In Cairo, in January 1896, Carl Reinhardt bought the codex, which had been recently discovered, wrapped in feathers, in a niche in a wall at a Christian burial site.
[1] Schmidt edited the Act of Peter in 1903,[2] but the gnostic contents of the Berlin Codex were not finally completely translated until 1955.
[3] Few people paid attention to it until the 1970s, when a new generation of scholars of early Christianity took an increased interest in the wake of the discovery of the more famous group of early Gnostic Christian documents found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, known as the Nag Hammadi library.
The "Berlin Codex" is a single-quire[4] Coptic codex bound with wooden boards covered with a leather that neither resembles tanned leather, nor does it resemble parchment or alum-tawed skin (i.e. skin that has been dressed with alum to soften and bleach it).
The Codex also contains the Apocryphon of John, The Sophia of Jesus Christ, and an epitome of the Act of Peter.