‘And he cast the sardine into the bath, and it lived and began to swim . . . And seeing this, many followed Peter and believed in the Lord.’
Acts of Peter, XIII, 2nd century AD
It was not one of the most moving resurrections of the era. Except, perhaps, for those who were particularly fond of sardines.
St Peter’s patience had been exhausted. He had already defeated the wicked Simon once, casting him out of Judaea, where he had ‘bewitched’ the locals with his sorcery.1 However, that was not the end of him. As a heavenly vision informed St Peter, Simon had now moved to the capital of the empire, where he was once again beguiling people with the craft of Satan.2 St Peter, as the second-century Acts of Peter records, set out swiftly.
The scene that greeted Peter in Rome was a terrible one. Many of the Christians there had already forsaken the ways of Christ and become ardent followers of Simon instead – including some of the Christians’ richest former donors. Pained by such theological, not to mention financial, irregularity, a distraught St Peter gave a lament about the ‘divers arts and temptations of the devil’, ‘the contrivances and devices of the wicked’, and a short exegesis on the ‘ravening wolf, the devourer and scatterer of eternal life’.3
Those Christians who were still faithful promptly urged Peter to ‘join battle with Simon and not suffer him any longer to vex the people.’4 St Peter agreed. Word of the forthcoming contest spread rapidly and the people of Rome – who were showing very little sign of being vexed and every sign that they were enjoying themselves immensely – gathered round to watch.
Peter’s first move against the wicked sorcerer was unexpected but nonetheless effective: he ordered a large dog to bound up to Simon, lift its forelegs up and insult him. The dog duly did so, growling such mouth-filling phrases as ‘Thou exceeding wicked and shameless one’ and ‘most wicked one and deceiver of simple souls’, as it balanced on two paws.5 Simon was appalled; the assembled multitude was delighted; the dog, having done its duty, dropped down dead at Peter’s feet.
The crowd immediately begged Peter to ‘show us another sign, that we may believe in thee as the minister of the living God.’ As they explained with honesty, if little constancy, Simon had done many miracles, ‘and therefore did we follow him.’6 St Peter must now do some too; then they would follow him instead.
St Peter turned and saw ‘a sardine hung in a window.’ He unhooked it and returned to the assembled group. ‘If ye now see this swimming in the water like a fish, will ye be able to believe in him whom I preach?’7 The crowd responded with one voice: ‘Verily we will believe thee.’
St Peter took the fish, cast it into a nearby bath of water and ordered the sardine to come to life, ‘In thy name, O Jesu Christ.’ The sardine, which was having a better day than the dog, duly did so. The people of Rome were awed. ‘Seeing this,’ the text records, ‘many followed Peter and believed in the Lord.’8
However remarkable the resurrections contained within the apocryphal tales might have been, perhaps the most remarkable resurrection of all has been that of the apocryphal texts themselves. To understand how that happened, it is necessary to travel to late Regency-era England, to the publishing house of a man named William Hone. Or rather, as furious Christians would later have it, the house of ‘the arch blasphemer’ of England.9
Hone was a man who had an almost infinite ability to irritate Christians. A journalist and satirist (he collaborated with the cartoonist George Cruikshank), his first clash with Christian morality had come just a few years before when he had written a piece of political satire modelled on the Lord’s prayer. This, to modern eyes, looks benignly mild: ‘OUR Lord who art in the Treasury,’ began its mockingly pious first line, ‘Whatsoever be thy name . . .’10 It was not considered mild at the time: it landed Hone in prison, and at the centre of what would prove to be the most important English libel trial of the century. Hone conducted his own defence and did so brilliantly, and so amusingly, that he won. It was a landmark moment in the fight for a free British press.*
Other writers might, after the experience of being jailed for a text, have chosen a more pacific topic for their next work. Not Hone. Instead, he returned almost immediately to Christianity and produced another work that would, in its own way, be almost as revolutionary. Hone’s interest in Christianity had begun early. He had been born in 1780 into an oppressively religious household. One day, when he had done something wrong, his father had handed him the family Bible and ‘enjoined upon me to learn by heart an entire chapter before he returned to dinner.’ As Hone later recalled, ‘I felt petrified. I knew it was utterly beyond my power’; so he simply closed the book in ‘reckless despair’. When his father came back, he duly ‘inflicted upon me the severest chastisement I had ever received; I believe the severest of which his arm was capable.’ Later, Hone threw the Bible down the stairs, declaring, ‘When I am my own master I will never open you.’11
