• But Theodoret's evidence is not above suspicion. How could 'Nazarene' Jewish Christians make so anti-Jewish a book their favourite Gospel ? Theodoret's reference, like several other references of the same kind, may be to a different volume from our ' Peter.'
t But it is difficult to understand why the writer did not draw material for his anti-Jewish representation from the vain appeals of Pilate to the Jews, or from their deliberate pre- ference of Barabbas to Jesus. Perhaps these were noted in sections which have not been preserved.
5 This is inconsequent ; but here as elsewhere the fragment does not seem to have preserved the true order of the text. Or, possibly, it has omitted connecting material.
§ This Gospel, like the Protevangelium Jacobi and the^Gospel of the Twelve, is definitely pseudonymous.
II On the connexion between what follows and the Jewish doctrine of the heavenly Adam, see Stocks' essay in NKZ, 1902, p. 302 f., ib. 1903, p. 628 f. The Cross probably symbolizes the soul of Jesus (see, further, p. 600).
OOSrELS (UN-CANOmCAL)
GOSPELS (UNCANONICAL) 497
voice in heaven, and they [i.e. the sentries] saw heaven opened and two men descending thence, with a great light, and approaching the tomb.' The boulder at the opening moves of its own accord, the two figures enter, and the astonished soldiers (including the centurion and the elders) ' see three men coming out of the tomb, two supporting the third, and a Cross following them ; the heads of the two reached as far as heaven, but the head of the One whom they escorted was higher than the heavens. And they heard a voice from the heavens saying, " Hast thou preached to them that sleep ? " And from the Cross the answer came, "Yes."' The next vision is that of a man descending from heaven and entering the sepulchre. The party of soldiers and Jews then retreat, and agree to say nothing about what they have seen. The following paragraph describes how Mary Magdalene took her friends on the morning of Sunday to wait at the tomb. They find a comely youth inside [ = the man who had entered '!] ; he tells them that the Lord has risen to heaven [there is no Ascension], and they fly in terror. The fragment then breaks off abruptly : ' Now it was the last day of Un- leavened Bread, and many went away home, since the feast was over ; but we, the twelve disciples of the Lord, wept and grieved. Each left for home, grieved at what had occurred ; but I, Simon Peter, and Andrew my brother, took our nets and went to the sea, ana with us were Levi the son of Alphseus, whom the Lord . . .'
According to ' Peter,' there are no Resurrection appearances to the women or to the disciples in Jerusalem. The fragment breaks off on the edge of what seems to be an account of some appearance at the Sea of Galilee to Peter, Andrew, Levi (and some others ?). This would tally with the appear- ance preserved in the appendix to 'John,' only, in ' Peter ' it would be an appearance of the Ascended Christ, for the word of the young man (angel) to the woman at the tomb is, ' he has risen and gone away to where he was sent from ' (direffToXT], i.e. from heaven, as in Lk 4^, where Mark's i^rjXdov, i.e. from Capernaum , is changed in to dire(XTd\r}v, i. e. from heaven). A further idiosyncrasy is the apparent length of interval between the Resurrection and the flight of the disciples from Jeiusalem to Galilee. Did the writer really mean that a week elapsed ? Or is his description due to chronological in- accuracy ?
Whether the terminus ad quern for the com- position of the Gospel can be carried back earlier than the last quarter of the 2nd cent, depends upon the view taken of its relation to Justin Martyr. It had been already conjectured by Credner and others that the Gospel of Peter might be one of the apostolic memoirs used by Justin, and this con- jecture seems corroborated by the Akhmim frag- ment, which apparently supplies the basis for the references in Apol. i. 35 (the seating of Jesus on the/375/xa),i. 40 ('The Spirit of prophecy foretold . . . the conspiracy formed against Christ by Herod, the king of the Jews, and the Jews themselves, and Pilate . . . with his soldiers'), and possibly i. 50, as well as in Dial. 103 (where Herod is termed ' a king'), Dial. 97 (\axfiov ^dWovres — the phrase in ' Peter '), and Dial. 108. Upon the whole, this dependence of Justin upon the Gospel of Peter seems preferable (so.e.g'., Harnack, von Soden,Lods) to the alternative hypothesis of von Schubert and Stanton (Gospels as Hist. Documents, i. [1903] 93 f., 103 f.) that the coincidences between the two are due to the use of a common source, viz. the Acts of Pilate, an official report of the trial of Jesus pur- porting to have been drawn up by the procurator and perhaps underlying the references in the later Acta Pilati and in TertuUian.
This fixes the date of the Gospel's composition
VOL. I. — 32
appi-oximately within the first quarter of the second century. The terminus a quo depends upon the view taken of its dependence on the canonical Gospels. Those who find in it traces of all four — as if the writer knew them and employed them indifferently, quoting perhaps from memory, to suit his own dogmatic ends — naturally place the Gospel c. A.D. 125 as a very early attempt to employ the canonical traditions in the interests of a Gnostic propaganda. The dependence on Mark and even Matthew is, we think, to be granted. The coinci- dences between ' Peter ' and Luke and John (cf. Lods, op. cit. 18 f.) are not quite so clear.* There is room still for the hypothesis that ' Peter' repre- sents a popular, early type of the inferior narratives which Luke desired to supersede. At several points ' Peter' marks the same line of development which recurs in Luke and John, and as a composition from Syrian Antioch, with which the traditions of Luke and John are independently connected, it may even be conjectured to have arisen within the 1st cen- tury. To a modern reader, a comparison of its text with those of Luke and John seems at first sight to put its dependence on them beyond doubt. But doubts recur as soon as we recollect that the specific traditions which for us exist primarily in Luke and John were already in existence, at least orally, and that touches which are extant in litera- ture in these canonical Gospels for the first time must have been current decades earlier. Take, for example, a piece of evidence like that of the ' garden ' of Joseph. ' Peter ' mentions this. The Fourth Gospel also does. Therefore, it is assumed, ' Peter ' used the Fourth Gospel. Why ? It is surely illogical for those who believe that this formed part of the authentic tradition to assume that the only access to it was through the text of a Gospel at the very end of the 1st century. And even apart from this, such a tradition may have been easily known orally decades before it was committed to writing.f " The evidence generally alleged for the dependence of ' Peter ' upon Luke and John must be sifted in the light of this con- sideration, and also with a desire to avoid the mistake of supposing that inferior traditions are invariably later, chronologically, than the written forms of what is more authentic. ' Peter,' like the Gospel of the Hebrews, is in danger of being read in the light of an uncritical assumption that the 1st cent. A.D. saw nothing but the circulation of good traditions about the life of Jesus, that the canonical Gospels swept up all of these into their pages, and that the uncanonical Gospels represent invariably the later, fantastic efforts of a generation which had to make up by the exercise of its imagination for the lack of sound materials.