The Apocalypse of Peter — Heaven, Hell, and the Book That Almost Made the Bible

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

What is the Apocalypse of Peter?

Sometime in the first half of the second century, a Christian author sat down to write in the name of the apostle Peter and produced something the Church had not seen before: a guided tour of the world beyond death. The risen Christ takes Peter to a mountain, shows him the radiant paradise of the righteous, and then—in far greater detail—the place of punishment, where blasphemers hang by their tongues and murderers writhe in a pit of venomous beasts while the souls of their victims look on. It is the earliest surviving Christian depiction of heaven and hell in any developed form, and it reads, at moments, like a rough draft of Dante.⁠¹

For a book now relegated to scholarly editions of “New Testament apocrypha,” the Apocalypse of Peter came astonishingly close to becoming Scripture. The oldest surviving list of New Testament books receives it in the same breath as the Revelation of John. Clement of Alexandria, the most learned Christian teacher of his age, treated it as the genuine work of Peter and wrote a commentary on it. A fourth-century canon list copies it out alongside the canonical books, and as late as the fifth century it was still read aloud once a year, on Good Friday, in some of the churches of Palestine.⁠²

And yet, when the dust of three centuries of debate finally settled, the Apocalypse of Peter was not among the twenty-seven books. This is the story of how a book got that close to the canon and was still, rightly, left out—and of why the early Church’s reasons for excluding it tell us something important about what Scripture is.

Two books, one name

Before going further, a clarification that most popular accounts botch. There are two ancient texts called the “Apocalypse of Peter,” and they have almost nothing to do with each other.

The first—the subject of this essay—is the early Greek Apocalypse of Peter, composed around 100–150 AD, surviving today in a Greek fragment and a fuller Ethiopic version. It is thoroughly proto-orthodox in its furniture: a real heaven, a real hell, the resurrection of the body, Christ returning in glory to judge.⁠³

The second is the Coptic “Apocalypse of Peter,” one of the texts discovered in 1945 in the Nag Hammadi library (it is the third tractate of Codex VII). It is a third-century Gnostic work, and its theology is the opposite of the first’s. Where the Greek text shows Christ as judge, the Coptic text shows a docetic Christ—a savior who only appears to have a body. In its most arresting scene, Peter watches the crucifixion and sees the true, living Jesus hovering above the cross, “glad and laughing,” while the nails are driven into a mere “fleshly part,” a substitute.⁠⁴ The text then turns on the emerging Catholic hierarchy, sneering at “those who name themselves bishop and also deacons, as if they have received their authority from God,” and calls them “dry canals.”⁠⁵

The two works share a title and the bare device of a revelation given to Peter near the end of Jesus’s life. They share nothing else. As most scholars judge, the Gnostic author does not appear even to have known the earlier book.⁠⁶ Everything that follows concerns the early Greek text—the one that nearly made the canon, not the one from Nag Hammadi. (There is, to complete the catalogue of confusions, also a much later medieval Arabic Apocalypse of Peter, distinct from both.)⁠⁷

Authorship, date, and a clue from a fig tree

The Apocalypse of Peter is, like most apocalypses, pseudonymous. It speaks in Peter’s voice—“And I, Peter, answered and said unto him”—but no serious scholar regards it as the work of the apostle. It belongs instead to a remarkable second-century flowering of literature written in Peter’s name: a Gospel of Peter, Acts of Peter, a Preaching (or Kerygma) of Peter, a Letter of Peter to James. Peter’s authority on matters of doctrine was unrivaled, and to write under his name was to borrow that authority for one’s message.⁠⁸

When was it written? The external limits are firm. The book draws on 4 Esdras, which dates to around 100 AD, and it is quoted by the Sibylline Oracles and by Clement of Alexandria, and named in the Muratorian Fragment, by the end of the second century. That brackets it between roughly 100 and 150 AD.⁠⁹

Richard Bauckham has argued for a more precise date, and his case turns on a parable. In the second chapter, Christ expounds the parable of the fig tree, and the interpretation is startling:

Understandest thou not that the fig-tree is the house of Israel? … when the twigs thereof have sprouted forth in the last days, then shall feigned Christs come and awake expectation saying: I am the Christ, that am now come into the world … And when they reject him he shall slay with the sword, and there shall be many martyrs.⁠¹⁰

Bauckham reads this single “false christ” who persecutes the faithful and produces martyrs as Simon bar Kokhba, the leader of the Jewish revolt against Rome of 132–135 AD, whom some Jews hailed as messiah. If he is right, the Apocalypse of Peter is a Palestinian Jewish-Christian work written in the crucible of that revolt.⁠¹¹ The thesis is attractive and widely cited, but it is not consensus; Eibert Tigchelaar and others have pointed out that other crises could fit the same language, and the provenance—Palestine or Egypt—remains disputed.⁠¹² What is not disputed is that the work is early, that it was written in Greek, and that it was not written by Peter.

