Talk:Apocalypse of Peter/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: SnowFire (talk · contribs) 18:17, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Seltaeb Eht (talk · contribs) 17:16, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi SnowFire, thanks for improving this article on an important and interesting early apocryphal text. I'll start the review, comments to follow shortly. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 17:16, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Images

Pass on images. All are well-chosen and have appropriate pd tags or licensing. No section screams out as being under-illustrated. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 18:38, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I'll dig into reviewing the article content and leave some comments this evening (EDT).

Prose - well-written, verifiable, neutral, broad

Article is great overall. Below are some suggestions/questions (not demands) for improvement:

• In 1907–1910, a large set of documents...a collection of Antoine d'Abbadie. - the provenance of this Ethiopic manuscript confused me a little. After following the link to d'Abbadie's page, I guess I follow that: d'Abbadie acquired it from an unknown source at an undetermined time in the 19th C; after his death, his collection of Ethiopic manuscripts (and others?) were published in French. Maybe I'm not parsing correctly, but it could be presented a little more clearly - maybe reconfigure so d'Abbadie is mentioned before James?

• Date of authorship Scholars hypothesize that the author of the Apocalypse of Peter may have been from Roman Judea or Roman Egypt. - Bauckham's case for Judea is well made in the prose adjacent to the picture, but the argument for Egypt isn't made until late in the article. Really, doesn't the paragraph The Apocalypse of Peter fits...8th century or later. belong in this section, rather than Later influences?

• In the Ethiopic version, Peter experiences - introduce Peter as "the apostle Peter" or "the disciple Peter"?

• the Apocalypse of Peter shows a close resemblance in ideas with the epistle 2 Peter - should this textual relationship also be referenced in the dating section?
  • Thanks for the review!
  • d'Abbadie: Yeah, it's tricky. I was kind of going for a "chronological as seen from what we knew about the Apocalypse of Peter" as d'Abbadie didn't know he'd purchased Pierre's Apocalypse at the time, and it was only once James noticed that the pieces were put together in retrospect. (But I've reorganized it to be a bit more strictly chronological, starting with d'Abbadie.)
  • I went ahead and added a brief sentence + footnote on the Egyptian origin bit. TBH the Mueller defense of Egyptian origin is not very convincing, but a general stance of "if Clement was talking about it, then it was already popular in Egypt, and the easiest assumption is that it had the most time to become popular there" is fair enough.
    • Also, maybe I should clarify it more although I'm less sure how, but the "8th century or later" bit later in the article is on the origin of... well there's not really a title for it, but "the other stuff in the Ethiopic manuscript that had the ApocPeter in it as one section without directly calling it the ApocPeter." The Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection of the Dead as the title of the combined work of both ApocPeter + (unnamed other stuff that most scholars are less interested in). If you're curious, you can see it in the 2024 Beck link in the "translations" list, just keep reading after the ApocPeter section is finished.
  • Done. (I suppose it's a little weird in that it's the apostle Peter in the Ethiopic and the disciple Peter in the Akhmim Greek!)
  • Not a great fit there. Nearly everyone agrees that the Clementine Oracles were quoting the Apocalypse of Peter (well, not Adamik, but he's wrong) so that's useful for dating (backed by Clement), but the problem with 2 Peter is that scholars argue about which came first. And more generally the date of 2 Peter itself isn't very known or agreed upon (anywhere from 60 to 150 AD!). I think most lean toward the 100-150 range, which is... exactly the same as ApocPet, and thus still doesn't really clarify things. :( SnowFire (talk) 22:21, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

@SnowFire Apologies, had a few busy days at work and wanted to give the article another good, focused once-over. Your changes have definitely cleared up my points above. On a re-read, I find the article very informative, well-researched, and well-written. Glancing through Google Scholar, there doesn't appear to be any major work missing and it appears the cited works are well-represented.

I'm going to give it one more read through to make sure I'm not missing anything, but after that will be passing.

One minor quibble for you to consider: In the second paragraph of the lead, consider the use of parentheses. In some cases, you give a term in common parlance, then the technical or non-English term in parentheses "Second Coming of Jesus (parousia)" and in others the opposite " katabasis (vision of the afterlife)". Maybe consider standardizing, or look at whether all those terms need to be defined in the lead. Doesn't hurt the article overall, just strikes me as odd as a reader. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 15:38, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I wondered if someone would bring that up. There are a lot of glosses in the second paragraph, but I figured there was a lot of technical terminology that gets used in the literature I should mention somewhere. I booted parousia down to the body, and standardized on "accessible English term first, fancy Greek/Latin term as the gloss." (Although I suppose it's possible now that someone could think "katabasis" is glossing only "afterlife"? Oh well.) SnowFire (talk) 17:09, 24 August 2024 (UTC)