Page:The Apocryphal New Testament (1924).djvu/69



[front] (that I) may reveal unto you all my glory and show you all your strength and the mystery of your apostleship. ...

[back] Our eyes penetrated through all places. We beheld the glory of his Godhead and all the glory of his dominion. He clothed us with the power of (our) apostleship.

We gain little from this. The scene is evidently the garden of Gethsemane. Our Lord utters a hymn to the Father: a faint resemblance to that in the Acts of John is perceptible. In it are clear reminiscences of 1 Cor. xv. Further reminiscences of St. John’s Gospel occur just after this. The second fragment implies a vision of the glorified Christ seen by the apostles. The writing of which these are fragments cannot have been a very early production. The apostles speak in the first person plural: but we need not infer that the book was a Gospel or the Gospel according to the Twelve (though this is Revillout’s view). As in other cases (e.g. the Gospel of Peter) a single apostle would most likely have figured as the author in some other part of it.

2. Bound up with the fifth-century manuscript which contains the Pistis Sophia is a slightly later leaf on which is the end of a book that may have been a Gospel. It has echoes of the last twelve verses of St. Mark.

the righteous man. They went forth by threes to the four regions of the heaven and preached the gospel of the kingdom in the whole world, Christ working with them by the word of strengthening and the signs and wonders which accompanied them. And so have men learned of the kingdom of God in all the earth and in the whole world of Israel for a testimony for all nations that are from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof.

3. Similarly the remains of the ancient manuscript of the Acts of Paul include a single leaf of a Gospel narrative:

... the works ... they wondered greatly and pondered in their hearts. He said unto them: Why marvel ye that I raise the dead, or that I make the lame to go, or that I cleanse the lepers or raise up the sick, or that I have healed the palsied and the possessed, or that I have parted a few loaves and satisfied many, or that I have walked on the sea or that I have commanded the winds? If ye believe this and are convinced, then are ye great. For verily I say