Except he did. For, as well as being petrified by the Bible, Hone was fascinated by it. When he was about thirteen, he had stumbled on a text talking about Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, a work which brusquely dismisses Christianity as a ‘fable’. For the teenaged Hone, this was a moment of almost religious revelation. For the first time he realized ‘that the Bible had been or could be doubted or disbelieved.’12
He would have another moment of biblical revelation many years later. By this time he was middle-aged, and a successful printer and satirist. As he was researching something in the British Museum, he happened to stumble across English translations of some ancient texts. These writings looked, in many ways, like texts from the Bible. They talked about miracles and the lives of Jesus and Mary and Joseph. They were clearly very old – they were rich in ‘Verily I say unto thee’s and ‘Lo!’s and whatnot. But they were not like any biblical texts that Hone had ever seen. For these stories told of how a midwife had been present at the birth of Jesus; of how Jesus had turned up, in person, at the gates of hell and, most surprisingly of all, they told of how the infant Jesus had murdered people. Hone had, in short, found himself in the looking-glass world of the apocryphal gospels.
As Hone read through them on that day in the British Museum, he was spellbound. He would have instantly realized that the significance of what he had found lay less in the particular narratives – though it was undoubtedly interesting that one Christian gospel offered a Jesus who killed people – than in the mere fact that these texts existed at all. Hone had grown up being schooled, relentlessly, in the Christian story – but these books showed that very idea to be false. There had not been a single Christian story. The story that had survived had simply been one of many Christian stories. It could be doubted, or disbelieved. Hone – who was not only a satirist but a shrewd man of print – immediately understood not merely the power but the selling power of what he was looking at. In a fit of excitement, he read on eagerly then ‘tore out the Gospels for the printer’.13
In 1820, Hone published a compilation of the apocryphal tales. To understand the fascination and outrage that greeted its publication it is worth looking at the frontispiece of a slightly later edition of it, published in 1863. As its title explained, in breathless capitals, this book contained: ‘THE SUPPRESSED GOSPELS AND EPISTLES OF THE ORIGINAL NEW TESTAMENT OF JESUS CHRIST, AND OTHER PORTIONS OF THE ANCIENT HOLY SCRIPTURES, NOW EXTANT, ATTRIBUTED TO HIS APOSTLES AND THEIR DISCIPLES, AND VENERATED BY THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES DURING THE FIRST FOUR CENTURIES; BUT SINCE, AFTER VIOLENT DISPUTATIONS, FORBIDDEN BY THE BISHOPS OF THE NICENE COUNCIL, IN THE REIGN OF THE EMPEROR CONSTANTINE; AND OMITTED FROM THE CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT EDITIONS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, BY ITS COMPILERS.’14 The historical implications of this title were far from perfect (its dates were a bit out, and the early Christians hadn’t sifted the gospels like newspaper editors – rather, certain groups simply favoured certain books). But the power of the headline was undeniable.
These apocryphal gospels had not been entirely unknown before Hone – he himself was drawing on translations done a century or so earlier – but they were more or less unknown to anyone but the few select scholars who could either access those translations or read the works in their original ancient languages. Hone brought them to widespread public attention and the result was fascination – and fury. His book was described as ‘mischievous and malevolent’, and ‘the most dangerous’ of ‘various recent attacks on scripture’, while Hone himself was called a man of ‘a deep and desperate malignity’, who had shown ‘a systematic disregard for the truth’.15 As one furious cleric reflected, in yet more energetic capitals, ‘AN ENEMY HATH DONE THIS.’16
Anything about Hone that could be attacked, was: Christian reviewers insulted his person, his character, his low social status, his lack of academic qualifications – and even his typesetting. For Hone – who knew what he was up to – had laid out his alternative gospels in faux-biblical style, dividing each gospel into chapters and verses, with drop caps at the start of each section, and headings across the top of the pages. Open his book and it therefore looked just like a real Bible; except its page headings did not say things such as ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ but instead ‘Kills his schoolmasters’, or ‘Satan and the Prince of Hell quarrel’.17 To devout Christians, this was not merely typesetting: it was mockery, in font form.
