The Acts of Peter

Introduction

There is a moment in the history of every great tradition when the official record and the living memory of its earliest followers begin to diverge. Institutions solidify, canons are established, and the sprawling, exuberant diversity of a movement's origins gets quietly tidied away. What remains in the authorized version is coherent, authoritative, and — inevitably — incomplete. What gets left out, however, does not simply disappear. It survives in fragments, in manuscripts copied by devoted hands in distant monasteries, in texts that were read aloud in communities that did not always know or care whether Rome or Alexandria had approved of them. The text you are about to read is one of those survivors.

The document known as the Acts of Peter is among the oldest and most remarkable of the early Christian apocryphal writings. Composed most likely in the latter half of the second century — probably somewhere between 150 and 200 CE — it belongs to a remarkable cluster of texts that scholars group together as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. These writings, which include parallel accounts centered on Paul, John, Andrew, and Thomas, represent a window into a Christianity that was still in the process of defining itself, still wrestling with enormous questions about the nature of Jesus, the meaning of his resurrection, the proper relationship between body and spirit, and the role of miraculous power in the life of the believer. They are not marginal curiosities. They are primary sources for understanding how millions of early Christians actually thought, prayed, argued, and died.

To read this text today is to step into a world that feels simultaneously alien and strangely familiar. The Rome it depicts is a city of crowded insulae and grand forums, of social hierarchies both rigid and surprisingly permeable, of competing religious movements jostling for adherents in a marketplace of belief that was far more open and contested than later centuries would suggest. Into this world comes Peter — the fisherman from Galilee who became the rock upon which, according to Matthew's Gospel, Christ promised to build his church. But the Peter of this text is not quite the institutional founder of later Catholic tradition, not yet the first pope enshrined in gold mosaic above the altar of a great basilica. He is something older and stranger: a wonder-worker, a spiritual warrior, a man whose faith is powerful enough to make dried fish swim and whose voice can silence a dog trained to speak with human words. He is, in other words, exactly the kind of figure that the earliest Christian communities found compelling — and that later, more settled Christianity found somewhat embarrassing.

The text opens, in the portions that survive, with a crisis of faith. The Roman Christian community, newly energized by Paul's preaching, is thrown into confusion by the arrival of a charismatic figure named Simon, a magician of apparently formidable powers who has already clashed with Peter in Judea and who now threatens to seduce the Roman believers away from their new faith. This Simon — almost certainly related to, if not identical with, the Simon Magus of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament — is one of the great villains of early Christian literature, and the contest between him and Peter forms the dramatic backbone of the narrative. It is a contest that operates on multiple levels simultaneously: it is a battle of miracles, a theological debate conducted through spectacular public performance, and an allegory about the nature of true spiritual power versus its counterfeit. The crowds who gather in the Roman forum to watch these two men call down heavenly fire and raise the dead are not merely spectators. They are stand-ins for every reader who has ever had to choose between competing claims to truth.

What makes this text so enduringly fascinating is not just its narrative energy, though that energy is considerable. It is the extraordinary density of theological and social concerns that the story manages to pack into what is, on the surface, a relatively straightforward adventure tale. Questions about sexual renunciation and the proper relationship between married Christians and their spouses run through the narrative like a live wire. The text's attitude toward the body — simultaneously the site of spiritual transformation and the source of dangerous attachment — reflects debates that were absolutely central to second-century Christianity and that have never entirely gone away. The role of women in the early church, which the canonical New Testament addresses in famously contradictory ways, surfaces here in ways that are both surprising and deeply thought-provoking. Female characters in this text are not passive recipients of apostolic blessing. They are agents of conversion, witnesses to miracles, and in at least one case, the indirect cause of the narrative's most consequential turning point.

Then there is the question of martyrdom. The text's climax — the account of Peter's death in Rome — is one of the most extraordinary passages in all of early Christian literature. The famous episode of Peter asking to be crucified upside down, declaring himself unworthy to die in the same manner as his Lord, has echoed through Christian art, theology, and imagination for nearly two thousand years. But the speech Peter delivers from that inverted cross goes far beyond a gesture of humility. It is a sustained meditation on the nature of reality, on the relationship between the visible and the invisible, on what it means to see the world as God sees it rather than as human convention has trained us to see it. Whether you approach it as a theological document, a piece of early Christian mysticism, or simply as a remarkable piece of prose, it demands to be read with full attention.

