With this post I conclude my discussion to the Gospel of Peter – although, of course, I’m

always happy to engage with any questions you have about it (or anything else). What we
have seen so far is that the Gospel was known in antiquity, even though it came to be judged
heretical. Our principal source of information about it is in a discussion of the church
historian Eusebius, who mentions a Gospel of Peter known to a Syrian bishop Serapion, who
eventually judged it inauthentic because it (allegedly) proclaimed a “docetic” understanding
of Christ (that he was not really a human being who really suffered).

A Gospel fragment was discovered in 1886 that scholars almost immediately claimed to be a
portion of the Gospel of Peter mentioned by Eusebius (and Serapion before him). But is it
that? Here are the issues, laid out in brief order. Again, this is lifted from my discussion in
my (and Zlatko Plese’s) book The Other Gospels.

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The author of this account [the discovered fragment] writes in the first-person on two
occasions, once without identifying himself (“I and my companions” v. 26), but the other
time indicating that he is none other than the disciple Peter: “But I, Simon Peter, and
Andrew my brother…” (v. 60). Here then is a Gospel with the marks of antiquity, written in
the name of Peter. Is it the Gospel of Peter known and proscribed by Serapion at the end of
the second century?

Unfortunately,

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Unfortunately, since Eusebius chose not to quote the passages of the Gospel that Serapion
had found potentially offensive to orthodox faith, but open to docetic construal, it may be
impossible ever to know. Scholars did identify this text with Serapion’s almost immediately
upon its discovery, for example, in U. Bouriant’s first edition in 1892. The identification was
accepted without question by the host of scholars who published editions or discussions of
the find soon thereafter. In part the identification was obvious: Serapion spoke of a Gospel
by Peter, we have record of only one such Gospel in the early church, and now we have an
ancient Gospel that claims to be written by Peter. Contributing to the identification,
however, was the sense that the theological emphases of this text coincide with what
Eusebius tells us about the Gospel, for it was thought that it was indeed a docetic text.
Particularly to be noted are the statements in v. 10, that Jesus “was silent as if he had no
pain” (if he had no pain, he must not have had a real body); in v. 19 his cry “My power, O
power, you have left me behind” (is this the divine Christ leaving the body of the man
Jesus?); the statement that on the cross “he was taken up” (Jesus’ body obviously wasn’t
“taken up,” since it remained on the cross; was it his “spirit”–the divine Christ–that
ascended?); and of course the resurrection narrative, where the body that emerges from the
tomb is obviously not a normal, but a superhuman body.

A number of scholars later in the twentieth century, however, came to question whether
these passages are necessarily docetic: v. 10 indicates that Jesus was silent “as if” he had no
pain–not that he had no pain. The cry in v. 19 is just a paraphrase of the cry of dereliction
in Mark 15:34. And his “being taken up” may simply be a euphemism for his “giving up his
spirit”–that is, for dying. Moreover, even in the New Testament Gospels Jesus’ resurrection
body is not a normal human body (it can walk through walls and disappear at will, for
example)–but that does not make these books docetic.
In trying to resolve these issues it is useful to return to what Eusebius indicates about
Serapion and the Gospel of Peter. Nowhere does Eusebius (or Serapion) indicate that the
Gospel was actually written from a docetic perspective, only that while the book was for the
most part orthodox, it was open to a docetic interpretation (hence it was used by the
Docetae). Certainly the Gospel we now have before us is all that. Much of the Gospel is
comparable to the Gospels of the New Testament, and there are some passages that could
be understood docetically (whether they were meant to be docetic is an entirely different
question).

For these reasons, the majority of scholars today see this Gospel as the one referred to by
Serapion in the late second century. Assuming that this identification is correct, what is the
book’s relationship to the Gospels of the New Testament, and what is its date? The first
issue has occupied a large number of scholarly discussions over the years, with every
possible relationship being proposed: (a) that the Gospel of Peter is a pastiche of the earlier
canonical Gospels with legendary accretions; (b) that its author had read the earlier Gospels
and constructed his own account based on his (somewhat faulty) recollection of them; (c)
that the author was writing independently of the other Gospels and had derived his stories
from the oral traditions about Jesus; (d) that the Gospel of Peter was based on a source that
ante-dated the canonical Gospels, and that it preserved this source better than they, so that
it, not they, represents the earliest form of the tradition of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
The final option has had the fewest adherents. On the other hand, since there are so few
verbatim agreements with the other Gospels, it is hard to establish that the author actually
used them as literary sources. And so it seems more likely that he constructed his Gospel
on the basis of oral traditions and/or on recollections of accounts he had earlier read.

Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Gospel of Judas Iscariot

The Discovery of the Gospel of Peter