(1) S. Paul in his second epistle to the Corinthians, xii. 2-4, said that he had been caught up to the third heaven and heard words unspeakable. But a detailed account of what he saw, partly drawn from the Revelation of Peter (ed. M. R. James, p. 65) and coloured by Egyptian ideas of the other world, was extensively circulated in the early Church, and existed in two Greek versions as early as the fourth century. One of these, the Ἀναβατικὸν Παύλου, is lost, but it is probably represented in a Latin version discovered by Dr. M. R. James and published in Texts and Studies, ii. no. 3. The other younger Greek version, denounced by S. Augustine as ‘nescio quibus fabulis plenam’ (iii. 541 e), was printed by Tischendorf in Apocalypses Apocryphae, 34-69: he dates it about 380 A.D. There is an early Syriac version, an English translation of which is reprinted by Tischendorf under the Greek Text. The Latin version already mentioned is the most ancient and the fullest form of the legend, and it is the main source of the Latin mediaeval versions, which have been classed by Brandes in six redactions. Of these the first alone contains an account of S. Paul’s visit to heaven, the others describe only the abode of the lost. The fourth redaction (B iv) printed in Brandes, Visio Pauli, 75, in the Cologne edition of Beda, vii. 362, as one of his sermons, and by P. Meyer from a Toulouse MS. of the fourteenth century in Romania, xxiv. 365, appears to be the main source of most of the versions in the modern languages, as of our text. Meyer enumerates twenty-three MSS. of it; he thinks that it is not anterior to the twelfth century and that it was widely circulated in England. In Notices et Extraits, xxxv. 153, he gives a list of six versions in French: (1) by Henri d’Arci, there printed; (2) by Adam de Ros, trouvère anglais, printed by Ozanam in Dante et la philosophie catholique, 1845, p. 425; (3) Anonymous, MS. Bibl. Nat. 2094, of which Brandes cites the beginning and end, p. 51; (4) Anonymous, B.M. Add. 15606, printed in part in Romania, vi. 11-16; (5) by Geoffroi de Paris, an adaptation of the preceding; (6) by an anonymous English trouvère, printed in Romania, xxiv. 357. The English versions in verse are (1) MS. Laud 108, Bodleian, printed by Horstman in Archiv lii. 35; (2{a}) MS. Jesus Coll. Oxford E 29, printed in OEM 147-155; (2{b}) MS. Digby 86, Bodleian, printed by Horstman in Archiv lxii. 403; (3) Vernon MS. Bodleian, in OEM 223-232 and ES i. 293-299; (4) MS. Douce 302, Bodleian, in OEM 210-222. There is, besides the present article, a fourteenth-century prose version printed in ES xxii. 134. The relations of the English and French versions are determined by Brandes in ES vii. 34.