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The Secret Book of John, also known as the Apocryphon of John, is an ancient Gnostic text said to reveal the hidden teachings of Jesus.

What is the Secret Book of John?

Jacob Michael King

The Secret Book of John, also known as the Apocryphon of John, is an ancient text composed some time in the second century. It is part of the Gnostic tradition, an aberrant form of Christianity condemned by the early Church. The Secret Book of John claims to contain hidden teachings of Jesus about the creation of the world, the origin of evil, and the destiny of human souls.

The Secret Book of John doesn’t read at all like the Gospel of John, nor is it similar to John’s letters in the Bible, or to the Book of Revelation. The text, clearly pseudepigraphal, has been called a work of “Bible fan fiction.” Like fan fiction, it uses “transformative techniques” to reimagine many figures in scripture, placing them in new (and often very strange) contexts.

A Difficult Text

It is among the most important Gnostic documents, in part because of how well preserved it is, and in part because of the extensive mythology it so thoroughly articulates.

The Apocryphon of John is thorough, but it isn’t exactly clear. We have four copies of the text, and they vary from one another. All of these copies are Coptic translations of a lost Greek text, but two of them are of a long version of the Secret Book of John, and two are translations of a shorter one.

And the short text isn’t just an abridgment. As Robert Smith notes, in the longer version, it is Christ who reveals “the knowledge from the forbidden tree [to Adam and Eve], whereas in the shorter version it is Epinoia—who is a manifestation of Sophia.”

If this didn’t make matters difficult enough, the text itself is dense with obscure philosophical language, cryptic genealogies of divine and demonic beings, and a huge cast of characters (many of whom it mentions only once). Worse still, several of the main characters in the Secret Book of John are called by different names at different times.

Clearing Things Up

To understand the Apocryphon of John, you need a way of interpreting it clearly. This is especially true for those unfamiliar with Gnostic texts, and those who don’t want to spend the time searching through academic papers. This article is designed to provide a summary, interpretation, and analysis of the major ideas in this important, mysterious text.

Our focus will be on the peculiar way the Apocryphon of John reinterprets the book of Genesis. Was its author merely performing a thought exercise, intending to amuse and provoke the reader, and nothing more? Hardly. These “hidden teachings” are some of the earliest, and most important, Christian heresies. From the ancient world to the present day, Gnosticism has had an immense impact—and a pernicious one.

(To see the way Gnosticism has been revived in the modern world, see my article Is Simulation Theory A Religion?)

John’s Excellent Adventure

The Biblical Book of Genesis begins with “In the beginning,” then immediately introduces us to the one and only God. The Secret Book of John doesn’t take the same approach. Instead, we get the following:

The teaching of the savior, and the revelation of the mysteries and the things hidden in silence, even these things which he taught John, his disciple.

And it happened one day, when John, the brother of James – who are the sons of Zebedee – had come up to the temple, that a Pharisee named Arimanius approached him and said to him, “Where is your master whom you followed?” And he said to him, “He has gone to the place from which he came.” The Pharisee said to him, “With deception did this Nazarene deceive you (pl.), and he filled your ears with lies, and closed your hearts (and) turned you from the traditions of your fathers.”

Unlike the Gospel of John, which also starts with “In the beginning,” we’re thrown straight into New Testament territory. It places us after Jesus ascended “to the place from which he came,” during what appears to be an unpleasant dispute with a Pharisee.

John doesn’t like what the Pharisee says, and turns “away from the temple to a desert place.” Once he’s in this desert place, he tells us, “I grieved greatly in my heart.” Then he asks:

How then was the savior appointed, and why was he sent into the world by his Father, and who is his Father who sent him, and of what sort is that aeon to which we shall go? For what did he mean when he said to us, ‘This aeon to which you will go is of the type of the imperishable aeon, but he did not teach us concerning the latter, of what sort it is.’

Those familiar with scripture might, after reading these remarks, wonder if the John of The Apocryphon of John bothered to read his own gospel. The Biblical text provides answers, and beautiful ones, to many of these questions.

The Secret Book of John is Not Your Grandma’s Christianity

As to how the savior was appointed, we know from the Gospel of John’s opening passage that Christ was “in the beginning with God,” and that, even from the beginning, he “was God.” So it doesn’t make sense to talk about “appointment,” as Christ and the Father are one. Why was he sent? “For God so loved the world…” As to who his Father is, He’s clearly established as the Jewish God.

But what about that last question? What did Jesus mean when he said, “This aeon to which you will go is of the type of the imperishable aeon”? If you don’t recall such a statement in John’s Gospel, that makes two of us.

Scholar Gerard P. Luttikhuizen provides some insight, writing that the Apocryphon of John “is not a Gnostic clarification of earlier words of Jesus; it rather pretends to convey new revelations of Jesus—revelations which are quite possibly meant to surpass if not to replace the teachings of the ‘earthly’ Jesus.”

