Chapter 19

The Fourth Gospel and Gnostic Christianity

Origins of Gnosticism

Chart outlining an example of the often complex theology of gnostics

Gnosis is simply the Greek word for “knowledge”, though by this period in history it had come to be shorthand for “esoteric spiritual truths one must attain to be saved.” The salvation religions that competed with and influenced early Christianity each offered their adherents a unique brand of saving gnosis—parceled out piecemeal as they passed through a sufficient number of initiations to prove their readiness.¹

Gnosticism, therefore, does not refer to a particular religion, but an orientation or outlook shared among various faiths.² The first Christian known to have promulgated a distinctly gnostic theology was a man named Cerinthus, active in the early 100s CE. Hailing from Egypt,³ Cerinthus seems to have been strongly influenced by the worldview of Philo Judaeus of Alexandria whose works, as we have seen, melded the Jewish scriptures with Greek philosophy, writing of such concepts as the Logos—an essence or “emanation” of God who came into being at the time of Creation and acts as an intermediary between humans and the ineffable supreme being.

Artist depiction of the Spirit departing from the ordinary mortal body it inhabited on Earth

Cerinthus shared Marcion’s belief that the material world was created by a lesser deity he called the Demiurge (“Craftsman”) who was entirely unaware of the existence of a Supreme God above him. But unlike Marcion, he taught that strictly following the Jewish Law was also essential for salvation.⁴ And like many later Gnostic Christians, he held that Jesus was a mere human who had been filled by the Holy Spirit at his baptism so he might preach gnosis to humankind, and then became emptied of the Spirit at his crucifixion.⁵ Gnostic Christians were also greatly influenced by the letters of Paul who drew stark distinctions between the perfection of the spiritual realm vs the corruption of the material world.⁶

The most successful and widespread form of Christian gnosis—likely rivaling the popularity of the Marcionites and the Roman Church in its day—was that taught by another Egyptian named Valentinus.⁷ This renowned charismatic orator and learned preacher⁸ held that Jesus and the apostle Paul had a set of secret teachings key to salvation (gnosis) which they kept from the public, only passing them down to a select few.⁹ Though often referred to by their detractors as “Valentinians”, his followers referred to themselves simply as Christians, seeing themselves as representing the true faith. The details of their complicated theology and Creation myth varied even between communities, but can be roughly summarized as follows:

Bythos (“Profundity”) is the unreachable, unknowable, primal Father.
Before creation, a series of 30 aeons (“vital forces”) emanated from Bythos, each being an immaterial archetype, such as Mind, Truth, Life, Logos, and Faith.
These aeons formed female-male pairs called syzygies.
Sophia (“Wisdom”) was the youngest of these aeons. She coveted the ability of Bythos to generate new beings, and managed to do so herself, but the result was malformed and flawed. Ashamed, she hid her offspring away from the aeons of the immaterial realm, bringing him into the material world of ignorance and corruption.
Sophia’s grotesque child is The Demiurge who manages to steal part of his mother’s divine power, and uses that to create humankind.
Sophia, meanwhile, repents of her actions, and Bythos sends the aeon Christ to give her the gnosis needed for salvation, returning her to the immaterial realm, but not before they together create the angels.
The Demiurge is Yahweh of the Hebrew Scriptures. Together with the angels he creates the Earth. He is neither good nor evil, but so ignorant that he believes himself the only and highest god.
Humans, though born into a world of confusion and suffering, contain a divine spark taken from Sophia, and can find salvation through learning the secret truth of their origin and destiny as taught by Christ and the apostle Paul.¹⁰

Artist depiction of demon “archons” waiting for a pure enough woman

Like Paul, Valentinus taught that the firmament of the material world was full of demons—the archons (“powers”) of the Devil—forever in opposition to Yahweh and his angels.¹¹ All of human history was seen as a long wait for the birth of a woman pure enough to bring Jesus and his saving gnosis into the world.

