The Apocalypse of Peter As the First Christian Martyr Text: Its Date, Provenance and Relationship with 2 Peter

Chapter 3 The Apocalypse of Peter as the First Christian Martyr Text: Its Date, Provenance and Relationship with 2 Peter

Jan N. Bremmer

Jörg Frey’s Radboud Prestige Lectures have convincingly demonstrated that 2 Peter reacts to the Apocalypse of Peter.1 His argument once again raises the question of the date and place of composition of this intriguing apocalypse, as it may help us to determine with more certainty the date and place of composition of 2 Peter. Unfortunately, these questions are not that easy to answer, as recent discussions may illustrate. Regarding the place of composition of the Apocalypse of Peter, I have wavered between Palestine and Egypt.2 On the other hand, regarding the time of composition Tobias Nicklas has been wavering too, recently locating the Apocalypse in the time after the great Jewish revolt in Egypt in 115–117, but in his contribution to this book showing himself less con- vinced of his own thesis.3 From these two problems, date and location, I have mainly concentrated my most recent discussion on the place of composition and stated regarding the time of composition: ‘At present, there is a general consensus that it must date from the last decades of the first half of the second century AD, given its mention by Clement of Alexandria.’4 Yet there is more

1 Frey elaborates here a thesis first argued by Wolfgang Grünstäudl, Petrus Alexandrinus: Studien zum historischen und theologischen Ort des Zweiten Petrusbriefes, WUNT 2/315 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). 2 Compare my “The Apocalypse of Peter: Greek or Jewish?,” in The Apocalypse of Peter, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and István Czachesz, Studies in Early Christian Apocrypha 7 (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 1–14, updated in my Maidens, Magic, and Martyrs in Early Christianity: Collected Essays I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 269–80, with my “Orphic, Roman, Jewish and Christian Tours of Hell: Observations on the Apocalypse of Peter,” in Other Worlds and Their Relation to This World: Early Jewish and Ancient Christian Traditions, ed. Tobias Nicklas et al., JSJSup 143 (Boston; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 308–9, updated in Maidens, Magic, and Martyrs, 313–28. 3 Compare Tobias Nicklas, “Jewish, Christian, Greek? The Apocalypse of Peter as a Witness of Early Second Century Christianity in Alexandria,” in Beyond Conflicts: Cultural and Religious Cohabitations in Alexandria and Egypt between the 1st and the 6th Century CE, ed. Luca Arcari, STAC 103 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 40 with his contribution to the present volume. 4 Clem. Alex. apud Eus. HE 6.14.1, cf. J.L. Lightfoot, The Sibylline Oracles: With Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on the First and Second Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132; Grünstäudl, Petrus Alexandrinus, 268–81.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004399549_004 76 Bremmer to say on both aspects, and I will therefore look once again at these problems in this essay. Unfortunately, there is no ‘smoking gun’ to determine a defini- tive solution, but I will evaluate various old arguments and offer a few new ones. Specifically, in what follows I will look at the theme of martyrdom in the Apocalypse (§ 1); its date and provenance (§ 2) and end with some conclusions regarding the date and provenance of our Apocalypse and 2 Peter (§ 3).

1 Martyrdom in the Apocalypse of Peter

Anyone interested in the history of ancient martyrdom will look in vain for attention to the Apocalypse of Peter in current surveys of early Christian mar- tyrological literature. The Apocalypse is absent from the recent provocative studies by Candida Moss, from the concise survey of martyrdom in RAC by Jan Willem van Henten and from the informed but debatable introduction to the recent new edition of many early Christian Acta martyrum by Hans Rudolph Seeliger and Wolfgang Wischmeyer.5 Clearly, scholarly conventions have framed the conversations around the Apocalypse of Peter and the Acta martyrum as two separate conversations. This is a great example of how some- times genre and category forestall our progress, as there are a number of refer- ences to martyrdom in our text. On the other hand, its survival especially in Ethiopic has made the Apocalypse perhaps less accessible to most students of early Christianity. Moreover, the earliest students of the text, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) and Eduard Norden (1868–1941), were especially interested in the depiction of hell in the Apocalypse as that was the most striking part of the newly found Greek text, which also was the easiest to compare to classical pagan literature.6 Subsequent studies have focused in particular on the relation between the Greek and Ethiopic text, between the text and the

5 Candida R. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Candida R. Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2013); J.W. van Henten, “Martyrium II,” RAC 22 (2011): 316–21; Hans Reinhard Seeliger and Wolfgang Wischmeyer, eds., Märtyrerliteratur, TU 172 (Berlin; Boston: de Gruyter, 2015), 1–45. 6 Adolf von Harnack, Bruchstücke des Evangeliums und der Apokalypse des Petrus, TU 9.2 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1893); Eduard Norden, “Die Petrusapokalypse und ihre antiken Vorbilder,” in Kleine Schriften zum klassischen Altertum, Reprint 1966 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1893), 218–33. For the early reception, see also my “The Apocalypse of Peter: Greek or Jewish?”; J.-M. Roessli, “Loisy et les Apocryphes Pétriniens découverts à Akhmîm-Panopolis,” in Gnose et maniché- isme: entre les oasis d’Égypte et la Route de la Soie : hommage à Jean-Daniel Dubois, ed. Anna Van den Kerchove and Luciana Grabriela Soares Santoprete, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Sciences Religieuses 176 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 782–86.