UP TO THIS POINT IN my discussion of ancient lying, deception, and forgery I have been using the term “truth” in a very simple sense, to mean something like “correct information.” In reality, though, truth and its opposite, falsehood, are complex. I think we all recognize this deep down, even if we haven’t given it a good deal of thought. When we watch a movie, we often ask, “Is this a true story?” By that we mean, “Is this something that really happened?” If the answer is yes, then we somehow feel assured and comforted that the events took place, and so, as a story, it is “truer” than one that is just made up. But even then we never think that absolutely everything found in the movie—all of the characters, the dialogue, the individual scenes, and so on—is absolutely and completely the way it “really” happened. We allow for a kind of poetic license of distortion, even when acknowledging that the story is somehow “true.”

One could easily make the case that a movie can be true in a deeper sense even if it is about something that never happened. This has been my view for many years, and it used to drive my kids crazy when they were young. We’d be watching a movie, and they’d say, “Dad, is this a true story?” And I’d almost always say yes. But then they’d remember that I tend to have a different view of things, and they’d ask the follow-up question, “No, Dad, I mean did this really happen?” I’d say no, and they’d continue to be puzzled.

As some of my readers may be. How can a story be “true” if it didn’t happen? In point of fact, there are all sorts of true stories that didn’t happen, as everyone will admit, I think, if they think about it a bit. When I try to illustrate this with my students, I usually rehearse for them the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.

True Stories That Didn’t Happen

EVERY GRADE-SCHOOL KID IN the country knows the cherry tree story. As a young boy, George Washington, for unknown reasons, took a hatchet to his father’s cherry tree. When his father came home, he saw the tree and asked, “Who chopped down my cherry tree?” Young George answered, “I cannot tell a lie. I did it.” The way the story is normally told, we don’t find out what happened afterwards—was young George taken out to the woodshed? The story ends with George’s one-liner.¹

We know that this story never happened, because the person who invented the tale later admitted to having done so. He was a Christian minister named Mason Locke Weems, usually known as Parson Weems. As a later biographer of Washington, Parson Weems confessed that he made up the story, even though he once had claimed that he received it from a credible eyewitness (a nice paradox: he “told a lie” in this story about not lying).

Here, then, is a story that we know is nonhistorical. But we still tell it to our children. Why? Not because we are trying to teach them about the facts of colonial history, but because we think the story conveys a “truth” that we want our children to learn. The truth claims of the story actually work on several levels. On one level the story is a good piece of political propaganda for the United States. Who was George Washington? He was the father of our nation. What kind of person was he? He was an honest man, a man who would never tell a lie. Really? How honest was he? Well, one day when he was a kid…The conclusion is clear. This country is founded on honesty. This country is honest. This country cannot tell a lie. Or so the story goes.

But the story of George Washington and the cherry tree functions on another level as well, and this is probably why most parents are glad their kids learn it. This is a story about personal morality and responsibility. I told the story to my kids because I wanted them to be like young George. Even if they did something wrong, I wanted them to come clean and tell the truth about it. It is better to be truthful and face the consequences than to live a life of dishonesty. It is better not to tell a lie.

My point is that fiction, even historical fiction, can in some sense convey “truth” even if it is something that “didn’t happen.” Truth is more than simply correct information.

That does not mean, however, that there is no such thing as falsehood. Quite the contrary, there are plenty of kinds of falsehood: incorrect information, flat-out deception, stories that convey messages that we do not accept as “true” based on our understanding of the world.² If I were to read a story about the childhood of Joseph Stalin that stressed his inherently sweet disposition, his kind, gentle nature, and his deep concern for the well-being of others, I would say that the story is false.

Ancient people also had a more nuanced sense of truth and falsehood; they too had stories that they accepted as “true” in some sense without thinking that they actually happened.³ Most scholars today recognize that the majority of educated people in ancient Greece and Rome did not literally believe that the myths about the gods had actually happened historically. They were stories intending to convey some kind of true understanding of the divine realm and humans’ relationship to it. And ancients had their equivalents of modern fiction. It is true, as some scholars have emphasized, that modern notions of fiction are much more sophisticated and nuanced than anything you can find in antiquity. But in addition to myths ancient people had epic poems, legends, and novels (sometimes called “romances”), which correspond in many ways to the forms of fictional narrative that we have today. People didn’t tell and retell, read and recite these forms of fiction simply because they thought they were literally true, but for much the same reason that we read fiction today: for entertainment, to learn something, to help them understand themselves and their world better.

The notion of “fiction” is very interesting. If we read a book that claims to be an authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, we expect it to stick to the facts and not to convey historically incorrect information. But if we read a novel about a president of the United States in the 1980s—a book that touts itself as pure fiction—we may expect some kinds of historical verisimilitude (the president would not be shown surfing the Internet or checking his wall on Facebook), but we do not expect to be given actual historical facts about an actual historical person. Ancient equivalents to modern fiction worked the same way. Readers expected the narrative to make some kind of historical sense—that is, to be plausible—but they did not expect the story to match up to the facts of historical reality.

The difference between a modern biography and a modern novel, of course, is a matter of literary genre. Scholars have long and protracted debates over what the notion of “genre” actually means, but for our purposes I think a fairly rough and ready description will suffice. A genre is a “kind” of writing that fits certain expected forms. A short story is short, for example; a novel is longer. Both have characters and plot and other shared features that make them different from a haiku. A limerick poem has clever rhymes and a surprising punch line. Free verse has neither, but relies on the depth of the language to convey meaning. And so on. The characteristics of each type of genre represent a sort of implied agreement between an author and readers. It is almost a contractual agreement in which the author provides what is expected for this kind of writing, and readers are not allowed to expect anything other than what typically happens in this kind of writing.

When it comes to fiction, in nearly all its forms, readers agree to suspend judgment on the historical accuracy of the details of the narrative, while expecting, nonetheless, that the account will be historically plausible.⁴ The reason fiction works is that, for the sake of being entertained, readers are willing to make this tacit agreement with an author.

When it comes to biography or historical writing, however, readers do not make this agreement. In this case the author agrees to stick to the historical facts insofar as she can, and readers expect her to do so. Any breach of this contract is seen as a violation of the rules and is condemned.

In ancient historical writing the matter was a bit more complicated. In large part that was because in antiquity there simply weren’t the research tools available that we have today: extensive access to reliable sources, copious written records, databases, data retrieval systems, the possibilities given us by mass media and electronic modes of communication. Ancient historians had to do their best to cobble together a plausible narrative of past events. It was very hard indeed to give an “accurate” account, though most historians tried. Nowhere was this more obviously a problem than in recording the actual words of someone who lived a long time ago. Some of the best histories from antiquity are chock full of speeches given by their main characters. But if the events took place decades or even centuries earlier, in an age before there were tape recorders, or even stenographers and same-day reporting, how was a historian to know what the character actually said? There was, in fact, no way to know.

For that reason, a superb historian such as the fifth-century BCE Thucydides explicitly states that he simply made up the speeches himself. What choice did ancient historians have? The best they could do was to invent a speech that seemed appropriate to the character of the speaker and the occasion and trust that it was a more or less close approximation of what was actually said. There was no way of showing whether the historian got it right. But educated readers realized that this is what the historians were doing, and so here again there was a kind of understood contract between author and readers; the author would come up with his best guess at what a speaker said and readers would accept it for what it was, a best guess.

