Examining Priorities: Another Look at the Gospel of Peter's Relationship to the New Testament Gospels

Abstract

Ever since a fragment of the Gospel of Peter was discovered at Akhmîm in 1886–7, and published in 1892, scholarship has been divided over its relationship to the New Testament gospels. In 1892 J. Armitage Robinson argued that the gospel was a tendentious appropriation of canonical material which contained no traces of a primitive Urevangelium. In 1893 Adolf von Harnack argued tentatively for its independence from the canonical gospels, while Theodore Zahn argued for a late date and complete dependence upon the four gospels. In the flurry of articles and monographs which followed, scholars aligned themselves with one or the other of these two positions, depending upon whether they viewed the new gospel's similarities with, or divergences from, the New Testament gospels as being more decisive. Since both striking similarities and striking divergences appear throughout the Gospel of Peter, a stalemate was soon reached, and scholarly interest in the question declined. In the late 1920s Gardner-Smith could write that ‘interest in the discovery has waned’, and Léon Vaganay that ‘a virtual silence has fallen upon the journals’. In his commentary Vaganay attempted to settle the argument in favour of the Gospel of Peter's dependence. Using literary criticism he showed how the material in the gospel could be seen as a free literary re-working of the texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, a re-working driven by sectarian and apologetic interests, as well as by the personal predilections of its author.