As we have seen on the blog before, when church leaders were deciding which books should be counted among the Christian Scriptures, to go along with the “Old Testament,” they used a range of criteria:   a book had to be written by an apostle or at least by an active companion of an apostle; it had to be widely used throughout the early Christianity communities; and it had to convey teachings that were widely accepted (by the “right” thinkers) as “orthodox.”  No false teachings allowed. And so my question about the Apocalypse of Peter.  What went wrong?  It was allegedly written by the apostle Peter himself.  Check.  It was known and used in widespread churches in the second and third centuries – not as much as, say, the Gospels and letters of Paul, but still, more than other books, such as 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude, that eventually made it into the NT.  So, widely enough used.  Check.  And its teachings about eternal torments for sinners and everlasting blessings for the saved [...]

  Sometimes in my courses on the New Testament my students have trouble understanding why I’m so interested (OK, obsessed) with the small details of the text, rather than the “big picture.”  Who cares if this or that little detail is a possible contradiction or problem for other reason?  What matters is the overall message, right? Yes, that’s right on one level.  But on another level (or two or three) the small details really matter.  Not only is the big picture made up of very small brush strokes – so if there are problems at the brush-stroke level there are problems with the picture itself – but also sometimes the details are the absolute key to understanding what’s happening in the big picture. And so I illustrate: when a detective arrives at the crime scene of a murder, he might start looking around for clues.   A finger print, a strand of hair.  And you can imagine the frustration of someone looking on:   There’s a DEAD BODY surrounded by BLOOD here!  Why are you looking for [...]

In my last post about the Apocalypse of Peter I got down in the weeds a bit to talk about the discoveries and character of the two main manuscript sources of evidence we have of the document, a Greek version discovered in 1886-87 (the manuscript was produced in the sixth century or so) and an Ethiopic translation, found in a writing numbered among the so-called Pseudo-Clementines, and published in 1907-10.  Expert linguists have shown that this Ethiopic translation was made from an Arabic translation of a Greek original. Our natural inclination, as I pointed out, would be to think that a *translation*, twice removed from an original, could not be as reliable a guide to what a text originally said as an actual copy in the original language.   But the differences are so vast between the two, the Greek text and the Ethiopic, that scholars were driven to ask: which one is more like the book as originally written? Recall, the Ethiopic is much longer than the other.  It gives descriptions of more sins and [...]

It was a long time ago that I started a thread dealing with the question of why the Apocalypse of Peter did not make it into the New Testament but 2 Peter did.  I’ll give a summary here of where we are in the discussion just now, but if you want the full play-by-play, use the search function to look up Apocalypse of Peter; I’ve been blogging on it, on and off, since November 11.  And it’s time finally to bring it to a close. I’ve been delaying for a lot of reasons, the two most prominent are that I’m not completely confident in my views and that the matter is complicated and it has seemed like an inordinate amount of work for me to try to make it simple enough to be interesting to someone who isn’t completely obsessed with the manuscript tradition of the early Christian writings.  I.e., most people! A brief recap.  The Apocalypse of Peter provides an account of a guided tour of heaven and hell, given to Peter himself.  He [...]