Acts of Philip

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

Some of these episodes are identifiable as belonging to more closely related "cycles". 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).

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. Many of the narratives in the manuscript were already known from other sources, but some were hitherto unknown. The narrative recounts that Jesus sent out a group of followers to spread his message. The followers were Philip, Bartholomew, and— a leading figure in the second half of the text— a woman named Mariamne, who is identified in the text as Philip's sister, and who Bovon at first suggested may be identical to Mary Magdalene. However, following the Discovery Channel's popularized speculations in The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Bovon publicly distanced himself from its claims, withdrawing his published assertion (Bovon 2002) that the Mariamne of the Talpiot tomb discussed in The Lost Tomb of Jesus is the same person, writing in an open letter to the Society of Biblical Literature:

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