Valentinus brought his teachings from Egypt to Rome where he seems to have been popular for a decade before ultimately being rejected by the Roman Church, after which he formed a community on Cyprus.¹² A treatise from a decade or two later, known as The Gospel of Truth, has been plausibly attributed to Valentinus. Not a story of Jesus’s life on Earth at all, it is rather the work of a skilled poet who composed a series of parables and explanations deeply informed by gnostic teachings similar to those outlined above.¹³

The Gospel of Jesus Christ 4.0

Artist depiction of the author of the fourth gospel

The last-written of the gospels that would go on to be included in the New Testament is known to us today as the Gospel of John, but it too was originally published anonymously. Though its author surely had copies of the first three gospels in front of him as he wrote, and makes use of material from them, his writing is starkly unique in many regards. It was composed not merely as another in a series of redactions, but as a near-complete rewrite that uses its predecessors merely as a jumping-off point. Though it is perhaps not accurate to call it a fully gnostic gospel, it is certainly the canonical gospel most influenced by Gnosticism.

A New Beginning

“In the beginning was the Logos,” the fourth gospel begins, “and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.”¹⁴ From the very first verse, we are deep in territory that is foreign to previous gospels which had made no mention at all of a “Logos”—much less did they equate it with Jesus, or even go so far as to equate Jesus with God. This gospel’s prologue—though it doesn’t put forth a full gnostic creation myth like that of Valentinus—does, seemingly not-so-incidentally, include mentions of all 8 of the aeons considered foremost and primal by most gnostic sects: Arche (“Beginning”), Logos (“Word”), Zoe (“Life”), Man (“Anthropos”), Church (“Ecclesia”), Grace (“Charis”), and Truth (“Aletheia”).¹⁵

Artist depiction of Moses speaking with an anthropomorphic entity which the fourth gospel implies isn’t the highest God whom Jesus revealed

Eschewing the birth narrative that was introduced by the third gospel, the fourth gospel simply states that “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.”¹⁶ Like the first gospel, the narrative begins with John the Baptist, but like the second gospel, this author will not allow John to actually baptize Jesus. Instead, the scene of the holy spirit descending on Jesus like a dove is divorced from its baptismal setting, and is related by John as something he had witnessed at some point in the past. Echoing gnostic ideas, John is made to tell the gathered crowd, “No one has ever seen God except the one and only Son, who is himself God,”¹⁷—a teaching strongly suggesting belief in a previously-unrevealed higher god than the more anthropomorphic god of the Jews who was said to have been seen face-to-face by Moses in the Hebrew scriptures.

Artist depiction of John the Baptist with his disciples, including Peter

The fourth gospel is the only one to mention John the Baptist’s own set of disciples, some of whom leave him to become the first disciples of Jesus, including Peter—whom previous gospels had instead presented as a Galilean fisherman. Jesus invites Peter and his brother Andrew to follow him to the place where he’s staying, and since it’s already 4pm, they stay with him. Curiously, this is the only place in any of the gospels that present the adult Jesus as having a residence of any kind. Despite its lack of a birth narrative, the author of the fourth gospel adopts the name Joseph from the third gospel for Jesus’s father, who is also here said to come from Nazareth.¹⁸

Artist depiction of Jesus at a wedding with his mother, miraculously turning water into wine

The author chooses not to include the other gospels’ stories of Jesus being tempted by Satan in the wilderness, and from this point forward until the passion, the fourth gospel’s entire narrative flow bears little resemblance to its predecessors. In this gospel’s first completely original story, Jesus and his disciples attend a wedding at Cana in Galilee. While there, Jesus’s mother—who goes unnamed throughout this gospel—points out that the host has run out of wine. Jesus, showing her no warmth, dismissively asks, “Woman, what do I have to do with you?” He then does, of course, famously turn vats of water into wine, and this, the author informs us, is first of his miraculous signs.¹⁹

Artist depiction of Jesus whipping a merchant who has collapsed

The very next story is that of Jesus visiting Jerusalem for Passover, entering the Temple courts, overturning tables, and driving away the currency exchangers with a whip of cords.²⁰ This same story was placed by all three preceding gospels at the very end of Jesus’s ministry. Scholars who assume Jesus to have been a historical person often suggest that this violently disruptive public act is what led directly to his being arrested and executed, so it is particularly puzzling to them that the fourth gospel presents it as inaugurating Jesus’s public ministry rather than concluding it. While the author’s motives for the switch are unknown, he consistently shows complete disregard for the sequencing of events in previous gospels, and leaves out a huge amount of their content, including almost all their healings, exorcisms, parables, and extended ethical teaching sections like the Sermon on the Mount and Sermon on the Plain.