A guided tour of heaven and hell

The setting

The frame is the Mount of Olives. In the Ethiopic version the disciples come to the seated Christ and ask, in the words of the Synoptic apocalypse, “what are the signs of thy coming and of the end of the world.” Christ warns them against deceivers, expounds the parable of the fig tree, and promises to come “in my majesty with all my saints … that I may judge the quick and the dead and recompense every man according to his works.”⁠¹³ That refrain—“according to his works,” “according to his deeds,” “according to his transgression”—runs through the whole book like a drumbeat. It is the engine of everything that follows.

Paradise and the two shining men

Christ shows Peter the destiny of the righteous first. In the Greek (Akhmim) text the seer beholds two men of impossible beauty, their skin “whiter than any snow and redder than any rose,” their hair like “a garland woven of nard and various flowers,” standing in a garden “exceeding bright with light,” its earth “flowering with blossoms that fade not.”⁠¹⁴ In the Ethiopic these two are named:

And I drew near unto the Lord … and said unto him: O my Lord, who are these? And he said unto me: They are Moses and Elias.⁠¹⁵

The scene is a transfiguration. Peter even offers, as in the Gospels, to build three tabernacles—and is rebuked for it. The point is unmistakable: the glory the apostles glimpsed on the holy mountain is the glory awaiting the saved.⁠¹⁶

The first Christian hell

Then comes the section that made the book famous, and infamous. Christ shows Peter “the place of punishment,” and the author lingers there with a thoroughness paradise never receives. The punishments are matched to the sins, body part for body part, in a scheme scholars often describe as a loose lex talionis—an eye for an eye:

And some there were there hanging by their tongues; and these were they that blasphemed the way of righteousness, and under them was laid fire flaming and tormenting them.⁠¹⁷

Murderers are cast into a narrow place full of “evil, creeping things” and worms, while the souls of those they killed look on and cry, “Righteousness and justice is the judgement of God.”⁠¹⁸ Usurers stand in a lake “full of foul matter and blood and boiling mire.”⁠¹⁹ One of the most disturbing passages concerns women who procured abortions, sunk to the neck in a pit of bodily discharge while, opposite them, the children they refused to bear emit “rays of fire” that pierce the eyes of their mothers.⁠²⁰ Presiding over the torments are angels whose names became fixtures of later tradition—Ezrael the angel of wrath, Uriel who raises the dead, and Tartarouchos, “keeper of hell.”⁠²¹

It is easy to read this as sadism, and harder, but more accurate, to notice that the book frames it as warning rather than relish. In the narrative the punishments are something Christ and the righteous weep over; the damned are told, “Now do you repent, when it is no longer the time for repentance.”⁠²² The whole grim catalogue is, in form, a call to conversion while there is still time—though whether the form survives the content is a fair question, and one the Church would eventually answer with its feet.

The deeper background is Jewish, not pagan. Martha Himmelfarb’s study of the “tours of hell” showed that the Apocalypse of Peter draws on a stock of Jewish apocalyptic material—the same world that produced the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch—rather than borrowing wholesale from Greek myth.⁠²³

The book that was almost Scripture

No early Christian apocalypse outside the canon was taken more seriously as a candidate for it. The evidence deserves to be laid out, because it shows just how genuinely open the question was.

The Muratorian Fragment

The oldest surviving list of New Testament books, the Muratorian Fragment—usually dated to around 170 and of Roman provenance—reaches the apocalypses and says, in Bruce Metzger’s translation:

We receive only the apocalypses of John and Peter, though some of us are not willing that the latter be read in church.⁠²⁴

The sentence is doing two things at once, and both matter. The Apocalypse of Peter is “received,” ranked beside the Revelation of John as one of only two apocalypses the list accepts. Yet a reservation is registered in the same clause: some will not have it read in the liturgy. Here, at the earliest moment we can see the canon taking shape, the book stands inside the circle and on its very edge.

