The Prayer of the Apostle Paul features among the Nag Hammadi Codices (Nag Hammadi Writings) discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945. It occupies one-and-a-half pages of the flyleaf to Codex I. Preserved in the Subakhmimic dialect of Coptic, its title appears at the end of the text in Greek (proseuchē pa[ulou] apostolou), followed by a short colophon (“In peace. Christ is holy”), recommending Greek as its original language.

It is, as the title suggests, a prayer. Approximately the first two lines are missing. The extant te…