Understanding why this text was not included in the New Testament canon requires understanding something about how that canon was formed — a process that was far more gradual, contested, and politically charged than most people realize. The great canon-forming councils of the fourth century were not simply recognizing texts whose authority had always been obvious. They were making choices, drawing lines, and in doing so, they were also constructing a particular kind of Christianity: more hierarchical, more doctrinally uniform, more suspicious of the kind of freewheeling spiritual individualism that texts like this one tend to celebrate. The Christianity of the Apocryphal Acts is a Christianity in which any believer, male or female, slave or free, might receive a vision, perform a miracle, or be called to martyrdom. It is a Christianity that has not yet fully decided what to do with the body, with sexuality, with wealth, or with Roman imperial power. Reading it alongside the canonical New Testament does not undermine the canonical texts. It enriches them enormously, restoring context and complexity that the process of canonization inevitably compressed.

A Text Between Worlds

The manuscript tradition of this text is itself a kind of adventure story. No single complete manuscript survives. What we have has been assembled from multiple sources: a Latin manuscript known as the Actus Vercellenses, discovered in the cathedral library of Vercelli in northern Italy and dating to the fourth or fifth century; a Greek fragment known as the Coptic Papyrus of Berlin; various other fragments in Greek, Coptic, Syriac, and other languages; and quotations and summaries preserved in the writings of early church fathers who sometimes cited the text approvingly and sometimes condemned it with the kind of detailed attention that tells you they had read it very carefully indeed. The process of reconstructing the text from these scattered witnesses has been one of the great scholarly detective stories of modern biblical studies, and the work is not finished. New fragments continue to surface. New arguments about the text's original language, its place of composition, and the identity of its author continue to be advanced and contested.

The question of authorship is worth pausing on, because it illuminates something important about the nature of these texts and the communities that produced them. The Acts of Peter does not claim to have been written by Peter himself. Unlike some other apocryphal texts, it does not present itself as a secret teaching preserved by the apostle for a select inner circle. It is, rather, a narrative about Peter, told in the third person by an anonymous author who clearly had access to a rich tradition of stories about the apostle and who shaped those stories with considerable literary skill. The author — or authors, since some scholars believe the text was assembled from multiple earlier sources — was almost certainly a Greek-speaking Christian, probably writing somewhere in Asia Minor or possibly Rome itself, who was deeply familiar with the canonical Gospels and with the Acts of the Apostles but who was also drawing on a living oral tradition that preserved memories and legends about the apostle that the canonical texts had not recorded.

This is a crucial point for modern readers to grasp. When we encounter miracles in this text that seem more extravagant than anything in the New Testament — a smoked tuna fish swimming in a pool, a dog delivering a lengthy verbal message to Simon Magus, a seven-month-old infant speaking with the voice of a mature man — the temptation is to dismiss these episodes as naive superstition or pious fantasy. But this would be a serious misreading. The miracle stories in this text are not simply entertainment, though they are certainly entertaining. They are theological arguments in narrative form. Every miracle Peter performs is a demonstration of a specific claim about the nature of Christ's power and its relationship to the counterfeit power wielded by Simon. The extravagance of the miracles is the point: it signals that the power at work is not merely human, not merely the product of clever technique or hidden knowledge, but something categorically different in kind. The ancient audiences who heard these stories read aloud in their communities were not credulous fools. They were people making sophisticated judgments about competing truth claims, and the miracle stories gave them a language for doing so.

