Деяния Филиппа: Гностический апокриф и чудеса апостола Филиппа

The Greek Acts of Philip (Acta Philippi) is an episodic gnostic apocryphal book of acts from the mid to late fourth century, originally in fifteen separate acta, that gives an accounting of the miraculous acts performed by the Apostle Philip, with overtones of the heroic romance.

The Acts of Philip is most completely represented by a text discovered in 1974 by François Bovon and Bertrand Bouvier in the library of Xenophontos monastery on Mount Athos in Greece. The manuscript dates from the fourteenth century but its language identifies it as a copy of a fourth century original. Bovon at first suggested that the text's character named Mariamne may be identical to Mary Magdalene.</blockquote>

New translations of the full text as discovered by Bovon have been published in French, 1996, and in English in 2012. Previous English translations, such as that in M. R. James, are based on the collections of fragments that were known previous to Bovon's discovery. A Medieval icon from Arsos in Cyprus depicts some of the events recounted in the acts.

The narrative recounts that Jesus sent out a group of followers to spread his message. The followers were Philip, Bartholomew, and a woman named Mariamne, who is identified in the text as Philip's sister, and is a leading figure in the second half of the text. They form a community that seems to practice vegetarianism and celibacy, Mariamne wears men's clothes and holds positions of authority comparable to men, serving as a priest and a deacon. with Mariamne's clothing reaffirming her resistance against the snake of Eden's seduction of Eve. The group travels through pagan lands spreading Christianity by performing powerful miracles, in a series of cycles that has been described to owe "as much to Christian doctrine, which they try to endorse, as they do to the raw material of Eastern and Mediterranean mythology, which they shamelessly exploit." Among their miraculous accomplishments were the conversion of a talking leopard and a talking goat into additional companions, The group crosses various lands in route to the city while exorcizing monsters, which are revealed to be demons, as well as the offspring of the snakes into which the Pharaoh's sorcerers turned their staffs. After their submission, Phillip turns them into black men in order for them to build a church before disappearing. The temple and the monster are then sent to the abyss in a final miracle. Two episodes recounting events of Philip's commission (3 and 8) have survived in both shorter and longer versions. There is no commission narrative in the surviving texts: Philip's authority rests on the prayers and benediction of Peter and John and is explicitly bolstered by a divine epiphany, in which the voice of Jesus urges "Hurry Philip! Behold, my angel is with you, do not neglect your task" and "Jesus is secretly walking with him".(ch. 3).

Bovon, F., B. Bouvier, F. Amsler, Acta Philippi: Textus (Turnhout, 1999) (Corpus Christianorum, 11). Amsler, F. Acta Philippi: Commentarius (Turnhout, 1999) (Corpus Christianorum, 12). F. Amsler et A. Frey (еdd), Concordantia Actorum Philippi (Turnhout, 2002) (Instruments pour l’étude des langues de l’Orient ancien, 4).

F. Bovon, B. Bouvier, F. Amsler, Actes de l'apôtre Philippe: Introduction, notes et traductions, Turnhout: Brepols 1996 (= Apocryphes. Collection de poche de l'AELAC 8). François Bovon and Christopher R. Matthews, The Acts of Philip: a new translation, Baylor University Press, 2012. .

De Santos Otero, "Acta Philippi," in W. Schneemelcher (ed), New Testament Apocrypha. vol. II (Writings Related to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects) (Cambridge Louisville, 1992), 468–473. Bovon, F., B. Bouvier, F. Amsler, Actes de l'apôtre Philippe (Tournhout, 1996) (Apocryphes, 8). Bovon, F., "Mary Magdalene in the Acts of Philip", in F. Stanley Jones (ed. ), Which Mary? (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature) 2002, 75–89. Bovon, F. "Women Priestesses in the Apocryphal Acts of Philip," in S. Matthews, C. Briggs Kittredge and M. Johnson DeBaufre (eds), Walk in the Ways of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Harrisburg, 2003), 109–121.