Gospel 2.0

As we continue our reading of the Secret Book of John, we see that John doesn’t have to wait long for an answer. As he’s thinking through the questions he asked himself, grieving in his heart, the heavens open up and “the whole creation which is below heaven” shines and the world trembles.

Naturally, John is afraid. In the midst of this dazzling vision, John spots “a youth” standing by him. But when he looks at the youth, the youth becomes “like an old man.” The old man doesn’t stay an old man for long, but changes “his likeness (again), becoming like a servant.” This being, “a likeness with multiple forms in the light,” whose “likenesses appeared through each other” quickly identifies himself:

He said to me, “John, John, why do you doubt, or why are you afraid? You are not unfamiliar with this image, are you? – that is, do not be timid! – I am the one who is with you (pl.) always. I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son. I am the undefiled and incorruptible one. Now I have come to teach you what is and what was and what will come to pass, that you may know the things which are not revealed and those which are revealed, and to teach you concerning the unwavering race of the perfect Man. Now, therefore, lift up your face, that you may receive the things that I shall teach you today, and may tell them to your fellow spirits who are from the unwavering race of the perfect Man.”

Who is this strange figure, and are they off their meds? In the midst of this perplexing statement, the speaker tells John, “I am the one who is with you always.” This echoes the end of Matthew 28, when Christ tells his disciples, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

The Apocryphon of John employs this allusion so we can identify who’s talking. It’s Jesus, who proceeds to paint a very unfamiliar image of himself. Apparently, he’s not just the Son, but the “Mother,” “Father,” and the “undefiled and incorruptible one.” And he comes bearing strange tidings.

The Highest God

Jesus then tells him that the highest deity, the creator of all, is the “invisible Spirit, of whom it is not right to think of him as a god, or something similar. For he is more than a god, since there is nothing above him.” This Spirit is “immeasurable light,” and is unknowable. “He is not,” Jesus says, “in perfection, nor in blessedness, nor in divinity, but he is far superior. He is not someone among (other) beings, rather he is far superior.”

While there are significant differences, this description mirrors some ideas that Christian theologians have about God. God isn’t “a god” like Zeus. Zeus is a being among other beings, contained in space and time, residing on Mount Olympus. Zeus is qualified, bound, limited by these attributes. The Christian God, on the other hand, is wholly other, unlike anything, outside of both space and time.

In Divine Names, the Christian theologian Pseudo-Dionysius went even further in describing God’s singular nature:

For God is not Existent in any ordinary sense, but in a simple and undefinable manner embracing and anticipating all existence in Himself. Hence He is called “King of the Ages,” because in Him and around Him all Being is and subsists, and He neither was, nor will be, nor hath entered the life-process, nor is doing so, nor ever will, or rather He doth not even exist, but is the Essence of existence in things that exist; and not only the things that exist but also their very existence comes from Him that Is before the ages. For He Himself is the Eternity of the ages and subsists before the ages.

He also writes, “From Him that Is come Eternity, Essence, Being, Time, Life-Process.” The reason “God is not Existent in any ordinary sense” isn’t because there is no God. Rather, it is because God created existence itself. So God is outside existence, outside of the very concept of being.

Not So Fast

But the similarities to orthodox Christian doctrine are few, and we quickly descend into strange waters. The god of the Secret Book of John goes to work soon after we meet him (it?), giving birth to one deity after another. They get names like “forethought” (also called Barbelo),” “thought,” “foreknowledge,” “indestructibility,” “light,” and “truth.”

Soon, there’s a big and messy family in the divine realm, and more realms are created to keep up with the rapidly growing population. Sophia (Greek for “wisdom”) is a being inhabiting one of these lower realms. She makes a very naughty choice, one with dire and cosmic consequences.

You Are NOT The Father

Sophia wants to have a baby with the “invisible Spirit and foreknowledge,” but doesn’t have the invisible Spirit’s consent to do so. Apparently things don’t work the same way up there as they do down here, and Sophia is able to conceive “a thought,” which is a living being.

They say that all babies are beautiful, but they’re wrong…

When Sophia sees her unfortunate offspring, it warps “into a form of a lion-faced serpent” with eyes like “lightning fires.” Sophia feels no pangs of motherly love: she throws it away “from her, outside that place, that no one of the immortal ones might see it.”

She decides to call it Yaldabaoth, a name as cute as her child. She surrounds it “with a luminous cloud.” So poor little Yaldabaoth isn’t left floating around for eternity, she puts a “throne in the middle of the cloud” to give him somewhere to sit.

Yaldabaoth is the first of the “archons,” powerful supernatural beings that inhabit our corrupt, material realm. Yaldabaoth decided to leave his overbearing mom, and moves “away from the places in which he was born.” Growing in strength, he elects to fashion other beings and realms. It is in a perverse imitation of the world above—a world of which he is wholly ignorant:

[Yaldabaoth] is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me,’ for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.

Sophia, seeing the mess she’d caused, “repented with much weeping.” The higher realms hear her, and accept her apology. Then the invisible Spirit decides to correct matters.