Hone was not insensitive to the criticism. As he later reflected, as soon as he had published the book he had been ‘attacked with a malignity and fury that would have graced the age of Mary and Elizabeth, when Catholics put to death Protestants, and Protestants put to death Catholics.’18 His book was still annoying Christians a century later. At the start of the twentieth century, when the medievalist and novelist M. R. James came to produce his own translation of the apocryphal gospels, he would write in an ungenerous preface that Hone’s book was ‘misleading’ and ‘unoriginal’ and had ‘enjoyed a popularity which is in truth far beyond its deserts’.* It was, James wrote, ‘in fact, to speak frankly, a very bad book.’19
In their outrage, Christians had paid Hone the greatest compliment they could. Because what these Christians tacitly admitted with every insult, every piece of what Hone disdainfully called their ‘craft of disingenuous criticism’, was that his book mattered – it mattered a lot.20 Hone was little more than the messenger. What was actually enraging the faithful was not his book but the texts that it had revealed. For centuries, Christians had been taught that the Bible was the unchanging word of God. And now, apparently, here were all His other words.
And what fun they were. Since Hone’s day, they have become even more fun, as more ‘apocryphal’ gospels and texts have been discovered, and their translations have become franker. We now know of apocryphal texts that tell of how dragons worshipped the young Jesus; texts in which Mary is fed by angels; texts that describe her youth and childhood; and one very engaging text in which Mary is capable of breathing fire. There are texts that explain how Herod’s daughter was accidentally decapitated by her mother while worms poured out of Herod’s mouth. There are texts that contain necrophilia and talking donkeys. There is one supremely pleasing text in which St John banishes bed bugs from a hotel, with full biblical bombast. Having spent half the night being bitten by the creatures, the holy John comes to the end of his tether and suddenly declares, ‘I say unto you, O Bugs, behave yourselves, one and all, and leave your abode for this night and remain quiet in one place, and keep your distance from the servants of God.’21 The bed bugs duly depart. And with them – and with all of these tales – went some of the unquestioned authority of the Bible.
There are certain themes within these apocryphal writings. Several of the later texts are clearly talking to stories within the Bible; some provide backstories to well-known characters in the gospels; others clear up biblical confusions or difficulties. Consider, for example, the tale of the camel and the needle’s eye. In the tale in the Bible, Jesus states that it is ‘easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’. It is a story that has distressed Christians (particularly the rich ones) for centuries.22 This story pops up – and its more problematic aspects are dealt with – in the apocryphal book known as the Acts of Peter and Andrew. In this version, a rich man hears this biblical tale and, understandably, becomes angry.23 Happily, St Peter is ready to help (the apostles are often on hand to assist the affluent in these works). He calmly reassures the rich man that ‘nothing is impossible with God’. Then he provides a vivid demonstration.
Seeing a camel coming, Peter demands a needle – just ‘a needle with a small eye’ – then sticks the needle in the ground and, in the name of Jesus Christ, commands the camel to go through its eye.24 Sure enough, ‘The eye opened like a gate and the camel passed through.’ Peter repeats the trick twice more – once, for extra drama, with a ‘defiled woman’ sitting on top of the camel.25 A few verses later, the rich man, amazed, promises to give all his wealth away. The story concludes with the apostles consecrating a church, and the rich man relieved of his anxiety about how a rich man like him is able to get to heaven. Perhaps not least because he now no longer is one.26
St Peter is a character who features heavily in the apocryphal writings, and in some of the most entertaining tales. The story of the sardine, for example, culminates with an even more dramatic resurrection competition between Peter and the sorcerer Simon. The son of an aristocratic woman has died, and she comes to Peter and begs for help. St Peter, ever the confident compère, turns to address the assembled crowd. ‘Romans,’ he says, ‘let a righteous judgement now take place between me and Simon, and judge which of us believes in the living God, he or I.’27 If Simon raises the dead man, then the crowd may ‘believe in him as an angel of God.’ But if Simon cannot and if, instead, Peter is able to ‘restore the son alive to his mother . . . then you shall believe that [Simon] is a sorcerer and deceiver.’28 The people of Rome agree – though, they also add that, if Simon wins and Peter fails, they will burn Peter alive. With such Christian feeling swelling in the breasts of the Romans, the contest begins. Needless to say, Peter wins.
