With this post I conclude my discussion to the Gospel of Peter – although, of course, I’m always happy to engage with any questions you have about it (or anything else).   What we have seen so far is that the Gospel was known in antiquity, even though it came to be judged heretical.  Our principal source of information about it is in a discussion of the church historian Eusebius, who mentions a Gospel of Peter known to a Syrian bishop Serapion, who eventually judged it inauthentic because it (allegedly) proclaimed a “docetic” understanding of Christ (that he was not really a human being who really suffered).

A Gospel fragment was discovered in 1886 that scholars almost immediately claimed to be a portion of the Gospel of Peter mentioned by Eusebius (and Serapion before him).  But is it that?   Here are the issues, laid out in brief order.  Again, this is lifted from my discussion in my (and Zlatko Plese’s) book The Other Gospels.

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The author of this account [the discovered fragment] writes in the first-person on two occasions, once without identifying himself (“I and my companions” v. 26), but the other time indicating that he is none other than the disciple Peter: “But I, Simon Peter, and Andrew my brother…” (v. 60).  Here then is a Gospel with the marks of antiquity, written in the name of Peter.  Is it the Gospel of Peter known and proscribed by Serapion at the end of the second century?

Unfortunately,

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