Many modern collections of Christian apocrypha group texts under headings such as “gospels,” “acts,” “epistles,” and “apocalypses.” But do these conventional genre categories help or hurt? Their resemblance to categories used in connection with the New Testament is not coincidental, and it helps explain why this classification scheme continues to be used for Christian apocrypha, despite the fact that scholars of apocrypha are well aware that many texts fail to fit into these boxes. This awareness has led recent collections of apocryphal texts such as the German Antike christliche Apokryphen and the English New Testament Apocrypha: More Non-Canonical Scriptures to refer to “gospels and related traditions” instead of “gospels,” and “apocryphal acts and related traditions” instead of “apocryphal acts”—but the same basic classification scheme has been retained.[1]
One lamentable effect of this publishing convention is to obscure the fact that many ancient narratives are not just about Jesus or just about a particular apostle—as the terms “gospels” and “apocryphal acts (of the apostles)” can suggest—but feature both Jesus and apostles as characters within the same story. As a result, some scholars who are interested in stories about Jesus seem to be unaware that texts classified as “apocryphal acts” could be relevant to their work.
A particularly striking example of a narrative that defies classification as either a “gospel” or “apocryphal acts” is the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome, which will appear in the third volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures in 2022. Two English translations will be included, one by me based on a Greek manuscript, and one by Slavomír Čéplö based on a Church Slavic version of the narrative. The Greek text was published with an Italian translation by Mario Capaldo in 2002, along with an edition and translation of the Church Slavic text based on a single manuscript.[2] A German translation of another Church Slavic manuscript was made by Ivan Franko a century earlier.[3] The MNTA 3 translations will be the first in English.
As readers will discover, the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome is simultaneously a story about Peter and a story about Christ. As the story begins, the apostle Peter is an old man—either 124 or 130 years old, depending on the manuscript—and has been living for years in ascetic solitude in a mountain hideaway. Then Christ shows up, disguised as a young man, and passes on a message: Peter is to leave his mountain dwelling behind and go to Rome. Peter obediently sets off and boards a ship—whose skipper is actually Christ in disguise (or the archangel Michael in Church Slavic manuscripts). A storm arises, but Peter prays and the storm is stilled. After the miracle, Peter instructs the skipper about Christ, and baptizes him. This initial part of the story has many commonalities with other stories about apostles, particularly the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals, where Andrew boards a ship whose “skipper” is really Christ. It is also a common feature of such stories for Christ to play an active role in the plot.[4]
Christ’s role in the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome increases as the story continues, to the extent that the apostle Peter does not even appear on stage in some later scenes. First, the skipper insists on selling Peter a child slave to serve him in his old age—a child slave who is actually Christ in disguise. (In the Greek version of the tale, Christ seems to be both the skipper and the child slave simultaneously, an intriguing although perhaps unintended example of bilocation.) In subsequent scenes, the child slave works miracles: he silences unclean spirits, creates a large amount of money for Peter to distribute to the poor (or catches a lot of fish in Church Slavic manuscripts), and causes fish to walk on land. Peter then sells the child to a man named Aribastos, who sends him to school.
This intriguing motif of Christ as Peter’s child slave seems to represent an adaptation of the popular stories about Jesus’ childhood that are sometimes referred to as “infancy gospels.” Narratives like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Armenian Infancy Gospel recount the antics of Jesus while a child in the company of his father Joseph. In those stories, the child Jesus helps his aged father, goes to school, astounds his teachers with his knowledge, and works miracles that lead Joseph to worry about the trouble that might be caused. There are close parallels to these stories in the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome. Here Christ takes the form of a child, helps the aged Peter, goes to school, and works miracles that cause Peter to worry that they will get into trouble. The school scenes are especially similar: a teacher asks questions that are far too simple for the pupil, and Christ proceeds to astound the teacher with his superior knowledge. Another parallel between the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome and other “infancy” traditions is the ability of the child to make fire (Acts Chr. Pet. 11:6; cf. Inf. Gos. Thom. 7:2). Reading the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome in light of such infancy narratives helps to explain the intriguing motif of Christ as Peter’s child slave: Peter takes the place of Joseph in the narrative structure, and because Christ cannot be portrayed as Peter’s son, he is depicted as his child slave instead, a structurally similar role.
While Christ is the main character in the middle part of the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome, the story ends with a focus on Peter and an account of Peter’s martyrdom. As in other stories about the apostle Peter’s demise, he is crucified head downwards at his own request, although the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome offers its own take on how Peter ended up in Rome and why his execution was ordered. In the Vercelli Acts of Peter, for example, Peter is dispatched to Rome from Jerusalem in order to confront the evil sorcerer Simon Magus, and is executed because wives and concubines have started refusing their husbands and partners sex. None of these elements appear in the Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome, where Peter’s crucifixion seems to be ordered because of his general success at winning converts, and in the Greek version because the child slave “hardens the hearts” of some people who have Nero’s ear.
The Acts of Christ and Peter in Rome is thus equally a story about Peter and a story about Christ, and defies classification as either “apocryphal acts” or a “gospel.” Like many other texts included in collections of Christian apocrypha, it illustrates the serious limitations of those conventional genre categories, and should prompt us to rethink their usefulness and consider other alternatives.
Julia Snyder is a scholar of early Christian literature and Research Associate in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.
[1] Volume 1 of Christoph Markschies and Jens Schröter, eds., Antike christliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck) is called Evangelien und Verwandtes. In Tony Burke and Brent Landau, eds., New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), texts are grouped into sections called “Gospels and related traditions of New Testament figures,” “Apocryphal acts and related traditions,” “Epistles,” and “Apocalypses.” The second volume (edited by Tony Burke and published in 2020), includes an additional category: “Church Orders.” The French collection Écrits apocryphes chrétiens (ed. François Bovon, Pierre Geoltrain, and Jean-Daniel Kaestli; Paris: Gallimard, 1997 and 2005) eschews words like “gospels” and “acts,” but groups texts in a similar manner. In the first volume, for example, section headings include “Sur Jésus et Marie,” “Visions et révélations,” and “Sur Jean-Baptiste et les apôtres.”
[2] Mario Capaldo, “Tradizione greca e slava degli Acta fabulosa di san Pietro (BHG 1485f),” Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici 39 (2002): 93–143.
[3] Franko, Ivan. “Beiträge aus dem Kirchenslavischen zu den Apokryphen des Neuen Testamentes: II. Zu den gnostischen Περίοδοι Πέτρου.” ZNW 3 (1902): 315–35.
[4] Cf. Julia A. Snyder, “Christ of the Acts of Andrew and Matthias,” in Christ of the Sacred Stories (ed. Predrag Dragutinović et al.; WUNT II, 453; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 247–62, and Julia A. Snyder, “Acts of John, Acts of Peter, Acts of Thekla, 3 Corinthians, Martyrdom of Paul,” in The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries, vol. 2 (ed. Jens Schröter and Christine Jacobi; 3 vols.; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019), 363–85.