Let Us Make Man

Down in Yaldabaoth’s realm, a voice is heard coming “from the exalted aeon-heaven.” And that voice says, “The Man exists and the son of Man.” When Yaldabaoth hears this, since he doesn’t know anything about the exalted aeon-heaven, he thinks Sophia said it. From the higher realms, the image of “the first Man” is revealed.

At this remarkable sight, Yaldabaoth and his friends say, “Come, let us create a man according to the image of God and according to our likeness, that his image may become a light for us.” The powers work on it, “until, limb for limb, the natural and the material body” are built. But their creature “was completely inactive and motionless for a long time.”

Earlier in the story, we’re told that Sophia had given some of her divine power to Yaldabaoth. Now, she wants to take it back from her malicious and ungrateful child, and the highest god decides to help her, and sends “the five lights down upon the place of the angels and the chief archon.” These lights tell Yaldabaoth to blow his spirit into the man’s face.

Taking Credit

Yaldabaoth, who doesn’t have any spirit of his own, blows his mother’s spirit (i.e. Sophia’s divine power) into the man, animating him. Yaldabaoth, who doesn’t know the truth of what happened, thinks it is he who has given the man life.

Adam, the man these lower powers form, comes into being “because of the shadow of the light which is in him.” Because he is filled with Sophia’s power, “his thinking [is] superior to all those who had made him.” The “whole array of archons and angels” don’t appreciate this very much at all.

So they bring Adam “into the shadow of death.” Their goal is to remake him “from earth and water and fire and the spirit which originates in matter. This spirit isn’t the true one, but a “counterfeit,” “the ignorance of darkness and desire.” “This,” we read, “is the tomb of the newly-formed body with which the robbers had clothed the man.” So Adam is now mortal.

Adam

Adam is placed in Eden, and told to eat his fill. But the trees he’s invited to eat from “are godlessness and their fruit is deadly poison and their promise is death.”

As for the tree of “their life,” “placed in the middle of paradise,” it’s no good, either. Its “root […is] bitter and its branches are death, its shadow is hate and deception is in its leaves.” If that doesn’t sound unappealing enough, we read further that “its blossom is the ointment of evil, and its fruit is death and desire is its seed, and it sprouts in darkness.” “Those who taste from it” have a “dwelling place” in “Hades, and darkness is their place of rest.”

What about the tree of knowledge of good and evil? “[T]hey stayed in front of it in order that he (Adam) might not look up to his fullness and recognize the nakedness of his shamefulness.”

“But,” Jesus says to John, “it is I who brought about that they ate.”

So, according to the Apocryphon of John, Jesus doesn’t save us from our original sin in the garden—he helps us commit it.

Eve

Yaldabaoth wants to take Sophia’s divine power back, so he decides to bring “a forgetfulness over Adam.” In Genesis, we read that God put Adam to sleep, but Jesus tells John that this isn’t what really happened:

And I said to the savior, “What is the forgetfulness?” And he said “It is not the way Moses wrote (and) you heard. For he said in his first book, ‘He put him to sleep’ (Gn 2:21), but (it was) in his perception. For also he said through the prophet, ‘I will make their hearts heavy, that they may not pay attention and may not see’ (Is 6:10).

“The Epinoia of the light,” identified above as a manifestation of Sophia, hides herself in Adam. Yaldabaoth tries to “bring her out of his rib. But the Epinoia of the light cannot be grasped.” Yaldabaoth does manage, however, to bring “a part of his power out of him.” From this power, he makes Eve, and gives her “the likeness of the Epinoia which had appeared to him.”

Jesus appears, John is told, “in the form of an eagle on the tree of knowledge […] that I might teach them and awaken them out of the depth of sleep.” Adam and Eve “recognized their nakedness,” and the “Epinoia” appears “to them as a light” and awakens “their thinking.”

Yaldabaoth is unaware of “the mystery which had come to pass through the holy decree,” but he can tell something is up when Adam and Eve “withdraw from him.” He’s pissed. He kicks them out of Eden and dresses them “in gloomy darkness.”

Cain, Abel, and Seth

Yaldabaoth seduces Eve, and she has two sons from their union—Eloim and Yave. These are not, as readers of the Bible might assume, two names for the God of the Bible.

Eloim has the face of a bear, and Yave the face of a cat. Jesus tells John, “Yave is righteous and Eloim is unrighteous. Yave he [Yaldabaoth] set over the fire and the wind, and Eloim he set over the water and the earth. And these he called with the names Cain and Abel with a view to deceive.”

Adam begets Seth, who, unlike the bear-faced Eloim and the cat-faced Yave, has “the likeness of the son of man.” They are made to drink “the water of forgetfulness […] in order that they might not know where from where they came.”

Noah

Generations pass, and Yaldabaoth, seeing the awful mess of a world he’d made, repents “for everything which had come to being through him.” He decides to destroy it all and “bring a flood upon the work of man.”

