What is the Apocalypse of Paul?
Written by Marko Marina, Ph.D.
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Author | Historian | BE Contributor
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Date written: October 8th, 2026
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman
What is The Apocalypse of Paul? This question immediately reminds me why I find the world of early Christianity so fascinating. The formative centuries of the new religion were marked by extraordinary literary and social richness.
Christians lived in different communities, produced a remarkable variety of texts, debated questions of authority and doctrine, and developed religious practices that would eventually shape Christianity as we know it today.
Some of their writings became part of the New Testament. Many others didn’t. Yet those noncanonical works can be just as revealing for historians because they allow us to glimpse the hopes, anxieties, theological debates, and imaginative worlds of Christians whose voices do not always fit neatly within the boundaries of the biblical canon.
The Apocalypse of Paul belongs squarely within this exceptional literary world.
Its very title also raises an intriguing historical question. Paul of Tarsus died sometime in the 1st century, yet Christians continued to write about him (and sometimes in his name) for centuries afterward.
In other words, his authority didn’t disappear with his death. Quite the opposite: as Christianity expanded, later generations repeatedly returned to Paul, interpreting his letters, retelling stories about his life, and imagining what else the famous apostle might have taught, experienced, or revealed.
In this sense, Paul became not simply a figure of the Christian past, but a remarkably productive presence within Christian collective memory.
The Apocalypse of Paul emerged from precisely this environment. It stands at the intersection of apostolic authority, Christian imagination, and a growing fascination with questions that have never entirely disappeared: What happens after death?
What awaits the righteous and the wicked? And what might an apostle such as Paul have been permitted to see beyond the boundaries of ordinary human experience?
To understand more about a text bearing his name and how this text could attract readers for centuries (and yet never become part of the New Testament) we first need to understand what happened to Paul in Christian memory after Paul himself was gone.
If you want to learn more about these "Banned Books", check out our course on Christian Apocrypha!
Paul After Paul: The Apostle in Christian Memory
In his book After Paul: The Apostle's Legacy in Early Christianity, James W. Aageson notes:
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Following his death his legacy developed in the fledgling church as he and his letters were used to address a series of new issues facing the church in new and varied contexts: the changing roles and place of women, the nature of the church itself, new issues of unity and diversity, the formation of the Pauline canon, the relationship between scripture and tradition, asceticism, and the church’s ongoing connection to Judaism. As an authority figure, his voice would now speak to different people in new and different contexts facing a host of new problems, and in that process his legacy would be established yet again for later generations of Christians. And in each of these contexts and with each of these issues, the sociology of what was happening in Christianity was critical to his developing reputation and legacy.
So, what was the position of the apostle Paul in the collective memory of the early Church? The answer is more complicated than simply saying that Christians preserved his letters and continued to read them. Paul’s memory developed along several different, though interconnected, trajectories.
Daniel Marguerat, in his article “Paul après Paul: une histoire de réception” (Paul After Paul: A History of the Reception) offers a particularly useful model for understanding this process. He distinguishes three broad modes (or “poles”) through which Paul continued to live in early Christian memory: the documentary, the biographical, and the doctoral.
In the documentary mode, Paul survived above all as a writer: his letters were preserved, copied, collected, and eventually incorporated into the emerging New Testament. In the biographical mode, Christians remembered Paul through stories about his life and activity, particularly as the missionary who carried the Christian message throughout the Mediterranean world.
The Book of Acts is the most obvious canonical example, while later works such as the Acts of Paul show how this biographical memory could continue to develop beyond the New Testament.
Finally, in what Marguerat calls the doctoral mode, Paul became an authoritative teacher whose voice could be invoked to address problems arising after his death.
These three forms of reception weren’t successive stages neatly replacing one another. They developed alongside one another as different ways of preserving, interpreting, and extending the legacy of an absent apostle.
The literary afterlife of Paul is especially important for our purposes. His authentic letters were gradually collected, but the Pauline corpus itself also came to include writings that many scholars regard as products of a post-Pauline generation.
Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians are commonly classified as Deutero-Pauline, while 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (the Pastoral Epistles) are even more widely understood as later compositions written in Paul’s name.
Marguerat treats these writings not simply as imitations but as expressions of a developing Pauline inheritance. Their authors adopt Paul’s authority, revisit themes associated with him, and extend (but also revise!) his teaching into new ecclesiastical and ethical circumstances.
