Talk:Apocalypse of Peter

Untitled

Wouldn't the third quarter of the second century be 150 - 175? The page currently notes it as 175 - 200. (Anon.)

Yes, last quarter is correct. Text now corrected. Thank you. --Wetman 05:59, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

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I am not expert enough to edit this page, but the grammar is terrible. Some sentences in the first paragraph do not make sense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.195.57.31 (talk) 04:39, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Without changing information, I've completed sentences, made the text clearer and set it under three simple headings. --Wetman 05:59, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I too had a go, but even deleting a suspect comma would change the information. A problem seems to be that the lede deals with a Greek text and an Ethiopic text (later called an Arab Christian document) that are basically two different texts, yet subsumed into one article. What little we know about the either one gets very muddled here by the combination in a single article. I propose splitting off the Ru'ya Butros into a separate article! Wegesrand (talk) 16:59, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

Suppression

Someone wanted to revert the following, as original research: "Comparison of the two on-line translations confirms that it is not the same text discussed here." What would Jon Stewart of The daily Show say of Wikipedians' concept of originality and research when he heard this! --Wetman (talk) 05:46, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Here's another attempted suppression (in italics) that should be discussed rather than silently censored:

"The Apocalypse of Peter was eventually not accepted into the Christian canon and thus remains today among the New Testament apocrypha, though the numerous references to it attest to its being once in wide circulation. Thus the disappearance of every single manuscript of the work is perhaps not entirely coincidental."

May Wikipedia make any reference at all to the concerted, consistent official suppression over the centuries of non-mainstream Christian texts? Perhaps not. --Wetman (talk) 06:46, 24 May 2008 (UTC):

One problem I have with such a reference is that it smacks of a "Vast right-wing conspiracy" type of talk that does not lend credibility to the article. A second problem is that "suppression" is a loaded word; surely a more neutral word is available. A third problem is that no conspiracy is needed to explain the disappearance over centuries of an obscure and neglected text; age, accident, recycling, and war, coupled with the very high cost of copying, are more than enough explanation for such disappearances.

That said, I don't really have an objection to the article as it now stands. It successfully avoids the loaded word "suppression". And it is reasonable to assume that had the Apocalypse of Peter been considered canonical, it likely would have been better preserved. Surely that, as the article correctly states, is not entirely coincidental. Rwflammang (talk) 15:44, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

(I guess I could add volcanic eruptions to that list of explanations of why all works not diligently copied eventually disappear. The link is to a fascinating news story about the "only surviving library from antiquity", although the term "surviving" may yet turn out to be optimistic. Rwflammang (talk) 16:52, 11 July 2008 (UTC) )

The unnamed library at Herculaneum mentionmed in the news article is the Villa of the Papyri, containing the only surviving Roman library. Is there a single text uncontroversially noted as suppressed by the Catholic Church in any Wikipedia article?--Wetman (talk) 21:37, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, I suggest you look at the articles on the Wycliffe Bible, Machiavelli's Prince, Copernicus and Galileo's heliocentric publications Faustina Kowalska's Divine Mercy. If they don't note suppression, they should. Of course, all these works are run-away best sellers, so they might not illustrate your point very well. But best-sellers are the only ones I'm likely to have heard of. You might want to take a look at the works listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. No doubt there are some works there that have disappeared entirely. But to the best of my knowlege, there was no analogue to the Index before the 16th century. For texts older than that, we only have conciliar condemnations, like those of Wycliffe. Arius, Nestorius, and a host of lesser theologians fall into that category, and many of their works, obviously, have not survived. But then the works of many of their persecutors have been lost as well. How significant are any of these losses? I don't know. Rwflammang (talk) 17:05, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

4 Esther?

I never heard of 4 Esther. Perhaps 4 Esdras was meant? Rwflammang (talk) 21:23, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

This source seems to indicate that the Apocalypse of Esdras was meant: [1]. There is no meantion of Esther. I will change the article. Rwflammang (talk) 18:11, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Peter as opposed to James