Clement of Alexandria

Around 200, Clement of Alexandria went further than the Muratorian author. He quoted the Apocalypse of Peter as the genuine work of the apostle—in his Prophetic Eclogues he cites it on the fate of infants who died unbaptized, delivered to a “care-taking angel”—and, according to Eusebius, he wrote summary comments on it in his (now lost) Hypotyposes. Eusebius reports that Clement’s work gave “abridged accounts of all canonical Scripture, not omitting the disputed books, — I refer to Jude and the other Catholic epistles, and Barnabas and the so-called Apocalypse of Peter.”⁠²⁵ In Alexandria, in other words, the book was being read and expounded with the disputed books of the New Testament.

A fourth-century canon list

A century or so later, the Apocalypse of Peter still turns up inside a list of Scripture. The stichometric catalogue preserved in the sixth-century Codex Claromontanus—a list of biblical books with their line counts, generally thought to reflect a fourth-century original—includes the Apocalypse of Peter (270 lines) alongside Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Acts of Paul. A horizontal dash stands beside these titles; it has often been read as a mark of inferior status, but Kelsie Rodenbiker has argued the dashes were added by a later hand, so that the original list may well have treated all of them simply as Scripture.⁠²⁶

Still read on Good Friday

Most striking of all is a remark by the fifth-century historian Sozomen, himself a Palestinian. Cataloguing divergent liturgical customs, he notes:

Thus the book entitled “The Apocalypse of Peter,” which was considered altogether spurious by the ancients, is still read in some of the churches of Palestine, on the day of preparation, when the people observe a fast in memory of the passion of the Saviour.⁠²⁷

Three centuries after it was written, and long after the learned had pronounced it spurious, the Apocalypse of Peter was still being read aloud in church on the holiest Friday of the year. The book had a life in the pews well after it had lost the argument among the scholars. Methodius of Olympus had drawn on it (without naming it) around 300, and a pagan critic preserved by Macarius Magnes quoted it in order to mock Christian eschatology—hostile testimony that is itself evidence of how widely the book circulated.⁠²⁸

The book that was left out

If the case for the book’s near-canonization is impressive, the case for its exclusion is more instructive—because the Church did not reject it for being heretical or absurd. It rejected it for reasons that reveal the criteria themselves.

Eusebius: among the rejected

By the early fourth century the tide had turned. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his great survey of which books the churches accepted, placed the Apocalypse of Peter among the notha—the “spurious” or rejected writings:

Among the rejected writings must be reckoned also the Acts of Paul, and the so-called Shepherd, and the Apocalypse of Peter, and in addition to these the extant epistle of Barnabas, and the so-called Teachings of the Apostles.⁠²⁹

It is worth being precise about what notha meant for Eusebius. These were not the heretical forgeries—the Gospels of Thomas or Matthias—which he says elsewhere are “to be cast aside as absurd and impious.” The notha are a respectable middle tier: orthodox, often edifying, frequently church-read, but not canonical. The Apocalypse of Peter keeps company there with the Shepherd and Barnabas, not with the Gnostic gospels.⁠³⁰ Eusebius even overstated the case—claiming elsewhere that “no ecclesiastical writer” had used these books, when he himself records that Clement wrote on the Apocalypse of Peter. The exaggeration betrays an establishment view hardening against a book it found increasingly awkward.⁠³¹

The criterion of apostolicity

Why did it harden? The deepest reason is the one the Muratorian author had already named—not about the Apocalypse of Peter, but about its constant companion, the Shepherd of Hermas. The Shepherd, the Fragment says, was written “very recently, in our times,” and therefore “cannot be read publicly to the people in church either among the Prophets, whose number is complete, or among the Apostles, for it is after [their] time.”⁠³²

There is the criterion, stated with perfect clarity: a book composed after the age of the apostles cannot be Scripture, however edifying it may be. The Shepherd of Hermas failed that test because everyone knew it was recent. The Apocalypse of Peter failed it in a subtler way. It claimed to be apostolic—it put its words in Peter’s mouth—but it was a second-century pseudepigraphon, and as the Church’s sense of the apostolic deposit sharpened, a false claim of Petrine authorship could not survive scrutiny. A common objection to these books, as the ancient sources show, was precisely that they lacked genuine apostolic authorship.⁠³³

