Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] An Amazing Fragment of a Lost Gospel anniversary post number 12 by Bart Ehrman Did Jesus tell Peter that his sheep, his followers did not need to worry about being torn to shreds by the wolves, the persecutors since. Well, when they were, they'd be dead anyway.
[00:00:19] Celebrating our 14th anniversary of the blog, which started in April of 2012, I have been posting 14 favorite posts from previous Aprils.
[00:00:29] This one is from April of 2024 and it's on one of my all time favorite gospel fragments that may be from the otherwise partially known Gospel of Peter.
[00:00:39] It records an intriguing conversation between Jesus and Peter. If nothing else, one of the most captivating tiny fragments of a lost gospel discovered in modern times came from the trash heap excavated from the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus and in Egypt, one of many thousands of manuscript fragments found there, some of them Christian, but most of them non Christian, most of which were non literary texts, I.e. personal letters, landees, divorce certificates, bills of sale, and so on. But did this fragment come from the Gospel of Peter?
[00:01:14] The Gospel of Peter that we have today, which was discovered in 1886, is unfortunately only a portion of the Passion narrative.
[00:01:24] Was the original gospel much longer? Was it a complete gospel? Or was it a Passion Gospel like the later Gospel of Nicodemus, that gave only accounts of the trial, death and resurrection of Jesus?
[00:01:36] That's been long debated.
[00:01:39] The weird saying of Jesus that I'm talking about in this post is not found in that fragment of the Gospel of Peter, but it may help decide whether Peter was a complete gospel or not.
[00:01:50] In recent years, a German scholar named Dieter Lehrmann has argued that other portions of the Gospel of Peter have shown up in very small fragments of papyrus discovered in Egypt.
[00:02:01] It's a controversial claim.
[00:02:04] The most interesting possibility for me is a papyrus fragment that Lerman published called Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 4009.
[00:02:13] It's the 4009th papyrus published from the huge find of papyri in the trash heap of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
[00:02:23] To understand why this might be a fragment of the Gospel of Peter requires a bit of tricky background. I hope it's not too hard to follow, but look, it ain't quantum physics, so stay with me here.
[00:02:34] The papyrus is tiny.
[00:02:37] The entire thing is very, very small. It's something like 4 inches by 1 inch, written on both sides. It probably was written in the second century.
[00:02:47] It contains a conversation with someone unnamed who is narrating the conversation in the first person.
[00:02:53] The conversation is not like anything else found in the New Testament.
[00:02:57] But it is very much like a very, very bizarre and intriguing conversation that Jesus is recorded as having precisely with Peter in a later second century book called Second Clement, which is one of the Apostolic Fathers.
[00:03:11] And so for the background here is the conversation as recorded in 2 Clement.
[00:03:17] Now, obviously this conversation is not in the New Testament and can be found nowhere else among the words of Jesus in any other gospel.
[00:03:25] 2 Clement 5, 2, 4.
[00:03:29] For the Lord said, you will be like sheep in the midst of wolves.
[00:03:33] But Peter replied to him, what if the wolves rip apart the sheep? And Jesus said to Peter, after they are dead, the sheep should fear the wolves no longer. So you too do not fear those who kill you and then can do nothing more to you but fear the one who after you die, has the power to cast your body and soul into the hell of fire.
[00:03:56] What a terrific back and forth. It's long been intriguing to scholars.
[00:04:01] And then Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 4009 turned up to make things still more interesting.
[00:04:10] If you look at an image of it on the website, you'll see that it's in Greek.
[00:04:15] Now I can tell you it's ancient and again probably second century.
[00:04:19] And most of it is missing.
[00:04:22] When Lermann reconstructed the text from the papyrus by filling in the lacunae, the missing bits at the beginning and the end of each line, he came up with the following and the reconstruction appears to be accurate.
[00:04:35] Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 4009.
[00:04:38] The harvest.
[00:04:41] But be as innocent as doves and as wise as serpents. Be like sheep among wolves.
[00:04:48] I said to him, what if we are torn apart?
[00:04:52] He replied to me and said to me, when the wolves tear apart the sheep, they can no longer do it any harm. Therefore I say to you, do not fear those who kill you. And after killing, you can no longer do anything.
[00:05:06] And so what Second Clement recalls as a conversation with Peter, this fragment of a gospel recounts as a conversation with someone speaking in the first person.
[00:05:16] The most sensible understanding in Lehrman's view, is that this comes from a Gospel in which Peter is speaking in the first person.
[00:05:23] That is the Gospel of Peter. If he's right, this fragment comes from an earlier portion of the gospel, a teaching of Jesus prior to his arrest.
[00:05:32] And that would mean that the Gospel of Peter was not just an account of Jesus death, resurrection, but more likely a complete gospel, including the words and deeds of Jesus prior to the Passion.
[00:05:46] I'm inclined to think he's right, but it's hotly debated among scholars in any event, whether he's right or wrong. This is one intriguing textual mystery.
[00:05:58] No one thinks this is something Jesus could reliably be thought to have said. Well, no one I know, anyway.
[00:06:05] But it's great to have these Old Christian papyri show up on occasion.
[00:06:09] For one thing, they give us information we didn't have before. In this case, probably not about the historical Jesus, but about a saying attributed to him later, raising the questions, why did someone come up with this conversation in the first place? In what context would it have made sense? Almost certainly a context of persecution. But what else could we say about it?
[00:06:30] But also, it can help us solve other questions. For example, was the Gospel of Peter an account only of Jesus Passion or of his ministry as well?
[00:06:40] And I'll note one alternative that's also interesting.
[00:06:44] What if this fragment does go back to the Gospel of Peter? But what if it's referring to a conversation that Jesus and Peter had after the resurrection?
[00:06:53] In that case, the fragment would not tell us one way or another if the Gospel of Peter had an account of Jesus, public ministry or not.
[00:07:01] Ain't historical scholarship fun.
