The Harrowing of Hell

The text's second and most influential section, often circulated together with the trial narrative as the combined Gospel of Nicodemus, describes Christ's descent into hell between his death and resurrection, an episode barely gestured at in the canonical New Testament, in a single obscure line in the First Epistle of Peter, but given full narrative treatment here: Christ breaks down hell's gates, confronts and binds Satan, and leads out the patriarchs and prophets who had been waiting since before his coming, Adam foremost among them, in a scene of triumphant liberation that became one of the most frequently painted subjects in medieval and Byzantine Christian art, the Anastasis or Harrowing of Hell icon. This apocryphal episode did more than almost any single biblical passage to give ordinary medieval Christians a vivid, concrete picture of what happened to Christ between his crucifixion and resurrection, feeding directly into the Apostles' Creed's brief and otherwise unelaborated line that Christ descended into hell, and into centuries of mystery plays, sermons and devotional art that treated the harrowing as settled Christian narrative even though its fullest telling comes from a text the church never formally canonized.