A second-century passion gospel found in an Egyptian grave: the trial before Herod, a cross that walks out of the tomb and answers a voice from heaven, and an ending that breaks off with Mary Magdalene at the sea.
The opening of the Akhmîm fragment (Sections I–II, verses 1–5) is live as a word-depth beta: every Greek word glossed with its sense and the flowing English beside it. The trial ends, the Jewish leaders refuse to wash their hands, Herod gives the order, and Joseph asks Pilate for the body. The book grows section by section.
❦ Read the Gospel of Peter now, freeA taste of the format — open the reader above to read all of The Gospel of Peter word by word.
The Gospel of Peter survives in a single Greek manuscript, dug up at Akhmîm in the winter of 1886–87 and lost to the church for seventeen centuries. It tells the passion from the outside, eerie and vivid, with details no canonical gospel keeps.
Reading it word by word in the original Greek, you meet an early Christian imagination unsmoothed by any later editor: Herod, not Pilate, condemns Jesus; the cross itself speaks; and the story ends mid-sentence, as fragments do.
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