Gospel of Peter

The fragment begins in the middle of a sentence, with the observation that none of the Jews washed their hands, and that Herod and the judges refused to do so. Pilate has already withdrawn. The trial is not narrated; what survives opens after responsibility has been transferred. Herod Antipas, not Pilate, gives the order for execution, and the crucifixion is carried out by "the people" rather than by Roman soldiers.

Two details in the crucifixion account drew ancient suspicion. Jesus is said to have kept silent, as though feeling no pain, and at the moment of death the text says he was taken up rather than that he died. The cry from the cross is not the Psalm quotation of Mark and Matthew but an address to a departing power. Neither phrase requires a docetic reading, in which Christ only appeared to have a body and only appeared to suffer, but both are easily read that way.

The resurrection is the passage everyone remembers, because it is the only narrated resurrection in early Christian literature. Roman soldiers and Jewish elders keep watch at a tomb sealed with seven seals, with a crowd from Jerusalem come out to look at it. In the night the heavens open, two men descend in great light, the stone rolls aside of its own accord, and three figures come out: two supporting a third, with a cross following behind them. The heads of the two reach to heaven; the head of the one they lead passes beyond the heavens. A voice from the heavens asks whether he has preached to those who sleep, and the answer, given from the cross, is yes.

The remainder has Pilate informed and asked to keep the guards silent, Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb at dawn and finding a young man inside, and finally Peter, Andrew and Levi son of Alphaeus taking their nets down to the sea. There the text stops, mid-sentence, before whatever appearance it was about to relate.

The whole of the surviving text comes from a small parchment codex found by Urbain Bouriant of the French Archaeological Mission at Cairo, during excavation of a cemetery at Akhmim in Upper Egypt in the winter of 1886-87. The codex was buried with a monk and is dated on palaeographic grounds to the eighth or ninth century, six or seven hundred years after the text it carries was written. It also contains portions of 1 Enoch and of the Apocalypse of Peter. Bouriant published it in 1892.

Two Oxyrhynchus fragments, P.Oxy. 2949 and P.Oxy. 4009, have been proposed as much earlier witnesses, and the so-called Fayyum fragment has also been suggested. None of these identifications is secure. P.Oxy. 2949 overlaps the Akhmim text loosely rather than exactly, and the case for P.Oxy. 4009 rests on reconstruction. Anyone who states flatly that second-century copies of this gospel survive is overstating the evidence.

Most scholars place composition in the second century, and a substantial number in its first half, on the grounds that the narrative shows knowledge of material found in all four canonical gospels while treating it freely, and that its anti-Jewish framing and its legendary expansion of the guard at the tomb fit that period. John Dominic Crossan argued the opposite direction: that embedded in the text is an independent early source he called the Cross Gospel, written before Mark and used by all four evangelists, so that the canonical passion narratives derive from it rather than it from them. The thesis is set out at length and has been influential in shaping the debate, but it has not been widely accepted; Raymond E. Brown, among others, argued in detail that the text instead reflects a writer working from memory of the canonical gospels, with the errors and conflations that implies. The minority position deserves to be known, and it should not be reported as the consensus.

The one substantial ancient report about the book is preserved by Eusebius in the Ecclesiastical History, at book six chapter twelve. Serapion, bishop of Antioch around 199 to 211, visited the congregation at Rhossus in Cilicia, found a gospel circulating under Peter's name, and, without reading it closely, allowed its use. Afterwards he was told it was being used to support heterodox teaching. He obtained a copy from those he calls the successors of Marcianus, read it, and wrote a tract listing the passages he objected to. His conclusion, as Eusebius quotes it, is measured: most of it accords with the true teaching of the Saviour, but some things have been added. The letter uses the term Docetae for the group he associates with the book, which is why the charge is usually summarised as docetism.

Whether the book Serapion read is the book found at Akhmim cannot be established. The Akhmim narrative's suspect phrases are mild, and Serapion says he objected to specific additions he does not fully specify. The identification is probable and is generally assumed, but it remains an inference.

The other part of its afterlife is harder. The text removes Pilate from the execution entirely, has the Jewish authorities refuse the hand-washing that Pilate performs, and has the people of Jerusalem, on seeing the signs at the death, lament their sins and speak of the coming judgement on the city. That is a sharper and more sustained transfer of guilt than anything in the canonical accounts, and it is regularly cited in studies of how Christian passion narratives hardened into an instrument of anti-Jewish polemic. It is worth noting that this, rather than the walking cross, is what made the text theologically consequential, and that the church's rejection of it had nothing to do with that feature.