Acts 29

Acts 29, also known as the Lost Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and the Sonnini Manuscript, is a short text purporting to be the translation of a manuscript containing the 29th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, detailing Paul the Apostle’s journey to Britannia, where he preached to a tribe of Israelites on Mount Lud (Ludgate Hill), later the site of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and met with druids, who proved to him that they were descended from Jews. Thereafter, Paul preached in Gaul and Belgium, and then to Switzerland (Helvetia), where a miraculous earthquake occurred at the site of Pontius Pilate’s supposed suicide. The canonical book of Acts ends rather abruptly with Paul kept under house arrest in chapter 28, which has led to various theories about the history of the text. The text made its first appearance in London in 1871. According to the editor, it was translated in the late 18th century by the French naturalist Sonnini de Manoncourt from a Greek manuscript discovered in the archives at Constantinople and presented to him by the Sultan Abdoul Achmet. However, no trace of any such manuscript has been found, and from internal evidence, mainstream philology considers it to most likely be a fraud, thus it is classed among the pseudepigrapha.