In the Pastorals, for example, “Paul” increasingly appears as a paradigmatic teacher and guarantor of the “sound” tradition that subsequent generations are expected to preserve.
Marguerat therefore describes this form of reception as one in which early Christians could imitate Pauline formulations, expand his teaching, and quite literally continue to write in his name.
Nor did this process stop at the borders of what eventually became the New Testament. Christians of the 2nd century and beyond continued producing literature centered on Paul and, in some cases, attributed directly to him.
The Acts of Paul, for instance, transformed the apostle into the protagonist of an expanding cycle of missionary, ascetic, and miraculous stories, while the 3 Epistle to the Corinthians, transmitted as part of that tradition, presents Paul once again as an author responding to theological controversy.
We can detect in such developments a gradual elevation of Paul’s remembered status: from missionary and letter writer to authoritative teacher, exemplary saint, and increasingly privileged mediator of divine revelation.
The important point here isn’t that later Christians simply invented a completely new Paul. Rather, different communities selected, emphasized, and amplified different aspects of the apostle already available in earlier traditions.
Pauline reception thus involved both continuity and transformation. In other words, a memory of Paul continually was reshaped to meet the needs of Christians living in circumstances Paul himself had never encountered.
Seen against this background, the appearance of yet another work associated with Paul is hardly surprising.
If later Christians could imagine Paul continuing to instruct churches, confront theological opponents, perform miracles, and reveal divine truths long after his death, they could also expand upon one of the most tantalizing claims found in his own letters: that he had once been taken up into the heavenly realm.
It’s within this much larger history of Pauline memory and literary reception that we should approach the Apocalypse of Paul.
We can now turn to the work itself: what it says, when scholars think it was written, and how its complex manuscript tradition has preserved it for us. Let’s take a look!
What Is the Apocalypse of Paul? Summary, Dating, and Manuscripts
In his book Journeys to Heaven and Hell, Bart D. Ehrman rightly points out:
The Jewish and Christian guided tours of heaven and hell have little in common with the nekuia of Homer but a good deal with the katabasis of Virgil: a specially chosen human is shown the various realms of the dead by a divine being; the dead experience differentiated fates, with some gloriously rewarded and others horribly punished; these fates depend entirely on how they have lived. The accounts differ a great deal from the Aeneid as well. None of them, obviously, glorifies Rome. Even more important, future punishments do not derive from the necessities of natural existence—the polluting influences of human bodies on souls that require painful purgation. On the contrary, punishments and rewards depend wholly on the will and justice of the Lord God Almighty, sovereign of heaven, earth, and under the earth, who exacts his judgment on all people, rewarding those who are faithful to him and punishing those who are not. The rewards are permanent for all rather than, as in Virgil, mostly temporary, and the punishments are correspondingly retributive, not purgative. In the earliest Jewish and Christian accounts, any exceptions to eternal punishment for sinners derive not from individual merit but from a sovereign decision of the divine ruler of all.
The Apocalypse of Paul is a prime example of this kind of guided journey through the world beyond death. Before we can talk more about its date of composition and complicated manuscript tradition, however, we need to take a closer look at its content. What is this book actually about?
At its core, the Apocalypse of Paul presents the apostle as the privileged recipient of a revelation concerning the fate of human souls after death. Accompanied by an angelic guide, Paul witnesses the judgment of the dead and is led through different regions of the heavenly and infernal worlds.
The text repeatedly stresses that divine judgment corresponds to human conduct. The deeds of each soul are known and recorded; mercy is answered with mercy, justice with justice, while failure to repent leaves the sinner exposed before the divine judge.
In one striking scene, Paul watches as a soul denies having sinned, only for its angel to appear with a written record of its deeds.
Yet the text simultaneously emphasizes the possibility of repentance: the judge declares that even a lifetime of wrongdoing could have been forgiven had the sinner truly repented before death.
Paul is then shown the rewards prepared for the righteous. He is taken to the third heaven, where the names (and even the heavenly likenesses) of those who faithfully serve God are already known.
There he encounters figures such as Enoch and Elijah before being shown increasingly splendid regions reserved for the blessed.
The landscape is described through the language of abundance and supernatural beauty: fertile lands, extraordinary trees, rivers, the Acherusian Lake, and the dazzling City of Christ. The rewards are differentiated as well.
Those who lived faithfully in ordinary married life receive blessings, while virgins and ascetics are promised still greater glory.
