Acts of Paul
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The Acts of Paul is one of the major works from the New Testament apocrypha, and thought to have been written at the end of the second century. The Acts were considered orthodox by Hippolytus, but were eventually regarded as heretical when the Manichaeans started using the texts.
The discovery of a Coptic version of the text, demonstrated that the text was composed of
- the Acts of Paul and Thecla
- the Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul
- the Third Epistle to the Corinthians
- 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 third and fifth century:
- The healing of Hermocrates from dropsy
- The strife of the Ephesian 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. According to Tertullian, the author was a priest in Asia Minor.
The Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul and the Third Epistle of the Corinthians both appear in some editions of the Armenian Bible.
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