For many years the standard work in English in this field, indeed for practical purposes the only work, was The Apocryphal New Testament edited by M.R. James and first published in 1924. By the late fifties, however, for all its unquestioned merits, it could be said to suffer from two defects; it was then more than thirty years old, and consequently took no account of the discoveries made in that period; and it provided but little in the way of guidance to the literature devoted to these apocryphal writings. Both these deficiencies were made good in the third edition of its German counterpart, the Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, originally edited by Edgar Hennecke and directed in its latest form by Wihelm Schneemelcher. An English edition (vol. I, 1963; vol. II, 1965) met with a cordial reception, and went into a second impression some ten years later.