The Preaching Of Peter.

        Peter appears in the Acts as the first Christian preacher, and it was natural for a Christian writer, setting up a pattern of Christian preaching to be followed in carrying the gospel about the Greek world, to think first of him. In his name, therefore, about the beginning of the second century, or very early in it, the Preaching of Peter was written. The little book itself has long since disappeared, but quotations from it in Clement of Alexandria and in Origen give us some substantial information about it.

        It attacked, on the one hand, the prevalent idolatry of its timesthe Greek ways of worshiping God-and, on the other, the Jewish ways of worship, with their angels and archangels and their sacred days and seasons, which were governed by the changes of the moon. Christians worshiped God in a new way and, in contrast with Jews and Greeks, formed a third race. For twelve years the apostles were to labor among the Jews; then they were to go out into the world to preach to all men the one God and salvation through faith in Christ. Jesus is both “Law” and “Word.” In the writings of the prophets the coming of Christ and his sufferings, death, and resurrection would be foretold.

        These teachings of the Preaching of Peter are reported in Clement of Alexandria. Origen, a generation later, seems to be using the same book (in his On First Principles, prologue 8) under the name the Teaching (or Doctrine) of Peter (the passage is preserved only in Latin) when he writes that in that book the Savior is represented as saying to the disciples, “I am not an incorporeal demon.” This saying appears in Ignatius' Letter to the Smyrnaeans 3:2 (A.D. 110-I7) as evidence that Jesus appeared in a material body after the resurrection. The way the saying is introduced in Ignatius (“When he came to Peter and his companions, he said to them, `Take and handle me, and see that I am not an incorporeal demon’”) sounds very much as though it were drawn from some document associated with Peter's name. Jerome says that this saying stood in the Gospel of the Hebrews (On Illustrious Men 16), but there is no difficulty in supposing that both Ignatius and that gospel derived it from the Preaching of Peter.

        If the Preaching is quoted in the Gospel ofthe Hebrews (A.D. 120-30) and in Ignatius (A.D. 110-I7), it must have been written in the opening years of the second century, A.D. I00-110. Its primitive character accords reasonably well with this date. Its reference to the worship of cats, dogs, and apes has been taken to suggest an Egyptian origin, since idols with the heads of cats and dogs were worshiped in Egypt. Jewish apologetic had been particularly active there, too, in the Wisdom of Solomon, the work of Philo, the Letter of Aristeas, and in such attacks on idolatry as the story of Bel and the Dragon and the Letter of Jeremiah in the Apocrypha.

        Some of our earliest mentions of it are also from Egypt — Clement of Alexandria, who accepts it and quotes it as Peter's, and Origen, who has found the book quoted in a work of Heracleon's but is very skeptical about its genuineness as a work of Peter. Heracleon was a pupil of Valentinus and flourished between A.D. 145 and 180. Clement says that he was the most distinguished of the followers of Valentinus and quotes some of his comments on the Gospel of Luke. Heracleon wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John, of which Origen made a good deal of use. Hippolytus locates Heracleon in Italy, and so the first reflections of the Preaching are widely scattered: the Apology of Aristides in Athens and the Gospel ofthe Hebrews in Egypt in the second quarter, and Heracleon in Italy in the third quarter. On the whole, the evidence rather favors Egypt as the place of origin.

        The Preaching may have been the model for a larger Christian apology, that of Aristides, written in Greece probably between A.D. 138 and 147, for much of what we have of it is reproduced in that book. The belief that Jesus instructed the apostles to remain in Jerusalem for twelve years after his departure before going out into the world to preach reappears, as we have seen, in the Acts of Peter, chapter 5, and seems to have influenced Eusebius to date the Gospel of Matthew in A.D. 41, when Matthew would, according to this belief, be ready to leave Jerusalem and would write his gospel to leave behind him. The Catholic tradition of Peter's twenty-five years ministry in Rome also rests upon it.

        In his work On First Principles (prologue 8), Origen says that the Teaching of Peter is not by Peter or anyone else inspired by the spirit and is not counted among the books of the church. Eusebius in his Church History (iii. 3. 2, A.D. 326) groups the Preaching with the Acts of Peter, the Gospel of Peter, and the Revelation of Peter as not accepted by standard Christianity and not appealed to by church writers.[34] Indeed, of all the works claiming the name of Peter, Eusebius accepted only the first epistle as his work (Church History iii. 3. 1).

        The Preaching of Peter is chiefly significant as the first of the Christian apologies. It is another book of which a complete copy may someday be found.