Some scholars have thought that forgery was like that, a kind of fiction comparable to the invention of speeches in a history, in which the real author and the real readers agreed not to take seriously the false name attached to a writing. As I have shown, recent scholars who have actually studied the ancient discussions of forgery indicate that this view is not right at all. Forgeries were literary texts in which the author adopted a kind of fiction without the permission of readers. And readers, when they found out, did not appreciate it. Ancient people treated forged historical narratives, treatises, letters, and so on as “false writings” and “lies,” not as some kind of harmless and innocent fiction. That is why the ancients were so interested in seeing whether books were “authentic children” of their named authors or “illegitimate” (notha), not really belonging to the person named as the author.

So too ancient people recognized the difference between fabricated fictional accounts and historical narratives. Some historians, such as Lucian of Samosata and Polybius, unlike Thucydides, were quite insistent that historical narratives should indicate only what actually happened. Historians should not make up stories or even the speeches delivered by the characters in their histories. As Polybius, a second-century BCE Greek historian who wrote about Rome’s rise to power, succinctly states it: the historian should “simply record what really happened and what really was said.” For Polybius, the historian is different from the “tragic poet” (i.e., the author of fictional drama): “The tragic poet should thrill and charm his audience for the moment by the verisimilitude of the words he puts into his characters’ mouths, but it is the task of the historian to instruct and convince for all time serious students by the truth of the facts and the speeches he narrates.”⁵

The reason a historian such as Polybius had to argue this point so strenuously, of course, is that other historians did precisely what he opposed, inventing speeches and even narratives as they saw fit for their “historical” accounts. It is certainly true that people in general, not just professional historians, made up a lot of stories about historical figures. In Christian circles this can be seen for nearly every historical figure of importance we know of: Jesus, Paul, Peter, and other members of the apostolic band. In this chapter, since I’m interested in books that claim to be written by Peter, but in fact were forged in his name, let us begin by considering some of the stories invented about him, before looking at books falsely attributed to him.

Stories About Peter

WE HAVE A NUMBER of books from early Christianity that tell stories about Peter. These were almost entirely “made up” by one Christian storyteller or another. By my definitions these stories are not forgeries; they are not accounts that falsely claim to be written by Peter. They, instead, might be called “fabrications,” stories invented about Peter.⁶

One of the most interesting does happen to occur in a forged document. This forgery, however, is not in the name of Peter, but in the name of Titus, the companion of Paul. The New Testament contains a letter allegedly by Paul to Titus, which I argue in Chapter 3 is pseudonymous (i.e., a forgery). About four hundred years later another letter appeared, this one claiming to be written by Titus. It is an intriguing letter, because it argues vociferously that the only way to have eternal life is by living an ascetic, chaste life. Or to put it more bluntly, one can have salvation only by refraining from sex. In the context of the forger’s discussion he cites a story about Peter that serves to illustrate his point.

A peasant brings his virgin daughter to Peter to be blessed. Peter says a prayer over the girl, asking that God do what is best for her. She drops down dead. The peasant is understandably distressed, but the author of the story calls him “distrustful,” since he doesn’t believe that what has happened is in the girl’s best interest. He begs Peter to restore the girl to life, and Peter does so. But a few days later a visitor who claims to be a Christian comes to stay with the peasant and seduces his daughter. They run off together and are never seen again. And that’s the end of the story. In its context the message is quite clear: it is far better to be dead than caught up in sexual desire.

A similar narrative can be found in a collection of stories about Peter’s missionary activities, probably written in the second Christian century. The account, simply called the Acts of Peter, describes the great miracles Peter performed after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension, as he demonstrates the power of his risen Lord and converts innumerable persons to the faith.

In one of the stories Peter is talking to a gathering of Christians in his home on a Sunday; they have brought a group of sick people for him to heal. But someone in the crowd asks Peter why he won’t heal his own daughter, who is lying paralyzed in the corner. Peter assures his guests that God has the power to heal the girl, should he choose to do so. To prove his point, Peter orders the girl to arise and walk naturally. And she does so. But then he orders her to return to her corner paralyzed. The crowd is both amazed and distraught.

Peter then tells the story of his daughter. When she was young, Peter learned in a vision from God that if she remained healthy, she would lead many astray; she apparently was beautiful as a child, and as an adult she would entice men to sleep with her. When she was ten, a next-door neighbor attempted to seduce her, but before he could sleep with her, she became paralyzed, by the mercy of God. The neighbor went blind for his troubles, until healed by Peter and converted to faith in Christ. But the girl had to remain paralyzed, lest she lead others astray. Here again the point is perfectly clear: sex is dangerous and to be avoided at all costs, even if it means being an invalid for life.

The Acts of Peter is chiefly built around a series of contests between Peter, the representative of the true God, and a heretic named Simon, a magician empowered by the devil. Each of them can do miracles, and each tries to convince the crowds that he, not the other, stands for the truth. One of the miracles involves Peter and a smoked tuna. We are told that Peter has been trying to convince the crowds and is having little success. But he is standing by a fishmonger’s shop and sees a smoked tuna hanging in the window. He asks the crowds if they will believe if he can make the dead fish come back to life. Yes, they reply, then they will believe. So he removes the tuna from the hook, throws it into a nearby pond, and orders it to come back from the dead. The fish comes to life—not for just a few minutes, but for real. The crowd rejoices and comes to believe.

Greater miracles are yet in store. Peter and Simon the Magician are called by the local Roman official into the arena to compete in order to see who is the true spokesperson for God. A slave boy is ordered into the arena. Simon is instructed to kill the boy, and Peter to raise him from the dead. Simon speaks a word in the boy’s ear, and he falls down dead (it is the heretic who speaks the word of death). But Peter tells the boy’s master to take his hand and raise him up, and the boy is immediately restored to life (the man of God has the word of life).

A wealthy woman then comes up to Peter and cries out for him to help her as well. Her son has died, and she desperately wants Peter to raise him back to life. Peter challenges Simon to a duel to see who can raise the man. While the crowd looks on, Simon goes through several shenanigans: standing next to the dead body, he stoops down three times and stands up three times, and lo and behold, the dead man raises up his head. The crowds are convinced that Simon is the true power of God, and Peter must be an impostor. They prepare to burn him at the stake. But Peter shouts them down and points out that the man has not actually been raised from the dead; he has simply moved his head. If Simon is truly from God, he will be able to raise him up and make him talk. When Simon is unable to do so, Peter then has his chance. He speaks a word, raises the man fully from the dead, and has him speak. From that hour on, the people “venerated Peter as a god.”

The climax of the story comes when the heretic Simon announces to the crowds that he will prove his superior power by flying like a bird over the hills and temples of Rome. When the day of his feat arrives, he is true to his word and takes off, flying like a bird. Peter, not to be outdone, calls out to God and deprives Simon of his power in mid-flight. He crashes to the ground and breaks his leg. The crowds converge on him and stone him to death as an impostor. It is Peter who has the true power of God.

