7/6/2026: from Claude.ai.
Be sure to read to the 2nd Prompt – What do critical bible scholars say is why the Gospel of Peter was not in the canon when it is clearly pro-Roman and anti-Judaism?
1st Prompt: Provide quotes and context about how the Gospel of Peter pushes anti-Judaism further. Cite all sources inline.
A note [from Claude] first: the user preference for NRSV/ASV applies to the canonical biblical text — the Gospel of Peter is a non-canonical, apocryphal text, so I’ll cite it from standard scholarly translations rather than a Bible version.
Context
The Gospel of Peter survives only in a fragmentary form (the Akhmîm fragment), so the text picks up mid-scene, after Pilate has already washed his hands. Scholars have long noted that this document goes further than the canonical Gospels in shifting blame for the crucifixion away from Rome and onto Jewish authorities specifically. As Wikipedia’s summary notes, the text assigns responsibility for the crucifixion to Herod Antipas rather than Pontius Pilate, who is exonerated. More broadly, “the Jews” — particularly the chief priests and scribes — are cast as the villains throughout: they condemn Jesus, abuse him, crucify him, and divide his clothing among themselves. Roman soldiers barely appear until Pilate sends them, at Jewish request, to guard the tomb.
Key passages showing this shift
- Pilate’s innocence is total and passive; Herod actively gives the execution order. The text opens: “of the Jews no man washed his hands, neither did Herod nor any one of his judges: and whereas they would not wash, Pilate rose up.” Herod then takes over, ordering that Jesus “be taken away,” telling the Jewish leaders to “do what I ordered you to do to him.” This inverts the canonical order — in Luke, Herod famously declines to pass judgment on Jesus and sends him back to Pilate; here Herod is the one issuing the death order, while Pilate has already ritually distanced himself.
- Herod, not Pilate, releases the body — reinforcing that Jewish authority, not Roman, controls Jesus’s fate. When Joseph asks for the body, Pilate has to send the request on to Herod, who answers that they would have buried Jesus even without being asked, since the Sabbath was approaching, citing the Law’s requirement that the sun not set on an executed man. Rome is no longer even the party with authority to grant burial — that belongs to the Jewish king.
- The mockery and crucifixion itself is carried out by Jewish captors, not Roman soldiers. The text describes those who had taken Jesus dragging him along and taunting, “Let’s drag the Son of God, having authority over him,” then dressing him in purple, crowning him with thorns, spitting on him, striking him, and scourging him while mocking, “With this honor, let’s honor the Son of God.” In the canonical Gospels this abuse is largely committed by Roman soldiers; here it is folded into the actions of “the Jews” who had custody of Jesus.
- Fear of “the Jews” persists even after the crucifixion, marking them as the ongoing threat/villain of the narrative. The women who go to mourn at the tomb are described as afraid the Jews would see them, saying that although they couldn’t weep and beat themselves publicly on the day of the crucifixion, they might now do so privately at the tomb.
Scholarly assessment
The pattern is stark enough that one source bluntly states: the tone of the text is anti-Semitic, citing as an example that Herod Antipas — a Jewish client-king — is held responsible for a punishment that was, as far as we know, distinctly Roman.
This fits exactly the trajectory Ehrman describes: where Mark has Pilate and Jewish leaders cooperating, and Matthew/John have Pilate declare innocence while “the Jews” force his hand, the Gospel of Peter removes Pilate from the causal chain almost entirely — Herod gives the order, Jewish captors carry out the abuse and crucifixion, and “the Jews” remain the looming, feared antagonists of the story even after Jesus’s death.
2nd Prompt – What do critical bible scholars say is why the Gospel of Peter was not in the canon when it is clearly pro-Roman and anti-Judaism?
This is actually a really interesting historical irony, and critical scholars are pretty clear that the exclusion had almost nothing to do with the anti-Jewish or pro-Roman slant of the text — that slant wasn’t the church’s problem with it.
The actual reason: pseudonymity and suspected docetism
The key evidence comes from Eusebius’s Church History, which preserves a letter from Serapion, bishop of Antioch (c. 190–203 CE). When Serapion first heard Christians in Rhossus were reading a “Gospel of Peter,” he approved it without having read it closely, reasoning that since it was attributed to Peter he initially authorized its use without close scrutiny. After actually examining the text, though, he reversed course — he came to believe the gospel concealed a heresy he attributed to a figure named Marcian, which he identified as docetism, while still conceding that much of the text reflected the Savior’s true teaching alongside some troubling additions.
Docetism (from the Greek dokeō, “to seem”) was the view that Christ only appeared to have a physical body and didn’t really suffer or die as a human. This mattered enormously to proto-orthodox bishops because it undercut the incarnation and the reality of the atonement. One line scholars point to as raising this suspicion is Jesus’s cry from the cross rendered not as an expression of human abandonment but as “my power, my power,” and the description of his death not as dying but as being “taken up” — phrasing Serapion read as implying Christ’s real, spiritual self was simply lifted away rather than truly dying.
So the two disqualifying factors, per the ancient sources themselves, were:
- Pseudepigraphy — it wasn’t actually written by Peter, and church authorities (Eusebius, later Jerome, and the Decretum Gelasianum attributed to Pope Gelasius I) rejected texts falsely attributed to apostles.
- Suspected doctrinal deviance (docetism) — not its portrayal of Jews or Romans.
A complication modern scholars have flagged
Interestingly, most contemporary critical scholars think Serapion may have gotten the docetism charge wrong, or was reacting to a different/expanded version of the text than what survives in the Akhmîm fragment. As one Cambridge NTS study notes, close analysis of the surviving portion actually shows the author leaning into the scandal of the cross rather than softening it, which is the opposite of what a docetic writer would do — leading some scholars to suggest that whatever Serapion read may not correspond neatly to what modern scholars have in hand.
Why the anti-Jewish/pro-Roman slant wasn’t disqualifying
This is really the heart of your question, and the straightforward answer critical scholars give is: it wasn’t a problem for the very people making canonical decisions, because they largely shared that same anti-Jewish trajectory. As Ehrman’s own body of work on this topic argues (and as your first article makes clear), the shift toward exonerating Pilate and blaming “the Jews” is already underway inside the canonical Gospels themselves — Luke, Matthew, and John all move in that direction. A text that pushed this further wasn’t an outlier the church needed to police; it was continuous with a trend the emerging orthodoxy was already comfortable with. The bishops vetting texts for canonicity were doing so on grounds of apostolic authorship and Christological orthodoxy (does this correctly describe the nature of Christ?) — not on grounds of how sympathetically or unsympathetically the text treated Jews or Rome. That criterion simply wasn’t part of the church’s canonical calculus, which is precisely why anti-Jewish rhetoric was able to intensify across canonical and non-canonical texts alike without functioning as a barrier to inclusion anywhere.