Later Paul enters Paradise itself, sees the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, encounters Mary and other righteous figures, and ultimately learns that a place has been prepared for him among the saints.
The revelation therefore does more than map the afterlife. It also magnifies Paul’s own status as a uniquely favored apostle whose preaching has brought multitudes to salvation.
The other side of the journey is far darker. Paul is taken to the realm of punishment, a landscape characterized by darkness, grief, fire, ice, pits, dragons, boiling pitch, and brimstone. There he sees different categories of sinners suffering punishments associated with the ways they lived on earth.
The text condemns not only obvious offenses such as murder, adultery, and violence, but also hypocrisy, lack of charity, neglect of widows and orphans, misuse of religious status, and failure to live according to Christian commitments.
Particularly revealing are those ascetics who had outwardly renounced the world but remained preoccupied with possessions and failed to show mercy to others. Their punishment underscores one of the work’s central moral claims: religious identity or outward observance means little without the conduct expected of those who bear the Christian name.
Paul, however, isn’t merely a detached spectator to these horrors. He repeatedly weeps over the suffering he witnesses and ultimately becomes an intercessor for the condemned. Together with Michael and the heavenly hosts, he appeals for mercy, and Christ responds by granting the sufferers a temporary respite.
The text explicitly associates this relief with Paul’s presence, calling him the “beloved of God.” This final dimension is essential for understanding the work as a whole.
The Apocalypse of Paul is a moral and pastoral vision in which the afterlife demonstrates the consequences of human behavior, repentance remains urgently possible before death, and Paul himself becomes both witness and compassionate mediator.
With that basic narrative in view, we can now turn to two more difficult historical questions: when was the Apocalypse of Paul composed, and how has it reached us through its complex manuscript tradition?
What Is the Apocalypse of Paul? Manuscript Tradition and Date of Composition
Unlike many non-canonical texts of the early Christian world, the Apocalypse of Paul reveals a complex and remarkably rich manuscript tradition.
The original Greek text has been lost, and what survives in Greek is only an abbreviated form preserved in much later manuscripts.
For reconstructing the fuller text, scholars therefore rely heavily on translations and recensions in other languages. The Latin tradition is especially important: a number of long Latin versions survive, with the Paris manuscript preserving what Jan Bremmer considers probably the longest and best text.
The Coptic tradition is also crucial. A Coptic manuscript dated to 960 C.E. preserves a version that is often much closer to the long Latin forms than the surviving Syriac and Greek texts. Jan Bremmer therefore suggests that where the Latin and Coptic traditions agree, we may come comparatively close to the lost Greek original.
But the transmission is anything but uniform. The work circulated in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Slavonic, and other languages, and the differences between the surviving forms can be substantial.
Hugo B. H. Duensing emphasized that the various witnesses cannot simply be combined into one seamless text, since different recensions preserve omissions, expansions, and secondary additions.
The Coptic version is a good example. It preserves material absent from the Latin tradition, but Bremmer argues that at least part of its extended ending is secondary and probably comes from a later author.
So, when we speak about the Apocalypse of Paul, we are really speaking about a text with a long and fluid history of copying, translation, abbreviation, and expansion.
While the manuscript tradition is certainly rich and complex, it only raises an even more important question: When was the original Apocalypse of Paul written?
As Jan N. Bremmer notes:
The received opinion has long been that the original version of the Apocalypse of Paul was written in Greek, perhaps even in the second century, as it was supposed to be mentioned by Origen. The supporting testimony for this idea derived from the thirteenth-century Syrian scholar Barhebraeus, but his information was evidently not based on firsthand knowledge, and clear indications suggest that our text derives from the period around 400 C.E.
The evidence for a date around 400 C.E. is considerably stronger than the older hypothesis of a 2nd-century composition (for more about the older hypothesis that still holds some of its merit, see here).
The work’s own prologue situates the supposed discovery of Paul’s revelation in the consulate associated with 388 C.E.
According to the story, a man living in a house in Tarsus once associated with Paul was instructed by an angel to dig beneath the foundations, where he found a marble box containing Paul’s revelation and even the sandals the apostle had worn while preaching.
The document was then sent to Emperor Theodosius. Bremmer argues that the mention of Cynegius, who died in 388, is especially suggestive because his name was probably still part of living memory when the work was composed.
Other internal features also fit a late-4th-century setting, including the prominence of monks and ascetics and the developing importance of Sunday as a sacred day of rest.