The Article now includes: "..granted to Peter, the favourite figure of the emerging mainstream Church (as opposed to James the Just, favourite of the Jewish Christians)". This sentence shall be removed because: 1) the figure of Peter cannot be summarized in so a short statement. There is a wikilink to Saint Peter where all the infos and different POV can be find. 2) to choose this statement to describe Saint Peter instead of many other possible choices (as "the head of the Apostles") is a POV. 3) to say that Peter was in opposition to James is a POV not at all universally accepted 4) We are speaking about a text, the Apocalypse of Peter, that says nothing about Peter as opposed to James. 5) it is un-sourced. I see no reason for this statement here in this Article. There is already the Article about Peter. I kindly ask not to revert my edit without any justification. A ntv (talk) 18:22, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Impressive. Ordinarily, deletions made by passers-by who have never contributed to an article are not backed by so many justifications. As a general rule, deleting is not editing. One spends many tiresome hours debating with oneself whether deletions are improvements: in rare cases, they are indeed.--Wetman (talk) 21:49, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

You are right I've never edited this Article. I've edited other similar articles, as the Jewish Apocalypse of Zephaniah that is very similar in date and in the description of the hell to the Apocalypse of Peter. What was striking in the sentence was that it supported that this text was an expression of the mainstream Church because it referred to Peter. On the contrary one of the few Judeo-Christian survived text, the Clementine literature, uses Peter as leading figure. A ntv (talk) 12:00, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Ru'ya Butrus

Is the document "Ru'ya Butrus" even related to the Apocalypse of Peter? This article should say yes or no if there is any commonality between the two.

If the only relation is the name, as seem to be the case, then 99% of the Ru'ya Butrus section should be removed to elsewhere, maybe as it own article. tahc ^chat 07:10, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Changing Grébaut to Maspéro

I'm changing the phrase "during excavations directed by Sylvain Grébaut during the 1886–87 season" to "during excavations initiated by Gaston Maspéro during the 1886–87 season": see Van Minnen in Bremmer et al. 2003, p. 17. Grébaut could certainly not have directed the digs, since he was only born in 1881: https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb12083556t.

Confusion over dating

This article makes it seem that both the massive Ethipic version and the miniscule Greek version are dependent on 4 Esdras. The source listed states that this is for the Ethiopic version. The Greek version cannot be dated to after 100 AD, based on the fact that an unrelated document with the same name quoted 4 Esdras. The Greek version is not an excerpt from the Ethiopic version. They are two different documents.

I don't want to tamper with the article, but as it stands it is confusing and even misleading. Perhaps these documents need separate articles? Either way they should not be confused as a single document. 24.114.38.59 (talk) 06:41, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

Interpretation

I think we should interpret without changing the meaning of original text. 'It was not allowed to be read in church by others' is sort of enlargement. Nuance of that sentence states that all of the people in church officially banned reading Apocalypse of Peter. There are 'some' people, written as 'some' among us, who would not have it read in church. People who don't want it to be read were maybe not even majority but minority, and I think that is why it was included in Muratorian canon. Otherwise, it would not have been included in, and therefore just rejected from the canon. 58.79.236.68 (talk) 21:09, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Apocalypse of Peter/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: SnowFire (talk · contribs) 18:17, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Seltaeb Eht (talk · contribs) 17:16, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi SnowFire, thanks for improving this article on an important and interesting early apocryphal text. I'll start the review, comments to follow shortly. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 17:16, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Images

Pass on images. All are well-chosen and have appropriate pd tags or licensing. No section screams out as being under-illustrated. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 18:38, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I'll dig into reviewing the article content and leave some comments this evening (EDT).

Prose - well-written, verifiable, neutral, broad

Article is great overall. Below are some suggestions/questions (not demands) for improvement:

• In 1907–1910, a large set of documents...a collection of Antoine d'Abbadie. - the provenance of this Ethiopic manuscript confused me a little. After following the link to d'Abbadie's page, I guess I follow that: d'Abbadie acquired it from an unknown source at an undetermined time in the 19th C; after his death, his collection of Ethiopic manuscripts (and others?) were published in French. Maybe I'm not parsing correctly, but it could be presented a little more clearly - maybe reconfigure so d'Abbadie is mentioned before James?