As M. R. James pointed out, such stories are clearly implausible and many Christian historians have, for centuries, discounted them as absurd. Texts such as the Infancy Gospel of James or the Infancy Gospel of Thomas were routinely dismissed and ignored by scholars, well into the second half of the twentieth century. One twentieth-century academic disparaged them as ‘the schlock that is supposed to pass for “literature”’ and added that it is ‘mystifying, indeed, why serious scholars continue to talk about the pertinence of apocryphal material to the study of the New Testament.’29 But this is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable – but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them – but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology, with dates.
Moreover, when evaluating the apparent implausibility of apocryphal tales, it is worth remembering how implausible those tales that are contained within modern Bibles once seemed to many readers. Today, time and tradition and long handling have worn the tales of the Western Bible smooth; we do not notice their rough edges or inconsistencies. In the ancient world, these now familiar biblical tales had no such antique grandeur, no well-worn lustre. And classical critics duly attacked them mercilessly, in prose rich in synonyms of the word ‘stupid’. ‘Preposterous’, snorts Porphyry when considering one biblical story; ‘the absolute stupidity of it all’, he scoffs at another. He accuses one revered Christian saying of being full of ‘obscurity and stupidity’ and another of being the sort of thing that ‘no one is so uneducated or stupid’ enough to believe. Celsus is blunter yet: he describes Christian stories as being the sort of thing that ‘a drunken old woman would have been ashamed to sing . . . to lull a little child to sleep’.30
At times, these writers attacked particular stories in detail. In one of the lengthier surviving sections of Porphyry, he takes a shot at that miracle in which Jesus exorcises the demons from the possessed man, so causing them to enter that herd of pigs, which then runs down the hill and is drowned in the sea. Much to Porphyry’s amusement.*
What ‘a piece of unscrupulous nonsense’, he writes. ‘What a myth! What empty talk! What a clumsy, ridiculous story!’31 Is this actually supposed to be true and not ‘fiction’? Surely not, for in this tale there is so ‘much to laugh at.’32 Gathering himself, Porphyry then sets about a more systematic critique of the tale, attacking everything from its geography (there is no sea there, so how was it that ‘all those swine came to be drowned, although it was a lake and not a great sea?’) to the improbability of the story’s agricultural setting (given the Jewish dietary laws on pork, he asks, ‘How could there be so large a swineherd grazing in Judea?’).
Porphyry also attacks its morals. What, he wonders, had the poor pigs done to deserve this? Why should Jesus drive the demons from one man, only to send them into helpless swine and, in the process, frighten the poor swineherds? It’s all very well to free one man from demonic possession, but to release one man from invisible bondage only ‘to place similar ties on others’, and then ‘to push fear into other men thereby’ – that ‘is unreasonable.’33 Almost two thousand years later, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his essay ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’, would find almost identical fault with the miracle. ‘You must remember that He was omnipotent,’ said Russell, ‘and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs.’34 Why?
Other critics took aim at other stories. Celsus, for example, vigorously attacked the Old Testament story of Creation – which he considered to be just as ludicrous. Some of his quibbles were practical – why, for example, did God request that light should appear right at the beginning of Creation? Surely an all-powerful, omniscient God ‘did not use light from above, like people who borrow lamps from their neighbour’?35 But his more powerful criticisms were philosophical.
Adam and Eve (or so some early Christians argued) had sinned in Eden when they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Christian interpretations, this moment would become known as ‘the Fall’ and would become one of profound intellectual importance in Western literature and philosophy, twining like a briar through the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, Milton, Malthus and many, many more. Classical authors, however, were deeply underwhelmed by this story. If an omnipotent God had made humans, Celsus argued, why did he not either make them flawless and without sin, or, if for some reason he chose to make them with sin (and, since he was omniscient, he must have known he was doing so), why did he then complain about their sinfulness afterwards?
