Apocalypse of Elijah

A Coptic Christian text with older Jewish material underneath. The surviving form is usually dated to around the 3rd century AD, though parts may go back to the 1st century BC. It survives in Sahidic and Akhmimic Coptic with Greek fragments — no manuscript is complete, and the gaps are visible as you read.

It never entered any canon. The work is pseudepigraphic — written centuries after Elijah and attributed to him — and that late date, together with martyrdom scenes belonging to the age of persecution, kept it out when the lists of books were closed.

• The adversary of the last days appears under the name the text itself uses: the Son of Sin, powerless against those who carry God's seal on their forehead.
• Elijah and Enoch return to earth to face him — the scene that echoes the two witnesses of Revelation 11.
• It opens on true fasting, before any vision of the end: fasting without love counts for nothing.
• The warning against the false prophets who will be many at the end, teaching doctrines that are not God's.

Is the Apocalypse of Elijah in the Bible?

No. It belongs to no canon — Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. It is an apocryphal text, read as a witness to early Christian faith rather than as Scripture.

How old is the Apocalypse of Elijah?

The surviving Coptic version is dated to about the 3rd century AD, but most scholars identify older Jewish layers within it, possibly from the 1st century BC or AD.

Does Paul quote the Apocalypse of Elijah in 1 Corinthians 2:9?

It is an ancient and still debated suggestion. Origen recorded that some attributed "no eye has seen, no ear has heard" to an apocalypse of Elijah, since it appears nowhere in the Old Testament in that form. It cannot be confirmed, and the surviving text does not contain the line.