The Apocryphon of John: The Gnostic Myth of Creation
Around the year 180 CE, Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon, sat down to write a long work against what he called "knowledge falsely so called." In the first book of his Against Heresies, he set out in detail a myth taught by certain rival Christians, about a divine mother, a lion-faced creator and a world made by mistake.
For almost eighteen centuries, his summary was the best account anyone had of that myth. Then, in 1945, a farmer digging for fertilizer near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt found a sealed jar. Inside were thirteen ancient books, and in three of them stood a text whose story closely matches the one Irenaeus summarized: the Apocryphon of John, the "Secret Book of John."
The Book and Its Manuscripts
The Apocryphon of John survives in four Coptic manuscripts. Three came from the Nag Hammadi find, and a fourth, the Berlin Codex, was bought in Cairo in 1896 and not published until 1955. It exists in a shorter and a longer version.
Scholars think the work was first composed in Greek in the second century and later translated into Coptic. It belongs to the group of texts that modern writers call Sethian, after Seth, the third son of Adam, who in these writings is the ancestor of the saved.
The framing is a vision. After the crucifixion, the apostle John goes away in grief, troubled by doubts that a Pharisee has planted in his mind. The heavens open, and a radiant figure appears to him and says, "I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son." He is the risen Christ, and he proceeds to unfold the history of the universe.
The Unknowable and the Mother
The story begins with a being beyond all description, the Invisible Spirit. The text can speak of it only by negation: it is not a god, not a quality, not a being, not limited. From this source comes the first emanation, called Barbelo, the divine thought, who is described as a mother-father.
From Barbelo come in turn a series of luminous beings, called aeons, which together make up the Fullness, the Pleroma.
The last of these beings is Sophia, whose name means Wisdom. Here the drama begins. Sophia desires to bring forth a being of her own without the agreement of her partner, and without the consent of the Invisible Spirit. The result is a flawed child.
The Lion-Faced Creator
The child is shapeless, a lion-faced serpent with eyes like flashes of fire. Sophia, ashamed, hides it in a cloud, far from the Fullness, and names it Yaldabaoth. The text also gives him the names Saklas, "fool," and Samael, "blind god." He steals some of his mother's power and uses it to create rulers and angels who help him make the world.
Yaldabaoth does not know of anything above him. He proclaims that he is God and there is no other. His mother answers from above that he is mistaken. In a reading that must have shocked its first hearers, this proud and ignorant creator is identified with the God of Genesis, since his boast echoes the biblical formula "I am God, and there is no other."
The Making of Adam
The rulers make a human body, but it lies motionless until Yaldabaoth, tricked into breathing into it, passes on the divine power that he took from Sophia. At once Adam comes alive, and is wiser than his makers. Jealous, the rulers place him in a paradise that is really a trap.
The heavenly powers do not abandon him. They send a helper, the Epinoia of Light, a power of insight hidden in Adam and Eve. In this text, it is Christ in the form of an eagle who urges them to eat from the tree of knowledge, and not the serpent of the Genesis account. The serpent as a hero belongs to other Gnostic writings, and it should not be read into this one.
What the Soul Must Do
The Apocryphon does not end with despair. The soul that has received the Spirit and has come to know its origin will be freed from the rulers and ascend to rest. Souls that have not yet learned are sent back into new bodies until they do.
Those who knew the truth and turned away face punishment. At the end, Christ commands John to write all this down and to keep it from those who would trade in it.
Behind this myth is a deep question that ancient people asked as we do: why is there suffering in the world, if the source of all things is good? The Apocryphon answers that the world was made by a mistake, and that the best part of us does not belong to it.
Closing
Few ancient writings are as strange as this one, and few remained hidden so long. We should be careful not to take it for something it was not. It was the creation of a small group of early Christians, written for readers who shared its images, and its views of the Hebrew Bible would have offended most Jews and Christians.
We should also be careful not to flatten it into a modern slogan about inner freedom. Still, it has the power of a great myth. In its lion-faced creator, its wise mother and its voice of awakening, we meet the oldest of questions told in the most unusual of ways, and we are invited to wonder who we are, and where we came from.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Gnostic Valentinus: The Pleroma and the Fall of Sophia
- The Exegesis on the Soul: The Gnostic Anatomy of Repentance
- The Origin of the World: The Gnostic Anatomy of the Archonic order
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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