Stories like this can easily be multiplied. In fact, they were multiplied as Christian storytellers fabricated legendary accounts of the great heroes of the faith in the second and third Christian centuries. So they made up stories about Peter. Did they also make up writings by Peter? There seems to be no doubt about that either. Nor are there many doubts about why they invented such writings. In no small measure it is for the reason we have seen. Different Christians had competing assumptions, outlooks, practices, and theologies, all of which needed apostolic “authority” behind them. A writing in the name of Peter could authorize one set of views in the name of a great “authority,” named as its “author.”

THE GOSPEL OF PETER

One of the most significant Gospels to be rediscovered in modern times is the so-called Gospel of Peter. I say that it has been rediscovered, because we actually knew of its existence for centuries, before it turned up in an archaeological dig near the end of the nineteenth century. Our earlier source of information was Eusebius. Eusebius is often called the “father of church history,” since his ten-volume book, The Church History, was the first narrative account of the early Christian church. In this account Eusebius traces the spread of the Christian movement from the time of Jesus down to his own day, the early fourth century. Eusebius is an invaluable source of information for Christianity’s first three hundred years. For many of his narratives, his Church History is the only source we have. It is true, as scholars have increasingly recognized, that Eusebius very much puts his own slant on his accounts, that he has personal views, theological perspectives, and hidden agendas that dictate how he tells his narrative. He often needs to be taken with a pound of salt. But he is especially valuable when he quotes verbatim from the earlier sources that were available to him. In those cases we get primary sources preserved for us from authors living before his time, direct access to earlier Christian authors whose writings have otherwise been lost.

In Book 6 of his Church History Eusebius tells the story of an important bishop of the large church in Antioch, Syria, near the end of the second century, a man named Serapion. The story concerns a Gospel of Peter, and luckily this is one of those instances in which Eusebius actually quotes a primary source, a writing of Serapion himself.⁷ As bishop of one of the largest communities in Christendom, Serapion had under his jurisdiction the churches in the villages and towns of the surrounding area, including the church in the town of Rhossus. Serapion indicates that while making the rounds of his churches, he visited Rhossus and found there was a division in the congregation. He attributed the division to petty squabbling and learned that it may have had its roots in the Gospel that was being used in the church. It was not Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John (Gospels that he doesn’t mention), but a Gospel of Peter. Serapion’s response was that Peter, of course, was a disciple of Jesus; any Gospel that he wrote must be perfectly acceptable. On these grounds he allowed the parishioners in Rhossus to continue using it.

But he did so without reading the book himself. When he returned to Antioch, he learned from several informers that the Gospel in fact was a problem—it contained heretical teachings. In particular, it was used by a group of Christians known as docetists. Docetists (from the Greek word dokeo, “to seem” or “to appear”) maintained that since Christ was fully divine, he could not have been fully human and could not have really suffered (people suffer, God doesn’t suffer). Why then did Christ “seem” to be human? For docetists, it was all an appearance. Christ didn’t have a real flesh-and-blood body and didn’t really suffer and die. He only seemed to do so.

Docetists maintained that Christ was not a real human being in two different ways. Some docetists claimed that Christ’s body only seemed to be human, because it was, in fact, phantasmal (like Casper the Friendly Ghost). The other docetic view is a bit more complicated. It maintained that there was a real man Jesus (flesh and blood like the rest of us), but there was also a different being known as the Christ. The Christ was a divine being who descended from heaven and came into Jesus at his baptism (the dove that descended on him and went into him), empowering him to perform miracles and deliver his divine teachings. Then, before Jesus died, the Christ left him to return to its heavenly home. So some people might have mistakenly thought that the Christ was a human who really died; but that was only Jesus. The Christ was divine and could not suffer.

When Serapion received word that the Gospel he had previously approved might contain docetic teachings, he was naturally disturbed, and so he procured a copy to read. Sure enough, he came to think that even though most of the account was perfectly “orthodox” (a “right teaching”), some parts were not. Serapion decided that the book was forged, and he wrote a letter to the Christians of Rhossus disallowing its use. In a kind of appendix he gave a list of the offensive passages.

Eusebius quotes from the letter in his Church History, but unfortunately he does not include the appendix with the portions that Serapion found objectionable. That is very much to be regretted, for a Gospel of Peter has been discovered in modern times, and without knowing what Serapion’s book said, it is difficult to know if what we now have is the same book he had.

The modern discovery occurred in 1886 or 1887, during an archaeological dig near the city of Akhmim in Upper Egypt. To the northeast of this city are three cemeteries, and during the winter months of 1886–87 a French archaeological team working out of Cairo was digging in the tombs. They uncovered the tomb of a person they took to be a monk, because he was buried with a sacred book (modern scholars are less sure that he was a monk; almost anyone could have been buried with an important book). The book itself was highly significant. It is sixty-six pages in length, written in Greek on vellum (pages made out of animal skin), and it contains a small anthology of four texts. The first of these, occupying the first ten pages, is a Gospel that was previously unknown.⁸

The Gospel is not a complete text, with beginning, middle, and end. It starts in the middle of a story, “…but none of the Jews washed his hands, nor did Herod or any of his judges. Since they did not wish to wash, Pilate stood up.” What follows is an alternative account of the trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus—alternative in that the story differs in remarkable ways from the accounts in the New Testament Gospels. One key difference can be seen already in this opening verse. In the New Testament, it is only in the Gospel of Matthew that we have a story of Pilate washing his hands at Jesus’s trial, declaring himself “innocent of this man’s blood” (27:24). Matthew says nothing about anyone else washing or refusing to wash his hands. But that is stressed here. And who does not wash their hands? “The Jews,” Herod (the Jewish king), and his (Jewish) judges.

This Gospel maintains even more emphatically than the Gospels of the New Testament that the blame for Jesus’s death falls squarely upon the Jewish people and their leaders. This anti-Jewish emphasis is part of a trend we can see developing throughout the early Christian tradition. With the passing of time, the fact that the Romans killed Jesus retreats into the background, and the Jewish leaders and Jewish people are made increasingly culpable. That can be seen simply by looking chronologically at the Gospels of the New Testament.

Our earliest Gospel, Mark, seems to suggest that the decision to have Jesus killed is shared by the Jewish leaders and the Roman governor Pilate (although even here Pilate’s hand seems to be forced). When we come to the Gospel of Luke, written later, Pilate actually declares Jesus innocent three times—so that the fault for his death falls on the Jewish leaders who demand it. The Gospel of Matthew, written at about the same time as Luke, has Pilate wash his hands to declare that he is innocent in the shedding of Jesus’s blood. Somewhat notoriously the Jewish people (this is only in Matthew) cry out, “His blood be upon us and our children” (27:25). In other words, for Matthew, the Jewish people are willing to accept the responsibility and consequences of Jesus’s death and to pass the responsibility on to their descendants. This verse, of course, came to be used for horrible acts of Christian anti-Semitism down through the Middle Ages, and even today.

The Gospel of John, the last of our canonical Gospels, goes a step farther. Here we are told that the Jewish people rejected Jesus as their king and declared that “we have no king but Caesar” (even though God himself was to be the king over his people). And then John says that Pilate “handed Jesus over to them to be crucified” (19:16). In this distortion of historical reality, it is the Jews themselves who actually kill Jesus.

