Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Was the apocalypse of Peter originally considered part of the New Testament, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch?
[00:00:11] In my previous post I pointed out that our earliest list of which books should be considered christian scripture, that is, parts of the New Testament. The muratorian fragment from the 100 eightys CE, lists the apocalypse of Peter as a book that was accepted by some christians. Ive talked about the book on the blog before. Its extraordinarily interesting. It is the first christian account we have of a journey to the realms of the damned and the blessed, where Peter himself is shown by Christ the torments of the one and the glories of the other. In my recent academic book, journeys to heaven and hell, I devote a chapter to explaining why the book in the end did not get included in scripture. But the Book of second Peter, which was not accepted by the meritorian canon or even known about then, so far as we can tell, did make it in. In this post I'll simply explain what we know about the popularity and acceptance of the apocalypse of Peter. In the early centuries.
[00:01:12] It was a reasonably popular book in some christian churches into the fourth century. It was not as massively influential as the four gospels or the writings of Paul, but even so, a number of christian individuals and churches saw it as a scriptural text written by Peter. If you recall the muratorian fragment, a late second century text written from Rome, does not include James first and second Peter or third John in its canon, but it does include two apocalypses, the apocalypse of John, that is, the book of revelation and the apocalypse of Peter. About the latter, it says that some christians do not think it should be read in church, that is, that it was not to be accepted as part of the canon. But since he says that was the opinion of some, it appears that most did indeed accept it as the author himself does. This is our earliest canon list of the New Testament, and it comes from the largest and most influential church in Christendom.
[00:02:13] A few years later, the apocalypse of Peter is explicitly cited by the important and influential clement of Alexandria end of the second century, who treats it as scripture. According to the church, Father Eusebius fourth century Clement actually wrote a commentary on it along with the other books of the Bible. We no longer have this work, but it shows that in two of the major centers of the christian church at the end of the second century, Rome and Alexandria, the book had canonical status from the late fourth or early fifth century. We have a christian apology written by Marcarius Magnus, who is defending the faith against the charges leveled against it by an anonymous pagan opponent, scholars have long adduced reasons. After weighing all the options for thinking that he is addressing the lost attack on Christianity by the famous neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, who was writing in Rome in the late third century, Porphyry, or whoever it was, quoted passages from the Christian Bible in order to show how ridiculous this new faith was, and he includes quotations from the apocalypse of Peter without differentiating it from other books of the New Testament. This third century outsider simply assumed that the book was part of the collection of writings that christians widely accepted as scripture.
[00:03:37] Methodius, an important late third, early fourth century bishop and eventual martyr, died 311 CE during the great persecution of Diocletian from southern Asia Minor. Modern Turkey, quoted the apocalypse of Peter in his book the Symposium and explicitly calls it one of the scriptures inspired by God. An anonymous homily or sermon written in Latin from North Africa from the fourth century also treats the book as scripture. In the fifth century, the church historian Sozelman explicitly states that even though the book was widely seen to be inauthentic, it was still used in some churches in Palestine as a canonical text in worship services in his own day, sometime between 443 and 50, so many people were no longer accepting it, but some clearly were. We have a 6th century manuscript named Codex Claromontanus that contains the pauline epistles. It is a bilingual manuscript written in both Greek and Latin between the letters of Philemon and Hebrews. It gives a list of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Scholars typically date this list from the fourth century. Strikingly, it includes among the writings of the New Testament the epistle of Barnabas, the shepherd of Hermas, and the acts of Paul, as well as the apocalypse of Peter in the manuscript. These four books are each marked with a short horizontal line drawn into the left margin, possibly indicating that there were questions about their canonicity. I have not checked to see if textual experts think these four lines were original to the scribe or were added later.
[00:05:24] Other church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries mention the apocalypse of Peter, for example, Eusebius and Jerome, but only to say that it is not genuine but apocryphal and not to be accepted as part of the New Testament. And so, in summary, it appears that the apocalypse of Peter found some favor in the second and third centuries and was considered by a number of christians, many most, as one of the books of the New Testament. Not as important as the four gospels or the letters of Paul, but possibly as important as many or most of the catholic epistles, for example, James first and second Peter, three John.
[00:06:05] But it fell into disfavor, at least in the fourth century, even if it continued to be used in some circles as a canonical text into the fifth. And so my question is, why didn't it make it? Unfortunately, none of the early authors who expresses doubts about the book tell us what they found problematic about it. There is no indication that they engaged in a serious literary analysis of it to see if Peter wrote it. They did do that, by the way, with the book of Revelation, to see if it was really written by John, the son of Zebedee. And they don't say what their grounds were for objecting to it. So the grounds have to be inferred. In my book I discuss the fact that we have different manuscripts of this apocalypse, and that among their key differences is one that proved to be detrimental. It appears that in the earliest version of the apocalypse, Jesus eventually intervenes on behalf of the poor souls, being horribly tormented in hell and saves them by taking them to heaven, all of them. The later version, found elsewhere in the manuscript tradition, modifies that passage, so that no longer does it teach universal salvation. I argue that the book was not included in scripture because church fathers had become increasingly antagonistic toward the idea that everyone would be saved in the fourth and fifth centuries. Later. Scribes of the book later changed the passage so it no longer taught that, but by that time it was too late. The book had been left out.
