The Apocalypse of Peter is an early Christian text, written in the first half of the second century AD, in which the risen Christ shows Peter detailed visions of heaven and hell — the punishments of sinners matched to their sins, and the radiant land of the blessed. It is the earliest surviving Christian tour of the afterlife, written more than a thousand years before Dante, and for a while it was a serious candidate for the New Testament. Today the complete work survives only in the Ethiopic manuscript tradition.
Most people have never heard of it, yet its afterimage is everywhere: in medieval visions of hell, in Dante's Inferno, in the popular imagination of fire, torment, and paradise. This guide covers what the Apocalypse of Peter is, what Peter actually sees, how close it came to making the Bible, the two very different versions that survive, the startling mercy passage scholars still argue about, and how the book quietly founded an entire genre.
The Apocalypse of Peter presents itself as the testimony of the apostle Peter, recording a revelation given by Jesus after the resurrection. No modern scholar thinks Peter wrote it. Like much of the literature covered in our guide to the pseudepigrapha, it was written under an apostle's name to claim his authority — a common and, in antiquity, widely understood practice.
Most scholars date it to roughly 100–150 AD, which makes it older than some books that did enter the New Testament discussion late, and puts it within a generation or two of the Gospels. One influential proposal, argued by the scholar Richard Bauckham, places it in Palestine during the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 AD, reading its warning about a false messiah who persecutes believers as a reference to Bar Kokhba himself. Whatever its exact origin, the book was circulating widely by the late second century, quoted by Clement of Alexandria and listed in the earliest surviving canon list.
One clarification before going further: this is not the same book as the Coptic "Apocalypse of Peter" found among the Gnostic codices at Nag Hammadi in 1945. That is a separate, later work with entirely different concerns — you can read about that collection in our Nag Hammadi library guide. The text this page covers is the older, far more influential Apocalypse of Peter: the vision of heaven and hell.
In the full Ethiopic version, the book opens as a conversation on the Mount of Olives. The disciples ask Jesus the same question they ask in Matthew 24: what will be the signs of your coming and of the end of the world? Jesus answers with the parable of the fig tree — interpreted here as Israel — and warns of deceivers and false messiahs who will come before the end. Then the scene widens into full apocalypse: the resurrection of the dead, with the angel Uriel presiding as every soul is restored to its body, and the judgment in which each person receives according to their deeds.
What follows is the part that made the book famous: a systematic vision of the punishments of the wicked. Its organizing logic is striking — each punishment mirrors the sin that earned it, usually through the very part of the body that sinned:
The catalogue runs on — persecutors, deceivers, those who abandoned their parents, those who twisted justice — each category named, each punishment fitted to the offense, with angels of judgment (one is called Tartarouchos, "keeper of Tartarus") overseeing the whole. It is vivid, sometimes grim material, but it is not gratuitous: the text's repeated point is that the judgment is exact and just, that nothing done in secret stays hidden, and that the powerful who escaped justice in life do not escape it after.
Then the vision turns. Peter is shown the destiny of the elect: a land outside this world, filled with light, blossoming with unfading flowers and fragrant trees, where the righteous shine in glory. In the Ethiopic version this culminates on the holy mountain in a scene that echoes the Gospel transfiguration — Peter sees two radiant figures, glorified humanity as it will be, their faces shining beyond anything in this world, before Christ ascends into the opened heavens. Hell in this book is detailed, but heaven is the destination the narrative bends toward.
Readers of the Book of Enoch will recognize the DNA. Enoch's guided journeys past the places of punishment, centuries earlier, established the template of the escorted cosmic tour — and when the Akhmim manuscript of the Apocalypse of Peter was found, it was bound in the same codex as Greek fragments of Enoch. Ancient readers filed them together.
The full Ethiopic text of the Apocalypse of Peter in clear modern English — the earliest Christian vision of heaven and hell, complete and readable. Members read free.
Get the Apocalypse of Peter →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryThis is not a fringe text that never had a chance. The Apocalypse of Peter had a genuine canonical career — arguably the strongest of any book that ultimately fell out.
The Muratorian fragment, usually dated to the late second century and the oldest surviving list of New Testament books, names exactly two apocalypses that the church receives: the Apocalypse of John — our Revelation — and the Apocalypse of Peter. It adds one honest note of dissent: "some among us will not have it read in church." That single sentence captures the book's whole story — accepted by many, doubted by some, hanging in the balance.
Clement of Alexandria, one of the most learned Christians of the late second century, quoted it as authoritative scripture and commented on it alongside the disputed letters. Two centuries later the historian Sozomen recorded that some churches in Palestine still read the Apocalypse of Peter aloud once a year, on Good Friday — a liturgical afterlife that outlasted its canonical one. But the tide had already turned: Eusebius, writing his catalogue of Christian books in the early fourth century, placed it among the spurious works, and the great fourth-century canon lists left it off entirely. For the fuller story of how those lists formed, see our guide to the lost books of the Bible.
For most of history, the Apocalypse of Peter was known only from quotations in early Christian writers. Then it came back — twice, in two different forms.
