The Apocalypse of Peter

The Ethiopic Apocalypse of Peter, which survives inside Qalementos — the Ethiopic Books of Clement, one of the five books of the Ethiopian canon this volume listed as absent. Peter asks the Lord on the Mount of Olives for the signs of his coming and is shown the end of the world, the punishments of hell and the garden of the righteous. It was read as scripture in Rome in the second century, and the Muratorian Canon lists it beside the Apocalypse of John.

It is a part of Qalementos and not the book. Six of the seven books of the Ethiopic Clement have no public-domain English translation at all, and James took even this one only as far as the point where he judged the rest of the Ethiopic late, saying so and stopping. The canon table counts the book as here in part for that reason, and says which part.

Where the text carries a section number from the Greek fragment rather than from the Ethiopic, James set it as a label in the margin — “Gr. 22.” and so on — and those are his and are left where he put them.

Every biblical book in this volume is checked verse for verse against independent reference counts. None exist for this text, so there is nothing to check it against but the scan itself, and it is marked unverified for that reason. Read it as a text recovered rather than as a text verified.

146 words here appear nowhere else in this volume and were left exactly as the scan has them, and nothing was mended. Most of them are not mistakes at all — they are words this library simply never uses elsewhere, and the Ge'ez forms of names — and the rest are the scanner's worst pages, left visible rather than smoothed over.