This account of Christ’s descent into Hades and his delivering the righteous who were in the bondage of death is taken from the fourth-century Gospel of Nicodemus, which incorporates the older Acts of Pilate. As early as A.D. 150, Justin Martyr describes this work, as does Tertullian about A.D. 197.

“When Christ on the cross gave up his spirit, then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”

“Suddenly there came a voice like thunder and a spiritual shout: ‘Lift up, your gates, O princes, and be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!’ And the Lord of Majesty appeared in the form of a man and lightened the eternal darkness and broke the unbreakable bonds, and His everlasting might brought relief to us that sat in the deep darkness of our transgressions and in the shadow of death of our sins… Then the King of Glory in his majesty trampled on death, and laid hold of Prince Satan and delivered him to the power of Hades, and drew Adam to Himself, to His own brightness.

The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas is a prison diary describing the martyrdom of three catechumens, Saturus, Saturninus and Revocatus, and two young women, Vibia Perpetua and her servant Felicity, who was pregnant at the time of her arrest and gave birth to a girl shortly before her death in the arena. They suffered martyrdom on March 7, 203, in Carthage. During the lifetime of Saint Augustine (†430), the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas was held in such high esteem in North Africa that the saint had to warn his listeners not to put it on a level with the canonical Scriptures.

Hilarian the governor said to me: “Spare your father’s grey hairs; spare the infancy of the boy. Make sacrifice for the Emperors’ prosperity.”

“I will not,” I answered.

“Are you a Christian?” Hilarian asked.

And I replied, “I am a Christian.”

My father still stood by me to draw me away from my faith, so Hilarian ordered him to be thrown to the ground and beaten with a rod. My aged father’s suffering grieved me as if I myself had been beaten.

Then Hilarian passed sentence on all of us and condemned us to the wild beasts, and we returned to prison in high spirits.

These prologues are short prefaces to the gospels of Mark, Luke and John, written in the 2nd–3rd century. If, as seems clear, they are based in part on the writings of Irenaeus and Hippolytus of Rome, then they can be no earlier than the third century. If a second-century date is correct, then the prologue to Luke is the earliest surviving text to name Luke as the author of the Acts of the Apostles, as well as being the earliest known text to use this specific title.

Indeed Luke was an Antiochene Syrian, a doctor by profession, a disciple of the apostles: later however he followed Paul until his martyrdom, serving the Lord blamelessly. He never had a wife, he never fathered children, and died at the age of eighty-four, full of the Holy Spirit, in Boetia. Therefore, although gospels had already been written – indeed by Matthew in Judea but by Mark in Italy – moved by the Holy Spirit he wrote down this gospel in the region of Achaia, signifying in the preface that the others were written before his, but also that it was of the greatest importance for him to expound with the greatest diligence the whole series of events in his narration for the Greek believers