Apocryphon of John - History

History

A book called the Apocryphon of John was referred to by Irenaeus in Adversus Haereses, written about 185 CE, among the writings that teachers in 2nd-century Christian communities were producing, "an indescribable number of secret and illegitimate writings, which they themselves have forged, to bewilder the minds of foolish people, who are ignorant of the true scriptures" — scriptures which Irenaeus himself was establishing as no more and no less than four, the "Fourfold gospel" that his authority helped make the canonical four. Among the writings he quotes from, in order to expose and refute them, include the Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Judas, and this secret book of John.

Little more was known of this text until 1945, when a cache of thirteen papyrus codices (bound books) that had been hidden away in the 4th century, was fortuitously discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt (CG II). The Apocryphon of John was among the texts, in three Coptic versions translated from the Greek. Two of the versions are very similar and represent one manuscript tradition; they incorporate a lengthy excerpt from a certain Book of Zoroaster appended to the Apocryphon (as chapters 15:29 – 19:8f) A shorter version of the Apocryphon found at Nag Hammadi does not contain the interpolation and represents another manuscript tradition. Still another version of this short edition of the text was discovered in an ancient Coptic Codex acquired by Dr. Carl Reinhardt in Cairo in 1896. This manuscript (identified as the "Berlin Gnostic Codex" or BG 8502) was used along with the three versions found at Nag Hammadi to produce the translations now available. The fact that four manuscript "editions" of this text survived—two "long" versions and two "short" versions—suggests how important this text was in early gnostic Christian circles. It should also be noted that in the three Nag Hammadi codices where the Apocryphon of John appears, the text in each case is the first text of the collection.