Luckily for Noah, “the greatness of the light of the foreknowledge” informs him of Yaldabaoth’s plan. He tells “all the offspring which are the sons of men” of the coming flood. (Presumably, these are the sons of Seth, and not of Cain (Eloim) or Abel (Yave).)

Noah doesn’t hide in an ark, but “a place.” Noah and “many other people” go to this place and hide “in a luminous cloud.” It is not God of the Bible who saves them, but “she who belongs to the light.” She shines on them because Yaldabaoth “had brought darkness upon the whole earth.”

But Yaldabaoth doesn’t give up. He tries to send his “angels to the daughters of men” to reproduce with them, but it doesn’t work. (Maybe these angels have no good pickup lines. All the text tells us, though, is that “they did not succeed.”)

So Yaldabaoth and his friends try another tactic. They create a “counterfeit spirit” that looks like the divine one. And Yaldabaoth’s angels alter their appearance to look human.

They bring “gold and silver and a gift and copper and iron and metal and all kinds of things.” (Perhaps this means that they turned the minds of men toward material things.) They lead “the people who had followed them into great troubles, by leading them astray with many deceptions.”

These poor people become “old without having any enjoyment,” and die “not having found truth and without knowing the God of truth.” So “the whole creation” becomes “enslaved forever, from the foundation of the world until now.”

Everything Upside Down

If you think this sounds like a radical inversion of Scripture, you’d be right. The God of the Bible is identified with Yaldabaoth, an ignorant, hideous, and capricious pseudo-deity. In Gnosticism, the creator of the material world is often called the demiurge.

If you’ve followed the narrative of the Secret Book of John so far, you probably have a sense of why the early Church condemned this text and others like it. It tells us that Christ didn’t come from the Biblical God, but from some higher realm. Instead of offering Himself as a sacrifice to the Father, his mission was to subvert the work of the Jewish Deity. Such claims are an affront to what Christians hold sacred.

Moreover, the Resurrection of Jesus was a means of redeeming the physical bodies of human beings. Christ didn’t come to elevate us all to a purely spiritual realm, but to raise our physical bodies (and our spirits) to their proper, divinely ordained place. Gnosticism sees matter as corrupt, unsalvageable, and unholy. But Christianity says that the world God created is good, wounded by the fall, and longing for redemption. If the Gnostics are right, then Christ’s sacrifice and triumph are meaningless.

Gnostics were aware that the crucifixion, in their system, couldn’t have the import that it did for their orthodox contemporaries. One Gnostic teacher, Basilides, asserted that Christ wasn’t really crucified. The works of Basilides are lost, but here is St. Iranaeus of Lyon on his strange teaching:

Those angels who occupy the lowest heaven, that, namely, which is visible to us, formed all the things which are in the world, and made allotments among themselves of the earth and of those nations which are upon it. The chief of them is he who is thought to be the God of the Jews; and inasmuch as he desired to render the other nations subject to his own people, that is, the Jews, all the other princes resisted and opposed him. Wherefore all other nations were at enmity with his nation. But the father without birth and without name, perceiving that they would be destroyed, sent his own first-begotten Nous (he it is who is called Christ) to bestow deliverance on them that believe in him, from the power of those who made the world. He appeared, then, on earth as a man, to the nations of these powers, and wrought miracles. Wherefore he did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them. For since he was an incorporeal power, and the Nous (mind) of the unborn father, he transfigured himself as he pleased, and thus ascended to him who had sent him, deriding them, inasmuch as he could not be laid hold of, and was invisible to all. 

A Lack of Beauty

What is so remarkable, so strange, so scandalous about the Incarnation is entirely lost on the Gnostics. That God would become fully man, while remaining fully God—that He wouldn’t reject physicality, but elect to suffer and die and, in rising from the dead, redeem it—testifies to the truth that the real John wrote, “God is love.”

One of the most glaring features of the Secret Book of John is its absence of beauty. Nowhere do we find the sense of love present in the Gospel of John—in the sublime passages, for example, depicting Christ raising Lazarus or washing the disciples’ feet.

Conclusion

Many books of the Bible are dense—just look, for example, at the Pauline Epistles. But Paul’s work is so moving. We can discern in his beautiful letters a courageous, flawed heart, touched by a God who forgave him of his sinful past, who gave him a new name, sent him to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world, and crowned his ministry with martyrdom.

And who was Christ for Paul? What was His relationship with the God of the Bible, with the material universe, and with the spiritual forces within the cosmos? In his letter to the Colossians, Paul writes:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a minister of this gospel.

Paul points out that Christ reconciled us to God “in his fleshly body through death.” He enjoins us to “continue […] steadfast in the faith.” Even from this brief passage, it is clear that Paul’s Christ, while divine, is not Gnostic. For He is human, too—it is by his Incarnation, Death, Burial, and Resurrection that we, the lost sheep, are returned to the Shepherd.

Reruns.