A New Jesus

Artist depiction of a supremely confident Son of God

Jesus’s overall character and deportment in the fourth gospel is also a radical departure. Gone is the somewhat relatable teacher who is secretive or even coy about revealing his true identity. This new Jesus is consistently prone to making megalomaniacal pronouncements, unceasingly talking about himself and his supreme importance to the world, declaring things like, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,”²¹ and “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me gathers them, and I will raise them up at the last day.”²² When Jewish leaders accuse him of blasphemy for equating himself with God, Jesus castigates them for their disbelief, and points out that his testimony concerning himself meets the Jewish Law’s requirement of being vouched for by two witnesses—in this case, himself and God.²³

Artist depiction of Jesus accusing the Jews

Continuing the increasingly hostile anti-Jewish trend of the gospels, Jesus then tells the Jewish crowd, “You have never heard the Father’s voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one He sent. You study the scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life.”²⁴ Whereas the third gospel depicted Jesus as stating that all his followers must follow the Law of Moses to the letter in order to be saved, the fourth gospel includes a scene where a crowd of Jews asks him, “What must we do to carry out the works God requires?” and in response, Jesus says nothing at all about the commandments, instead telling them, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”²⁵

Artist depiction of the Jews as the children of the Devil

In another heated debate later in the gospel, Jesus goes so far as to tell a crowd of Jews that his god is not their father. “You belong to your father, the Devil,” he tells them, “and you want to carry out your father’s desires.”²⁶ When they protest, saying, “The only Father we have is God himself,” Jesus reiterates: “The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” When he goes on to equate himself with God’s self-designation “I am” from Exodus, the crowd attempts to follow the Law of Moses by picking up rocks with which to stone him to death for blasphemy, but Jesus slips away from them unscathed.²⁷

A New Ministry

Artist depiction of Jesus blessing the bread before feeding the multitudes

Not all the stories from Jesus’s ministry in the fourth gospel are original. The author includes both the Feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus Walking on Water—hewing closest to the first gospel’s wording, and forgoing the third gospel’s unique addition of Peter stepping out of the boat. It has long been noted by scholars that the fourth gospel as we have it seems to be out of sequence—almost as if its loose pages were accidentally dropped on the ground, and the attempt to put them all back in the proper order was not entirely successful. Partly this is evident in the way Jesus seems to begin a speech in one location, but finish it in a different setting; or we are told “the next day” Jesus and his disciples are somewhere far more than a day’s journey away. And partly this is seen in the way Jesus—or the author—makes reference to an occurrence as if we’ve already read about it, but the event in question doesn’t occur until later in the gospel.²⁸

In keeping with his distancing Jesus from the Jews, the fourth gospel’s author does not include the Transfiguration scene found in all three previous gospels in which Jesus communes with God, Moses, and Elijah on a mountain. Every one of Jesus’s famous ethical teachings in previous gospels has been removed in this gospel, leaving a single moral teaching that the Son of God gives only amongst his disciples—to “Love one another, as I have loved you.”²⁹ Despite its common modern interpretation as a universal directive, this in-group commandment is not depicted as a public-facing teaching, and makes no demands concerning how to treat those outside Jesus’s closest circle. Nothing along the lines of “Love your neighbor as yourself” much less “Love your enemies” is found here.

Artist depiction of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead

Certain original content in the fourth gospel seems to be in direct reaction to material in previous gospels. Rather than retell the second gospel’s unique story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the fourth gospel’s author creates a new story in which Lazarus is not a character from a parable, but a friend of Jesus who falls ill. Jesus is told of his plight, but chooses not to begin the four day journey to visit him until his friend has succumbed to death. Then upon arrival at his house, two of Lazarus’s sisters express dismay that Jesus did not come there sooner and save his life. But Jesus then famously calls Lazarus from his tomb, showing him to be resurrected from the dead.³⁰ This may be intended to rebut Abraham’s words in the second gospel’s Lazarus story: “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead,” for this gospel specifies that those who witnessed Lazarus’s resurrection did become believers.