• Date of authorship Scholars hypothesize that the author of the Apocalypse of Peter may have been from Roman Judea or Roman Egypt. - Bauckham's case for Judea is well made in the prose adjacent to the picture, but the argument for Egypt isn't made until late in the article. Really, doesn't the paragraph The Apocalypse of Peter fits...8th century or later. belong in this section, rather than Later influences?

• In the Ethiopic version, Peter experiences - introduce Peter as "the apostle Peter" or "the disciple Peter"?

• the Apocalypse of Peter shows a close resemblance in ideas with the epistle 2 Peter - should this textual relationship also be referenced in the dating section?
  • Thanks for the review!
  • d'Abbadie: Yeah, it's tricky. I was kind of going for a "chronological as seen from what we knew about the Apocalypse of Peter" as d'Abbadie didn't know he'd purchased Pierre's Apocalypse at the time, and it was only once James noticed that the pieces were put together in retrospect. (But I've reorganized it to be a bit more strictly chronological, starting with d'Abbadie.)
  • I went ahead and added a brief sentence + footnote on the Egyptian origin bit. TBH the Mueller defense of Egyptian origin is not very convincing, but a general stance of "if Clement was talking about it, then it was already popular in Egypt, and the easiest assumption is that it had the most time to become popular there" is fair enough.
    • Also, maybe I should clarify it more although I'm less sure how, but the "8th century or later" bit later in the article is on the origin of... well there's not really a title for it, but "the other stuff in the Ethiopic manuscript that had the ApocPeter in it as one section without directly calling it the ApocPeter." The Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection of the Dead as the title of the combined work of both ApocPeter + (unnamed other stuff that most scholars are less interested in). If you're curious, you can see it in the 2024 Beck link in the "translations" list, just keep reading after the ApocPeter section is finished.
  • Done. (I suppose it's a little weird in that it's the apostle Peter in the Ethiopic and the disciple Peter in the Akhmim Greek!)
  • Not a great fit there. Nearly everyone agrees that the Clementine Oracles were quoting the Apocalypse of Peter (well, not Adamik, but he's wrong) so that's useful for dating (backed by Clement), but the problem with 2 Peter is that scholars argue about which came first. And more generally the date of 2 Peter itself isn't very known or agreed upon (anywhere from 60 to 150 AD!). I think most lean toward the 100-150 range, which is... exactly the same as ApocPet, and thus still doesn't really clarify things. :( SnowFire (talk) 22:21, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

@SnowFire Apologies, had a few busy days at work and wanted to give the article another good, focused once-over. Your changes have definitely cleared up my points above. On a re-read, I find the article very informative, well-researched, and well-written. Glancing through Google Scholar, there doesn't appear to be any major work missing and it appears the cited works are well-represented.

I'm going to give it one more read through to make sure I'm not missing anything, but after that will be passing.

One minor quibble for you to consider: In the second paragraph of the lead, consider the use of parentheses. In some cases, you give a term in common parlance, then the technical or non-English term in parentheses "Second Coming of Jesus (parousia)" and in others the opposite " katabasis (vision of the afterlife)". Maybe consider standardizing, or look at whether all those terms need to be defined in the lead. Doesn't hurt the article overall, just strikes me as odd as a reader. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 15:38, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I wondered if someone would bring that up. There are a lot of glosses in the second paragraph, but I figured there was a lot of technical terminology that gets used in the literature I should mention somewhere. I booted parousia down to the body, and standardized on "accessible English term first, fancy Greek/Latin term as the gloss." (Although I suppose it's possible now that someone could think "katabasis" is glossing only "afterlife"? Oh well.) SnowFire (talk) 17:09, 24 August 2024 (UTC)