The Apocryphon of John

Abstract

STUDENTS of Gnosticism will welcome this volume because it gives them access, for the first time in English, to the so-called longer version of the important Gnostic text which had been used, in part, as a source by Irenaeus in his great work against heresies. While the shorter version has been known in part since 1896 when Carl Schmidt announced its discovery, it was not edited until 1954.1 The longer version appears in two codices from Nag Hammadi, with the text in Codex II being better preserved than the text in Codex IV. Pahor Labib made the Coptic text of the Apocryphon available to a limited circle of scholars in his photographic reproduction of part of Codex II,2 but the text needed editing, which Giversen has done. The volume is divided into two parts. In Part I Giversen presents a brief introduction to Gnosticism and the manuscript find, a section dealing with the manuscript and the mechanical make-up of the Codex (which contains a number of other important works, including the Gospels of Thomas and Philip), and the paleography and language of the text, followed by the text edition and translation itself and indexes of Greek and Coptic words and proper names in the text.