And so, as time goes on, within the Christian tradition Pilate becomes increasingly innocent in the death of Jesus, and the Jewish people and their leaders become increasingly guilty. The Gospel of Peter is even later than John, and here Jewish responsibility is heightened further. Now it is not even the Roman governor Pilate who orders Jesus crucified; it is the Jewish king Herod: “Then King Herod ordered the Lord to be taken away and said to them, ‘Do everything that I ordered you to do to him’” (v. 2).

In other verses of this account the Jewish mistreatment of Jesus is intensified. The Jewish authorities crucify Jesus and take him off the cross. The author is quite clear that they are the ones who are at fault: “They brought all things to fulfillment and completed all their sins on their heads” (v. 17). More significant still, the Jewish people realize that what they have done is wrong and that they will be punished for it: “Then the Jews, the elders, and the priests realized how much evil they had done to themselves and began beating their breasts, saying, ‘Woe to us because of our sins. The judgment and the end of Jerusalem are near’” (v. 25). This is a reference to the view, found among Christians in the second century and later, that when the Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE after a Jewish uprising, it was not for political or military reasons, but religious ones. Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jewish Temple burned to the ground as divine retribution against the Jews for their sinful act of killing God’s messiah. Here in the Gospel of Peter the Jewish people themselves recognize their guilt and their imminent punishment.

In addition to the anti-Jewish character of this account, there are a number of other interesting legendary features. In the Gospels of the New Testament Jesus is crucified with two others, as happens here. But in this Gospel there is a curious incident. When those who crucify Jesus gamble for his clothes, one of the “evildoers” being crucified with him maligns them: “We have suffered like this for the evil things we did; but this one, the Savior of the people, what wrong has he done you?” The soldiers get angry at the man and order “his legs not be broken, so that he would die in torment” (vv. 14–15).⁹ The idea is that a crucified man would die more quickly if he could not push up with his legs to relieve the pressure on his lungs and breathe. By not breaking the criminal’s legs they prolong his torment.

One of the big questions of this Gospel is whether Jesus himself experiences any torment. In v. 11 we are told that Jesus was “silent, as if he had no pain.” Is it possible that this is one of the verses that Serapion found potentially objectionable? That Jesus appeared not to have pain, because in fact he did not have any pain? That his body was a phantasm?

A later verse is equally puzzling. When Jesus is about to die, rather than crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as, say, in the Gospel of Mark (15:34), he instead cries, “My power, O power, you have left me behind!” And then we are told, “When he said this, he was taken up.” Doesn’t this sound like the other kind of docetism, the kind where the divine Christ leaves the human Jesus to die alone?¹⁰

The most striking passage of the Gospel comes at the very end, a passage that provides us with something we never find in the New Testament Gospels: an actual account of the resurrection. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, the canonical Gospels do not narrate the resurrection of Jesus. In their stories, Jesus is crucified, dies, and is buried, and on the third day the women go to the tomb and find it empty. But there is no story in the Gospels of the New Testament about Jesus coming out of the tomb alive. The Gospel of Peter, however, does have such a story.

As happens in the Gospel of Matthew, but in none of the other canonical Gospels, a guard is posted at the tomb of Jesus to make sure that no one comes to steal the body. But unlike in Matthew, in the Gospel of Peter a very peculiar sequence of events occurs while the guards are looking on. The heavens open up and two “men” descend, while the stone in front of the tomb rolls aside. The two heavenly men enter the tomb.

Terrified, the soldiers go off to wake the centurion to tell him what has happened. But while they are talking, they look up and see three figures emerge from the tomb. Two of them are so tall that their heads reach up to the sky. The one they are supporting—Jesus obviously—is taller still; his head reaches above the sky. And then, behind them, the cross itself emerges from the tomb. And a voice comes from heaven asking, “Have you preached to those who are asleep?” And the cross replies, “Yes.” So, at the resurrection, we have a giant Jesus and a walking, talking cross.

The narrative is meant, of course, to be highly symbolic. Divine beings are often portrayed as gigantic in ancient texts. Jesus is the tallest since he is the most divine. And the cross is said to have proclaimed its message, the news of the salvation brought to those who are “asleep,” that is, to those who are already dead and waiting for the salvation to come.

The Gospel continues by indicating that the Jewish authorities go to Pilate and urge him to cover up the story by ordering the soldiers not to breathe a word of what they have seen. Then comes an account of the women going to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus, only to learn that he has been raised. The disciples are still grieving over what has happened, not knowing yet about the resurrection. Then we have the concluding sentences of the Gospel: “But we, the twelve disciples of the Lord, wept and grieved; and each one returned to his home, grieving for what had happened. But I, Simon Peter, and my brother Andrew, took our nets and went off to the sea. And with us was Levi, the son of Alphaeus, whom the Lord…(vv. 59–60). And there it ends, right in the middle of a sentence.

The reason the account seems to start in the middle of a thought and definitely ends in the middle of a sentence is that the person who created this book of sixty-six pages—probably in the sixth century—had only a fragmentary account in front of him. It is impossible to say whether the complete Gospel of Peter included stories of Jesus’s birth, life, ministry, teachings, miracles, and so on before the account of his Passion and resurrection. What is clear, from the final verse, is that this Gospel, unlike the Gospels of the New Testament, is written in the first person. The author claims to be Peter. But there is no way he was Peter. This is an author claiming to be someone he is not. This is a forgery.

The reason Simon Peter could not have written this account is that it almost certainly dates to the second century, at least sixty years after Peter had died. Virtually all scholars agree on this, for compelling reasons. For one thing, the heightened anti-Judaism fits better with the second century, when it became common, for example, for Christians to blame the destruction of Jerusalem on the Jews themselves for killing Jesus. Moreover, there are the highly legendary aspects of the story, such as the robber whose legs were not broken, the giant Jesus, and the talking cross. These too suggest it is a later account. Scholars debate whether the author of this Gospel had access to the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; there are numerous parallels with one or the other of the Gospels throughout. If he did use them, then he was obviously writing after them, that is, no sooner than the beginning of the second century.

Scholars also debate whether this is the Gospel of Peter that was known to Serapion. In part the debate has been over whether this is really a docetic account, as the Gospel described by Serapion evidently was, at least in his eyes. Some scholars have their doubts. When it says that Jesus was silent on the cross “as if” he felt no pain, that isn’t really the same thing, it is often argued, as saying that he did not feel pain. And to say that “he was taken up” may not mean that the Christ had left Jesus. Jesus still has a miraculous body and divine power at the resurrection, for example. So the phrase about being taken up may simply be a euphemism for “he died.”

My own view is that the Gospel would not need to be actually docetic in order to be the Gospel mentioned by Serapion. Serapion admitted that most of the Gospel was perfectly orthodox, but he found some “additions” that were troubling and that could be used by docetic Christians. And certainly this Gospel fits that bill. It is by and large perfectly acceptable from an orthodox perspective, but several verses might easily lend themselves to a docetic reading. This would include the major account of Jesus emerging from the tomb, where he looks as if he has anything but a real body that has just suffered the agonies of crucifixion!