The vanishing in the West

In the Latin West the book did not so much get condemned as forgotten. It is a curious fact, noted by M.R. James, that the Decretum Gelasianum—the sixth-century Latin list of books “to be received and not received,” which troubles to reject the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of Peter, and the Shepherd—does not mention the Apocalypse of Peter at all.⁠³⁴ In the Greek East it fared a little better, lingering in lists of disputed books: the ninth-century Stichometry of Nicephorus still records it among the New Testament antilegomena, at 300 lines, right after the Revelation of John.⁠³⁵

The suppressed ending: did it teach universal salvation?

There is one more reason the book may have made the fourth-century Church uneasy, and it is the most theologically interesting of all.

For most of its modern history the Apocalypse of Peter was known only from the Akhmim Greek fragment and the Ethiopic version, neither of which preserves a clear original ending. Then, in a Greek parchment leaf in the Rainer collection in Vienna, M.R. James identified the conclusion of the book—and found something the later tradition had quietly buried. After the tour of hell, the damned cry out for mercy, and Christ answers:

Then will I give unto my called and my chosen whomsoever they shall ask me for, out of torment, and will give them a fair baptism in … salvation from the Acherusian lake which men so call in the Elysian field, even a portion of righteousness with my holy ones.⁠³⁶

In its original form, that is, the Apocalypse of Peter held out a hope that the saved could intercede for the damned—and that their intercession would be granted. The same idea is paraphrased in the second book of the Sibylline Oracles, which confirms that the reading is original rather than a late interpolation.⁠³⁷

James saw at once why this passage had nearly disappeared. Comparing the Greek with the Ethiopic, where the same lines are reworked so that only the elect receive the baptism, he concluded that “the maker of the Ethiopic version … has designedly omitted or slurred over some clauses,” and added the explanation in a single dry sentence: “The doctrine—which is indeed a very curious one—was thought dangerous.”⁠³⁸

We should be careful not to overstate what the book teaches. As Bauckham argues, this is not a doctrinaire universalism that empties hell by decree; it is a contingent, intercessory hope—the elect, and especially the martyrs, secure the release of those for whom they pray, in a way Bauckham finds congruent with Christ’s command to pray for one’s persecutors.⁠³⁹ But that hope, even in its qualified form, sat poorly with where the Church’s reflection was heading. The idea that hell might not be final is precisely the kind of speculation that would be condemned, in its full Origenist form, in the sixth century—and a book that whispered it, however gently, was a book the canon could do without.⁠⁴⁰

The relationship to 2 Peter

There is a literary puzzle here that bears directly on the New Testament itself. The Apocalypse of Peter and the canonical Second Letter of Peter share a striking amount: an appeal to the Transfiguration, a prophecy of false teachers, the same vocabulary of “the way” of righteousness, the same fiery dissolution of the cosmos at the end. They are clearly related. The question is how.⁠⁴¹

For a long time the dominant answer was that the Apocalypse borrowed from 2 Peter—that the canonical letter came first. Richard Bauckham argued this in his major 1983 commentary. More recently the current has reversed: Wolfgang Grünstäudl and Jörg Frey have made a substantial case that 2 Peter is the later text, dependent on the Apocalypse of Peter, an Alexandrian composition of the second century.⁠⁴² Most arrestingly, Bauckham himself revisited the question in 2019 and withdrew his earlier view—concluding now that the connections are too limited to prove literary dependence in either direction, and that the two texts are most likely independent.⁠⁴³ The conservative case for genuine Petrine authorship and the priority of 2 Peter still has able defenders, such as Michael Kruger.⁠⁴⁴ The honest summary is that the field is unsettled—but the very existence of the debate is a useful reminder that 2 Peter was itself the most doubted letter in the New Testament, and that it took shape in the same teeming workshop of Petrine literature that produced the Apocalypse.⁠⁴⁵

Why the Church was right

From a Catholic perspective, the exclusion of the Apocalypse of Peter was not an accident of politics or taste. It followed from what Scripture is.

