The Apocalypse of Peter's Description of Hell

What the Apocalypse of Peter is

The Apocalypse of Peter is a Christian revelation written in the first half of the second century, in which the risen Jesus shows Peter the world to come: first the land of the righteous, then the place of punishment. It is not a gnostic book and it did not come from Nag Hammadi. It is a mainstream apocalypse that several early churches read aloud as scripture.

That matters for reading it honestly. This is not a fringe text smuggled past the bishops; it is what ordinary second-century Christians in Egypt and Palestine were told hell was like, written in the same generation as some of the New Testament's later books. The English throughout this page is M. R. James's translation from The Apocryphal New Testament (1924), which is in the public domain and which we quote in full, gaps included.

What hell looks like in it

Hell here is a place, not a condition. It sits directly across from paradise, so that the two can be seen in one glance. It is dark and filthy; the angels who administer the torments wear dark clothing to match the air of it. Within that landscape sit pits, lakes, rocks and rivers, each holding one category of sinner.

“And I saw also another place over against that one, very squalid; and it was a place of punishment, and they that were punished and the angels that punished them had their raiment dark, according to the air of the place.”

The first sinners named are the ones who talked. Peter is shown them before the murderers, before the idolaters, before anyone else — an ordering that tells you what the author was most afraid of.

“And some there were there hanging by their tongues; and these were they that blasphemed the way of righteousness, and under them was laid fire flaming and tormenting them.”

Both passages come from the Greek fragment found at Akhmîm (verses 21 and 22 in James's numbering). The Ethiopic version tells the same scene in different words, and the two run in parallel until the Greek breaks off, which is why James printed them one after the other and cross-referenced them verse by verse.

The punishments, sin by sin

The tour is organised as a list. Each stop names a torment and then identifies the people in it with the same formula — “And these were they that” — repeated down the page like a legal docket. The table below follows the Greek Akhmîm sequence, then continues into the material that only the Ethiopic preserves.

Two of these deserve their words in full, because they show how bluntly the book ties money to punishment — riches held without pity, and lending at compound interest:

“And in another place were gravel-stones sharper than swords or any spit, heated with fire, and men and women clad in filthy rags rolled upon them in torment. And these were they that were rich and trusted in their riches, and had no pity upon orphans and widows but neglected the commandments of God.”

“And in another great lake full of foul matter (pus) and blood and boiling mire stood men and women up to their knees. And these were they that lent money and demanded usury upon usury.”

The parenthetical gloss on “foul matter” is James's, not the manuscript's; we leave his editorial marks where he put them rather than tidying the text into something it is not. Elsewhere the tour is grimmer still — there are sections on women who caused abortions, and a passage condemning sexual acts between people of the same sex which James marked as very corrupt in the Ethiopic while noting that the sense is clear in the Greek. Those sections are printed in our text with the damage marked rather than paraphrased away.

Some stops give the victims a speaking part. In the Akhmîm Greek the souls of the murdered stand and look on, and what they say is addressed to God rather than to the men being punished:

“And I saw the murderers and them that were consenting to them cast into a strait place full of evil, creeping things, and smitten by those beasts, and so turning themselves about in that torment. And upon them were set worms like clouds of darkness. And the souls of them that were murdered stood and looked upon the torment of those murderers and said: O God, righteous is thy judgement.”

Why the punishment fits the organ

Nearly every torment in the book is aimed at the body part that committed the sin. Blasphemers and false witnesses are hung, gnawed or burned at the tongue. Women who dressed for adultery hang by the hair they dressed. Those who spoke evil of the way of righteousness gnaw their own lips. The principle is exactness, not cruelty for its own sake.

Martha Himmelfarb's Tours of Hell (1983) is the standard study of this pattern; she traced the demonstrative naming formula and the measure-for-measure logic back through Jewish apocalyptic writing, arguing that the Christian tours inherited a form rather than inventing one. Dante would later give the same idea a name, contrapasso, and build a hundred cantos on it. The Apocalypse of Peter got there roughly eleven hundred years earlier and with no poetry at all: it simply catalogues.

How close it came to the canon

The Apocalypse of Peter is the strongest counter-example to the idea that the excluded books were all excluded early and easily. Four separate witnesses show it inside the argument rather than outside it, and one of them shows it still being read in church more than a century after Eusebius had filed it among the spurious books.

