The Act of Peter is a brief miracle text celebrating virginity that is found in the 5th-century papyrus Berlin Codex (Berolinensis Gnosticus 8502).
It treats of the crippled virgin daughter of Peter, who was accused by the crowd that gathered before his door, among whom he had caused many blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk: "But your virgin daughter, who has grown up to be beautiful and who has believed in the name of God, why have you not helped her?
Finding her "with one whole side of her body, from her toes to her head, paralyzed and withered, we picked her up, praising the Lord who had saved his servant from defilement, [and] pollution."
Ptolemy leaves a plot of land to the girl, "since because of her he believed in God and was saved", and Peter sells it and distributes the price to the poor.
Only nominally connected with the Peter of the New Testament, this brief Act expresses in a characteristically extreme form the cult of virginity in the male-dominated 5th-century Christian Church, a cultural thread that may also be detected in many early Acta of female martyrs.