Apostolicity. The canon required a real connection to the apostolic generation, and the Apocalypse of Peter could not supply one. It was a pseudepigraphon: a second-century work wearing a first-century name. This is the same wall the Shepherd of Hermas ran into—both books sit together among Eusebius’s notha for the same reason—and it is a wall the Church was right to keep standing. A canon that admitted books on the strength of a borrowed apostolic name would have no way to exclude the Gospel of Peter or the Coptic Apocalypse either.

Doctrinal precision. A book that norms the faith must be able to bear that weight, and at two points the Apocalypse of Peter cannot. Its near-universalist ending cuts against the Church’s settled teaching that hell is real and eternal. And its very mode—the lurid, body-part-by-body-part catalogue of torments—is not the Church’s eschatology. The Catechism is sober where the Apocalypse is sensational. “The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity,” it says; but “the chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.”⁠⁴⁶ Hell, in Catholic teaching, is “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God,” freely chosen—not a divine torture chamber.⁠⁴⁷ The Church does not even claim to know that any particular human being is in hell; “God predestines no one to go to hell,” and in her liturgy she prays for the salvation of all.⁠⁴⁸

Here the contrast is worth pausing over, because it cuts in a surprising direction. On the question of universal salvation, the Apocalypse of Peter is in one sense too generous for the canon, and in another—its relentless physical tortures—too cruel. The Church’s actual doctrine threads between them: hell is genuinely eternal and genuinely possible, yet it is essentially the loss of God rather than a sadist’s inventory, and the Church may hope and pray that it be empty even while she refuses to teach that it certainly will be. A book that gets the matter wrong in both directions is not the place to ground that teaching.

The canon as discernment. Catholics do not believe the canon was assembled by a committee weighing literary merit. They believe the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, recognized over time which books carried the apostolic faith. The Apocalypse of Peter is, in that light, a test case of the process working—a book read with respect for centuries, weighed, and finally found to be a witness to the faith rather than a rule of it. The same Church that left it out is the Church that included the Revelation of John, whose own road to the canon was nearly as rocky.

The afterlife of the Apocalypse

To say the book was excluded is not to say it died. Its real influence came through its imitators. The fourth-century Apocalypse of Paul—the Visio Pauli—took the Apocalypse of Peter’s heaven and hell and expanded them into a far more elaborate tour, and through the Visio Pauli the imagery passed into the medieval visionary literature that stands behind Dante’s Commedia. The angel of punishment Temeluchus, born of a Greek misreading in the Apocalypse of Peter, walks straight into the Apocalypse of Paul and onward.⁠⁴⁹ Jan Bremmer calls the Apocalypse of Paul “the most important step in the direction that would find its apogee in Dante”; the Apocalypse of Peter is where that road begins.⁠⁵⁰ Dante never read it—the line is mediated, not direct—but the Inferno’s great conceit, a guided descent through punishments fitted to sins, is the conceit this little second-century book invented.

That is reason enough to read it. The Apocalypse of Peter is a window into what ordinary Christians, two generations after the apostles, hoped and feared about death: that the body would rise, that justice would finally be done, that the prayers of the saints might reach even into the fire. The Church was right not to make it Scripture. But it remains one of the most revealing documents the early Church left behind—a witness to the faith of the Church, even where it is not a norm of it.⁠⁵¹

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was the Apocalypse of Peter not included in the Bible?

Chiefly because it failed the test of apostolicity. Although it was written in Peter’s name, it is a pseudonymous composition of the early second century—after the age of the apostles—and the early Church held that a book composed after the apostolic generation could not be Scripture, however edifying. The same reasoning excluded the Shepherd of Hermas. A secondary factor was doctrinal unease: the book’s original ending held out a near-universalist hope that the damned might be released through the prayers of the saved, which sat poorly with the Church’s settled teaching on the eternity of hell.

Is the Apocalypse of Peter the same as the Gnostic text from Nag Hammadi?

No. They are two different works that share only a title. The early Greek Apocalypse of Peter (c. 100–150 AD) is a proto-orthodox tour of heaven and hell. The Coptic “Apocalypse of Peter” found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 is a third-century Gnostic work with a docetic Christology—it portrays a “living Jesus” laughing above the cross while only a fleshly substitute is crucified. Most scholars judge that the Gnostic author did not even know the earlier book.

How close did the Apocalypse of Peter come to being canonized?