The Secret Book of John, also known as the Apocryphon of John, is an ancient Gnostic text said to reveal the hidden teachings of Jesus.

What is the Secret Book of John?

Jacob Michael King

The Secret Book of John, also known as the Apocryphon of John, is an ancient text composed some time in the second century. It is part of the Gnostic tradition, an aberrant form of Christianity condemned by the early Church. The Secret Book of John claims to contain hidden teachings of Jesus about the creation of the world, the origin of evil, and the destiny of human souls.

The Secret Book of John doesn’t read at all like the Gospel of John, nor is it similar to John’s letters in the Bible, or to the Book of Revelation. The text, clearly pseudepigraphal, has been called a work of “Bible fan fiction.” Like fan fiction, it uses “transformative techniques” to reimagine many figures in scripture, placing them in new (and often very strange) contexts.

A Difficult Text

It is among the most important Gnostic documents, in part because of how well preserved it is, and in part because of the extensive mythology it so thoroughly articulates.

The Apocryphon of John is thorough, but it isn’t exactly clear. We have four copies of the text, and they vary from one another. All of these copies are Coptic translations of a lost Greek text, but two of them are of a long version of the Secret Book of John, and two are translations of a shorter one.

And the short text isn’t just an abridgment. As Robert Smith notes, in the longer version, it is Christ who reveals “the knowledge from the forbidden tree [to Adam and Eve], whereas in the shorter version it is Epinoia—who is a manifestation of Sophia.”

If this didn’t make matters difficult enough, the text itself is dense with obscure philosophical language, cryptic genealogies of divine and demonic beings, and a huge cast of characters (many of whom it mentions only once). Worse still, several of the main characters in the Secret Book of John are called by different names at different times.

Clearing Things Up

To understand the Apocryphon of John, you need a way of interpreting it clearly. This is especially true for those unfamiliar with Gnostic texts, and those who don’t want to spend the time searching through academic papers. This article is designed to provide a summary, interpretation, and analysis of the major ideas in this important, mysterious text.

Our focus will be on the peculiar way the Apocryphon of John reinterprets the book of Genesis. Was its author merely performing a thought exercise, intending to amuse and provoke the reader, and nothing more? Hardly. These “hidden teachings” are some of the earliest, and most important, Christian heresies. From the ancient world to the present day, Gnosticism has had an immense impact—and a pernicious one.

(To see the way Gnosticism has been revived in the modern world, see my article Is Simulation Theory A Religion?)

John’s Excellent Adventure

The Biblical Book of Genesis begins with “In the beginning,” then immediately introduces us to the one and only God. The Secret Book of John doesn’t take the same approach. Instead, we get the following:

The teaching of the savior, and the revelation of the mysteries and the things hidden in silence, even these things which he taught John, his disciple.

And it happened one day, when John, the brother of James – who are the sons of Zebedee – had come up to the temple, that a Pharisee named Arimanius approached him and said to him, “Where is your master whom you followed?” And he said to him, “He has gone to the place from which he came.” The Pharisee said to him, “With deception did this Nazarene deceive you (pl.), and he filled your ears with lies, and closed your hearts (and) turned you from the traditions of your fathers.”

Unlike the Gospel of John, which also starts with “In the beginning,” we’re thrown straight into New Testament territory. It places us after Jesus ascended “to the place from which he came,” during what appears to be an unpleasant dispute with a Pharisee.

John doesn’t like what the Pharisee says, and turns “away from the temple to a desert place.” Once he’s in this desert place, he tells us, “I grieved greatly in my heart.” Then he asks:

How then was the savior appointed, and why was he sent into the world by his Father, and who is his Father who sent him, and of what sort is that aeon to which we shall go? For what did he mean when he said to us, ‘This aeon to which you will go is of the type of the imperishable aeon, but he did not teach us concerning the latter, of what sort it is.’

Those familiar with scripture might, after reading these remarks, wonder if the John of The Apocryphon of John bothered to read his own gospel. The Biblical text provides answers, and beautiful ones, to many of these questions.

The Secret Book of John is Not Your Grandma’s Christianity

As to how the savior was appointed, we know from the Gospel of John’s opening passage that Christ was “in the beginning with God,” and that, even from the beginning, he “was God.” So it doesn’t make sense to talk about “appointment,” as Christ and the Father are one. Why was he sent? “For God so loved the world…” As to who his Father is, He’s clearly established as the Jewish God.

But what about that last question? What did Jesus mean when he said, “This aeon to which you will go is of the type of the imperishable aeon”? If you don’t recall such a statement in John’s Gospel, that makes two of us.

Scholar Gerard P. Luttikhuizen provides some insight, writing that the Apocryphon of John “is not a Gnostic clarification of earlier words of Jesus; it rather pretends to convey new revelations of Jesus—revelations which are quite possibly meant to surpass if not to replace the teachings of the ‘earthly’ Jesus.”