The figure of Simon Magus deserves particular attention, because he is one of the most complex and interesting antagonists in all of early Christian literature. He is not simply a fraud or a charlatan. The text is careful to establish that his powers are real — or at least that they appear real and produce real effects. What distinguishes him from Peter is not that he cannot perform wonders but that his wonders serve himself rather than others, that they are rooted in pride and the desire for human admiration rather than in genuine love for God and neighbor. This distinction — between miracle as self-aggrandizement and miracle as service — is one of the text's central theological concerns, and it maps onto debates about spiritual authority that were absolutely live issues in second-century Christian communities. Who had the right to lead? What validated that right? Was it institutional appointment, personal holiness, the ability to perform signs and wonders, or some combination of all three? The contest between Peter and Simon is, among other things, a sustained exploration of these questions.

The social world that the text depicts is also worth examining carefully, because it tells us a great deal about the communities for which it was written. Rome in the second century was a city of extraordinary social complexity, and the Christian communities that had taken root there by the time this text was composed were themselves remarkably diverse. They included wealthy patrons who hosted house churches in their villas, slaves who had converted alongside their masters or in spite of them, freedmen and freedwomen navigating the complicated social terrain between slavery and full citizenship, merchants, soldiers, craftspeople, and intellectuals. The text reflects this diversity in its cast of characters. The Roman Christians who gather to hear Peter preach and to witness his contests with Simon are not a homogeneous group. They have different social positions, different relationships to the imperial order, different vulnerabilities and different hopes. And the message Peter brings to them is not a simple one. It does not promise worldly success or social advancement. It promises something stranger and more demanding: a complete reorientation of desire, a turning away from the things that Roman society valued most highly — wealth, status, sexual dominance, political power — toward something that the text can only describe in the language of paradox and vision.

The text's treatment of sexuality is one of the aspects that modern readers often find most challenging, and it is worth addressing directly. The Acts of Peter is one of several early Christian texts that present sexual renunciation — celibacy, or the abandonment of sexual relations even within marriage — as an ideal, and in some cases as a requirement for full participation in the Christian life. Several of the narrative's most dramatic episodes hinge on women who, converted by Peter's preaching, choose to withdraw from sexual relations with their husbands. This causes significant social disruption, as one might expect, and it is this disruption that ultimately brings Peter into fatal conflict with the Roman authorities. Modern readers may find this emphasis on sexual renunciation difficult to sympathize with, and it is true that it represents a strand of early Christian thought that the mainstream tradition eventually moved away from, at least for laypeople. But it is important to understand what these stories meant to their original audiences. In a world where women had very little control over their own bodies, where marriage was primarily an economic and social institution rather than a romantic one, and where sexual availability was one of the primary markers of female subordination, the call to renunciation could function as a remarkable assertion of female autonomy. The women in this text who choose celibacy are not simply obeying an ascetic rule. They are claiming ownership of their own bodies in a social context that denied them that ownership. This does not make the text's sexual ethics straightforwardly progressive by modern standards. But it does make them more complex and more interesting than they might initially appear.

Why This Text Still Matters

There is a persistent tendency in popular culture to treat the apocryphal texts of early Christianity as if they were primarily interesting for the secrets they reveal — hidden gospels, suppressed teachings, the real story that the church did not want you to know. This framing is not entirely wrong, but it is deeply misleading, because it suggests that the value of texts like this one lies primarily in their relationship to the canonical tradition, as corrections or supplements or subversions of it. In fact, the Acts of Peter is interesting and valuable on its own terms, as a document that tells us something profound about the experience of being human in a particular time and place, about the hopes and fears and desires that drove people to embrace a new and demanding religion, and about the kinds of stories that communities tell themselves when they are trying to make sense of suffering, power, and death.

The martyrdom narrative that forms the text's climax is perhaps the clearest illustration of this. Peter's death as the text describes it is not presented primarily as a historical record, though it may preserve genuine historical memory about the apostle's execution in Rome under Nero. It is presented as a theological event, a moment of revelation in which the meaning of everything that has come before is suddenly made clear. The speech Peter delivers from the cross — that extraordinary meditation on inversion and vision, on the difference between the world as it appears and the world as it truly is — is not the last words of a man who has accepted defeat. It is the triumphant declaration of someone who has seen through the surface of things to a reality that the crucifixion, far from negating, actually confirms. This is a vision of the world that has deep roots in the teaching of Jesus as the canonical Gospels present it, but the Acts of Peter develops it with a philosophical depth and a visionary intensity that is quite distinctive.

