As I indicated in my previous post, I’m planning to write a book (after the one on charity in early Christianity) explaining how we got the canon of the New Testament.  Who choose the books?  On what grounds?  And when?

In this post I thought I’d show the kind of think I’ll be interested in, by explaining a particularly intriguing issue of “what got in” and “what got out” that I worked on a good bit a few years ago when writing my book Journeys to Heaven and Hell  (Yale University Press), and then blogged on.

It involves one of the books that did not make it into the canon (there are several!) allegedly written by Peter.  Unlike most of the others, though, this one nearly made it.  In the end, it was axed.  But why?  Not for a reason most anyone would suspect (or at least no one had suggested in writing before my book).

Here’s how I explain it all in the prospectus I sent to my publisher, Simon&Schuster when I was proposing to write the book..

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In 1887 a French archaeological team digging in an ancient cemetery in Akhmim Egypt, about eighty miles north of Luxor, made a remarkable manuscript discovery.  In one of the tombs, taken to be that of a Christian monk, they discovered a sixty-six page book, written in Greek and containing an anthology of four ancient texts.  One of these described a guided tour of heaven and hell allegedly written by Peter.  Scholars had long known that this book – the Apocalypse of Peter — had once existed: some early church fathers of the second to fourth centuries had counted it among the books of Christian Scriptures, either in addition to or instead of the Apocalypse of John.   But for some reason it had fallen into disfavor, and after the fifth century it was no longer known to be in circulation.  And no one knew exactly what as in it.

Once deciphered it received considerable scholarly attention.  The account begins with Jesus delivering his final sermon to his apostles, an alternative version of the “apocalyptic” discourse found (in various forms) in Mark 13 and Matthew 24-25.  In all the canonical accounts, Jesus explains to his disciples what will happen at the end of the age.  The disciples, understandably, want to know when this will be and what it will be like at the end.  In the New Testament Gospels Jesus tells them what to look for, but in the Apocalypse of Peter, he gives them an actual preview.

Jesus shows Peter the respective fates of those who are in the depths of hell and others enjoying the glories of paradise.  Peter enters into these realms and describes what he sees.  In detailed and lurid terms, Peter describes the torments of the damned: sinners are tortured according to their characteristic transgressions while living (adulterers, murderers, blasphemers, idolaters, etc.).  The saints, on the other hand, experience a glorious existence in the world above.  Peter’s description, however, is surprisingly bland. Possibly once the fantastic climate, sights, and smells are mentioned, not much more can be said about eternal bliss.  The account ends with Jesus being transformed into a glorious being in the presence of his disciples.

The first reference to this Apocalypse of Peter occurs in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, at the end of the second century, who regards and treats it as a book of Scripture.  Writers after that continue to treat it as a divinely inspired sacred text up through the third century.  In the early fourth century the church historian Eusebius indicates that various Christian communities continued to see it as canonical, even though others had their doubts.  Soon after that the book falls out of sight and is lost to history.  But why?

The explanation has to do with the contents of the book, as scholars recognized from subsequent discoveries.  About two decades after the Greek version of the Apocalypse of Peter appeared in Akhmim Egypt (in 1887), a different, fuller, edition of the book was discovered in the ancient Ethiopic language.  Soon after that two tiny fragments of the account appeared from the sands of Egypt.  These various accounts all differ from one another, often in small ways and sometimes quite significantly.   It is now clear that the Apocalypse went through at least two new editions over time, as ancient editors changed a number details of its narrative and some of its most important claims.

In the now oldest version of the text, as found in one of the Greek fragments, “Peter’s” description of the torments of the damned come to an entirely unexpected conclusion.  When Peter and the other apostles see the horrifying sufferings being inflicted on sinners, they cannot hold back their tears and plead with Christ to have mercy on these souls damned to eternal torment. In the end, Christ cannot resist the pleas of his faithful.  He reverses his judgment, takes all the sinners out of hell, provides them with a baptism in the heavenly realm, and leads them to eternal glory.  All sinners, in the end, are saved.  The original version of the Apocalypse of Peter taught universal salvation.

The idea that God’s mercy would ultimately triumph over his judgment was held by some Christians in the early church.  After God doled out sufficient, often long, punishment, he would relent and provide salvation to all.  In support of this view, some Christian leaders pointed out that even the apostle Paul makes universalistic claims in some of his letters (Rom. 5:18; 11:32; Phil. 2:6-11; 1 Cor, 15:25, 28).  The majority of Christian teachers, however, condemned such views and proclaimed their proponents to be “heretics.”   Sinners would be severely punished for all time, world without end.

In the revision history of the Apocalypse of Peter, the later editors attempted to salvage its now-out-of-favor universalistic conclusion by changing its ending, as evidenced in both the surviving Ethiopic version and the Greek text originally discovered in Akhmim Egypt.  But these editorial efforts came too late.  The book was already in broad circulation and was known to teach salvation for all sinners. Church leaders were repelled by the idea and so rejected the book.  The Apocalypse disappeared from the scene, until discovered by archaeologists fourteen centuries later.

The textual history of the Apocalypse of Peter reveals one of the main criteria church leaders used to determine if a book could be considered canonical Scripture.  It had to be “orthodox,” teaching the “correct doctrine.”  Otherwise, it didn’t have a chance.