Gospel 2.0

As we continue our reading of the Secret Book of John, we see that John doesn’t have to wait long for an answer. As he’s thinking through the questions he asked himself, grieving in his heart, the heavens open up and “the whole creation which is below heaven” shines and the world trembles.

Naturally, John is afraid. In the midst of this dazzling vision, John spots “a youth” standing by him. But when he looks at the youth, the youth becomes “like an old man.” The old man doesn’t stay an old man for long, but changes “his likeness (again), becoming like a servant.” This being, “a likeness with multiple forms in the light,” whose “likenesses appeared through each other” quickly identifies himself:

He said to me, “John, John, why do you doubt, or why are you afraid? You are not unfamiliar with this image, are you? – that is, do not be timid! – I am the one who is with you (pl.) always. I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son. I am the undefiled and incorruptible one. Now I have come to teach you what is and what was and what will come to pass, that you may know the things which are not revealed and those which are revealed, and to teach you concerning the unwavering race of the perfect Man. Now, therefore, lift up your face, that you may receive the things that I shall teach you today, and may tell them to your fellow spirits who are from the unwavering race of the perfect Man.”

Who is this strange figure, and are they off their meds? In the midst of this perplexing statement, the speaker tells John, “I am the one who is with you always.” This echoes the end of Matthew 28, when Christ tells his disciples, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

The Apocryphon of John employs this allusion so we can identify who’s talking. It’s Jesus, who proceeds to paint a very unfamiliar image of himself. Apparently, he’s not just the Son, but the “Mother,” “Father,” and the “undefiled and incorruptible one.” And he comes bearing strange tidings.

The Highest God

Jesus then tells him that the highest deity, the creator of all, is the “invisible Spirit, of whom it is not right to think of him as a god, or something similar. For he is more than a god, since there is nothing above him.” This Spirit is “immeasurable light,” and is unknowable. “He is not,” Jesus says, “in perfection, nor in blessedness, nor in divinity, but he is far superior. He is not someone among (other) beings, rather he is far superior.”

While there are significant differences, this description mirrors some ideas that Christian theologians have about God. God isn’t “a god” like Zeus. Zeus is a being among other beings, contained in space and time, residing on Mount Olympus. Zeus is qualified, bound, limited by these attributes. The Christian God, on the other hand, is wholly other, unlike anything, outside of both space and time.

In Divine Names, the Christian theologian Pseudo-Dionysius went even further in describing God’s singular nature:

For God is not Existent in any ordinary sense, but in a simple and undefinable manner embracing and anticipating all existence in Himself. Hence He is called “King of the Ages,” because in Him and around Him all Being is and subsists, and He neither was, nor will be, nor hath entered the life-process, nor is doing so, nor ever will, or rather He doth not even exist, but is the Essence of existence in things that exist; and not only the things that exist but also their very existence comes from Him that Is before the ages. For He Himself is the Eternity of the ages and subsists before the ages.

He also writes, “From Him that Is come Eternity, Essence, Being, Time, Life-Process.” The reason “God is not Existent in any ordinary sense” isn’t because there is no God. Rather, it is because God created existence itself. So God is outside existence, outside of the very concept of being.

Not So Fast

But the similarities to orthodox Christian doctrine are few, and we quickly descend into strange waters. The god of the Secret Book of John goes to work soon after we meet him (it?), giving birth to one deity after another. They get names like “forethought” (also called Barbelo),” “thought,” “foreknowledge,” “indestructibility,” “light,” and “truth.”

Soon, there’s a big and messy family in the divine realm, and more realms are created to keep up with the rapidly growing population. Sophia (Greek for “wisdom”) is a being inhabiting one of these lower realms. She makes a very naughty choice, one with dire and cosmic consequences.

You Are NOT The Father

Sophia wants to have a baby with the “invisible Spirit and foreknowledge,” but doesn’t have the invisible Spirit’s consent to do so. Apparently things don’t work the same way up there as they do down here, and Sophia is able to conceive “a thought,” which is a living being.

They say that all babies are beautiful, but they’re wrong…

When Sophia sees her unfortunate offspring, it warps “into a form of a lion-faced serpent” with eyes like “lightning fires.” Sophia feels no pangs of motherly love: she throws it away “from her, outside that place, that no one of the immortal ones might see it.”

She decides to call it Yaldabaoth, a name as cute as her child. She surrounds it “with a luminous cloud.” So poor little Yaldabaoth isn’t left floating around for eternity, she puts a “throne in the middle of the cloud” to give him somewhere to sit.

Yaldabaoth is the first of the “archons,” powerful supernatural beings that inhabit our corrupt, material realm. Yaldabaoth decided to leave his overbearing mom, and moves “away from the places in which he was born.” Growing in strength, he elects to fashion other beings and realms. It is in a perverse imitation of the world above—a world of which he is wholly ignorant:

[Yaldabaoth] is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me,’ for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.

Sophia, seeing the mess she’d caused, “repented with much weeping.” The higher realms hear her, and accept her apology. Then the invisible Spirit decides to correct matters.

