The Apocalypse of Peter: A Gnostic View of the Crucifixion
In most tellings of the crucifixion, Jesus dies in agony while his followers weep. One Coptic text from Egypt gives a startling picture. The apostle Peter looks up and sees the Savior glad and laughing above the cross, while another figure is being nailed to it.
Peter asks what he is seeing, and the reply is one of the strangest answers in early Christian writing. The Apocalypse of Peter was lost for centuries and was found only in 1945, in a jar of papyrus books near Nag Hammadi. It shows us a Christian world far wider, and angrier, than the one handed down by the churches.
Not the Other Apocalypse of Peter
Two different books carry this title. The better known Apocalypse of Peter is a Greek work of the second century that gives a tour of heaven and hell, with graphic punishments for sinners. Some early churches read it as Scripture.
The one found at Nag Hammadi (Codex VII, third text) is a different book altogether. It survives only in Coptic, in a translation of a lost Greek original, and scholars usually date its composition to the third century, though the exact date is uncertain.
It is often grouped with the Gnostic writings, though some scholars prefer more careful labels, since it lacks much of the elaborate scheme of heavens and rulers found in other Gnostic works.
A Vision in the Temple
The setting is Jerusalem. Peter and the Savior are in the Temple, and Peter sees priests and a crowd rushing toward them with stones. The Savior tells him they are blind, and that Peter should not fear. A series of visions follows, in which Peter is shown the crucifixion from two points of view.
On one level, Peter sees the usual scene: a man whose hands and feet are being nailed. On another, he sees a living figure standing nearby, who is glad and laughing. The Savior explains. The one being nailed is only the fleshly part, the "substitute," a body that belongs to the world and can be harmed.
The living Jesus, the one who is laughing, cannot be touched. Those who think they have killed him have hurt only an empty form.
The Laughing Savior
The laughter is the most remarkable thing in the book. It is not cruel. In this view, the powers of the world mistake the shell for the person, and their effort is pointless and a little absurd. The one who suffers is the part that was always going to die, and what is truly alive is beyond their reach.
This teaching is called docetism, from the Greek word for "to seem." It holds that the suffering of Christ was only apparent. The idea was condemned by the later church, which insisted that Jesus truly suffered and truly died, and which saw in his real pain the heart of the faith.
The Apocalypse of Peter stands on the other side, and its readers seem to have found comfort in a Savior who is untouched by pain.
An Angry Book
The text is also a polemic. Its author attacks fellow Christians, in particular leaders who "call themselves bishops and deacons," and who, he says, are like dry canals, with no true water in them. He accuses them of leading others astray and of claiming authority they have not earned.
Such language shows that the early church was no single body. Different groups all claimed to hold the true teaching of Jesus, and they spoke bitterly of each other.
It is worth remembering that we are hearing only one side. Most of what we know about such groups comes from their opponents, so a text like this helps us hear one party in its own voice, with all the heat of the argument.
Echoes Elsewhere
The idea that someone else died in Jesus' place was not unique. The second-century bishop Irenaeus reports that a teacher named Basilides taught that Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross, was crucified in Jesus' stead while Jesus stood by and laughed.
We know this only from Irenaeus, who was an opponent. A hymn in the Acts of John likewise shows the Lord in a vision, apart from the cross.
A thousand years later, a verse in the Qur'an (4:157) says that the Jews did not kill Jesus nor crucify him, "but it appeared so to them." Scholars debate how that verse relates to the earlier Christian traditions, and Muslim commentators have understood it in various ways. The question of how such an idea traveled, if it did, remains open.
Closing
The Apocalypse of Peter does not argue its case so much as stage it, and it leaves the reader with a picture: a cross, a victim, and above them a Savior who smiles at the confusion of the world. Whatever one believes about the crucifixion, the image is hard to forget.
It reminds us how many ways the first Christians found to answer the oldest question, which is what to do with suffering.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Testimony of Truth: The Gnostic Critique of the Material world
- The Apocalypse of Paul: The Gnostic Ascent Through the Heavens
- The Letter of Peter to Philip: The Gnostic Anatomy of the Struggle
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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