The Repose of Saint John the Evangelist and Apostle

The Coptic (Sahidic) account of the death of John the apostle at Ephesus, in British Museum MS. Oriental 6782, a manuscript dated AD 990; author unknown. It is a later form of the ending of the Acts of John (the Metastasis), which also stands in this corpus in M. R. James's English. On the first day of the week John exhorts the brethren, prays, gives thanks over the bread and breaks it with them, then goes out of the city with two young men, has a deep grave dug among the tombs, prays a long prayer of thanksgiving for having been kept pure, and lies down in it, dismissing the brethren. On the morrow they find only his sandal and the dug earth, and remember the Lord's word to Peter about John (John 21:22). This is E. A. Wallis Budge's English in Coptic Apocrypha in the Dialect of Upper Egypt (British Museum, 1913); his notes are not reproduced. Chapters are the leaves of the manuscript (folios 2 to 8; leaf 7 falls inside John's prayer and has no paragraph of its own), and verses are Budge's paragraphs. Not part of any church's canon.