Apocryphon of John

The Secret Book of John, also called the Apocryphon of John, is a second-century Sethian Gnostic Christian text of secret teachings. Since it was known to the church father Irenaeus, it must have been written before around 180. It describes Jesus appearing and giving secret knowledge (gnosis) to John the Apostle. The author describes this having occurred after Jesus "has gone back to the place from which he came". This book is reputed to bear this revelation.

Many Christians in the second century hoped to receive a transcendent personal revelation such as Paul the Apostle was able to report to the church at Corinth () or that John experienced on the isle of Patmos, which inspired the Book of Revelation. As Acts narrates what happened after the time Jesus ascended to heaven, so the Apocryphon of John begins at the same point but relates how Christ reappeared to John.

The opening words of the Secret Book of John are, "The teaching of the saviour, and the revelation of the mysteries and the things hidden in silence, even these things which he taught John, his disciple." The author John is immediately specified as "John, the brother of James — who are the sons of Zebedee." The remainder of the book is a vision of spiritual realms and of the prior history of spiritual humanity.

There are four separate surviving manuscripts of "The Secret Book of John". Three of these were found in the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945, while the fourth was found independently 50 years earlier from another site in Egypt. All four versions date to the 4th century. Three of these appear to be independently produced Coptic translations of an original Greek text. Two of the four are similar enough that they probably represent copies of a single source.

Although the different versions of the texts have minor variants (the Berlin Codex has many minor differences with Nag Hammadi II and IV), all texts generally agree that the main revealing entity was Jesus.

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