Whether or not this is Serapion’s Gospel, it is certainly a Gospel of Peter. It claims its authority in the name of Jesus’s closest disciple, in part, no doubt, to make its incredible and anti-Jewish narratives seem completely credible. But Peter didn’t write it. This is a forgery in the name of Peter. And it’s not the only one.¹¹

THE EPISTLE OF PETER

Many scholars have thought of the early Christian church as seriously divided. On one side were the Jewish followers of Jesus, such as his brother James, who was the head of the church in Jerusalem, and the disciple Peter. On the other side were people like the apostle Paul, who focused on converting Gentiles (non-Jews). In this modern schema, James and Peter are often thought to have been more “true” to Jesus’s original message, that it was the God of Israel who had brought salvation to those who kept his teachings, as found in the Jewish law. For these early Christians, Jesus was the Jewish messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish law. Naturally, to be a follower of this Jewish savior, a person had to be Jewish. Gentiles were, of course, welcomed into the community with open arms, but only if they converted to Judaism. For men that meant getting circumcised, and for both men and women it meant observing the Sabbath, keeping kosher, and following the other Jewish laws.

Paul, in this understanding, taught something quite different, that believing in the death and resurrection of Christ was the only way to have a right standing before God. Moreover, this salvation applied equally to Jews and Gentiles, so that one did not have to be a Jew to be a follower of Jesus. For Paul, according to this view, the law had passed away; Jews could keep it if they chose (and as a Jew he himself kept it), but Gentiles were not supposed to keep it. This was the national law for Israel, and it had nothing to do with salvation. Only Jesus’s death and resurrection could bring salvation. Through Paul, then, the church largely filled up with Gentiles who did not see themselves as Jewish and who worshiped the God of Israel without following his law.

It is not necessary here for me to evaluate this common understanding of the relationship of Paul to the apostles before him, particularly James and Peter. But I do want to say that this idea that there was a split between their views is not just a modern notion. It goes way back to earliest Christianity. Historically speaking, it is true that Paul established churches made up of Gentiles and that he insisted that these converts not keep the Jewish law. This is a case he makes quite strenuously, for example, in the (orthonymous) letter to the Galatians. For Paul, any Gentile who tried to keep the law completely misunderstood that salvation comes from Christ’s death alone, to be received by faith. Keeping the law was worse than irrelevant; it was an admission that Christ’s death was insufficient for salvation (see 2:15–16, 21).

Other Christians did indeed disagree. Many of them were Paul’s opponents in his various churches. Later, in the second Christian century, there continued to be groups of Jewish Christians who insisted that the law certainly had to be followed by anyone who wanted to belong to God’s people. God had given the law, and he never changed his mind. This was the law that told people how to live, it was the law that Jesus himself taught and fulfilled, and it was the law that was to be followed, especially by followers of Christ.

This split in the early church between the (now) minority of Jewish Christians and the dominant majority of Gentiles can be seen nowhere more clearly than in a writing forged in Peter’s name called the Epistula Petri, or the Epistle of Peter.¹² This book is not to be confused with 1 Peter or 2 Peter in the New Testament. It was written later, years after the New Testament writings had been completed.

The Epistle of Peter is found as a kind of introduction to group of writings that scholars call the Pseudo-Clementines. As implied by its scholarly name, this group of writings falsely claims (hence “Pseudo”) to be written by Clement, who, as we saw earlier, was widely thought to have been the fourth bishop of Rome (or pope), appointed to his position by none other than Peter. The Pseudo-Clementines have a highly complicated literary history. For over a century scholars have strenuously debated what sources the books used, how the various writings are related to each other, and other technical questions. But the basic character of the writings is clear. These are accounts of the travels and adventures of Clement, especially as he converts to Christianity through Peter’s preaching and then journeys with Peter as the apostle spreads the gospel, gives speeches, and performs miracles. These include miracle contests with the archheretic Simon the Magician, whom we saw earlier. The Acts of Peter may have been one of the sources for these stories.

The Clementine books clearly were not written by the historical Clement, but long after his death, even though they are (allegedly) narrated by him in the first person. They are, therefore, forged. In one set of these writings the adventures of Clement are prefaced by the Epistle of Peter, a letter supposedly written by Peter to the brother of Jesus, James, head of the church in Jerusalem. The letter instructs James not to allow Peter’s writings to be handed over to just anyone, because they might be misinterpreted or altered, but only to a select group of trustworthy people. The author, “Peter,” attacks Christians who interpret his message as saying that the Jewish law is no longer in force. That is completely false, says the author, for Jesus himself had indicated that “not one jot or tittle will pass away from the law” and that it would be eternally valid (see Matt. 5:17–20). According to this letter, one of Peter’s opponents in particular has led “the Gentiles” to reject Peter’s “lawful preaching” and, instead, to prefer “a lawless and absurd doctrine of the man who is my enemy.”

It does not take a lot of thought to realize who the enemy is whom “Peter” is opposing. It is someone who preaches to the Gentiles, insists on a gospel apart from the Jewish law (a “lawless doctrine”), and claims that Peter himself subscribes to that view (see Gal. 2). Without naming him, this author is talking about Paul.

Here we have a view of Peter and Paul very much at odds with what we find in some of the writings of the New Testament.¹³ In the history of the early church found in the book of Acts, for example, Peter and Paul see eye to eye, they agree on every major point, they stand arm in arm in the mission to spread the gospel, and most important, they wholeheartedly concur that Gentiles do not need to be Jews to be followers of Jesus (see Acts 10–11; 15). This is not the case, however, for the author of the Epistle of Peter. Here there is a clear split between Peter, Jesus’s closest disciple, and Paul, an interloper who has misinterpreted Peter. Paul has misrepresented the gospel.

This, then, is an author who saw Paul as the enemy and his “lawless and absurd” doctrine as heresy. For this author, Paul not only disagreed with Peter; he was wrong. And on what authority does the author claim this? On the authority of Peter himself. The author forged the letter in Peter’s name in order to make his point.

THE APOCALYPSE OF PETER

I will not be talking at length in this book about how we got our twenty-seven books of the New Testament, that is, how the canon was formed and how some writings came to be included and others left out. Plenty of other books describe this process at length.¹⁴ I can say, though, that there were some writings that were a “close call,” that nearly made it in but did not, just as there were others that nearly were left out, but finally made it in. One of the books that nearly made it in is called the Apocalypse of Peter.¹⁵

From authors such as Eusebius, we know that there were Christian communities as late as the fourth century who thought that the Apocalypse of Peter should be included in the canon, either in place of the Apocalypse of John (i.e., the book of Revelation), which obviously ended up being included, or alongside it.¹⁶ The Apocalypse of Peter is very different from the Apocalypse of John, however. Both books are apocalypses, in which an author is given a secret revelation about the divine, heavenly mysteries that can make sense of the mundane, earthly realities. In the New Testament Apocalypse of John, these mysteries have to do with the future course of history to be unfurled on earth, as has been decided already in heaven. In the noncanonical Apocalypse of Peter, these mysteries have to do with the fate of souls in life after death. This book describes a personal tour that Peter is given of the realms of the blessed and of the damned.

