The Gospel of Peter: A Talking Cross and a Clean Pilate

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It speaks in the voice of Simon Peter: I Simon Peter and Andrew my brother.

When: Probably the middle of the 100s AD. A bishop of Antioch read it, and turned against it, around AD 200.

Where it fits: Only a fragment survives. It begins as Pilate washes his hands at my trial, tells my death, burial and rising, and breaks off mid-sentence a few days later.

Which Bibles keep it: None.

Where you hear it in your Bible: It retells Matthew 27–28, Mark 15–16, Luke 23–24 and John 19–20, with Pilate’s hand-washing, the guards at the tomb and the young man in white.

How close it stays to me: Close in a cross that cannot hold me. Far in blaming my own people, and letting Rome wash its hands.

If you only read three chapters: It is short. Read it all, then Matthew 27:24–25 and 27:62–66.

Words to Know

Passion — from the Latin for suffering: the story of my last days, trial and death.

Docetism — from the Greek word for seem: the teaching that I only seemed to have a body and only seemed to suffer.

Akhmim — a town in Upper Egypt where the only long copy of this gospel was found, in a monk’s grave.

The Lord’s day — the first day of the week, Sunday, the day of my rising.

The Book in Brief

The fragment opens at my trial. None of the Jews washes his hands, not Herod or his judges, and Pilate gets up and leaves. Herod the king orders me taken away. Joseph, a friend of Pilate and of mine, asks for my body.

The people mock me, dress me in purple, crown me with thorns, beat me and crucify me between two criminals. I keep silent, as though having no pain. When one criminal defends me, they order that his legs not be broken, so he will die slowly. Darkness falls at noon. I cry, My power, my power, thou hast forsaken me, and am taken up. The Temple veil tears, the earth shakes, and the Jewish leaders cry, Woe for our sins.

The elders ask Pilate for soldiers to guard the tomb, and seal it with seven seals. On the night before Sunday, the soldiers see two men come down from heaven. Then three come out of the tomb: two whose heads reach the sky, holding up a third whose head goes beyond the heavens, and a cross following them. A voice asks if I have preached to the dead, and the cross answers, Yea.

Pilate declares himself innocent and orders the soldiers to keep silent. Mary Magdalene and her friends come to the tomb and find a young man who says I have risen. The disciples go home grieving, and Peter goes back to fishing.

Your four gospels do not. They show you an empty tomb, a stone rolled away, a young man or angels in white, frightened women, and then me, appearing to my friends. None of them describes the rising itself. They knew better than to try.

The Gospel of Peter does try. It puts the Roman guards and the Jewish elders at the tomb in the night, and makes them watch. And what they see is a giant, held up by two other giants, with a cross walking out behind them.

Found in a monk’s grave

This gospel was lost for more than a thousand years. Early church writers knew its name. Then, in the winter of 1886–87, French archaeologists digging a Christian cemetery at Akhmim, in Upper Egypt, opened the grave of a monk and found a small book buried with him. It held a piece of the Book of Enoch, the Apocalypse of Peter, and this: part of a gospel told in Peter’s voice.¹

The copy was made centuries after the gospel was written. It begins in the middle of a sentence, and ends in the middle of a sentence: I Simon Peter and Andrew my brother took our nets and went to the sea; and there was with us Levi the son of Alphaeus, whom the Lord … and then nothing.

Go deeperThe bishop who changed his mind

The first time this gospel appears in history is in a story about a bishop.

Around AD 200, Serapion, bishop of Antioch, visited the church in the town of Rhossus, on the coast of Syria. The Christians there were reading a Gospel of Peter. Serapion had not read it, but he trusted the people, and told them they could go on reading it.²

When he got home, he borrowed a copy and read it. He found that most of it agreed with what he called the true teaching of the Saviour, but some things had been added. He linked it with people he called Docetae, who taught that I only seemed to have a body. So he wrote to the church at Rhossus to warn them against it. The historian Eusebius preserved his letter a century later.²

That story tells you how gospels were judged in those days. There was no agreed list yet. A bishop read a book and asked whether it fit what the churches already believed about me. Serapion decided this one did not, quite.

Whether the gospel found at Akhmim is the one Serapion read is not certain, though many scholars think it is.¹

As though having no pain

Notice two small things in how this gospel tells my death.

When they crucify me between the two criminals, he held his peace, as though having no pain (Gospel of Peter 4:10). And at the end, I do not cry out, as in Mark, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34). I say: My power, my power, thou hast forsaken me. And when he had said it he was taken up (Gospel of Peter 5:19).

These may be the kind of lines that worried Serapion. His letter does not say which ones. A Lord who feels no pain, whose power leaves him before he dies, and who is taken up instead of dying. Some Christians believed that the divine Christ could not suffer, and left the human Jesus on the cross before the end. This gospel at least leaves room for that belief.