The external evidence points in the same direction. Augustine knew the work and rejected it in the early 5th century, providing a firm upper limit for its composition.
Taken together, the evidence makes a date around 400 C.E. the most plausible conclusion, with Egypt (especially an ascetic or monastic environment) often proposed as the most likely place of origin.
Why Isn't the Apocalypse of Paul in the New Testament?
If you think that the New Testament was shaped through a political decision of the emperor Constantine, this part of our discussion is for you. Nothing could be further from the historical evidence.
The formation of the New Testament canon was a gradual and uneven process that unfolded over several centuries, not the result of a single imperial decree. As Christians debated which writings should function as authoritative Scripture, several considerations repeatedly came into play.
In Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, Bart D. Ehrman explains:
A sacred authority had to date back to near the time of Jesus. And so The Shepherd of Hermas could not pass muster since it was, relatively speaking, a recent production. An authority had to be written by an apostle – or at least by a companion of the apostles. And so the Muratorian Canon accepts the Gospels of Luke (written by Paul’s companion) and John and the writings of Paul. But it rejects the forgeries in Paul’s name by the Marcionites. Books had to have widespread acceptance among established churches to be accepted into the canon. In other words, they had to be ‘catholic,’ the Greek term for ‘universal’. Far and away the most important criterion, though, had to do with the nature of the views set forth in a book. To some extent, in fact, the other criteria were handmaidens to this one. For if a book was not orthodox, it was obviously not apostolic (‘obviously,’ that is, to the one making the judgment), ancient (it must have been forged recently), or catholic (in that none of the other orthodox churches would have had anything to do with it).
So, measured against these considerations, how did the Apocalypse of Paul fare?
Its greatest obstacle was chronology and, consequently, apostolicity. The work speaks in Paul’s voice and expands upon the apostle’s reference to his heavenly ascent in 2 Corinthians 12, but the evidence we examined points to a composition around 400 C.E.
By that point, the core collection of writings that would constitute the New Testament was already well established, and a newly appearing work claiming to preserve a revelation of Paul faced an obvious credibility problem.
Indeed, the text’s own unusual discovery story seems designed to answer precisely that difficulty: Paul’s revelation had supposedly remained hidden beneath his former house in Tarsus until it was miraculously recovered in the late 4th century.
Yet this strategy didn’t convince everyone. Sozomen reports that an elderly presbyter in Tarsus rejected the supposed discovery as fraudulent, while Augustine complained that some people had produced an Apocalypse of Paul that the church didn’t accept.
The second problem was catholicity in the ancient sense of widespread ecclesiastical acceptance.
The Apocalypse of Paul was unquestionably popular: it circulated in numerous languages and became particularly admired in monastic circles. Bremmer notes Sozomen’s statement that “most monks praise” the work, and its extraordinary manuscript history demonstrate that Christians continued reading, copying, translating, and adapting it for centuries.
But popularity wasn’t the same thing as canonical recognition. The work never achieved the broad and sustained acceptance among geographically dispersed churches enjoyed by books such as the four Gospels or Paul’s recognized letters.
Its theology, moreover, doesn’t appear to have been the primary obstacle: much of its teaching about judgment, repentance, resurrection, reward, and punishment could sit comfortably within late-antique Christian discourse.
The decisive problems were instead that it appeared far too late to command plausible apostolic antiquity and never secured sufficiently universal recognition as Scripture. Its later appearance in the Decretum Gelasianum among rejected apocryphal writings illustrates where that process ultimately left it.
Conclusion
What is the Apocalypse of Paul? It’s much more than a curious noncanonical account of heaven and hell.
Written most plausibly around 400 C.E. in a Christian environment in which Paul’s authority had continued to grow long after his death, the text transforms the apostle’s brief reference to a heavenly ascent in 2 Corinthians into an elaborate vision of judgment, reward, punishment, repentance, and divine mercy.
Its remarkably rich manuscript tradition shows how widely Christians continued to copy, translate, adapt, and read it, even though its late date and uncertain apostolic credentials prevented it from gaining the broad ecclesiastical recognition required for inclusion in the New Testament.
Perhaps that is precisely what makes the Apocalypse of Paul so valuable to historians. It reminds us that the literary world of early Christianity was always larger than the eventual boundaries of the biblical canon.
It also reminds us that texts excluded from the New Testament could nevertheless exercise a profound influence on how generations of Christians imagined the fate of the soul, the justice of God, and the world that awaited them after death.