Page:Apocryphal Gospels and Other Documents Relating to the History of Christ.djvu/344

228 extant Acts of Pilate, which that father regarded as genuine, and which may have been so for anything we can tell. But the Greek text here translated is avowedly not earlier than the time of Valentinian, as appears in the Prologue. The phraseology is barbarous. It is unknown in what language it was primarily written. The author may have been a converted Jew who wrote in Greek.

The book has been often printed both in Latin and in Greek, and Tischendorf gives three recensions of it. The one which immediately follows is often connected with a supplement of later date, which I have called Part II.

It is perhaps the most famous of the New Testament Apocrypha, and its merits, such as they are, have attracted to it much attention. Although it largely uses the genuine Gospels, it omits important details which they exhibit, and in many other ways it departs widely from them. The marvellous incidents in it are partly pure fictions, and apparently imitations from the Apocalypse and other portions of Scripture. Tischendorf would ascribe its origin to the second century.