Abortion, Infanticide, and the Social Rhetoric of the Apocalypse of Peter

Abstract

The apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter is the earliest Christian description of hell. Among its Dantesque images there appears in chapter eight a brief but gruesome depiction of those guilty of infanticide and abortion. By virtue of the author's participation in the linguistic, social, and ideological worlds of second-century Christianity, the text is a complex one, just as contemporary debates about abortion are complex. Apoc. Pet. 8 is not simply "about" abortion or hell. This essay employs the insights of sociorhetorical criticism as a heuristic device for sorting out the various threads of discourse about abortion and infanticide in this early Christian text. Focus upon the scene's inner argumentative texture, intertexture, and social-cultural texture reveals a dynamic interplay between this text and the Greco-Roman milieu of which it is a part.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.