The Secret Book of John (Apocryphon of John)

What the book is

The Secret Book of John is a revelation dialogue: a framed conversation in which a risen Christ answers a disciple's questions about the origin of everything. The disciple is John, son of Zebedee. The answer takes roughly thirty manuscript pages and moves from an unnameable Spirit, through a fullness of divine beings, to a botched creation and a rescue operation still under way. It is the closest thing gnostic literature has to a systematic theology.

Its Greek title, Apocryphon, simply means “secret book” — not “forgery,” not “banned,” just not for the public reading desk. Karen King prefers the Secret Revelation of John, arguing that the work is a revelation in the technical sense, and the renaming has caught on. Whatever you call it, it is the text every other article on this site quietly depends on: the one place where Sophia, Yaldabaoth, and the archons appear in a single connected narrative rather than as scattered allusions.

The frame sets the mood. John leaves the temple after the crucifixion and a Pharisee taunts him: your teacher deceived you. He goes away grieving and asks the questions grief asks — who sent him, what is the world, what is coming. The heavens open, and a figure appears that will not hold still, shifting between a child, an old man, and a servant, and calling itself Father, Mother, and Son. The cosmology that follows is an answer to a wounded man, not a lecture.

The four surviving copies

Four ancient copies of the Secret Book of John survive — more than any other gnostic text. Three were in the sealed jar a farmer struck at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif cliff near Nag Hammadi in December 1945; the fourth had been sitting in Berlin since 1896, bought in a Cairo antiquities shop half a century before anyone knew what it belonged to.

Three of those copies stand first in their codices — Nag Hammadi Codices II, III, and IV all open with this text. Whoever assembled those books treated it as the foundation and the rest as commentary.

The Berlin copy has the more painful history. Its codex, BG 8502, also carries the Gospel of Mary, and its publication was cursed by farce: a burst water main flooded the Leipzig print shop and destroyed the sheets in 1912, then came a world war, then the death of the scholar preparing it, then a second war. Walter Till finally published it in 1955 — by which time the Nag Hammadi copies had surfaced and had to be folded in.

How we know it predates 180 CE

Around 180 CE, Irenaeus of Lyon wrote Against Heresies to refute the teachers he considered the church's most dangerous rivals. In Book I, chapter 29, he summarizes a myth for the purpose of ridiculing it — and his summary matches the Secret Book of John closely enough that the text, in some form, must already have been in circulation.

Irenaeus reports a teaching that begins with an unnameable Father in a virgin spirit, a first Thought called Barbelo, a Self-Generated son, four attendant lights, and a Wisdom who produced an imperfect work by herself and was ashamed of it; that work became a first ruler who made the lower world in ignorance. Change nothing but the tone and you have the opening two-thirds of the Secret Book of John. He also gives us the century's best insult, complaining that such teachers had sprung up “like mushrooms growing out of the ground” (Against Heresies I.29.1, Ante-Nicene Fathers translation).

This is one of the great confirmations in the study of early Christianity. For seventeen centuries Irenaeus was the only witness, and anyone was free to assume he had invented a parody. In 1945 the parody's original came out of the ground, and the hostile summary proved substantially accurate.

What it says, part by part

The Secret Book of John moves in a single arc: from a source beyond description, down through a mistake, into a world built by someone who did not understand what he was copying, and back up by way of knowledge planted inside the human being. What follows paraphrases the text, which is not in this library's corpus and is therefore never quoted here as scripture.

