Apocryphon of John

The book opens in grief. John is challenged after the crucifixion by a Pharisee who tells him the Nazarene has deceived him, and the risen Christ appears in shifting form to answer the question that leaves him with.

The answer begins as far up as it is possible to begin. The first principle is the Monad, a single God of whom the text can only say what is not true, since it is beyond quality, quantity, naming and comprehension. From it proceeds Barbelo, its first thought, described in feminine terms and called the womb of everything, and from the union of the two comes a self-generated Christ and a sequence of aeons, the ordered divine world.

The collapse comes from within that world. Sophia, wisdom, conceives without the consent of her consort and without the approval of the Spirit, and produces something malformed. She hides it in a cloud away from the immortals, and it becomes Yaldabaoth, a lion-faced serpent who steals power from his mother, generates rulers of his own and fashions the material cosmos. He then says that he is a jealous god and that there is no other beside him, which the text treats as the definitive proof of his ignorance, since it shows he does not know the realm above him exists.

Salvation, in this system, is not a transaction over sin. Human beings carry a portion of the stolen light, placed in Adam by a stratagem that tricked the rulers into breathing it into him. What is required is recognition of what one already contains. The longer version closes with a monologue by Pronoia, forethought, describing three descents into the darkness to wake the sleeper and seal him in light.

Very little of this literature survives in more than one copy. The Apocryphon of John survives in four: Nag Hammadi Codices II, III and IV, and the Berlin Codex, a manuscript bought in Cairo in 1896 and published only in 1955, decades after its acquisition. All four are Coptic translations from Greek and all are usually dated to the fourth century as objects.

They do not agree in length. Codices II and IV carry a longer recension, Codex III and the Berlin Codex a shorter one, and the difference is not a matter of scribal slips. The longer version contains substantial extra material, including a catalogue of angels assigned to the parts of the human body, drawn from a source the text names, and the closing Pronoia monologue. Whether the long version expanded a short original or the short version trimmed a long one is disputed; the presence of a named source inside the extra material inclines many scholars towards expansion, but the four copies are close enough in structure that the underlying work was clearly stable in outline while remaining open at the seams.

The dating rests on an opponent. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing Against Heresies around 180, summarises a system involving Barbelo, the aeons, the erring wisdom and the arrogant creator that matches the first part of the book closely enough that he was almost certainly using this text or its immediate source. That puts the material no later than the mid-second century, well before any surviving copy, and makes the Apocryphon one of the few works of its kind that can be pinned to a date by external evidence rather than by argument from style.

Roughly the second half of the revelation is a running commentary on Genesis 1 to 7, and it proceeds by contradiction. Where the Greek Bible is quoted, it is frequently quoted in order to be denied: the text says that it was not as Moses wrote, and then gives what it holds to be the case.

The consequences are systematic. The creator who says there is no god beside him is not the highest God but Yaldabaoth. The spirit moving over the waters is Sophia trying to repair her error. Adam is made by the rulers in imitation of an image they glimpsed above them and lies inert until the light is tricked out of Yaldabaoth and into him. Eve, rather than the cause of the fall, is the appearance of the awakening insight within Adam, and the instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge is a command by an ignorant ruler to remain ignorant. The serpent that urges eating is treated variously in the different copies, but the eating itself is a gain rather than a loss. Noah is saved not by the ark but by hiding in a cloud of light, and the flood, in this telling, was an attempt to destroy humanity rather than to purify it.

The point of the exercise is not iconoclasm for its own sake. The reading is designed to explain how a world containing this much cruelty can also contain beings who recognise that it is cruel, and it answers by separating the maker of the world from the source of the recognition. Christians who rejected the book, and there were many from Irenaeus onwards, rejected it precisely there: it severs creation from redemption, and makes the God of Israel a subordinate who does not know his own place.