The Acts of Paul is one of the major works and earliest pseudepigraphal (noncanonical) series from the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

 also known as Apocryphal Acts, an approximate date given to the Acts of Paul is 160 CE. The Acts were first mentioned by Tertullian. Tertullian found it heretical because it encouraged women to preach and baptize. The Acts were considered orthodox by Hippolytus

Hippolytus (writer)

Hippolytus of Rome was the most important 3rd-century theologian in the Christian Church in Rome, where he was probably born. Photios I of Constantinople describes him in his Bibliotheca Hippolytus of Rome (170 – 235) was the most important 3rd-century theologian in the Christian Church in Rome,...

, but were eventually regarded as heretical when the Manichaeans started using the texts. The author of the Acts of Paul is unknown and wrote out of respect for Paul, in Asia Minor. The author does not show any dependency on the canonical Acts, but uses oral traditions of Paul's missionary work.

The discovery of a Coptic

Coptic language

Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...

 version of the text, demonstrated that the text was composed of

• the Acts of Paul and Thecla
  Acts of Paul and Thecla
  The Acts of Paul and Thecla is an apocryphal story— Goodspeed called it a "religious romance"— of St Paul's influence on a young virgin named Thecla. It is one of the writings of the New Testament Apocrypha.- The text :...
  
  
• the Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul
  Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul
  The Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul is a work from the New Testament apocrypha, and originally formed part of the Acts of Paul, though it was later detached and circulated separately....
  
  
• the Third Epistle to the Corinthians
  Third Epistle to the Corinthians
  The Third Epistle to the Corinthians is believed to be a pseudepigraphical text under the name of Paul of Tarsus. It is also found in the Acts of Paul, and was framed as Paul's response to the Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul. The earliest extant copy is Bodmer Papyrus X.In the West it was not...
  
  
• the Martyrdom of Paul - his death at the hand of Nero

All of these constituent parts were often considered worth treating as separate texts, and frequently appeared independently, although scholars agree that they were originally part of the Acts of Paul. Besides the four main sections mentioned above, the remainder of the Acts exist only in fragments from the 3rd and 5th centuries:

• The healing of Hermocrates
  Hermocrates
  Hermocrates was a general of Syracuse during the Athenians' Sicilian Expedition.The first historical reference to Hermocrates is at the congress of Gela in 424 BC, where he gave a speech demanding the Sicilian Greeks stop their quarrelling...
  
   from dropsy
  Edema
  Edema or oedema ; both words from the Greek , oídēma "swelling"), formerly known as dropsy or hydropsy, is an abnormal accumulation of fluid beneath the skin or in one or more cavities of the body that produces swelling...
  
  
• The strife of the Ephesian
  Ephesus
  Ephesus was an ancient Greek city, and later a major Roman city, on the west coast of Asia Minor, near present-day Selçuk, Izmir Province, Turkey. It was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League during the Classical Greek era...
  
   beasts

The texts are a coherent whole, and generally thought to have been written by one author using oral traditions, rather than basing it on any of the other apocrypha or the orthodox canon. The main emphasis of the text is on Chastity and anti-Gnosticism

Gnosticism

Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...

. According to Tertullian

Tertullian

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, anglicised as Tertullian , was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa. He is the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin Christian literature. He also was a notable early Christian apologist and...

, the author was a priest in Asia Minor. While the priest encouraged female ministry, it did have doctrinal orthodoxy in regards to continence and Resurrection. Also, they mentioned the close relationship of sexual purity and salvation.

The Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul and the Third Epistle of the Corinthians both appear in some editions of the Armenian Bible.

Overview

As said above, Acts of Paul consists of the third letter to the Corinthians, an account of his martyrdom, and other narratives depicting his preaching and activity. There is a ranger of literature either about or purporting to be by Paul, including letters, narratives, prayers, and apocalypses. The pseudonymous Third Letter to the Corinthians claims to have been written from prison to correct the misinterpretations that his first and second letter had created. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he stated that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" and this statement is not unrelated to the debates that ensued between the Gnostic and proto-orthodox Christians thereafter. A Christian concerned to emphasize that people would be physically resurrected rather than merely spiritually forged 3 Corinthians to counter what the Gnostics were saying, presumably because their argument was gaining much ground. The Acts of Paul also appear to be familiar with the traditional account about the martyrdom of Peter, in which, having been arrested and condemned to death, Peter asked to be crucified head-down because he wasn't worthy of having the same death as Jesus.

External links

• Acta Pauli A website devoted to an international, scholarly discussion of the Acts of Paul.
• http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/446919/Acts-of-Paul