Fan Fiction and Early Christian Writings: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and Canon

"What can contemporary media fandoms, like Anne Rice, Star Wars, Batman, or Sherlock Holmes, tell us about ancient Christianity? Proposing an ingenious analysis, Tom de Bruin argues that disparaging terms applied to ancient Christian derivative texts, such as fakes, forgeries or corruptions, are not sufficient to capture the production, consumption, and value of these writings. He instead suggests seeing them as analogous to contemporary fan fiction, and explores the analogies between current fan fiction and Christian pseudepigrapha, apocrypha and other secondary texts-and their limits"--