• The Invisible Spirit. The book opens by describing God almost entirely in negatives: not corporeal, not measurable, not a quantity or a quality, beyond perfection, beyond divinity as the word is normally used. This is apophatic theology, in the idiom the Middle Platonists were using at the same time.
• Barbelo and the aeons. The Spirit sees itself in the light surrounding it, and its own Thought comes forth as Barbelo — first power, mother-father. From Barbelo unfold Foreknowledge, Incorruptibility, Eternal Life, Truth, and the Self-Generated son, with four luminaries named Harmozel, Oroiael, Daveithai, and Eleleth, who together populate the Pleroma.
• Sophia's error. The last of these beings, Wisdom, conceives a thought on her own — without her partner and without the Spirit's consent. What comes forth is unlike her: a serpent with a lion's face and eyes flashing like lightning. She hides it in a cloud and names it Yaldabaoth.
• The counterfeit cosmos. Carrying stolen power from his mother, the creator staffs a sky — twelve authorities, seven kings over the heavens, five over the abyss, 365 angels for the days of the year — and builds the world as a copy of a pattern he has never seen. Then he announces that he is God and there is none beside him, a line lifted from Isaiah to convict him of ignorance rather than blasphemy.
• The making of Adam. An image of the true Human appears on the waters. The rulers resolve to make a creature after it, and in the long version each power contributes an organ — an itemized anatomy the text credits to a source it calls the Book of Zoroaster. The body cannot stand. Then the trick: the powers above persuade the creator to breathe into its face, and the stolen light passes out of him into the human, who rises brighter than his makers.
• Eden, inverted. Paradise becomes a containment facility; the tree of knowledge is the light hidden in Adam, and eating from it is the right move. Eve is the insight taken out of Adam and given a body. The chief ruler assaults her; the flood is an attempted purge, survived by those hidden in a luminous cloud rather than in an ark; a counterfeit spirit is bred into humanity to keep it dull.
• The questions about souls. John asks the practical question — who is actually saved? The answers sort people by whether the Spirit of life reaches them and whether the counterfeit spirit holds them, with the harshest verdict reserved for those who knew and turned away. Souls that miss knowledge are placed into another body until they find it.

Why it matters: the whole myth in one book

Almost every other gnostic text assumes the creation myth instead of telling it. The Gospel of Philip discusses a bridal chamber whose logic depends on the fall of Wisdom; the Gospel of Judas names Saklas and Nebro as though you already know them; the Gospel of Truth meditates on an error the reader is expected to have heard about. The Secret Book of John is where the assumed story is written down — which is why the Demiurge and the creation myth as popularly summarized are, nine times in ten, summaries of this book.

It also matters because of what it does with Genesis. This is not a rival scripture inventing new characters; it is a counter-reading of the Bible's first chapters, turning the spirit moving over the waters into a mother's agitation over a ruined child and the forbidden tree into the one honest object in the garden. It is not ignorant of scripture. It has read scripture very carefully and drawn an unbearable conclusion.

Long version, short version, and the hymn

The four copies preserve two editions. NHC II,1 and IV,1 carry a long version; NHC III,1 and the Berlin Codex carry a shorter one. The differences are not cosmetic: the long version adds the itemized anatomy of Adam, extra demonology, and — at the very end — a first-person poem that many readers consider the finest thing in the book.

In that closing hymn, divine Forethought speaks in her own voice and describes descending three times into the darkness, into the middle of the prison, to wake a sleeper and tell him to rise and remember. The book then closes with an instruction to write the revelation down and keep it safe, and a curse on anyone who trades it for food, drink, or clothing. Whether the hymn was composed for this text or attached later is disputed, as is the priority of the versions: most scholars treat the long version as an expansion of something like the short.

What scholars still argue about

Three questions about the Secret Book of John remain genuinely open. First, the date: a version existed before 180 CE, but nothing tells us how much earlier, and estimates for the underlying material range across the second century. Second, the Christianity: several scholars — following Hans-Martin Schenke's reconstruction of a Sethian corpus, and developed by John D. Turner — read the Christian frame as a later wrapper over a Jewish Platonist myth, while Karen King argues the work is Christian throughout. Third, the audience: whether texts like this served a separate sect, a school inside the churches, or a reading circle no bishop had noticed.

What is not disputed: the text is real, its copies are catalogued and photographed, and its myth was described by an enemy before any surviving manuscript was written. The document is more interesting than the rumour.

Where to read it

Every English translation of the Secret Book of John in current print — Wisse, Waldstein and Wisse's synoptic edition, Meyer, King — is under copyright, which is why this library quotes none of them. Our rule is strict: a text is quoted verbatim from a public-domain source or it is not quoted at all. In January 2025 Samuel Zinner published a synoptic translation and committed it to the public domain; edited by Mark M. Mattison, that is the text served here — the long version from Codex II, complete, with the manuscript's gaps left visible. Read it at The Secret Book of John.

The closest primary sources you can read here now are the Gospel of Judas, whose cosmology names Nebro, Yaldabaoth, and Saklas in the same sequence of clouds and angels, and the Pistis Sophia, which tells the fall of Wisdom at length in G. R. S. Mead's 1921 translation of the Askew Codex — we carry twelve chapters of its 148, labeled as a selection — both linked below. Read either beside this summary and the family resemblance is unmistakable: the same myth, told by people who assumed their readers already knew its shape.