The Apocryphal Acts Of Peter:Magic, Miracles And Gnosticism

After the fall of the Berlin Wall the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen decided to intensify contacts with universities in Eastern Europe. In 1991 the then Head of the Department of Church History, Professor Hans Roldanus, took this opportunity to forge links with the Károli Gáspár University of Budapest. In the search for a common research project, which would also prove to be attractive to classicists of the Loránd-Eötvös University of Budapest, it was decided to focus on the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. This particular choice hardly needs to be defended. The world of early Christianity is currently receiving an ever increasing attention from New Testament and patristic scholars as well as from ancient historians. Various Apocryphal Acts have recently been re-edited or are in process of being re-edited, but the contents of these Acts are still very much under-researched. It is the object of the Dutch-Hungarian cooperation to study the major Apocryphal Acts in a series of yearly conferences, of which the proceedings are published in the series, Studies in the Apoctyphal Acts of the Apostles. The editors in principle envisage the publication of five volumes, but they are open to further suggestions. Following the first two volumes of the new series on the Acts of John (1995) and the Acts of Paul and Thecla (1996), this new volume is devoted to the Acts of Peter. The major part of the book studies various persons, aspects and passages of the Acts: women, magic, Agrippa, Simon Magus, resurrection accounts, invectives, miracles, the cross, and credal formulations. After a study of their Latinity, there follow two chapters studying the relation of the Acts of Peter to those of John and Paul. The penultimate chapter succeeds in locating the Actus Vercellenses, the surviving part of the Acts of Peter- in Latin, in Africa. As has become customary, the volume is rounded off by a bibliography and an index. The conference which formed the basis of this book took place at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the autumn of 1996