The New Testament tells us almost nothing about one of the most intriguing periods in the life of Jesus: the time between His resurrection and His ascension. Acts says only that the risen Christ “shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.”Acts 1:3.
That is nearly all. Forty days of teaching by the resurrected Lord, and the canon preserves only a handful of scenes. It is natural to wonder what He said.
The canonical scenes are worth gathering. Luke records the walk to Emmaus, where Christ “expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself,” and an appearance in which He “opened... their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.”Luke 24:27, 45. John records the breakfast by the Sea of Tiberias and the charge to Peter, “Feed my sheep.”John 21. Paul mentions an appearance to more than five hundred at once.1 Corinthians 15:6. And Matthew closes with the commission to teach all nations.Matthew 28:16–20. Each is brief, and each hints at more teaching than it records.
A Whole Genre of Texts
In the centuries after the New Testament, a number of writings appeared that claim to record the teachings of the risen Christ to His disciples. Some are orthodox in tone, some are deeply strange, and many were later set aside by the church.
The Epistula Apostolorum (“Epistle of the Apostles”), usually dated to the mid-second century, presents itself as a letter from the eleven recording a long dialogue with the risen Christ. It survives complete only in Ethiopic, with portions in Coptic. Topics include His descent from heaven through the angelic orders, the resurrection of the flesh, His descent to the dead, and the future of the church. The Apocryphon of James, found among the Nag Hammadi codices and probably from the second or third century, describes Jesus appearing 550 days after His resurrection and teaching Peter and James privately before His final ascent. The Pistis Sophia, a Coptic work usually dated to the third or fourth century, opens by saying that Jesus spent eleven years after His resurrection teaching His disciples. It is long and elaborate, concerned with the heavenly realms and their orders, and with the “mysteries,” rites needed for the soul’s ascent through them.Preserved in the Askew Codex, now in the British Library. The Questions of Bartholomew survives in Greek, Latin, and Slavonic versions; its date is uncertain, with proposals ranging from the third to the sixth century. In it the apostles question the risen Jesus, and Bartholomew asks Him about His descent into hell, among other mysteries. The Testament of Our Lord is a church order surviving mainly in Syriac, usually dated to the fourth or fifth century. It frames instructions on church offices and worship as words spoken by Jesus to His disciples before His ascension. The classic Latter-day Saint treatment of this literature is Hugh Nibley’s article “Evangelium Quadraginta Dierum” (“The Gospel of the Forty Days”).Vigiliae Christianae 20 (1966): 1–24; reprinted as “The Forty-day Mission of Christ—The Forgotten Heritage” in When the Lights Went Out (1970) and in Mormonism and Early Christianity (Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol. 4). Nibley’s central observation is that, for all their differences, these texts keep returning to the same themes: teachings kept from the wider world, the premortal existence of souls, ordinances connected with an ascent to God, and the redemption of the dead. Many Latter-day Saint readers find those themes strikingly familiar. It is worth noticing where Nibley published. Vigiliae Christianae is a mainstream peer-reviewed journal of early Christian studies, and the article was written for scholars in that field rather than for a Latter-day Saint audience. Its argument is a comparative one: that a recurring cluster of themes in the forty-day literature deserves attention as a pattern. Scholars outside the Latter-day Saint tradition have generally explained the same themes as later developments, many of them Gnostic, rather than as memories of authentic teaching. Readers should weigh both. Jonah R. Barnes’s The Missing Ministry of the Risen Christ (Plain and Precious Publishing, 2026) takes up the same subject. According to the publisher’s description, it explores ancient traditions about the forty-day ministry “through a Latter-day Saint lens,” looking at parallels between the teachings attributed to the risen Christ and restored temple theology.Description from the publisher’s product page; this book has not otherwise been reviewed here. Most scholars date all of these works well after the apostles, and many show the influence of later movements, including Gnostic ones. That does not make them worthless. It means they are best read as evidence of what some early Christians believed and remembered, not as verbatim transcripts of what Jesus said. Where they agree with one another, and with themes found in restoration scripture, the agreement is interesting. But it is a pattern to be weighed, not a proof. Two features of this literature connect naturally to the model in Part One. First, its interest in the redemption of the dead fits a providence that reaches across all of history and leaves no one outside its scope. Second, its picture of a long and deliberate unfolding of God’s purposes, prepared from the beginning and revealed in stages, fits a God who fixes the end while letting the way be lived. The redemption of the dead is the strongest point of contact. The New Testament itself says Christ “went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” and that “for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead.”1 Peter 3:19; 4:6. Joseph F. Smith’s 1918 vision describes the Savior organizing that work among the dead.Doctrine and Covenants 138. In the terms of this book, the redemption of the dead is what one would expect if God’s purposes are conditions on the whole of history: no one’s place in the story is fixed merely by when or where they happened to live.Hugh Nibley’s Study
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