Apocalypse of Paul

Written around the 4th century AD in Greek, known in Latin as the Visio Pauli. It survives in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Slavonic and Ethiopic, with large differences between versions — a sign of how much it was read and rewritten through the Middle Ages.

Never canonical. Augustine criticised it directly, observing that Paul says he heard words that may not be repeated — so a book that repeats them cannot be his.

• The soul leaving the body is narrated twice, for the righteous and for the sinner, with the angels of each giving account.
• The river of fire, with people immersed to different depths according to their guilt.
• The Sunday rest granted to the damned at the request of Paul and the archangel Michael.
• The geography of paradise, with its four rivers and cities of Christ, that shaped the medieval imagination.

Did the apostle Paul write the Apocalypse of Paul?

No. It is pseudepigraphic, from the 4th century, written to develop what 2 Corinthians 12 leaves unsaid about being caught up to the third heaven.

Did this book influence Dante?

That is the standard scholarly reading. The medieval picture of a hell organised by category of sin owes much to the tradition this text begins, and Dante mentions Paul's journey in the first canto of the Inferno.