Closer than almost any other non-canonical book except the Shepherd of Hermas. The Muratorian Fragment (c. 170) received it alongside the Revelation of John; Clement of Alexandria treated it as the genuine work of Peter and commented on it; it appears in a fourth-century canon list; and it was still read aloud in some churches of Palestine on Good Friday into the fifth century. Eusebius ultimately classified it among the “rejected” (but not heretical) books.

What is in the Apocalypse of Peter?

The risen Christ takes Peter to a mountain and reveals the world to come. He shows him the radiant paradise of the righteous—including a transfiguration-like vision of Moses and Elijah—and then, at greater length, a hell in which punishments are matched to sins: blasphemers hang by their tongues, murderers lie in a pit of beasts, usurers stand in a lake of blood and mire. It is the earliest detailed Christian depiction of the afterlife and a forerunner of the Apocalypse of Paul and, ultimately, Dante’s Inferno.

Did the Apocalypse of Peter teach universal salvation?

In its original form it came close. A Greek fragment (the Rainer fragment) preserves an ending in which Christ promises to grant the saved “whomsoever they shall ask me for, out of torment.” Scholars including M.R. James and Richard Bauckham judge this passage original; the later Ethiopic version softened it so that only the elect are saved. M.R. James concluded the doctrine “was thought dangerous” and was deliberately edited out. Bauckham cautions that even the original is a contingent, intercessory hope, not a doctrinaire universalism.

Does the Catholic Church reject the Apocalypse of Peter?

The Church does not regard it as inspired Scripture, and never has in its definitive canon. But it is not “rejected” in the sense of condemned as heretical—Eusebius placed it among the orthodox-but-uncanonical books, and it was read devotionally for centuries. From a Catholic perspective it belongs to the early Church’s literature rather than to its Scripture: a valuable historical witness to early belief about judgment, the resurrection of the body, and prayer for the dead, but not a rule of faith.

Footnotes

1. 1. On the work as the earliest detailed Christian depiction of heaven and hell and a forerunner of the genre that culminates in Dante, see Richard Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, NovTSup 93 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); and Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz, eds., The Apocalypse of Peter, Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 7 (Leuven: Peeters, 2003).

2. 2. Muratorian Fragment, lines 71–72; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.1; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7.19. Each is discussed and cited in full below.

3. 3. The standard critical edition of the Greek fragments is Thomas J. Kraus and Tobias Nicklas, Das Petrusevangelium und die Petrusapokalypse, GCS Neue Folge 11 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004); the Ethiopic is edited in Dennis D. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened: A Study of the Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter, SBLDS 97 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988). For date, see n. 9 below.

4. 4. Coptic Apocalypse of Peter (NHC VII,3) 81,15–23: “He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame” (trans. James Brashler and Roger A. Bullard, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd ed. [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988]).

5. 5. Coptic Apocalypse of Peter (NHC VII,3) 79,22–30 (trans. Brashler and Bullard). The phrase “dry canals” (also rendered “waterless canals”) echoes 2 Peter 2:17, which some scholars (Birger Pearson, Tobias Nicklas) take as a sign that the Coptic text knew the canonical letter.

6. 6. “Most scholars believe that the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter has no relationship with the 2nd-century Apocalypse of Peter other than the title and the coincidence of both involving a revelation of Christ to Peter near the end of Jesus's life” (Michel Desjardins and James Brashler, in Nag Hammadi Codex VII, ed. Birger A. Pearson, NHMS 30 [Leiden: Brill, 1996]). On the Gnostic text generally see Henriette W. Havelaar, The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter (Nag-Hammadi-Codex VII,3), TU 144 (Berlin: Akademie, 1999).

7. 7. The medieval Arabic Apocalypse of Peter (also called the Book of the Rolls or Kitāb al-Magāll) is a separate Clementine work and is not in view here.

8. 8. “Like many other apocalypses, the work is pseudepigraphal: it claims the authorship of a famous figure to bolster the authority of its message” (see Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]). On the broader Petrine literature, see Jörg Frey, “Petrine Traditions and Petrine Authorship Constructions in Early Christianity,” in The Apocalypse of Peter in Context, ed. Daniel C. Maier, Jörg Frey, and Thomas J. Kraus, SECA 21 (Leuven: Peeters, 2024).

