The Apocryphal New Testament – Montague Rhodes James

M.R. James has been credited (perhaps unfairly) with creating the ghost story genre. But what most people don’t know is that he was also a respected Medieval scholar. This collection is a series of stories not found in the Bible, but found in other works he translated. Among these stories are Adam, about how God showed Adam and Eve how to live outside of Eden, and Solomon and the Demons, the story of how Solomon tamed the demons told from the point of view of the King.

Montague Rhodes James (1862 – 1936), who published under the name M. R. James, was an English author, medievalist scholar and provost of King’s College, Cambridge (1905-18) and of Eton College (1918-36). Though James’s work as a medievalist is still highly regarded, he is best remembered for his ghost stories, which are regarded as among the best in the genre. James redefined the ghost story for the new century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors and using more realistic contemporary settings. However, James’s protagonists and plots tend to reflect his own antiquarian interests. Accordingly, he is known as the originator of the antiquarian ghost story.