‘How can he repent when they become ungrateful and wicked and find fault with his own handiwork, and hate and threaten and destroy his own offspring?’36 If this world and all that is in it ‘are the Creator’s works,’ asked Celsus, ‘how can it be that God should make what is evil?’ Why do that? Why didn’t this supposedly all-powerful god simply make mankind better? Or, having made them inadequately, why didn’t he just force them to behave? If God was all-powerful, ‘How can he be incapable of persuading and admonishing men?’37 Later Christians might find their belief shaken by silly stories about bed bugs; for classical critics, the inconsistencies and absurdities within the Bible itself were a far more insurmountable barrier to belief. The Old Testament, wrote Celsus with scorn, was ‘utter trash’.38
M. R. James would claim that the apocryphal stories were so silly that they would never have been included in any Bible: they had ‘excluded . . . themselves’ by their preposterousness. He was overconfident. That the apocryphal books were not contained within the Bible is true – though some had come close to being included. But that did not mean they were dismissed by Christians. Many had a far more profound influence, not merely on Christianity, but on Western morality, art and literature, than some of those contained within the Bible.
Consider, for example, the numerous apocryphal tales that relate to hell. To most people, the idea of a hell – a fiery place of everlasting punishment – feels integral to Christianity. It is nothing of the kind. For hell, in that sense, is more or less absent from the New Testament. This isn’t clear if you read the Bible today, as the word ‘hell’ recurs repeatedly. ‘[I]f thy hand offend thee,’ says Jesus in one translation, ‘cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell’.39 But ‘hell’ is not actually what the original text says. The Greek word being translated, in this instance, is ‘Gehenna’, a valley outside Jerusalem. It was not a nice place – it was believed to have been a place of child sacrifice and, as Jesus says, ‘Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.’40 But it was a very long way from hell in the complex sense that the modern mind imagines it. As one historian puts it: ‘amazing as it may seem . . . it is quite evident that hell, as a place of individual, corporal and eternal torture . . . is absent from the New Testament.’41
It is not absent from the so-called apocrypha. Read these and, at last, you can see the hellfires starting to catch and kindle in Christianity. The Apocalypse of Peter, one of the earliest Christian descriptions of hell, dates to the second century and offers a symphony in sadism.42 In its pages, the reader is taken on a brisk guided tour of hell, pausing as each torture is explained to the infernal tourist. The punishments are exquisitely apposite: blasphemers can be seen hanging by their tongues; women who ‘adorned themselves for adultery’ can be seen dangling by their hair over boiling mire; adulterers can be seen hanging by their ‘feet’ (a euphemism for genitalia).43 This hideous imagery was, naturally, very popular: this text was considered for inclusion within the New Testament proper and, in fifth-century Palestine, pious Christians who went to church on Good Friday to meditate upon the Easter message would be read sections from its ghoulish verses.
The Apocalypse of Peter was followed by the similarly macabre Apocalypse of Paul, an invigorating read that offered another infernal tour, not to mention accounts of damned women being variously roasted in pits of fire (those were the ‘whoremongers’), or having red-hot chains placed about their necks (the ‘virgins which defiled their virginity’), or even suffering the baroque fate of being ‘hung head downwards, torches burning before their faces, serpents girt about them, devouring them’ (the women who had committed the similarly baroque, and very precise crime of having ‘beautified themselves with paints and unguents [and then gone] to church to ensnare men’).44 The Church would eventually frown on such writings – the very titles of these books were, as one later decree put it, not merely to be abandoned by the Church, but actively eliminated by them. Rather ironically, this decree then added a line that would have been at home in those very hellscapes: these writings, and their authors, were to be ‘damned in the unbreakable chains of anathema for eternity.’45
Such threats were to no avail. The Church might offer damnation, but the Apocalypses offered images of moneylenders standing for eternity in pus. There was no contest. From the moment of their creation, in the second century, such hellscapes were enormously popular, and they remained popular, despite later prohibitions, for centuries. They were read across the empire and beyond – in Rome, Syria and in Palestine; in Ethiopia and in North Africa and northern Europe.46 They were translated into numerous languages – into Greek and Syriac and Coptic; into Arabic and Ethiopic and Latin.47 They influenced Christian doctrine, morality, art and, above all, imagination. Later scholars might sniff at them, but they mattered. The cloths of European heavens were woven with the words of these apocrypha; the fires of its hells burned brighter with their images.48