The Acts of Paul is one of the major works from the New Testament apocrypha, and thought to have been written at the end of the second century. The Acts were considered orthodox by Hippolytus, but were eventually regarded as heretical when the Manichaeans started using the texts.

The discovery of a Coptic version of the text, demonstrated that the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul, Third Epistle to the Corinthians, and story of the Martyrdom of Paul, are actually constituent parts of the text of the Acts of Paul, which were sometimes considered worth treating as separate texts. The remainder of the Acts exist only in fragments from the third and fifth century.

The texts are a coherent whole, and generally thought to have been written by one author using oral traditions, rather than basing it on any of the other apocrypha or the orthodox canon.