Category:Gospel of Peter (text)

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The Gospel of Peter (see Online Text) is an early (2nd century) Christian document, now included in collections of NT Apocrypha.

Overview

The Gospel of Peter was recovered in 1886, by the French archaeologist, Urbain Bouriant. The 8th-9th century manuscript was found buried with an Egyptian monk, in the modern Egyptian city of Akhmim (sixty miles north of Nag Hammadi). It was first published in 1892 (see Bouriant, "Fragments du texte grec du livre d’Énoch et de quelques écrits attribués à saint Pierre" in Mémoires de la mission archéologique française au Caire, 1892).

Some major themes

The Gospel seems to supplement the narrative of Mark (where there was no account of the resurrection) with data from the Gospel of Matthew, reflecting the situation after the destruction of the Temple, when all the entire Jewish population of Jerusalem is collectively blamed for the death of Jesus.

“The Jews, the elders, and the priests realized how much evil they had done to themselves and began beating their breasts, saying, “Woe to us because of our sins. The judgment and the end of Jerusalem are near” (25).

Jesus is still called “the Son of God = The Messiah = the King of Israel”. There is no reference to his divinity. There is no noticeable influence from the Gospel of John.

When Jesus died “the centurion… reported: Truly he was a son of God (=a righteous man)! Pilate answered and said: I am clean of the blood of this son of God… (11:45-46).

It is the only Gospel to describe the actual resurrection of Jesus.

History of research

As the first non-canonical gospel to have been rediscovered in the dry sand of Egypt, its publication in 1892 by Urbain Bouriant occasioned intense interest and debate among the major specialists of the time.

A long period of silence followed, interrupted only by the publication of the commentary by Léon Vaganay in 1930.

The scholarly debate about the Gospel of Peter reemerged in the 1970, following the publication of the commentary by Mara in 1975. In the 1980s Crossan suggested that the Gospel of Peter preserved the earliest narrative about the Passion of Jesus. The hypothesis has not gained consensus. The most recent commentaries present the text as a 2nd century example of reworking of the earliest Gospel traditions.

References

• / [[]] / In: Dictionary of New Testament Background (2000 Evans & Porter), dictionary,

• / [[]] / In: The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992 Freedman), dictionary,

External links

• Wikipedia