Artist depiction of Mary the sister of Lazarus washing Jesus’s feet with her hair

The author then copies the story of Jesus’s Anointing at Bethany from the previous gospels, but changes the setting from the house of Simon the leper to the house in which Lazarus and his sisters live. A woman—unnamed in the other gospels, but here identified as being one of Lazarus’s sisters, Mary—then pours a great amount of very precious aromatic ointment on Jesus. While the first and third gospel have her pour this on Jesus’s head, the fourth gospel follows the second gospel in having her pour it on Jesus’s feet, and having her wipe his feet with her hair. While the first two gospels depict an unspecified disciple objecting to the waste of valuable nard that could have been—in accordance with Jesus’s ethical teachings from the other gospels—sold for a great sum and the money given to the poor; the fourth gospel seems to consider this an evil suggestion with its specification that the disciple who made it was none other than the arch-betrayer Judas Iscariot.³¹

A New Passion

Artist depiction of an undressed Jesus washing a disciple’s feet

As Jesus’s traveling ministry ends, the author includes a close rewrite of the previous gospels’ Triumphal Entry Into Jerusalem scene. But he then studiously ignores a long series of stories, parables, and teachings which follow in the preceding gospels—including Jesus’s description to his disciples of the signs of the End Times. Instead, he moves straight to the Last Supper scene which is remarkably unlike the ones we’ve seen. Though it is also said to be a Passover supper, Jesus begins it with a peculiar ritual. He removes his clothing, takes a towel and a basin of water, and washes each of the disciples’ feet. When Peter protests the impropriety of having the Son of God wash his feet, Jesus tells him that if he won’t have his feet washed, he can have nothing to do with him.³² It’s likely that regular mutual foot washing was an established ritual among the author’s community, and that he is here giving it an origin story going back to Jesus himself.³³

Artist depiction of Jesus offering bread

It’s also very likely that the author’s community did not practice the Eucharist ritual. Some modern Christians are quite surprised to discover that the fourth gospel’s Last Supper scene contains no sharing of bread and wine. But this not to say that the fourth gospel is unfamiliar with the symbolism of bread and wine for the flesh and blood of Jesus. In the synagogue at Capernaum, Jesus had proclaimed, “I am the bread of life…I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world…The one who feeds on me will live because of me…Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”³⁴ But for this author, this language is highly symbolic and does not extend to eating actual bread and drinking actual wine in any sort of ritual, much less the belief that it was somehow Jesus’s actual flesh and blood.

The fourth gospel is the only one to mention a character referred to only as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” The phrase is odd, in and of itself, with its seeming necessary corollary that Jesus did not love his other disciples. If we rule out that interpretation, then it would seem that its meaning must be along the lines of “the disciple Jesus loved best”. That too, is odd, since one might expect that the Son of God doesn’t play favorites. The identity of this unnamed figure is debated among scholars. From scenes in which they are mentioned being together, we can rule out that Peter is “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, and we can be sure it’s not Judas Iscariot, but there’s no certain way to know which of the other 10 disciples is intended.

Artist depiction of Jesus with “the disciple Jesus loved”

Christian tradition holds that John, the supposed author of the gospel, is this beloved disciple,³⁵ but as noted earlier, the gospel was originally published anonymously. Moving away from traditional interpretations, it has even been suggested that—unlike the seeming asexuality of Jesus in the first three gospels—Jesus is here presented as having a boyfriend. In support of this, the fourth gospel’s unique Last Supper scene describes “the disciple whom Jesus loved” as resting on Jesus’s chest, surely an intimate gesture.³⁶ While such a same-sex relationship would have been scandalous to the Jews—as much of Jesus’s teachings are in this gospel—it would not have been particularly troubling to most Gentile Greeks who are almost certainly the intended audience of this gospel.

