The Akhmîm Codex
The Four Texts Buried Together at Panopolis
- The Gospel of Peter- trans. M. R. James, 1924
- The Apocalypse of Peter – trans. M. R. James, 1924
- 1 Enoch – trans. Richard Laurence, with R. H. Charles
- The Martyrdom of St Julian – no English translation extant
A compilation of public-domain translations, annotated to show what the manuscript itself contains and what has been supplied from other witnesses. Assembled 13 August 2026
The file Dropbox/Christianity/Scholars/Marcus%20Blue/Akhmim_Codex_Four_Texts.pdf in that Dropbox directory was provided by Marcus Blue via Tabor Research Center’s circle web site. Downloaded 8/18/2026.
The following is from that file.
About This Compilation
In the winter of 1886–87 the French Archaeological Mission, digging in the cemetery at Akhmîm in Upper Egypt — ancient Panopolis — opened a grave traditionally described as a monk’s and found a small parchment codex, roughly fifteen by twelve centimetres, buried with its owner. It is catalogued as P.Cair. 10759 and now held as BAAM 0522 at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The book had been copied by several hands between about the sixth and seventh centuries, and it holds four separate works. Three of them are the reason the codex is famous; the fourth is barely known at all.
This volume gathers all four. That is the whole of its purpose — to put between two covers the same set of texts that one late-antique reader thought worth taking into the grave, and to be precise at every point about what the manuscript actually preserves as against what has been supplied from elsewhere.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. Only the Gospel of Peter is represented here by essentially the whole of what Akhmîm contains. The codex’s Apocalypse of Peter is a shorter and divergent Greek version of a work whose fuller form survives only in Ethiopic; its 1 Enoch is a Greek copy of about the first third of a book that survives complete only in Ethiopic; and its Martyrdom of St Julian is a single damaged leaf that has never been translated into English at all. Printing these four texts without saying so would misrepresent three of them.
James Tabor’s comment in the post with the above file – James D Tabor – Thanks for this. Of course there are more accurate and updated translations of these works than the choices he made, I assume they are in the public domain. Nonetheless, it is good to know of the trove, what was in it, and so forth. I have worked most on the GPet, as many of you know—it is key to my work on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus…too bad it breaks off…but the key for my work are the ways the text both echoes Mark and revises it. The followers of Jesus weep and mourn for the eight days of Unleavened Bread…so no Sunday Morning Easter resurrection…it is cobbled togeher, but pretty clear. “You will see him in the Galilee,” becomes the pivotal line in working on our earliest accounts of “sightings of Jesus.” Mark has none of course.
