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INTRODUCTION the Apocryphon of John (Ap. John, Or Apocryphon

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INTRODUCTION the Apocryphon of John (Ap. John, Or Apocryphon INTRODUCTION The Apocryphon of John (Ap. John, or Apocryphon) provides one of the most coherent and comprehensive narrations of the revelatory account traditionally labeled as ‘Gnostic’. It is not preserved in Greek, the language in which it was originally written, but only in four Coptic manuscripts: in Nag Hammadi codex (NHC) II 1–32, NHC III 1–40, NHC IV 1–49, all copied sometime between about a.d. 350 and 450 and all simultaneously discovered in December 1945 in Upper Egypt, and in the codex Berolinensis Gnosticus (BG, P.Berol. inv. 8502) 19–77, a manuscript copied probably in the fifth century a.d. and acquired for the Berlin Museum in 1896 from the Achmim region in Upper Egypt. A fair number of unconscious scribal errors (e.g., saut du même au même, haplography) in the four witnesses leave no doubt that each was copied from a Coptic exemplar. The dialect of all four witnesses is Sahidic, with occasional features resembling Lycopolitan. Codices II and IV have a virtually identical text and are considered two witnesses of a separate redaction. This redaction yields material that is not found in codices III and BG and is there- fore called the longer version. Codices III and BG contain two different copies of the shorter redaction. The divergences between these two copies are limited to orthography, grammar, and phrase- ology. The extent to which these divergences go back either to the variant readings in the Greek exemplar(s) or to developments within the Coptic transmission cannot be determined with certainty. The author and place of composition of the Apocryphon of John are unknown. The work is a piece of pseudepigraphy, falsely attributed to John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ original disciples. The ter- minus ante quem of the original Greek composition is sometime around a.d. 400, the time when the Nag Hammadi codices were copied. The terminus post quem cannot be established with certainty. A simi- lar account of cosmogony can be found in the doctrine of “a mul- titude of Gnostics named after Barbelo,” as summarized by Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 1.29) in about a.d. 180. Irenaeus’s compressed version differs, both in phraseology and in theological details, from the cos- mological sections in all of Apocryphon’s versions. Whether the here- siologist had at his disposal a different Greek version of the Apocryphon 2 introduction of John or some other “Gnostic document which was the apparent source of the first part of the main revelation discourse” in Ap. John (Wisse-Waldstein 1995, 1), we do not know.1 Significant divergences between the longer version and the shorter versions have elicited conflicting interpretations about the stages in the evolution of the Apocryphon of John. The most obvious difference is that the longer version contains a lengthy account of Adam’s ‘melothesia’, excerpted from a certain Book of Zoroaster, and the con- cluding ‘Pronoia hymn’, reminiscent of the first-person Wisdom mono- logues in biblical literature. Less obvious, yet equally important distinctive features of the longer version are the prominent role assigned to Pronoia and the extensive use of the light-darkness imagery. The editors of the first complete synopsis of the four manuscript wit- nesses claim that “there is no reason to believe that the redactor of the longer version started with anything other than the form of [Ap. John] preserved in codices III and BG” (ibid., 7). Common sense, however, has rarely been a reliable guide in such matters. The same holds true for the alleged “law of text-criticism, form-criticism and source-criticism that short forms tend to become longer” (Quispel 1966, 379). In the process of textual transmission of ancient texts, the evidence for addition and omission is evenly balanced, and length cannot in itself confirm or deny the priority of one version to another.2 1 For a brief yet accurate description of the extant manuscript witnesses of the Apocryphon of John see Layton (1987) 26–27. The only published synopsis of the four manuscript witnesses, with “parallel” texts (e.g., Irenaeus) printed in appendices, is in Waldstein-Wisse 1995. For a description of the manuscript witnesses, orthogra- phy, and dialect cf. their “Introduction,” 1–8. The dialect and orthography of the other texts in NHC II is analyzed by Layton (1989) 1–36, significant for laying out the general principles of editing Nag Hammadi texts. Emmel (1978) collated old photographs of the Nag Hammadi codices containing the text of Ap. John. For the discovery and date of the Nag Hammadi Codices see Robinson (1978). An older edition with translation and commentary of the longer version in NHC II is by Giversen (1963), that of the shorter version in BG by Till-Schenke (1972). Interesting observations on Berolinensis Gnosticus can be found in Schenke (1990) and Tardieu- Dubois (1986). Funk (1995) provides the restoration of a few extant fragments from the first two leaves of NHC III. The best published commentary of Ap. John is Tardieu (1984). 2 For the problem of editorial tendencies in the pre-canonical Synoptic tradition, see Sanders (1969). According to Royse (1979) 155, “The principle that the shorter reading is to be preferred...is an inadequate guide to the earliest period of the transmission of the NT text.” The opposite rule, namely that the longer reading is better and earlier, and the process is one of contraction, not of expansion, was forcefully defended by Clark (1914). An authoritative survey of causes of textual.
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