Artist depiction of Jesus unexpectedly launching into another extended speech at the Last Supper

At the close of the meal, Jesus delivers a speech to his disciples that takes up the entirety of chapter 14, and ends by saying, “Come now, let us leave.” But oddly, Jesus then continues to speechify straight through the whole of chapters 15, 16, and 17 as well. This may be the result of the same shuffling of the pages of the narrative we noted earlier, or could indicate that a later author (clumsily) added a lot of material to Jesus’s speech that wasn’t present in the original. Scholars unanimously hold that some material in the Gospel of John as we know it was added at a later date. This includes one of its most famous scenes in which a crowd of Jews wishes to stone a woman to death who was caught in the act of adultery—which is exactly what the Law of Moses specifies is the proper punishment—but Jesus dissuades them with the words “Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.” This entire story is missing from the earliest manuscripts of the gospel and doesn’t appear until 150 to 200 years later.³⁷

Artist depiction of Jesus showing no traces of trepidation or fear in the face of death

As with the previous gospels, after the supper, Jesus leads his disciples to the garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. But whereas the first three gospels allow Jesus to momentarily show human vulnerability in his desperate prayer to God, the fourth gospel’s author will have none of it, presenting his Jesus as utterly and fearlessly resolute—even looking forward to his “glorification” by execution.³⁸ He seems to be not merely correcting the writers of the previous gospels, but directly chiding them, as this comparison of Jesus’s words in each gospel shows:

First gospel:

“Father, all things are possible unto thee; remove this cup from me.”³⁹
‎

Second gospel:

“My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me.”⁴⁰
‎

Third gospel:

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.”⁴¹
‎

Fourth gospel:

“What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour⁴²…Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?”⁴³

Artist depiction of Judas betraying Jesus to the chief priest’s henchmen

Jesus is then betrayed by Judas and led away by henchmen. Perhaps realizing the logical inconsistency of the previous gospels offering a detailed report of Jesus’s trial at which none of his followers were present, the fourth gospel adds the detail that “another disciple”—who remains unnamed—followed Peter to the court of the high priest. This disciple is said to have used a connection to enter the building and witness the trial while Peter stays outside and does his customary denial of Jesus before the cock crows.⁴⁴

Artist depiction of Pilate insisting on Jesus’s innocence, telling the crowd of Jews to “crucify him yourself!”

When Jesus is brought before Pilate, the fourth gospel again diverges from its predecessors by having him explain to the Roman governor, “My kingship is not of this world.” Jesus further adds that he came into the world “to bear witness to the truth,” adding, “Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” To this semi-gnostic sounding pronouncement, Pilate philosophically replies, “What is truth?” With that his questioning of Jesus ends, and despite Pilate declaring to the Jewish crowd outside that, “I find no crime in him,” they nonetheless demand the release of Barabbas the insurrectionist instead.⁴⁵

Artist depiction of Jesus carrying his cross without any need of assistance

Pilate’s innocence in the matter of Jesus’ execution is again stressed to the point of absurdity, for when the crowd shouts for Jesus to be crucified, the governor fires back, “Take him and crucify him yourselves, for I find no crime in him!” Pilate makes one last attempt to have Jesus released, but despite holding all the power, he is somehow beholden to the crowd whose members shout that Pilate is no friend to the Emperor if he seeks this man’s release.⁴⁶

Artist depiction of Jesus confident to his dying breath

The fourth gospel’s author—clearly uncomfortable at another perceived sign of weakness in previous gospels’ presentation—goes out of his way to specify that Jesus carried his own cross to the site of his crucifixion, contradicting the three previous gospels’ reports that a certain Simon of Cyrene had carried his cross for him. This gospel is also the only one to place Jesus’s mother as a witness to her son’s death—this being her only other appearance in the entire gospel after the Wedding at Cana. And whereas previous gospels did not present any of the disciples as being present at his execution, here, once again, we find “the disciple Jesus loved.” From the cross, Jesus is portrayed as saying to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” and to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” From that hour, we are told, the disciple took her into his own home.⁴⁷

Unable to stomach the powerlessness of the last words of Jesus as presented in the first and third gospel—”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—this author has Jesus simply and triumphantly proclaim, “It is finished,” before dying fully on his own terms, always in control, never trepidatious.⁴⁸

