Apocalypse of Peter - Content

Content

The Apocalypse of Peter is framed as a discourse of the Risen Christ to his faithful, offering a vision first of heaven, and then of hell, granted to Peter, the favourite figure of the emerging mainstream Church (as opposed to James the Just, favourite of the Jewish Christians). In the form of a nekyia it goes into elaborate detail about the punishment in hell for each type of crime, later to be depicted by Hieronymus Bosch, and the pleasures given in heaven for each virtue.

In heaven, in the vision,

• People have pure milky white skin, curly hair, and are generally beautiful
• The earth blooms with everlasting flowers and spices
• People wear shiny clothes made of light, like the angels
• Everyone sings in choral prayer

The punishments in the vision each closely correspond to the past sinful actions in a version of the Jewish notion of an eye for an eye, that the punishment may fit the crime. Some of the punishments in hell according to the vision include:

• Blasphemers are hung by the tongue.
• Women who "adorn" themselves for the purpose of adultery, are hung by the hair over a bubbling mire. The men that had adulterous relationships with them are hung by their feet, with their heads in the mire, next to them).
• Murderers and those that give consent to murder are set in a pit of creeping things that torment them.
• Men who take on the role of women in a sexual way, and lesbians, are "driven" up a great cliff by punishing angels, and are "cast off" to the bottom. Then they are forced up it, over and over again, ceaselessly, to their doom.
• Women who have abortions are set in a lake formed from the blood and gore from all the other punishments, up to their necks. They are also tormented by the spirits of their unborn children, who shoot a "flash of fire" into their eyes.
• Incidentally, those unborn children are "delivered to a care-taking" angel by whom they are educated, and "made to grow up."
• Those who lend money and demand "usury upon usury" stand up to their knees in a lake of foul matter and blood.

"The Revelation of Peter shows remarkable kinship in ideas with the Second Epistle of Peter. It also presents notable parallels to the Sibylline Oracles while its influence has been conjectured, almost with certainty, in the Acts of Perpetua and the visions narrated in the Acts of Thomas and the History of Barlaam and Josaphat. It certainly was one of the sources from which the writer of the Vision of Paul drew. And directly or indirectly it may be regarded as the parent of all the mediaeval visions of the other world."

The Gospel parables of the budding fig tree and the barren fig tree, partly selected from the parousia of Matthew 24, appear only in the Ethiopic version (ch. 2). The two parables are joined, and the setting "in the summer" has been transferred to "the end of the world", in a detailed allegory in which the tree becomes Israel and the flourishing shoots Jews who have adopted Jesus as Messiah and achieve martyrdom.

There is also a highly contentious section which explains that in the end God will save all sinners from their plight in Hell:

"My Father will give unto them all the life, the glory, and the kingdom that passeth not away, ... It is because of them that have believed in me that I am come. It is also because of them that have believed in me, that, at their word, I shall have pity on men... "

Thus, sinners will finally be saved by the prayers of those in heaven. Peter then orders his son Clement not to speak of this revelation since God had told Peter to keep it secret:

"... thou must not tell that which thou hearest unto the sinners lest they transgress the more, and sin."