In the winter of 1886–87, French archaeologists excavating at Akhmim in Upper Egypt opened the grave of a monk buried with a small parchment codex. Inside were portions of the Gospel of Peter, Greek fragments of 1 Enoch — and a Greek text of the Apocalypse of Peter. Published in 1892, the Akhmim fragment caused a sensation: the lost apocalypse, or a large piece of it, had returned. But it was incomplete, and it framed the material differently — the punishments appear as a vision Peter narrates in the past tense, and the setting and order diverge from what the ancient quotations led scholars to expect.
The second recovery settled the picture. In 1910, a complete version of the work came to light in Ge'ez — classical Ethiopic — embedded within a larger body of Ethiopian manuscript literature, and the scholar M. R. James soon demonstrated that this was the whole Apocalypse of Peter. Comparison with the early quotations, and with two small Greek fragments (the Bodleian and Rainer fragments), convinced most scholars that the Ethiopic text preserves the work's original shape far more faithfully than Akhmim, whose editor appears to have reworked the material. It is a familiar pattern: as with the Book of Enoch and Jubilees, the Ethiopian church's manuscript tradition preserved complete what the rest of the world had lost — part of the much larger story told in our Ethiopian Bible guide. Our edition translates the complete Ethiopic tradition.
The most astonishing passage in the book is also its most debated. The Rainer fragment — a small piece of early Greek text housed in Vienna — preserves a promise made to the elect: that God will grant them whomever they ask for out of the punishment, and that those so rescued will receive a washing in the field of Acherusia, the paradise-lake of the blessed. In other words, the text appears to say that the prayers of the righteous can bring the damned out of torment.
The Ethiopic version carries a version of the same passage, though in a garbled and softened form — and that softening is itself telling. Scholars such as M. R. James and Richard Bauckham have argued that the mercy passage is original, and that later copyists blunted it precisely because it was theologically explosive: an early Christian book, once read in churches, holding open a door out of hell. A related passage borrowed into the Sibylline Oracles so unsettled one later reader that a marginal note in a manuscript protests against it.
It would be too much to call the Apocalypse of Peter a universalist book — its punishments are emphatically real, and the text does not say everyone escapes them. But what it describes is remarkable on any reading: the same book that gave Christianity its first detailed hell also recorded, at the edge of that hell, a mechanism of mercy. Readers should weigh the passage for themselves; it is one of the best reasons to read the complete Ethiopic text rather than summaries of it.
The honest, history-framed answer is that the two apocalypses were direct competitors — the Muratorian fragment lists them side by side — and over the third and fourth centuries the church's tests for canonicity favored John's.
Apostolic authorship was the first test, and doubts about the Petrine apocalypse hardened early; by Eusebius' day the mainstream judgment was that Peter had not written it. Breadth of use was the second: Revelation, whatever the arguments over it (and it was fiercely disputed in the Greek East for centuries), had deep roots in the churches of Asia Minor and the Latin West, while the Apocalypse of Peter's strongholds were narrower — Egypt and Palestine above all. Content played a part too: church authorities grew wary of a book whose graphic afterlife scenes invited speculative teaching, and the mercy passage cannot have helped. There was no dramatic suppression, no single council casting it out — the book was weighed over generations, left off the fourth-century lists, and then simply stopped being copied in Greek and Latin. Books that stop being copied disappear. This one survived because Ethiopian scribes kept copying it.
Measured by influence per reader, the Apocalypse of Peter is one of the most consequential books of early Christianity. It stands at the head of the entire genre of afterlife visions — the guided tour of hell and paradise, with punishments matched to sins and a saintly witness reporting back.
Its material was absorbed into the Sibylline Oracles and, above all, into the fourth-century Apocalypse of Paul, which lifted its structure, expanded its geography, and became one of the most copied visionary texts of the Middle Ages. From the Apocalypse of Paul the tradition runs through the great medieval visions — Tundale's, Drythelm's, St. Patrick's Purgatory — down to Dante. Dante almost certainly never read the Apocalypse of Peter itself; by his time it had been lost in the West for centuries. But the architecture of the Inferno — the descending catalogue of sinners, the punishments that mirror each sin (Dante's contrapasso), the escorted pilgrim who sees and returns — is the Petrine apocalypse's template, transmitted through a thousand years of imitators. When modern readers picture hell, they are, at several removes, picturing this book.
Yes — and it may be the highest ratio of historical importance to reading time in early Christian literature. The complete text runs to only a few dozen pages, and in a single sitting you get: the earliest detailed Christian vision of heaven and hell; a book the early church seriously weighed for the New Testament; the disputed mercy passage in its full context; and the fountainhead of a genre that shaped Western imagination through Dante and beyond.
Read it as what it is — a second-century Christian visionary text, not doctrine — with Matthew 24 and the letter of Jude nearby for context. Pair it with the Book of Enoch to see the tradition it grew from, and with the other lost books to see the company it kept. Our edition presents the complete Ethiopic text in clear modern English, with the historical context to read it well.
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