9. 9. Terminus post quem: probable use of 4 Esdras (c. 100). Terminus ante quem: quotation in Sibylline Oracles 2, by Clement of Alexandria, and naming in the Muratorian Fragment (late 2nd c.). See C.D.G. Müller, “Apocalypse of Peter,” in New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, rev. ed., trans. R. McL. Wilson, vol. 2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 620–38; and J.K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 593–615.

10. 10. Apocalypse of Peter 2 (Ethiopic), trans. M.R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924).

11. 11. Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 160–61, arguing the work “derives from Palestinian Jewish Christianity during the Bar Kokhba war of 132–135 C.E.” The reading rests on the single “false christ” of ch. 2 who persecutes the faithful and produces martyrs.

12. 12. Eibert Tigchelaar, “Is the Liar Bar Kokhba? Considering the Date and Provenance of the Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter,” in Bremmer and Czachesz, The Apocalypse of Peter, 63–77. Müller and others have argued for an Egyptian provenance.

13. 13. Apocalypse of Peter 1–4 (Ethiopic), trans. James. The questions echo Matthew 24:3.

14. 14. Apocalypse of Peter 3–5 (Akhmim), trans. James.

15. 15. Apocalypse of Peter 15–16 (Ethiopic), trans. James.

16. 16. Apocalypse of Peter 16–17 (Ethiopic), trans. James: “wilt thou that I make here three tabernacles . . . And he said unto me in wrath: Satan maketh war against thee.” Cf. Matthew 17:1–8.

17. 17. Apocalypse of Peter 22 (Akhmim), trans. James.

18. 18. Apocalypse of Peter 25 (Akhmim) and the parallel in ch. 7 (Ethiopic), trans. James.

19. 19. Apocalypse of Peter 31 (Akhmim), trans. James.

20. 20. Apocalypse of Peter 26 (Akhmim) and ch. 8 (Ethiopic), trans. James. The motif of the aborted infants delivered to a “care-taking angel” is the same passage Clement of Alexandria quotes (see n. 25).

21. 21. On the angels Ezrael, Uriel, and Tartarouchos, see Apocalypse of Peter chs. 4–13 (Ethiopic); James notes that “Tartaruchus, keeper of hell,” an epithet, was later mistaken for a proper name, as was the “care-taking” angel temelouchos.

22. 22. See the framing in Apocalypse of Peter 3 and the address to the damned in ch. 13 (Ethiopic), trans. James; on the text as warning and call to repentance rather than a celebration of suffering, see Cambry G. Pardee, “Apocalypse of Peter,” e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha (NASSCAL).

23. 23. Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). On the lex talionis description and its critics, see Bart D. Ehrman, Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), who argues the punishments exceed strict proportion and reflect bodily correspondence rather than an exact eye-for-an-eye.

24. 24. Muratorian Fragment, lines 71–72; trans. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 305–7. On the date (c. 170), see Metzger, 191–201; the late-fourth-century redating proposed by Sundberg and Hahneman is rejected by most scholars.

25. 25. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.1, trans. A.C. McGiffert (NPNF2 1): the Hypotyposes gave “abridged accounts of all canonical Scripture, not omitting the disputed books, — I refer to Jude and the other Catholic epistles, and Barnabas and the so-called Apocalypse of Peter.” Clement quotes the work in Eclogae Propheticae 41 and 48.

26. 26. On the Claromontanus stichometry (270 lines for the Apocalypse of Peter) and the obeli, see Kelsie G. Rodenbiker, “The Claromontanus Stichometry and Its Canonical Implications,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 44, no. 2 (2021): 240–53; and Metzger, Canon, 310.

27. 27. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 7.19, trans. Chester D. Hartranft (NPNF2 2).

28. 28. Methodius, Symposium 2.6 (an unnamed allusion, identified by the shared rare word for the “care-taking” angel); Macarius Magnes, Apocriticus 4.6–7, preserving a pagan critic's hostile quotation of the work, including a passage—“the heaven shall be rolled up like a book”—not found in the surviving Akhmim or Ethiopic texts. Both in James, Apocryphal New Testament.

29. 29. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.4, trans. McGiffert (NPNF2 1).

30. 30. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.6–7, distinguishing the orthodox-but-uncanonical notha from the heretical forgeries “to be cast aside as absurd and impious.”

