Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and eighth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings: the apocryphal Acts of the apostles. This volume holds the Acts of Paul, Peter, Andrew, Thomas and Philip, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and the later acts and martyrdoms of Matthew, Bartholomew, Barnabas, Thaddaeus and John, with William Wright’s Syriac apocryphal acts.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. The translations of M. R. James were read by machine from scans of the printed books and have not been proofread against the pages, so a misreading may remain. The Ante-Nicene translations were transcribed by the volunteers of English Wikisource, and William Wright’s and Andrew Eastbourne’s were transcribed for Roger Pearse’s collection. Page numbers and footnotes are left out. Greek, Hebrew and Latin words in the editors’ notes are left out or, where a Greek word occurs in the text itself, given in Latin letters.

In this volume

The apocryphal Acts tell what the apostles did after Pentecost, in Asia, in Greece, in India and in Rome. They are romances rather than histories, but many of them hold a good deal of early Christian teaching, and a few, such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, were being read in the churches by the end of the second century. Their stories of virgins who refused to marry and of apostles who stood against kings gave the martyr and the saint their shape.

The volume prints M. R. James’s translations of the Acts of Paul, Peter and Andrew, the Syriac Acts that William Wright translated, and the shorter Greek acts of Thaddaeus, Philip, Barnabas, Matthew and Bartholomew in the translation of Alexander Walker. Where the same work survives in several forms, the forms are printed one after another and not combined.

Dates and authorship

None of these books is part of the Bible. Some were written by Jews before the time of Christ, some by Christians in the first centuries, and some much later, and many carry the name of a patriarch, an apostle or a Father who did not write them. Some of them contain stories that the Church never received and teaching that it rejected. They are printed here so that a reader can see what they say and judge them against the Scriptures, as the Fathers themselves did. The acts of the apostles are romances of the second century and later, and they are not history.