The Gnostic Adoption of John's Gospel and Its Canonization by the Church Catholic

Abstract

The severest threat to early Christianity was the Gnostic religion, the roots of which were probably in Iran. By the late second century there was a full-blown Gnostic Christianity in Rome and Alexandria, making its appeal chiefly to intellectuals. Accounts of its teaching found in the writings of St. Irenaeus and other church fathers were held suspect because of their adversarial stance until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, which largely confirmed them. The first known commentary on the Gospel according to John is that of the Gnostic thinker Heracleon, while various Ghostic tractates betray clear Johannine affinities. Patristic writers, aware of this challenge, began to use John's Gospel with its "Word become flesh" and many attributions of humanity to him, culminating in his death, against the Gnostics. This article suggests what cannot be proved: namely, that the insistence of the epistles of John on Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh (1 John 4:2; 2 John 7) is clearly an anti-docetic and possibly anti-Gnostic polemic, free of any naive acceptance of what it deplores.