Most readers are familiar with the idea of a tour of heaven and hell from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante did not invent the idea, however. He stood in a long line of Christian authors who used the motif of a tour of the afterlife in order to make whatever important points they wanted to stress about life here on earth. Our earliest example of this kind of writing is the Apocalypse of Peter.

Here again we knew about the book for centuries before it was available. As it turns out, it was another of the four texts found in the sixty-six-page book uncovered by archaeologists near Akhmim, Egypt, in 1886–87. Since then an Ethiopic version has been found, which gives an even fuller account.

The narrative begins with Peter and the disciples talking with Jesus on the Mount of Olives (see Mark 13). They ask Jesus about what will happen when the world comes to an end, and he provides them with a brief account. But then the discussion shifts to a description, given in some graphic detail, of what happens to souls after they die, either in the place of torment or the place of eternal bliss. As sometimes happens in these personal tours of heaven and hell, the description of the realms of the blessed is a bit stereotyped and brief. There are, after all, only so many ways you can describe eternal, ecstatic joy. It’s fantastic! What more can one say? The realms of the damned, however, are a different matter altogether. Anyone with any creativity and imagination can invent lurid and detailed descriptions of the torments of sinners.

In Peter’s vision, a number of the damned are tortured in ways that befit their characteristic sins, so that the punishment fits the crime. Those who have blasphemed against the ways of God, for example—that is, sinned by what they’ve said—are hanged by their tongues over eternal flames. Women who have braided their hair in order to make themselves attractive to men so as to seduce them are hanged by their hair over eternal flames. The men they seduced are hanged by a different body part over the flames. In this case, the men cry out, as you might imagine, “We didn’t know it would come to this!”

The overarching message of this book is quite clear and not altogether subtle: if you want to enjoy the amazing blessings of paradise and avoid the horrific torments of hell, don’t sin! This message conveys a reliable and incontrovertible truth: those who fail to follow God’s will face eternal torture. How do we know? Because someone who has observed the realms of the damned has told us, Jesus’s right-hand man, Peter himself. In order to get his point across, the author writes in the first person—not in his own name, but in the name of the chief disciple. Here again we have a forgery in the name of Peter.

“Petrine” Writings in the New Testament

THE BOOKS I HAVE talked about here at some length—the Acts of Peter, the Gospel of Peter, the Pseudo-Clementine Writings, the Epistle of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter—are not the only fabrications about Peter and forgeries allegedly written by Peter from the early church. There were others: other “Acts” of Peter, a collection called the “Preaching” of Peter, two other apocalypses of Peter. And these are just the ones that we still have today. No one knows how many once existed. Producing books in the name of Peter was a virtual cottage industry in the early church.

Is it possible, in light of this extensive use of Peter’s name to authorize others’ views, that any forgeries in the name of Peter made it into the New Testament? As it turns out, two books bear Peter’s name there as well, the letters of 1 Peter and 2 Peter. Both claim to be written by Peter, but there are solid reasons for thinking that Peter did not write either one.

1 PETER

The book of 1 Peter is allegedly written by “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ,” to Christians whom he calls “exiles” in five provinces in the western part of what is now Turkey.¹⁷ There is no doubt that the author is claiming to be Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter. “Peter” was not a personal name before Peter was given it as a nickname by Jesus himself. According to the Gospels, this disciple’s real name was Simon. But Jesus indicated that he would be the “rock” (Greek petros) on whom the church would be founded. So he called him “Rocky,” or “Peter” (see Matt. 16:13–18).¹⁸ So far as we know, there were no other persons named Peter until later times when Christians started naming their children after the great apostle. So the author of 1 Peter is certainly claiming to be “that” Peter. This is borne out by his comment in 5:1, that he was personally a “witness of the sufferings of Christ.”¹⁹

This matter of suffering is the key theme of the book. In fact, the word “suffering” occurs more often in this short five-chapter letter than in any other book of the entire New Testament, including the Gospels, which are much, much longer. The author assumes that his readers themselves are undergoing persecution and that they will be experiencing yet more in the future. “Now for a little while,” he tells them, they “have had to suffer various trials.” But that is all to the good, because through being “tested” their faith will be refined and become “more precious than gold that is…tested by fire” (1:6–7). They should not therefore be “surprised at the fiery ordeal that is coming…, as if something strange were happening,” but they are to “rejoice,” because they “share in the sufferings of Christ” (4:12–13).

Scholars have long debated what kind of suffering the author has in mind. The older view was that the author was dealing with official state persecutions, such as happened when the emperor Nero imprisoned and then executed Christians in the city of Rome in 64 CE, blaming them for starting the horrible fire that destroyed much of the city, a fire that his own arsonists may have set. But over the past twenty years or so scholars have begun to stress that the book of 1 Peter never says much about “official” persecution, where Christians are arrested, put on trial for their faith, and martyred. Instead, the opposition seems to come from former friends and neighbors who do not understand or appreciate the Christians’ new lifestyle, which is removed from the joyful celebrations of pagan religions (4:1–5). That is to say, Christians stopped attending pagan festivals to form their own secret societies, and pagans became upset, suspicious, and hateful, leading to local opposition to Christians that could at times turn nasty.

If this is the case, it makes sense that the author stresses to his readers that it is important for them to be obedient to the government and governing officials (2:13–15), to show good conduct among outsiders (2:12), to be devoted slaves, wives, and husbands (2:18–3:7), to do nothing to warrant any opposition, but to suffer only for doing what is right (2:20). A good deal of the exhortation and encouragement to his readers is based on a sophisticated interpretation of key passages in the Old Testament, quoted, of course, in Greek, the so-called Septuagint (the legendary origins of which are described in the forged Letter of Aristeas discussed in Chapter 1), as can be seen, for example, in 1:24–25; 2:3, 6–9, 22, 24–25; 3:10–12.

The author ends his exhortation to be steadfast in the face of adversity by indicating that he has written his letter “through Silvanus, a faithful brother” (i.e., a true Christian) and by sending greetings from “she who is in Babylon, who is also chosen” (5:13). Scholars have long realized what this last bit means. Babylon was the city that was seen as the ultimate enemy of God among Jews, since it was Babylon that had defeated Judah and destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in the sixth century BCE. By the end of the first century, Christians and Jews had started using the word “Babylon” as a code word for the city that was the enemy of God in their own day, the city of Rome, which also destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple, in the year 70 (see, e.g., Rev. 14:8; 17:5). The author, then, is claiming to be writing from the city of Rome. This makes sense, given the later traditions that associated Peter with the city of Rome, in fact as its first bishop—the first pope.

But tradition also indicates that Peter was martyred in Rome under Nero in 64 CE. Would it make sense that he would be calling Rome “Babylon” before the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70? By the time that catastrophe hit, Peter was long dead. As it turns out there are other, very good grounds for thinking that Peter did not actually write this book. It was written by someone claiming to be Peter. Before explaining some of those grounds, we should first look at the second letter in the New Testament written in Peter’s name.

