The
Acts of John is a 2nd-century
ChristianA Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic, religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians believe was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, and the Son of God.The term "Christian" is also used adjectivally to...
collection of narratives and traditions, well described as a "library of materials"
http://www.gnosis.org/library/actjohn.htm, inspired by the
Gospel of JohnThe Gospel of John , is the last of the four canonical gospels. This non synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth...
, long known in fragmentary form. The traditional author was said to be one
Leucius CharinusLeucius, called Leucius Charinus by the Patriarch Photios I of Constantinople in the ninth century, is the name applied to a cycle of what M. R. James termed "Apostolic romances" that seem to have had wide currency long before a selection were read aloud at the Second Council of Nicaea and rejected...
, a companion of John, who was associated with several 2nd century
Acts.
The
Acts of John is a 2nd-century
ChristianA Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic, religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians believe was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, and the Son of God.The term "Christian" is also used adjectivally to...
collection of narratives and traditions, well described as a "library of materials"
http://www.gnosis.org/library/actjohn.htm, inspired by the
Gospel of JohnThe Gospel of John , is the last of the four canonical gospels. This non synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth...
, long known in fragmentary form. The traditional author was said to be one
Leucius CharinusLeucius, called Leucius Charinus by the Patriarch Photios I of Constantinople in the ninth century, is the name applied to a cycle of what M. R. James termed "Apostolic romances" that seem to have had wide currency long before a selection were read aloud at the Second Council of Nicaea and rejected...
, a companion of John, who was associated with several 2nd century
Acts. As a description of acts attributed to one of the major apostles who had put their words down into the New Testament, together with the
Acts of PaulThe Acts of Paul is one of the major works from the New Testament apocrypha, an approximate date given to the Acts of Paul is 160 C.E. The Acts were considered orthodox by Hippolytus, but were eventually regarded as heretical when the Manichaeans started using the texts.The discovery of a Coptic...
it is considered one of the most significant of the apostolic Acts in the
New Testament apocryphaThe New Testament apocrypha are a number of writings by early Christians that give accounts of Jesus and his teachings, the nature of God, or the teachings of his apostles and of their lives. These writings often have links with those books which are regarded as "canonical"...
. It was traditionally ascribed to Prochorus, one of the
Seven DeaconsThe Seven Deacons were leaders elected by the early Christian church to minister to the people of Jerusalem. They are described in the Acts of the Apostles, and are the subject of later traditions as well; for instance they are supposed to have been members of the Seventy Disciples who appear in...
discussed in
Acts of the ApostlesThe Acts of the Apostles is the fifth book of the New Testament. It is commonly referred to as Acts and outlines the history of the Apostolic Age...
.
It contains two
apocryphaApocrypha comes from the Greek word , which means those having been hidden away. The general term is usually applied to the books that were considered by the Church as useful, but not divinely inspired...
l journeys of John to
EphesusEphesus was an ancient Roman and Greek city on the west coast of Anatolia, near present-day Selçuk, Izmir Province, Turkey. It was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League during the Classical Greek period....
, filled with dramatic events, miracles such as the collapse of the
Temple of ArtemisThe Temple of Artemis , also known less precisely as Temple of Diana, was a Greek temple dedicated to Artemis completed— in its most famous phase— around 550 BC at Ephesus . Though the monument was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only foundations and sculptural fragments of the...
just as John is in the theater preaching to try to convert
ArtemisArtemis was one of the most widely venerated of the Ancient Greek deities. In the classical period of Greek mythology, Artemis was often described as the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and the twin sister of Apollo...
' followers, anecdotes and well-framed melodramatic speeches. It may have originated as a Christianized wonder tale, designed for an urbane Hellenic audience accustomed to such things as having one's portrait painted (the setting for one episode), living in that part of the province of Asia. It also contains the episode at the
Last SupperIn the Christian Gospels, the Last Supper was the last meal Jesus shared with his Twelve Apostles and disciples before his death...
of the
Round Dance of the Cross initiated by Jesus, saying, "Before I am delivered to them, let us sing a hymn to the Father and so go to meet what lies before us". Directed to form a circle around him holding hands and dancing, the apostles cry "Amen" to the hymn of Jesus.
Embedded in the text is another hymn (sections 94 – 96), "which no doubt was once used as a liturgical song (with response) in some Johannine communities" (Davis). In the summer of 1916
Gustav HolstGustav Theodore Holst was an English composer. He is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets.Having studied at the Royal College of Music in London,...
set it, in a version by G.R.S. Mead, as "The Hymn of Jesus" for two mixed choirs and a small
orchestraAn orchestra is an instrumental ensemble, usually fairly large with string, brass, woodwind sections, and possibly a percussion section as well. The term orchestra derives from the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
(Trippett).
Though the
Acts of John was condemned as heretical, a large fragment survives in Greek manuscripts of widely varying date. In two medieval Greek versions, the magical survival of John when put to tortures will be familiar to any reader of
hagiographyHagiography is the study of saints. A hagiography, from the Greek and , refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of ecclesiastical and secular leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though...
: "He was brought before Domitian, and made to drink poison, which did not hurt him: the dregs of it killed a criminal on whom it was tried: and John revived him; he also raised a girl who was slain by an
unclean spiritUnclean spirit is a common English translation of pneuma akatharton , a term appearing in the Greek New Testament 21 times in the context of demonic possession. It is also translated into English as spirit of impurity or more loosely as "evil spirit." The Latin equivalent is spiritus immundus...
." (James 1924, Introduction).
Most of its
doceticIn Christianity, Docetism is the belief that Jesus' physical body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion; that is, Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and to physically die, but in reality he was incorporeal, a pure spirit, and hence could not physically die...
imagery and overt
gnosticGnosticism refers to diverse, syncretistic religious movements in antiquity consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect god, the demiurge; this being is frequently identified with the...
teachings are concentrated in a few chapters (94-102 and 109), which may be interpolations, or they may simply reflect the diverse nature of the sources that were drawn upon to assemble this episodic collection, which falls in the
genre of RomanceAs a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about the marvelous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight errant,...
.
The surviving Latin fragments, by contrast, seem to have been purged of unorthodox content, according to their translator
M. R. JamesMontague Rhodes James, OM, MA, , who used the publication name M. R. James, was a noted British mediaeval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge and of Eton College . He is best remembered for his ghost stories which are widely regarded as among the finest in English literature...
: the Latin fragments contain episodes now missing in the Greek. The
Stichometry of Nicephorus gives its length as 2500 lines. An on-line translation
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0827.htm presents the confrontation of John and
DomitianTitus Flavius Domitianus , known as Domitian, was a Roman Emperor who reigned from 14 September 81 until his death...
during Domitian's persecution of Christians, described as instigated by a letter of complaint from the Jews.
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