A New Ending

Artist depiction of Jesus telling Mary Magdalene not to touch him

The details of the Empty Tomb story are altered in the fourth gospel as well. Instead of three women coming to the tomb at dawn, it is only Mary Magdalene who arrives to find the stone already rolled away from the entrance. She immediately runs to Peter and “the disciple Jesus loved”, and they both come to the tomb and find it empty inside. Mary Magdalene is weeping outside the tomb when a pair of angels appear, and almost immediately Jesus himself appears behind her, though she at first mistakes him for a gardener. “Don’t touch me,” he tells her, “for I have not yet ascended to my Father.” In another of the gospel’s ambiguously gnostic-sounding verses, Jesus then says, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,”⁴⁹ possibly drawing a distinction between their higher god made known through Jesus and the lower god of the Jews.

Artist depiction of the disciple Thomas inserting his finger into an open wound on Jesus’s body

That same evening, we are told, the disciples have locked themselves in a room out of a “fear of the Jews”—though the basis of this fear is never explained. Jesus suddenly appears amongst them, and immediately has to prove it is really him by showing them the injuries from his crucifixion. He then breathes on them all so that they might receive the Holy Spirit. This apparently confers on them the power to forgive—or choose not to forgive—people’s sins. One of the twelve disciples known as Didymous Thomas (literally “Twin Twin”) had gone on some errands and missed Jesus’s appearance. When he hears of it from another disciple, he oddly states that he will not believe it “unless I place my finger in the nail holes of his hands”. The following week, Jesus makes another sudden appearance among the disciples in this same hideout, and he immediately commands Thomas to put his finger in his nail holes and believe. Surely enough, this does the trick, and Thomas finds his faith.⁵⁰

The author of the fourth gospel seems to have come from a community that considered the apostle John as its patron founder at a time when they and other sometimes-competing Christian communities were trying to ground their church’s authority on an unbroken chain of leaders going back to the original disciples. It has been suggested that this Doubting Thomas tale was intended as a dig at those neighboring churches in Syria who considered the apostle Thomas as their patron founder.⁵¹ A document known as the Gospel of Thomas was composed around this time—not a narrative story, but a long list of sayings attributed to Jesus, some familiar to us—and those which are unfamiliar sharing a distinctly gnostic bent.⁵²

Artist depiction of the resurrected Jesus sharing grilled fish with his disciples

Originally the fourth gospel ended at this point, with the author writing, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.” But a later-added epilogue has been tacked onto the end in which another post-death appearance of Jesus is related.⁵³ The disciples are now in Galilee where they are fishing, which is somewhat odd, because this gospel—unlike the others—had never established that any of the disciples were fishermen. Peter, for some reason, is specified as being naked. Jesus appears on the shore and, before they recognize him, he tells them where to drop their net to catch some fish. They are said to drag ashore 153 fish—a number whose significance eludes modern scholars, but must have meant something to the author’s community. The disciples now recognize Jesus who then eats a breakfast of bread and broiled fish with them.⁵⁴

Artist depiction of the resurrected Jesus telling Peter three times to look after his sheep

Finally, in a follow-up scene that may have been added by the later Roman church to help restore Peter’s tarnished reputation in the gospels, Jesus takes him aside and three times tells him to look after his “sheep”—generally understood as his establishing Peter as the head of the church. Peter is then said to notice that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is following them. In response, Jesus questions Peter, asking, “If it’s my will that he stays until I come, what’s that to you?” We are then told that a rumor spread from this point on that the “disciple whom Jesus loved” would never die. But the author explains that this is incorrect, and that he will only remain until Jesus comes. It is then claimed that the “disciple whom Jesus loved” is none other than the author of this gospel, and therefore we can rest assured that it’s all reliable and true.⁵⁵ This claim of authorship is, of course, made by the author of this second ending to the gospel, not the original anonymous author. The point of this “rumor” may have been to explain away how a disciple of Jesus could have written a gospel that was arriving on the scene circa 130-150 CE.