Let Us Make Man

Down in Yaldabaoth’s realm, a voice is heard coming “from the exalted aeon-heaven.” And that voice says, “The Man exists and the son of Man.” When Yaldabaoth hears this, since he doesn’t know anything about the exalted aeon-heaven, he thinks Sophia said it. From the higher realms, the image of “the first Man” is revealed.

At this remarkable sight, Yaldabaoth and his friends say, “Come, let us create a man according to the image of God and according to our likeness, that his image may become a light for us.” The powers work on it, “until, limb for limb, the natural and the material body” are built. But their creature “was completely inactive and motionless for a long time.”

Earlier in the story, we’re told that Sophia had given some of her divine power to Yaldabaoth. Now, she wants to take it back from her malicious and ungrateful child, and the highest god decides to help her, and sends “the five lights down upon the place of the angels and the chief archon.” These lights tell Yaldabaoth to blow his spirit into the man’s face.

Taking Credit

Yaldabaoth, who doesn’t have any spirit of his own, blows his mother’s spirit (i.e. Sophia’s divine power) into the man, animating him. Yaldabaoth, who doesn’t know the truth of what happened, thinks it is he who has given the man life.

Adam, the man these lower powers form, comes into being “because of the shadow of the light which is in him.” Because he is filled with Sophia’s power, “his thinking [is] superior to all those who had made him.” The “whole array of archons and angels” don’t appreciate this very much at all.

So they bring Adam “into the shadow of death.” Their goal is to remake him “from earth and water and fire and the spirit which originates in matter. This spirit isn’t the true one, but a “counterfeit,” “the ignorance of darkness and desire.” “This,” we read, “is the tomb of the newly-formed body with which the robbers had clothed the man.” So Adam is now mortal.

Adam

Adam is placed in Eden, and told to eat his fill. But the trees he’s invited to eat from “are godlessness and their fruit is deadly poison and their promise is death.”

As for the tree of “their life,” “placed in the middle of paradise,” it’s no good, either. Its “root […is] bitter and its branches are death, its shadow is hate and deception is in its leaves.” If that doesn’t sound unappealing enough, we read further that “its blossom is the ointment of evil, and its fruit is death and desire is its seed, and it sprouts in darkness.” “Those who taste from it” have a “dwelling place” in “Hades, and darkness is their place of rest.”

What about the tree of knowledge of good and evil? “[T]hey stayed in front of it in order that he (Adam) might not look up to his fullness and recognize the nakedness of his shamefulness.”

“But,” Jesus says to John, “it is I who brought about that they ate.”

So, according to the Apocryphon of John, Jesus doesn’t save us from our original sin in the garden—he helps us commit it.

Eve

Yaldabaoth wants to take Sophia’s divine power back, so he decides to bring “a forgetfulness over Adam.” In Genesis, we read that God put Adam to sleep, but Jesus tells John that this isn’t what really happened:

And I said to the savior, “What is the forgetfulness?” And he said “It is not the way Moses wrote (and) you heard. For he said in his first book, ‘He put him to sleep’ (Gn 2:21), but (it was) in his perception. For also he said through the prophet, ‘I will make their hearts heavy, that they may not pay attention and may not see’ (Is 6:10).

“The Epinoia of the light,” identified above as a manifestation of Sophia, hides herself in Adam. Yaldabaoth tries to “bring her out of his rib. But the Epinoia of the light cannot be grasped.” Yaldabaoth does manage, however, to bring “a part of his power out of him.” From this power, he makes Eve, and gives her “the likeness of the Epinoia which had appeared to him.”

Jesus appears, John is told, “in the form of an eagle on the tree of knowledge […] that I might teach them and awaken them out of the depth of sleep.” Adam and Eve “recognized their nakedness,” and the “Epinoia” appears “to them as a light” and awakens “their thinking.”

Yaldabaoth is unaware of “the mystery which had come to pass through the holy decree,” but he can tell something is up when Adam and Eve “withdraw from him.” He’s pissed. He kicks them out of Eden and dresses them “in gloomy darkness.”

Cain, Abel, and Seth

Yaldabaoth seduces Eve, and she has two sons from their union—Eloim and Yave. These are not, as readers of the Bible might assume, two names for the God of the Bible.

Eloim has the face of a bear, and Yave the face of a cat. Jesus tells John, “Yave is righteous and Eloim is unrighteous. Yave he [Yaldabaoth] set over the fire and the wind, and Eloim he set over the water and the earth. And these he called with the names Cain and Abel with a view to deceive.”

Adam begets Seth, who, unlike the bear-faced Eloim and the cat-faced Yave, has “the likeness of the son of man.” They are made to drink “the water of forgetfulness […] in order that they might not know where from where they came.”

Noah

Generations pass, and Yaldabaoth, seeing the awful mess of a world he’d made, repents “for everything which had come to being through him.” He decides to destroy it all and “bring a flood upon the work of man.”

