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The Acts of John
The Acts of John
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The Acts of John is an early 2nd-century Christian collection of Johannine narratives and traditions, long known in fragmentary form. The traditional author was said to be one Leucius Charinus, a companion and disciple of John. The Acts of John is considered one of the most significant of the apocryphal apostolic Acts. It preserves strains of early oral traditions about the "beloved disciple" and sole apostolic author of a canonical gospel text.
The Acts of John describes several journeys of John, tales filled with dramatic and miraculous events, anecdotes and well-framed apostolic speeches. Many of these reveal strong docetistic tendencies in the John tradition, and at least one episode is really quite amusing (see section 60, the "tale of John and the bed bugs").
But our text also contain two extraordinary mystical sections which are in character distinct from the rest of the document. The first recounts the sacred words and actions of the Lord on the night before his death. This is followed directly by the second, recounting the vision John received of the Lord at the moment of the crucifixion. The first section (sections 94-96 in the James edition, below) has been in modern times titled the "Hymn of Jesus", and very likely preserves a text used in the liturgy of at least some Johannine communities. The vision text that follows, sometimes titled "the Mystery of the Cross" (sections 97-102), illustrates with great beauty the mystical depths penetrated by Johannine Christology. These two sections make the Acts of John a crucially important document for understanding the visionary and Gnostic underpinnings within the tradition of John. They are important companion texts to the Apocryphon of John. Also see G.R.S. Mead's very fine study of The Hymn of Jesus for more extensive commentary on the Acts of John.
Though the Acts of John was condemned by orthodoxy as heretical, it found a perpetual place in many monastic libraries, and a large fragment survives in Greek manuscripts of widely varying date. The surviving Latin fragments, by contrast, appear to have been edited with an eye to purging all "unorthodox" content.
The Acts of John describes several journeys of John, tales filled with dramatic and miraculous events, anecdotes and well-framed apostolic speeches. Many of these reveal strong docetistic tendencies in the John tradition, and at least one episode is really quite amusing (see section 60, the "tale of John and the bed bugs").
But our text also contain two extraordinary mystical sections which are in character distinct from the rest of the document. The first recounts the sacred words and actions of the Lord on the night before his death. This is followed directly by the second, recounting the vision John received of the Lord at the moment of the crucifixion. The first section (sections 94-96 in the James edition, below) has been in modern times titled the "Hymn of Jesus", and very likely preserves a text used in the liturgy of at least some Johannine communities. The vision text that follows, sometimes titled "the Mystery of the Cross" (sections 97-102), illustrates with great beauty the mystical depths penetrated by Johannine Christology. These two sections make the Acts of John a crucially important document for understanding the visionary and Gnostic underpinnings within the tradition of John. They are important companion texts to the Apocryphon of John. Also see G.R.S. Mead's very fine study of The Hymn of Jesus for more extensive commentary on the Acts of John.
Though the Acts of John was condemned by orthodoxy as heretical, it found a perpetual place in many monastic libraries, and a large fragment survives in Greek manuscripts of widely varying date. The surviving Latin fragments, by contrast, appear to have been edited with an eye to purging all "unorthodox" content.
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