Friday, May 5, 2023

Note on the Apocalypsis Petri (Apocalypse of Peter)

 


 

Apocalypsis Petri

 

Composed around 135, probably in Egypt, the Apocalypsis Petri stands as one of the oldest extant works of the New Testament Apocrypha. Interestingly, it is not the surviving Greek MS (the so-called Akhmim Fragment, found in 1887), but the Ethiopic translation (found in the Corpus Clementinum in 1910), which is regarded as being closest to the original Greek text; . . .

(Christopher Veniamin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Greek Patristic Literature from Irenaeus of Lyons to Gregory Palamas [Dalton, Pa. Mount Tabor Publishing, 2022], 12-13)

 

Language

 

A riddle that has shaped the history of research devoted to this apocalypse is posed by its textual integrity. While it was composed in Greek, there are precious few extant Greek fragments with only small sections, and the complete text is only preserved in Ethiopic, itself presumably translated from a now lost Arabic version. Only one Greek witness, the so-called Akhmîm codex, spans over several pages. However, since the quotations from the Apocalypse of Peter preserved by early Greek fathers confirm the Ethiopic text and note that of the Akhmîm Codex, it becomes evident that the latter is a different recension and therefore an edited text, secondary to the one preserved in Ethiopic. As a result, this book is sometimes referred to as the “Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter” in scholarly literature. (Dan Batovici, “Apocalypse of Peter (Greek),” in Early New Testament Apocrypha, ed, J. Christopher Edwards [Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies 9; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Academic, 2022], 446)

 

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