For readers coming to this text from a background in Christian theology, the encounter will be both familiar and disorienting in productive ways. You will recognize the central figures and many of the theological concerns. You will find echoes of Paul's letters, of the Gospel of John, of the book of Revelation. But you will also find a Christianity that has not yet settled into the forms that later centuries would make definitive — a Christianity that is still arguing about everything, still experimenting with forms of community and practice, still open to the possibility that the Spirit might move in unexpected directions and through unexpected people. This is not a reason to prefer the apocryphal tradition to the canonical one, or to dismiss the canonical tradition in favor of the apocryphal. It is a reason to read both, and to allow the encounter between them to complicate and deepen your understanding of what Christianity has been, what it has meant to different people in different times and places, and what resources it might still offer.

For readers who come to this text with no particular religious investment, the rewards are different but equally real. The Acts of Peter is a genuinely compelling narrative, full of vivid scenes and memorable characters, driven by a dramatic tension that builds steadily toward a climax of real power. It is also a remarkable historical document, one of the few texts that gives us an intimate view of the daily life, the social anxieties, and the spiritual aspirations of ordinary people in the Roman Empire of the second century. The Rome it depicts is not the Rome of emperors and senators, of triumphs and gladiatorial games, though those things form the backdrop. It is the Rome of back streets and house churches, of slaves and freedwomen, of people who had been told by every institution around them that they did not matter and who had found in a new religious movement the extraordinary and dangerous idea that they did.

The scholarship on this text has grown enormously in the past half century. What was once treated as a minor curiosity at the fringes of biblical studies has become a central text in the growing field of early Christian apocrypha, and the questions it raises — about canon formation, about gender and sexuality in early Christianity, about the relationship between miracle and authority, about the nature of martyrdom and its cultural functions — are now recognized as central questions for anyone who wants to understand how Christianity became the religion it became. The present edition aims to make the fruits of that scholarship accessible to general readers without sacrificing the complexity and nuance that the text deserves. The translation prioritizes clarity and readability while remaining faithful to the rhetorical character of the original, which moves fluidly between the colloquial and the elevated, between vivid narrative and sustained theological reflection.

One of the most important things a reader can bring to this text is a willingness to sit with uncertainty. We do not know who wrote it. We do not know exactly when or where it was composed. We do not know how much of it has been lost or how accurately the surviving manuscripts preserve the original. We do not know with certainty what community or communities it was written for, what specific controversies it was responding to, or how widely it was read and in what contexts. These uncertainties are not failures of scholarship. They are features of the historical situation, reminders that the past is genuinely other, that it does not yield its secrets easily or completely, and that the effort to understand it requires imagination as well as analysis. What we do know is that this text was read, copied, translated, debated, condemned, and preserved across more than fifteen centuries, and that the communities that found it worth preserving were responding to something real in it — something that spoke to their experience of faith, doubt, power, suffering, and hope.

As you begin reading, it may help to hold in mind a simple image: a group of people gathered in a private home somewhere in Rome, perhaps in the evening, perhaps by lamplight, listening to someone read this story aloud. They are not scholars or theologians. They are people with ordinary lives and extraordinary hopes. They have chosen to affiliate themselves with a movement that their neighbors regard with suspicion and their government regards with intermittent hostility. They are trying to understand what that choice means, what it requires of them, and what it promises. The story they are listening to does not give them easy answers. It gives them something better: a world in which the questions they are living with have been taken seriously, in which the struggle between authentic faith and its counterfeits has been dramatized with honesty and power, and in which the possibility of a reality deeper than the one their society presents to them has been affirmed with a conviction that can survive even death. That is what great literature does, in any age. And by that measure, what you are about to read is great literature indeed.