Luckily for Noah, “the greatness of the light of the foreknowledge” informs him of Yaldabaoth’s plan. He tells “all the offspring which are the sons of men” of the coming flood. (Presumably, these are the sons of Seth, and not of Cain (Eloim) or Abel (Yave).)

Noah doesn’t hide in an ark, but “a place.” Noah and “many other people” go to this place and hide “in a luminous cloud.” It is not God of the Bible who saves them, but “she who belongs to the light.” She shines on them because Yaldabaoth “had brought darkness upon the whole earth.”

But Yaldabaoth doesn’t give up. He tries to send his “angels to the daughters of men” to reproduce with them, but it doesn’t work. (Maybe these angels have no good pickup lines. All the text tells us, though, is that “they did not succeed.”)

So Yaldabaoth and his friends try another tactic. They create a “counterfeit spirit” that looks like the divine one. And Yaldabaoth’s angels alter their appearance to look human.

They bring “gold and silver and a gift and copper and iron and metal and all kinds of things.” (Perhaps this means that they turned the minds of men toward material things.) They lead “the people who had followed them into great troubles, by leading them astray with many deceptions.”

These poor people become “old without having any enjoyment,” and die “not having found truth and without knowing the God of truth.” So “the whole creation” becomes “enslaved forever, from the foundation of the world until now.”

Everything Upside Down

If you think this sounds like a radical inversion of Scripture, you’d be right. The God of the Bible is identified with Yaldabaoth, an ignorant, hideous, and capricious pseudo-deity. In Gnosticism, the creator of the material world is often called the demiurge.

If you’ve followed the narrative of the Secret Book of John so far, you probably have a sense of why the early Church condemned this text and others like it. It tells us that Christ didn’t come from the Biblical God, but from some higher realm. Instead of offering Himself as a sacrifice to the Father, his mission was to subvert the work of the Jewish Deity. Such claims are an affront to what Christians hold sacred.

Moreover, the Resurrection of Jesus was a means of redeeming the physical bodies of human beings. Christ didn’t come to elevate us all to a purely spiritual realm, but to raise our physical bodies (and our spirits) to their proper, divinely ordained place. Gnosticism sees matter as corrupt, unsalvageable, and unholy. But Christianity says that the world God created is good, wounded by the fall, and longing for redemption. If the Gnostics are right, then Christ’s sacrifice and triumph are meaningless.

Gnostics were aware that the crucifixion, in their system, couldn’t have the import that it did for their orthodox contemporaries. One Gnostic teacher, Basilides, asserted that Christ wasn’t really crucified. The works of Basilides are lost, but here is St. Iranaeus of Lyon on his strange teaching:

Those angels who occupy the lowest heaven, that, namely, which is visible to us, formed all the things which are in the world, and made allotments among themselves of the earth and of those nations which are upon it. The chief of them is he who is thought to be the God of the Jews; and inasmuch as he desired to render the other nations subject to his own people, that is, the Jews, all the other princes resisted and opposed him. Wherefore all other nations were at enmity with his nation. But the father without birth and without name, perceiving that they would be destroyed, sent his own first-begotten Nous (he it is who is called Christ) to bestow deliverance on them that believe in him, from the power of those who made the world. He appeared, then, on earth as a man, to the nations of these powers, and wrought miracles. Wherefore he did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them. For since he was an incorporeal power, and the Nous (mind) of the unborn father, he transfigured himself as he pleased, and thus ascended to him who had sent him, deriding them, inasmuch as he could not be laid hold of, and was invisible to all. 

A Lack of Beauty

What is so remarkable, so strange, so scandalous about the Incarnation is entirely lost on the Gnostics. That God would become fully man, while remaining fully God—that He wouldn’t reject physicality, but elect to suffer and die and, in rising from the dead, redeem it—testifies to the truth that the real John wrote, “God is love.”

One of the most glaring features of the Secret Book of John is its absence of beauty. Nowhere do we find the sense of love present in the Gospel of John—in the sublime passages, for example, depicting Christ raising Lazarus or washing the disciples’ feet.

Conclusion

Many books of the Bible are dense—just look, for example, at the Pauline Epistles. But Paul’s work is so moving. We can discern in his beautiful letters a courageous, flawed heart, touched by a God who forgave him of his sinful past, who gave him a new name, sent him to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world, and crowned his ministry with martyrdom.

And who was Christ for Paul? What was His relationship with the God of the Bible, with the material universe, and with the spiritual forces within the cosmos? In his letter to the Colossians, Paul writes:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a minister of this gospel.

Paul points out that Christ reconciled us to God “in his fleshly body through death.” He enjoins us to “continue […] steadfast in the faith.” Even from this brief passage, it is clear that Paul’s Christ, while divine, is not Gnostic. For He is human, too—it is by his Incarnation, Death, Burial, and Resurrection that we, the lost sheep, are returned to the Shepherd.

Reruns.