2 PETER

There is less debate among scholars of the New Testament about the authorship of 2 Peter than for any of the other books sometimes considered forgeries. Whoever wrote 2 Peter, it was not Simon Peter.²⁰ The author certainly claims to be Peter, even more explicitly than in the case of 1 Peter. He introduces himself as “Simeon Peter,²¹ a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ.” But more than that, he claims personally to have been present at the “transfiguration” scene narrated in the Gospels, where Jesus was transformed before the eyes of his disciples Peter, James, and John and began speaking with Moses and Elijah, before a voice came from heaven saying, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” (see Matt. 17:1–8). The author insists that he himself was there to hear these words, brought to him by the “voice…of the majestic glory” (1:17). The author wants there to be no doubt: he is Peter.

His chief concern is that there are false teachers in the community who have twisted the true message of the gospel. Most of chapter 2 is devoted to maligning these persons, without ever explaining what, exactly, they teach. This highly vituperative attack calls their teachings “destructive heresies” and says that they, the opponents, are licentious, greedy, and exploitative. The author indicates that they will suffer like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah and like the inhabitants of the entire world in the days of Noah. That is to say, they too will be destroyed. He calls them ignorant and says they are “blots and blemishes, reveling in their dissipation, carousing.” He says they have eyes that are “full of adultery, unslakable for sin.” And on and on.

This assault on his opponents, the “false prophets,” contains numerous verbal similarities to what can be found in the New Testament book of Jude. The parallels are so numerous that scholars are virtually unified in thinking that the author has taken Jude’s message and simply edited it a bit to incorporate it into his book.

In addition to the false teachers, “scoffers” have appeared who mock the Christian view that Jesus is soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. If he was supposed to come soon, say these skeptics, why hasn’t he come? A lot of time has passed, and everything goes on just the same as before! The author replies that these unbelievers are ignorant and deceived, having forgotten that “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as one day” (3:8). In other words, even if Jesus waits another three thousand years, he still is coming “soon.” Jesus has in fact delayed returning simply to give people a chance to repent before the coming destruction. Paul himself, the author tells us, taught such things in “all his letters, which the ignorant and unstable people twist, as they do with all the other Scriptures, to their own destruction” (3:16).

One of the reasons virtually all scholars agree that Peter did not actually write this letter is that the situation being presupposed appears to be of much later times. When Peter himself died—say, the year 64 under Nero—there was still eager expectation that Jesus would return soon; not even a full generation had passed since the crucifixion. It was only with the passing of time that the Christian claim that all would take place “within this generation” (Mark 13:30) and before the disciples had “tasted death” (9:1) started to ring hollow. By the time 2 Peter was written, Christians were having to defend themselves in the face of opponents who mocked their view that the end was supposed to be imminent. So “Peter” has to explain that even if the end is thousands of years off, it is still right around the corner by God’s calendar; everything is still on schedule.

Moreover, the author of 2 Peter is writing at a time when there was already a collection of Paul’s letters in circulation, and these letters were being considered on a par with the Old Testament “Scriptures” (3:16). This could not have been during Paul’s lifetime,²² and early church tradition indicates that both Peter and Paul were killed during the reign of Nero.

These are among the reasons for thinking that 2 Peter almost certainly could not have been written by Peter.²³ And there is one more compelling reason. There are excellent grounds for thinking that Peter could not write.

Simon Peter, Ancient Palestine, and Literacy

WHAT DO WE KNOW about literacy and the ability to write in the ancient world, especially in rural Palestine, where Simon Peter was born and raised? Scholars of antiquity have been diligent over the past twenty-five years or so in trying to understand every aspect of ancient literacy and education. In what is now the classic study, the 1989 book Ancient Literacy, William Harris, professor of ancient history at Columbia University, shows that modern assumptions about literacy simply are not applicable to ancient times.²⁴ Today, in modern America, we live in a world where nearly every child goes to school and learns to read and write. Just about everyone we know can read the sports page and copy out a page of a novel if they choose. But the phenomenon of massive and widespread literacy is completely modern. Before the industrial revolution, societies had no compelling reasons to invest enormous amounts of money and other resources into creating a literate population. It was only with the development of the industrial world that such a thing became both desirable and feasible.

Harris argues that in the ancient world, at the very best of times, only about 10 percent of the population was reasonably literate. By the “best of times” he means Athens, a center of learning, at the height of its intellectual power, during the days of Socrates and Plato (fifth–fourth century BCE). Most of these 10 percent were men, as might be expected in a highly patriarchal society. And all of them were in the upper classes, the social and economic elite, who had the leisure and the money (well, their parents had the money) to afford an education. Lower-class people did not learn how to read, let alone write. And the vast majority of people in the ancient world were in the lower classes (to the surprise of many, the “middle class” is another invention of the industrial revolution; in the ancient world virtually everyone was high or low, or very, very low). The only notable exceptions were slaves, who were naturally a very low class indeed, but who were sometimes educated at their masters’ expense, so that they could carry out household duties that required literacy skills, such as taking care of the household finances, helping with correspondence, or teaching the children.

When I say that few people could read, “let alone write,” I mean to signal something else quite significant about the ancient world. When upper-class people were educated, reading and writing were taught as two different skills.²⁵ Today we learn reading and writing together, and we naturally assume that if people can read, they can also write—not necessarily write a novel, but at least a letter. But that’s because of the way we have set up our educational system. There is nothing inherent in learning to read that can necessarily teach you how to write. I know this full well personally. I can read Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and a range of other languages, but I cannot compose a letter in any of these languages. I learned how to read all of them in graduate school, so I could read ancient documents in their original languages and modern scholarship in the languages of Europe. But I never learned how to write them.

Most people in the ancient world could not read. And those who could read often could not write. And in this case by “write” I mean that most people—even if they could copy down words—could not compose a sentence, let alone a well-argued treatise. On the contrary, the people who could compose an ethical essay, a learned philosophical discussion, or an involved religious treatise were highly educated and highly exceptional. And that was in the very best of times. Very, very few people indeed were able to perform these skills in a language other than the one they were raised with. I’m not saying that just 1 percent of the population could do such a thing. I’m saying that far fewer than 1 percent of the population could do it.

It is sometimes thought that Palestine was an exception, that in Palestine Jewish boys all learned to read so that they could study the Hebrew Scriptures, and that since they could read, they could probably write. Moreover, it is often argued that in Palestine most adults were bilingual or even trilingual, able to read Hebrew, speak the local language, Aramaic, and communicate well in the language of the broader empire, Greek. Recent studies of literacy in Palestine, however, have shown convincingly that none of these assertions is true.

The fullest, most thoroughly researched, and most widely influential study of literacy in Palestine during the period of the Roman Empire is by Catherine Hezser.²⁶ After examining all of the evidence, Hezser concludes that in Roman Palestine the best guestimate is that something like 3 percent of the population could read, and that the majority of these would have been in the cities and larger towns. Most people outside of the urban areas would scarcely ever even see a written text. Some smaller towns and villages may have had a literacy level of around 1 percent. Moreover, these literate people were almost always the elite of the upper classes. Those who learned to read learned how to read Hebrew (not Greek).

And what is more, once again, far more people could read than could write. The people who knew how to write were primarily men who were priests. In fact, for the entire first century CE (the time of Jesus and Simon Peter), we know for certain of only two authors in Palestine who produced literary works (i.e., educated compositions other than tax documents, land deeds, or marriage certificates, etc.): the Jewish historian Josephus and a man named Justus of Tiberius. We still have Josephus’s writings, but Justus’s don’t survive. Both of these men were in the upper echelons of society, and both were inordinately well educated. We know of no other literary authors for the entire century. Was Peter in Josephus’s and Justus’s class? No, not even close.