The pages that follow will take you into one of the most vivid and consequential stories that the early Christian world produced. They will introduce you to a Peter who is fully human — capable of failure, doubt, and fear — and fully committed, a man whose faith has been tested by denial and restored by resurrection and who now carries that faith into the heart of the empire that crucified his Lord. They will show you a world in which the battle between truth and deception is fought not in abstract theological argument but in the streets and forums and private homes of a great city, before crowds of ordinary people trying to decide what to believe. And they will bring you, finally, to a cross — inverted, paradoxical, theologically inexhaustible — where a man speaks his last words about the nature of reality and the shape of salvation. Read carefully. Read slowly when the text rewards it. And allow yourself to be surprised.

The Acts of Peter

Chapter 1

On the first day of the week — that is, on the Lord's day — a great crowd gathered, and they brought many sick people to Peter so that he might heal them. One man in the crowd ventured to speak up: "Look, Peter, in our presence you have made the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk. You have helped the weak and given them strength. But why have you not helped your own daughter, the virgin who grew up beautiful and has believed in the name of God? There she lies, one whole side of her body completely paralyzed, stretched out helpless in the corner. We see those you have healed — yet your own daughter you have left as she is."

Peter smiled and said to him: "My son, God alone knows why her body is not whole. Understand that God is neither weak nor powerless to grant his gift to my daughter. But so that your heart may be convinced, and all who are present may believe all the more —" then he turned to his daughter and said: "Rise up from where you lie, with no one helping you but Jesus alone, and walk before everyone here, and come to me." And she got up and came to him, and the crowd rejoiced at what had happened.

Then Peter said to them: "See — your hearts are now convinced that God is not without power in anything we ask of him." And they rejoiced all the more and praised God.

Then Peter said to his daughter: "Go back to your place, lie down, and return to your infirmity, for this is what is right for you and for me." The girl went back and lay down in her place and was as she had been before. The whole crowd wept and begged Peter to make her well.

But Peter said to them: "As the Lord lives, this condition is right for her and for me. On the day she was born, I received a vision, and the Lord said to me: 'Peter, a great temptation has been born to you this day, for this daughter will bring harm to many souls if her body remains whole.' I thought at the time that the vision was mocking me.

"When the girl was ten years old, she became a cause of stumbling for many. A very wealthy man named Ptolemaeus saw her bathing with her mother and sent word asking to take her as his wife. Her mother refused. He sent repeatedly and could not restrain himself.

"His servants seized the girl, carried her off, and laid her down before the door of our house, then left. When her mother and I came down and found her, one entire side of her body — from her toes to her head — was paralyzed and withered. We carried her away, praising the Lord who had preserved his handmaid from defilement, shame, and corruption. That is the reason the girl remains as she is to this day.

"Now you should also know what became of Ptolemaeus. He went home and grieved day and night over what had happened, and from the many tears he shed he went blind. When he had resolved to get up and hang himself, at about the ninth hour of the day a great light suddenly filled the whole house, and he heard a voice saying to him: 'Ptolemaeus, God did not give you these vessels for corruption and shame. And it is even less fitting for you, who have believed in me, to defile my virgin. Know her as your sister, for I am one spirit to you both. Now rise and go quickly to the house of the apostle Peter, and you will see my glory; he will tell you what you must do.'

"Ptolemaeus did not delay. He ordered his servants to guide him and bring him to me. When they arrived, he told me everything that had happened to him through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then he received his sight — both the sight of his eyes and the sight of his soul — and many people believed in Christ. He did good to them and gave them the gift of God.

"After this, Ptolemaeus died and departed this life to go to his Lord. In his will he left a piece of land in my daughter's name, because it was through her that he had come to believe in God and been made whole. The management of this property fell to me, and I handled it with great care. I sold the land — and God alone knows — neither my daughter nor I kept the money. I sold the land and held back nothing of the price, but gave it all to the poor.

"Know this, then, you servants of Jesus Christ: God guides those who are his and prepares good things for every one of them, even when we think God has forgotten us. Therefore, brothers, let us be watchful, let us grieve over our sins, and let us pray — and the goodness of God, for which we wait, will look upon us."

Peter spoke further to them all, glorifying the name of Christ the Lord, and gave them all of the bread. When he had distributed it, he rose and went to his house.