Loading...Now that I’ve said a few things about the Gospel of Peter, I thought it would be interesting to give you a bit of it. It is a fascinating account, with lots of intriguing differences from the Passion narratives of the New Testament. As I said in my previous post, its most striking passage involves Jesus’ resurrection.
It may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that the resurrection of Jesus is never narrated, or even described, in the New Testament. But that’s true. The NT Gospels explain how Jesus was crucified and buried; they then pick up the action on the third day after with the women finding the empty tomb. But they don’t say a word about what actually *happened* between those two events, when Jesus came back to life and then emerged from the tomb. The Gospel of Peter does provide an account.
Below I’ve included the section of the Gospel on Jesus’ Burial, skipped the bit about the discovery of the tomb, and then given the section on the resurrection, ending with the very tantalizing next scene which we are *so* glad is preserved, since otherwise we would not know that this thing claimed to be written by Jesus’ disciple Peter.
As you read these bits, one thing to pay special attention to is how Jews are portrayed. Spoiler alert: it ain’t good.
This is my translation from the Greek, as found in The Other Gospels, which my colleague Zlatko Plese and I translated and edited.
The Burial of Jesus
(23) But the Jews were glad and gave his body to Joseph that he might bury him, since he had seen all the good things he did. (24) He took the Lord, washed him, wrapped him in a linen cloth,[1] and brought him into his own tomb, called the Garden of Joseph.[2] (25) Then the Jews, the elders, and the priests realized how much evil they had done to themselves and began beating their breasts, saying “Woe to us because of our sins. The judgment and the end of Jerusalem are near.”[3]
(26) But I and my companions were grieving and….
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So how was it heretical and condemned? What ideas were contrary to the proto-orthodox position?
It was thoguht (possibly wrongly?) to embody a docetic Christology.
Isn’t Mark’s gospel actually the Gospel according to Peter? Mark being Peter’s ‘secretary’ or companion.
I looked it up, and sure enough, ‘scholars date the Gospel of Mark to AD70 when the temple was destroyed.’
That’s because Mark (or Peter) quoted Jesus as saying the temple would be destroyed. Who’s post-dating who? We have to change that to AD 136, the Bar Kokhba war, which was the real end of Israel that Jesus spoke of. Intellectually honest people will need to revise the Book of Daniel to some post temple date as well.
Peter died mid ’60’s I understand, so Mark’s gospel was done anywhere from AD 35 to AD 68. I would go for an earlier date. Not that it matters – it’s the substance of the account that’s important – something largely missing in apocrypha.
It was never called that, no, but you’re right, in proto-orthodox Christianity it came to be thought that Mark was Peter’s secretary and had written down his version of events.
“While these things were happening, we fasted and sat mourning and weeping, night and day, until the Sabbath.” Not specific to the Gospel of Peter, but what’s your best estimate of the timeline of the crucifixion and reported resurrection? Traditionally it is Friday evening burial and pre-dawn Sunday morning resurrection, but that isn’t close to 3 days, although by modern calendars it overlaps parts of 3 days. Mark and John differ on the day of crucifixion. Do early Christian sources after the Gospels give different opinions on the timeline?
It’s usually said that in ancient Jewish reckoning, a *part* of a day was considered to be constitutive of the entire day, and so could be loosely referred to as “a day and a night.” Not sure if there is any grounding for that outside of this particular issue: if Jesus was buried on Friday just before sundown but the tomb was found empty just after dawn on Sunday, how is that “three days and three nights.”
I can’t help but feel like part of this post is missing . . .
Oddly reminds me of a play I performed almost thirty years ago in Boston called The Christus. A priest from Dorchester wrote his version of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. I played John, “the beloved apostle.” There was an argument between the apostles concerning who would sit closest to Jesus during the Last Supper. Wonder what archaeologists will think in five hundred years when they uncover portions of that script?