Judeo-Christian scholars), rather like the Song of Songs and for much the same reason. (Go go erotic ethical mysticism, yay! 
) It’s a completely harmless work, that scholars have known about since literally the 1st century; it is not a “Lost Gospel”, because (1) it is not a Gospel at all without deep levels of special “decoding” to eke out a supposed historical narrative code in it; and (2) it was never Lost. There are plenty of translations in many languages, including English already, even though not (strictly) of the Syriac copy of a Greek version included in a Syriac collection of various odds and ends the (quite orthodox but anonymous) collector thought nifty (mostly Zachariah Rhetor’s Ecclesiastical History from about a century prior).
(I say “strictly” because that Syriac copy has most likely already been factored into English critical editions, for whatever worth it has, which probably isn’t much as it’s a late copy by someone who was getting a friend to translate it from Greek into Syriac and his friend may not have done a bang-up job after all.)
There are more links and information in the Cadre article above, including to a nice archive where anyone can read Joseph and Aseneth in many different translations totally for free without having to pay for someone adding an anti-Christian conspiracy theory by creative interpretation of it.
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what a huge shock!
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