What about Greek education in the land of Peter’s birth and up-bringing? It is sometimes assumed that since Galilee, the northern part of what we think of as Israel, was occasionally called “Galilee of the Gentiles,” it was overrun by Gentiles in Jesus and Peter’s day. And according to a common kind of logic, if there were lots of Gentiles in Galilee, they would have spoken Greek; so to get along, everyone must have spoken Greek. As it turns out, that’s not true either.

The most recent thorough studies of Gentiles in Galilee have been undertaken by the American scholar Mark Chancey.²⁷ Chancey has studied every archaeological find from Galilee from around the time of the first century, has read every single piece of writing from the period of any relevance, and draws a decisive conclusion: the Gentiles in Galilee were almost exclusively located in the two major cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias. All the rest of Galilee was predominantly Jewish. And since most of Galilee was rural, not urban, the vast majority of Jews had no encounters with Gentiles. Moreover, Greek was not widely, let alone normally, spoken. The vast majority of Jews spoke Aramaic and had no facility in Greek.

How do all these findings affect our question of whether Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter or any other books? Was Peter among the very upper echelons of the educated elite of Palestine who could compose letter-essays in Greek? Apart from the legendary accounts I have mentioned, all we know about Peter’s life comes to us from the New Testament. What we principally learn about him is that before he was a follower of Jesus he was a fisherman from Capernaum in Galilee.

In order to evaluate Peter’s linguistic abilities, the place to begin, then, is with Capernaum. A full summary of what we know about Capernaum from Peter’s day is provided by an American archaeologist of Palestine, Jonathan Reed.²⁸ On the basis of archaeological digs and historical sources, it is clear that Capernaum was a historically insignificant village in rural Galilee. It is never mentioned in any ancient source prior to the Gospels. It is scarcely mentioned by any sources after that. It was discovered by archaeologists in the nineteenth century and has been excavated since then. In the time of Jesus it may have had anywhere between six and fifteen hundred inhabitants, so say a thousand.

The archaeological digs have revealed no evidence of any public buildings whatsoever, such as shops or storage facilities.²⁹ The market for buying food and other necessities must have been held in tents or booths in open unpaved public areas. The town is on none of the major international trade routes. The Roman roads in the area date from a hundred years after Peter’s life. There is no trace of any pagan or Gentile population in the town. There are no inscriptions of any kind on any of the buildings. Reed concludes that the inhabitants were almost certainly “predominantly illiterate.” Archaeologists have found no building structures or materials associated with social elites from the first century (e.g., plaster surfaces, decorative frescoes, marble, mosaics, red ceramic roof tiles). The houses were roughly constructed out of stone basalt, and mud or clay was used to fill in the gaps; they probably had thatched roofs.

In short, Peter’s town was a backwoods Jewish village made up of hand-to-mouth laborers who did not have an education. Everyone spoke Aramaic. Nothing suggests that anyone could speak Greek. Nothing suggests that anyone in town could write. As a lower-class fisherman, Peter would have started work as a young boy and never attended school. There was, in fact, probably no school there; if there was a school, he probably didn’t attend; if he did attend, it would have been in order to receive rudimentary training in how to read Hebrew. But that almost certainly never happened. Peter was an illiterate peasant.

This should come as no surprise, really. As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter’s education level. According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agrammatoi, a Greek word that literally means “unlettered,” that is, “illiterate.”

And so, is it possible that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter? We have seen good reasons for believing he did not write 2 Peter, and some reason for thinking he didn’t write 1 Peter. But it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly literate, highly educated, Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their Greek translation, the Septuagint. This is not Peter.

It is theoretically possible, of course, that Peter decided to go to school after Jesus’s resurrection. In this imaginative (not to say imaginary) scenario, he learned his alphabet, learned how to sound out syllables and then words, learned to read, and learned to write. Then he took Greek classes, mastered Greek as a foreign language, and started memorizing large chunks of the Septuagint, after which he took Greek composition classes and learned how to compose complicated and rhetorically effective sentences; then, toward the end of his life, he wrote 1 Peter.

Is this scenario plausible? Apart from the fact that we don’t know of “adult education” classes in antiquity—there’s no evidence they existed—I think most reasonable people would conclude that Peter probably had other things on his mind and on his hands after he came to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. He probably never thought for a single second about learning how to become a rhetorically skilled Greek author.

Some scholars have suggested that Peter did not directly write 1 Peter (as I’ve indicated, almost no one thinks he wrote 2 Peter), but that he indirectly wrote it, for example, by dictating the letter to a scribe. Some have noted that the letter is written “through Silvanus” (5:12) and thought that maybe Silvanus wrote down Peter’s thoughts for him. I deal with this question of whether scribes or secretaries actually ever composed such letter-essays in Chapter 4. The answer is, “Almost certainly not.” But for now I can say at least a couple of words about the case of 1 Peter.

First off, scholars now widely recognize that when the author indicates that he wrote the book “through Silvanus,” he is indicating not the name of his secretary, but the person who was carrying the letter to the recipients. Authors who used secretaries don’t refer to them in this way.

But why not suppose that Peter used someone else, other than Silvanus, as a secretary? It would help to imagine how this theory is supposed to work exactly. Peter could not have dictated this letter in Greek to a secretary any more than he could have written it in Greek. That would have required him to be perfectly fluent in Greek, to have mastered rhetorical techniques in Greek, and to have had an intimate familiarity with the Jewish Scriptures in Greek. None of that is plausible. Nor can one easily think that he dictated the letter in Aramaic and the secretary translated it into Greek. The letter does not read like a Greek translation of an Aramaic original, but as an original Greek composition with Greek rhetorical flourishes. Moreover the letter presupposes the knowledge of the Greek Old Testament, so the person who composed the letter (whether orally or in writing) must have known the Scriptures in Greek.

Is it possible, then, that the historical Peter directed someone to write a letter, basically told him what to say, and let him produce it? To that there are two responses. First, it would seem that if someone else actually composed the letter, it would be that person, not Peter, who was the author. But the other person is never named. Even in Paul’s letters that are coauthored (almost all of them) he names the others, even though he probably wrote them himself. In this case, Peter would not have even written the thing. And it should be remembered that there are good grounds for thinking that the letter was written after Peter had died, since it alludes to Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70.

But even more compelling is this. Where in the ancient world do we have anything at all analogous to this hypothetical situation of someone writing a letter-essay for someone else and putting the other person’s name on it—the name of the person who did not write it—rather than his own name? So far as I know, there is not a single instance of any such procedure attested from antiquity or any discussion, in any ancient source, of this being a legitimate practice. Or even an illegitimate one. Such a thing is never discussed.

There are plenty of instances of another phenomenon, however. This is the phenomenon of Christian authors writing pseudonymous works, falsely claiming to be a famous person. Ancient scholars would have called a book like that a “falsely inscribed” writing, a “lie,” an “illegitimate” child. Modern people would simply call it a forgery.