The closing words that follow are similar to the gospel’s original ending, though now written in the first person: “There are also many other things which Jesus did. If every one of them were to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”⁵⁶

Continue Reading:

Chapter 20: The Roman Church Acts

Footnotes

1
Ehrman, Bart D. (2003). Lost Christianities. Oxford University Press.
2
Ehrman, Bart D. (2003). Lost Christianities. Oxford University Press.
3
Irenaeus, Against Heresies.
4
Williams, F. (2009). The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill.
5
Irenaeus, Against Heresies.
6
Magris, Aldo (2005). “Gnosticism: Gnosticism from its origins to the Middle Ages (further considerations)”. In Jones, L. (ed.). (2004). Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd ed.). Macmillan Inc.
7
Cross, F. L.; Livingstone, E. A., eds. (2005). “Valentinus”. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd, Revised ed.). Oxford University Press.
8
Brakke, D. (2010). The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Harvard University Press.
9
Ehrman, Bart D. (2003). Lost Christianities. Oxford University Press.
10
Clement. Stromateis.
11
Williams, G. (2009). The Spirit World in the Letters of Paul the Apostle: A Critical Examination of the Role of Spiritual Beings in the Authentic Pauline Epistles. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
12
Green, B. (2010). Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries. A&C Black.
13
Pearson, B.A. (2007). Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries. Fortress Press.
14
John 1:1. The Bible. New International Version.
15
Sanders, J.N. (1943). The Fourth Gospel in the Early Church: Its Origin & Influence on Christian Theology Up to Irenaeus. CUP Archive.
16
John 1:14. The Bible. New International Version.
17
John 1:6-18. The Bible. New International Version.
18
John 1:35-46. The Bible. New International Version.
19
John 2:1-11. The Bible. New International Version.
20
John 2:13-25. The Bible. New International Version.
21
John 14:6. The Bible. New International Version.
22
John 6:44. The Bible. New International Version.
23
John 8:17-18. The Bible. New International Version.
24
John 5:37-40. The Bible. New International Version.
25
John 6:29. The Bible. New International Version.
26
John 8:44. The Bible. New International Version.
27
John 8:41-47. The Bible. New International Version.
28
Davidson, P. (2015.) Is John out of Order? The Strange Geography and Chronology of the Fourth Gospel. Is That In the Bible? https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/is-john-out-of-order-the-strange-geography-and-chronology-of-the-fourth-gospel/
29
John 13:34. The Bible. New International Version.
30
John 11:1-44. The Bible. New International Version.
31
John 12:1-8. The Bible. New International Version.
32
John 13:1-12. The Bible. New International Version.
33
Weiss, H. (1979). Foot Washing in the Johannine Community. Novum Testamentum, 21(4), 298–325. https://doi.org/10.2307/1560729
34
John 6:35-56. The Bible. New International Version.
35
Matkin, J.M. (2005). The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Gnostic Gospels. Penguin.
36
Nissinen, M. (2004). Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective. Fortress Press.
37
Ehrman, Bart. (2017). The Bart Ehrman Blog. The Woman Taken in Adultery in the King James Version. https://ehrmanblog.org/the-woman-taken-in-adultery-in-the-king-james-version/
38
John 17:1-5. The Bible. New International Version.
39
Mark 14:36. The Bible. New International Version.
40
Luke 22:42. The Bible. New International Version.
41
Matthew 26:39. The Bible. New International Version.
42
John 12:27. The Bible. New International Version.
43
John 18:11. The Bible. New International Version.
44
John 18:15. The Bible. New International Version.
45
John 18:36-40. The Bible. New International Version.
46
John 19:6-12. The Bible. New International Version.
47
John 19:17-27. The Bible. New International Version.
48
John 19:30. The Bible. New International Version.
49
John 20:1-17. The Bible. New International Version.
50
John 20:19-23. The Bible. New International Version.
51
Pagels, E. (2004). Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
52
Foster, P., ed. (2008). The Non-Canonical Gospels. Bloomsbury Publishing.
53
Koester, H. (2000). Introduction to the New Testament, Volume 2. Walter de Gruyter.
54
John 21:1-14. The Bible. New International Version.
55
John 21:15-24. The Bible. New International Version.
56
John 21:25. The Bible. New International Version.