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PETER, GOSPEL OF

A 2nd-century c.e. pseudonymous work literarily related to the Synoptic Gospels. A Greek Gospel manuscript from the 7th century purporting to have been written by Peter was found by French archaeologists in 1886-87 in Egypt. Scholars identified it as the Gospel of Peter, witnessed only twice in antiquity, by Eusebius (HE 6.12.2-6) and Origen (Comm. on Matt. 10.17). The manuscript, only partially preserved, abruptly begins in the trial of Jesus before Pilate, continues with his death, burial, and resurrection, and breaks off at the beginning of an appearance of the risen Lord to several disciples in Galilee. Two fragments from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri were identified in 1972 as the Gospel of Peter and demonstrate this book to be circulating by 200.

Past scholarship viewed the Gospel of Peter as gnostic or docetic, following Eusebius. More recently it is viewed as mainly a Great Church document (probably used by Justin and almost certainly by Mileto of Sardis), but one also usable by Gnostics. Most current research focuses on its relation to the canonical Gospels. John Dominic Crossan, following Helmut Koester, has argued that a source which he isolates in the Gospel of Peter, “The Cross Gospel,” goes back to the mid-1st century and was a source of all four canonical Passion narratives. Others have sharply contested this, maintaining that the Gospel of Peter is literarily dependent for most of its composition on the Synoptics, especially Matthew, and supplemented with 2nd-century oral tradition from popular mainstream Christianity.

Bibliography. R. E. Brown, “The Gospel of Peter — A Noncanonical Passion Narrative,” in The Death of the Messiah (New York, 1994) 2:1317-49; J. D. Crossan, The Cross That Spoke (San Francisco, 1988); C. Maurer and W. Schneemelcher, “The Gospel of Peter,” in New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Schneemelcher and R. McL. Wilson, rev. ed., 1 (Philadelphia, 1991): 216-27.

Robert E. Van Voorst

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

PETER, GOSPEL OF

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)