31. 31. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.3.2 (“the so-called . . . Apocalypse . . . we know have not been universally accepted, because no ecclesiastical writer . . . has made use of testimonies drawn from them”); McGiffert's note observes that this is an exaggeration, since Eusebius himself records Clement's use of the book (6.14.1).

32. 32. Muratorian Fragment, lines 73–80, trans. Metzger, Canon, 307.

33. 33. On apostolicity as the operative criterion, and the lack of apostolic authorship as the standard objection to such books, see Metzger, Canon, 251–54; and the synthesis in McGiffert's notes to Eusebius, HE 3.3 and 3.25.

34. 34. M.R. James observed: “There is no mention of it in the Gelasian Decree, which is curious.” On the Decretum Gelasianum (a sixth-century, pseudonymous Latin list) see Ernst von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, TU 38.4 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912).

35. 35. Stichometry of Nicephorus (appended to the Chronographikon Syntomon), listing the Apocalypse of Peter among the New Testament antilegomena at 300 lines, after the Revelation of John.

36. 36. Rainer fragment (P.Vindob.G 39756), trans. M.R. James, “The Rainer Fragment of the Apocalypse of Peter,” Journal of Theological Studies 32 (1931): 270–79, at 271.

37. 37. Sibylline Oracles 2.330–38, which James (JTS, 272) judged a close paraphrase confirming the originality of the Rainer reading; see also Kirsti B. Copeland, “Sinners and Post-Mortem ‘Baptism’ in the Acherusian Lake,” in Bremmer and Czachesz, The Apocalypse of Peter, 91–107.

38. 38. James, “The Rainer Fragment,” 273–74.

39. 39. Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 145, 235; and Copeland, “Sinners and Post-Mortem ‘Baptism,’” 99–101. Bauckham connects the hope to the intercessory power of the martyrs and to Matthew 5:44.

40. 40. On the condemnation of Origenist apokatastasis, see the edict and home synod under Justinian (543) and the anti-Origenist anathemas associated with the Second Council of Constantinople (553); the precise conciliar status of the fifteen anathemas is debated, the majority view being that they were signed before the council formally opened. The defined doctrine is the eternity of hell (see nn. 46–48), not a bare anathema against any hope.

41. 41. On the shared material, see Matthijs den Dulk, “Introduction: A Second Look at Second Peter,” in Jörg Frey, Matthijs den Dulk, and Jan van der Watt, eds., 2 Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter: Towards a New Perspective, Biblical Interpretation Series 174 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 1–6.

42. 42. Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 50 (Waco: Word, 1983), arguing the Apocalypse depends on 2 Peter; Wolfgang Grünstäudl, Petrus Alexandrinus, WUNT II/353 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), and Jörg Frey, The Letter of Jude and the Second Letter of Peter (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018), arguing the reverse.

43. 43. Richard Bauckham, “2 Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter Revisited: A Response to Jörg Frey,” in Frey, den Dulk, and van der Watt, 2 Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter; summarized in den Dulk, “Introduction,” 4: Bauckham “now considers it more likely that the two documents are independent from each other.”

44. 44. Michael J. Kruger, “The Authenticity of 2 Peter,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 42, no. 4 (1999): 645–71.

45. 45. On 2 Peter's status among the disputed books (antilegomena), see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.3; on its place in the canon, see the companion essay on [2 Peter](/second-peter/).

46. 46. Catechism of the Catholic Church §1035.

47. 47. Catechism of the Catholic Church §1033.

48. 48. Catechism of the Catholic Church §1037; cf. §§1021–1022 on the particular judgment.

49. 49. On the angel Temeluchus passing from the Apocalypse of Peter into the Apocalypse of Paul, see Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 223.

50. 50. The quotation is from Jan N. Bremmer, “Christian Hell: From the Apocalypse of Peter to the Apocalypse of Paul,” Numen 56 (2009): 298–325; see also Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (London: Routledge, 2002). On the mediated line to Dante via the Visio Pauli, see Theodore Silverstein, Visio Sancti Pauli (London: Christophers, 1935).

51. 51. For recent scholarship see, in addition to the works cited above, Eric J. Beck, Justice and Mercy in the Apocalypse of Peter, WUNT 427 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), and Maier, Frey, and Kraus, eds., The Apocalypse of Peter in Context (2024).