Page:The Apocryphal New Testament (1924).djvu/543

Rh things, the rise of the Nile, the dew, &c., and also somewhat about Hezekiah and Solomon (l.c., p. 241).

A revelation made by our Lord to the apostles about Abbaton the angel of death (Coptic Martyrdoms).

There is also a sort of Apocalypse of Philip extant only in Irish, which is apparently derived from a Latin original. It is called the Evernew Tongue. The tongue of the apostle Philip&mdash;which had been cut out seven times by his persecutors, ineffectually&mdash;discourses to an assembly of kings and prelates at Jerusalem, and tells them wonderful secrets of nature. See the ''Journal of Theol. Studies'', 1918 (xx. 9), where I give an account of it.

In the same article I write on an apocalypse of which we do not know the name. Portions of it exist in Latin and in Irish&mdash;the latter embodied in the Vision of Adamnan. The Rev. St. J. Seymour also dealt with it more recently (l. c., xxii. 16).

It tells of the sufferings of souls in the several heavens, and of their presentation to the Lord and acceptance or rejection. A distinctive mark of it is that the names of the heavens, and of the angelic guardian of each, are given.

Of the three Christian Apocalypses which will be presented here, two, Peter and Paul, are visions of the next world, the other, Thomas, is a prophecy of the end of this.

 

We have not a pure and complete text of this book, which ranked next in popularity and probably also in date to the Canonical Apocalypse of St. John.

We have, first, certain quotations made by writers of the first four centuries.

Next, a fragment in Greek, called the Akhmim fragment, found with the Passion-fragment of the Gospel of Peter in a manuscript known as the Gizeh MS. (discovered in a tomb) now at Cairo. This is undoubtedly drawn from the Apocalypse of Peter: but my present belief is that, like the Passion-fragment (see p. 90), it is part of the Gospel of Peter, which was a slightly later book than the Apocalypse and quoted it almost in extenso. There is also in the Bodleian Library a mutilated leaf of a very tiny Greek MS. of the fifth century which supplies a few lines of what I take to be the original Greek text.

Thirdly, an Ethiopic version contained in one of the numerous forms of the Books of Clement, a writing current in Arabic and Ethiopic, purporting to contain revelations&mdash;of the history of the world from the Creation, of the last times, and of guidance for the churches&mdash;dictated by Peter to Clement. The version of the Apocalypse contained in this has some extraneous matter at the beginning and the end; but, as I have tried to show in a series of articles in the Journal of Theological Studies (1910-11) and the Church Quarterly Review (1915), it affords the best general idea of the contents of the whole book which we have. The second book of the Sibylline Oracles contains (in Greek hexameters) a paraphrase of a great part of the Apocalypse: and its influence can be traced in many early writings&mdash;the Acts of Thomas (55-57), the Martyrdom of Perpetua, the so-called Second Epistle of Clement, 