• The Muratorian canon list — a Latin fragment usually dated to the late second century, though Albert Sundberg and Geoffrey Hahneman argued for a fourth-century date — receives the Apocalypses of John and of Peter, while noting that some Christians will not allow the Petrine one to be read in church. That is a canon list admitting a live disagreement in the same breath.
• Clement of Alexandria (c. 200 CE) treated it as authoritative. Eusebius reports that Clement's Hypotyposeis gave summaries of the disputed writings including the Apocalypse of Peter, and Clement's surviving Eclogae Propheticae paraphrases its teaching that infants who died unwanted are handed to a caretaking angel — the angel the Ethiopic text calls Temlakos.
• Codex Claromontanus preserves a Latin stichometric list, probably fourth-century in origin, that still counts the Revelation of Peter among the books alongside Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.
• Sozomen, writing his church history around 440 CE, says that although the ancients judged it spurious, the Apocalypse of Peter was still read once a year in some churches of Palestine on the day of preparation before Easter.
• Eusebius (c. 320 CE) is the counterweight: he files it among the spurious writings and observes that no orthodox writer of his own generation had used it as evidence.

So the honest summary is that it lost a long argument rather than being struck out of anything. That is how the boundary of the New Testament was drawn generally — by slow attrition across four centuries, not by a single vote — and it is why the phrase “removed from the Bible” misdescribes almost every book it is applied to. We work through the actual list here.

Is there mercy in it?

There is, and it is the most contested feature of the book. Twice the text stages a plea for the damned: once by Peter himself, who is rebuked for it, and once by the tormented, who repent too late. Then a third passage hints at something the rest of the tour seems to exclude.

“Lord, suffer me to speak thy word concerning the sinners: It were better for them if they had not been created.”

Jesus's answer is that Peter is presuming to be more compassionate than God, who made the sinners out of nothing and knows what he is doing. The damned themselves get the second plea, and it is refused by an angel with a name borrowed from Tartarus:

“And all they that are in torment shall say with one voice: Have mercy upon us, for now know we the judgement of God, which he declared unto us aforetime, and we believed not.”

And then, a few lines later, the Ethiopic promises the elect a washing in a lake with a strange half-Greek name:

“Then will I give unto mine elect and righteous the washing (baptism) and the salvation for which they have besought me, in the field of Akrosja…”

What had they besought him for? A small Greek scrap in Vienna, the Rainer fragment, was identified as part of this book only after James published his translation, and it carries this passage in a form that appears to say the elect will be granted salvation for the people they ask for — that is, for some of the damned. Richard Bauckham built a case that the original Apocalypse of Peter taught exactly that, and that later copyists softened it; Jan Bremmer and others have been more cautious about how much weight a scrap can carry. The disagreement is real, it is unresolved, and it turns on a fragment small enough to lose in a coat pocket.

The road from here to Dante

No line runs directly from the Apocalypse of Peter to the Inferno. What runs between them is a genre. The Apocalypse of Peter is the first Christian text to take a named human being on a guided tour of the damned and catalogue what he sees; every later Christian hell is written in the form it established.

The relay is traceable. The Apocalypse of Paul, written in Greek in the late fourth century and translated into Latin as the Visio Pauli, reworks the Petrine tour and adds a guide angel. The Latin Visio became one of the most copied books of the Middle Ages, feeding the Vision of Tundale (c. 1149) and the tract on Saint Patrick's Purgatory (c. 1180). Dante wrote at the far end of that chain, and gave hell an architecture and a moral logic the earlier tours had only gestured at. What he did not need to invent was the basic idea: that the punishment says out loud what the sin was.

The other half of the early Christian afterlife imagination went the opposite direction — not a tour of hell by a living visitor, but an invasion of it by Christ. That story, the harrowing of hell, ended up in the creed while its source book stayed outside the canon, which is a fair summary of how this whole literature was treated.

What survives, what is missing

No complete Greek manuscript of the Apocalypse of Peter exists. The book is reconstructed from four unequal witnesses, and every modern reading of it depends on which one is trusted where.

• The Akhmîm fragment (P. Cair. 10759), found in the winter of 1886–87 in a monk's grave at Akhmîm in Upper Egypt. The same small codex carried the fragment of the Gospel of Peter and a Greek portion of Enoch — which is why James suspected the apocalypse fragment might belong to the gospel rather than stand on its own.
• The Ethiopic version, published by Sylvain Grébaut in 1910 and translated afresh by Hugo Duensing in 1913. It is much longer, and most scholars since James — Bauckham and Dennis Buchholz among them — now think it stands closer to the original than the Greek does, reversing James's own instinct.
• The Bodleian leaf, a scrap two and three-quarter inches by two, with thirteen lines of eight to ten letters a side, overlapping the idolatry sections.
• The Rainer fragment in Vienna, identified after 1924, carrying the disputed mercy passage discussed above.

Where the witnesses break off, they break off. The Greek stops dead after verse 34; the Ethiopic continues into a long later discourse that James judged plainly of later date and did not translate in full. What we publish is everything James translated — the Akhmîm Greek, the Bodleian leaf and the Ethiopic, with those seams left visible — and the Rainer scrap named in the manuscript note, since it was identified too late to be in his edition. A hell that has holes in it is more useful than one that has been quietly repaired.