thumb|The [[Nag Hammadi library|Nag Hammadi manuscript of the Apocryphon of John, discovered in 1945]]
The Apocryphon of John, also called the Secret Book of John or the Secret Revelation of John, is a 2nd-century Sethian Gnostic Christian pseudepigraphical text attributed to John the Apostle. It is one of the texts addressed by Irenaeus in his Christian polemic Against Heresies, placing its composition before 180 AD. It tells of the appearance of Jesus and the imparting of secret knowledge (gnosis) to his disciple John. The author describes it as having occurred after Jesus had "gone back to the place from which he came".
Overview
Many second-century Christians, both Gnostic and orthodox, hoped to receive a transcendent personal revelation such as Paul the Apostle reported to the church at Corinth () or that John the Revelator experienced on the isle of Patmos, which inspired the Book of Revelation. As Acts narrates what happened after the time Jesus ascended to heaven, so the Apocryphon of John begins at the same point but relates how Christ reappeared to John.
The opening words of the Secret Book of John are, "The teaching of the saviour, and the revelation of the mysteries and the things hidden in silence, even these things which he taught John, his disciple." The author John is immediately specified as "John, the brother of James—who are the sons of Zebedee." The remainder of the book is a vision of spiritual realms and of the prior history of spiritual humanity.
There are four separate surviving manuscripts of "The Secret Book of John". One was purchased in Egypt in 1896 (the Berlin Codex) and three were found in the Nag Hammadi codices discovered in 1945. All date to the 4th century and are Coptic translations from Greek. Three appear to have been independently produced. Two of the four are similar enough that they probably were copied from a single source.
Although the different versions of the texts have minor variants (the Berlin Codex has many minor differences with Nag Hammadi II and IV), all texts generally agree on the assertion that the main revealing entity was Jesus.
History
A book called the Apocryphon of John was referred to by Irenaeus in Adversus Haereses, written about 185, among "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 helped to establish (see the canonical four). Among the writings he quotes from, in order to expose and refute them, are the Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Judas, and this secret book of John.
Little more was known of this text until an edition of it was discovered in an ancient Coptic Berlin Codex (BG 8502) acquired by Dr. Carl Reinhardt in Cairo in 1896. However, it would not be until the middle of the 20th century that it would be published. Carl Schmidt published a comparative study of the Apocryphon in the Codex with that described by Irenaeus in 1907, and then prepared an edition of the Coptic text, which was almost ready for publication in 1912 when a broken pipe in the printing house destroyed the whole run. Shortly before his death in 1938, Schmidt began work on an anastatic lithograph of the proofs; after some difficulty with his estate, the Coptic text finally saw print in 1938.