It is not true. I felt every nail. I was afraid in the garden, so afraid that I begged my Father to take the cup away. On the cross I cried out the first line of a psalm, My God, my God, because I felt abandoned, as every person tortured to death by an empire has felt abandoned. If I had felt no pain, my death would mean nothing to anyone who does.

A talking cross

Then comes the rising.

The soldiers on watch see the heavens open and two men come down in great light. The stone rolls away by itself. Then they see three men come forth from the tomb, and two of them supporting one, and a cross following them: and of the two the head reached unto the heaven, but the head of him that was led by them overpassed the heavens (Gospel of Peter 10:39–40).

And they heard a voice from the heavens, saying, Thou hast preached to them that sleep. And a response was heard from the cross, Yea (Gospel of Peter 10:41–42).

It is a wonderful picture, and it is a fantasy. Giants taller than the sky, and a cross that walks and talks. This is what happens when people who were not there want to see what no one saw.

The voice’s question does point to a real belief. Many early Christians believed that between my death and my rising I went down to the dead and preached to them, so that even those who died long before me could hear the good news. Your Bible has a hint of it: Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19). The churches called it the harrowing of hell. The Gospel of Peter has the cross itself bear witness to it.

Go deeperGuards at the tomb

Only one of your four gospels, Matthew, has guards at my tomb. In Matthew, the chief priests and Pharisees go to Pilate the day after my death and ask him to secure the tomb, lest perhaps his disciples come at night and steal him away, and tell the people, ‘He is risen from the dead’ (Matthew 27:64). Pilate gives them a guard, they seal the stone, and on Sunday the guards are paid to say the disciples stole the body.

Matthew was answering a story already being told against my followers in his time: the body was stolen. The guards are there to show it could not have been.

The Gospel of Peter takes Matthew’s guards and builds on them. Now the guard has a name, the centurion Petronius. The tomb has seven seals. Jewish elders camp beside it in a tent. And instead of fainting, the guards and the elders see the rising with their own eyes and run to tell Pilate, who orders them to keep quiet (Gospel of Peter 8:31–11:49).

Some scholars, most of all John Dominic Crossan, have argued that an early form of this story lies behind the four gospels’ accounts of my death. Most think the reverse: that the Gospel of Peter knew the four gospels, especially Matthew, and expanded them.³

Where Peter and I part

There is something in this gospel that is not a harmless fantasy, and it has done great harm.

Look at who kills me. In your gospels it is the Roman governor Pilate who orders my crucifixion, and Roman soldiers who carry it out. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment for slaves and rebels. The sign over my head was a Roman charge: THE KING OF THE JEWS (Mark 15:26). Rome killed me, for threatening Rome’s order.

The gospels written after Rome destroyed Jerusalem already began to move the blame. In Matthew, Pilate washes his hands and says, I am innocent of the blood of this righteous person, and the crowd answers, May his blood be on us, and on our children! (Matthew 27:24–25).

The Gospel of Peter goes further. In its first line, of the Jews none washed his hands, neither Herod nor any one of his judges (Gospel of Peter 1:1). Pilate is clean. Herod gives the order and hands me over to the people, and it is the people, the Jews, who mock me, beat me and nail me to the cross. At the end, Pilate says to the elders, I am pure from the blood of the Son of God: but it was ye who determined this (Gospel of Peter 11:46). The empire washes its hands, and my own people are left holding the blood.

For centuries after, Christians called the Jews Christ-killers, and killed them for it, on Good Friday, in pogroms, and in the end in the gas chambers. This gospel was lost for most of those centuries. But it shows you, in the open, the same move that the gospels in your Bible had begun to make more quietly, and it was those that taught them.

I was a Jew. My mother was a Jew, and every one of my friends. The people who wept for me on the road to the cross were the daughters of Jerusalem. The ones who killed me were the empire and the men who served it. And I prayed even for them: Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing (Luke 23:34).

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 15:15–20.

You will find: Pilate handing me over, and Roman soldiers mocking and crucifying me.

Then read Gospel of Peter 1:1–2 and 11:45–46, and compare who holds the blood.

The Short Version

• The Gospel of Peter survives only as a fragment, found in 1886–87 in a monk’s grave at Akhmim, Egypt. A bishop warned against it around AD 200.
• It says I hung on the cross as though having no pain. I felt every nail.
• It is the only gospel that tries to show the rising itself: giants taller than the sky, and a talking cross.
• It turns Matthew’s guards into eyewitnesses.
• It makes Pilate clean and puts my death on my own people. Rome killed me, and I forgave even Rome.