The History of John the Son of Zebedee
Introduction, Texts and Translations
Jacob A. Lollar
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For Kora and Maryn
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people have contributed to making this book possible. First and foremost, thanks to my dissertation committee, chaired by Nicole Kelley and including David Levenson, Matthew Goff, and Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, who provided invaluable feedback for me and were gracious in their comments and critiques. Second, I would like to thank Christelle Jullien who so graciously sponsored me through the Chateaubriand fellowship and was a generous host while I was in Paris. Additionally, my time in Paris would have been wasted had it not been for Anne-Catherine Baudoin, Muriel Debié, and Alain Desreaumaux. My sincere thanks to all of you and to the other members of SELAC who graciously suffered through my presentation of much of this material.
Third, I would like to thank my colleagues and many conversation partners over the years: Blake Jurgens, Carson Bay, Sheldon Steen, Giancarlo Angulo, Josh Matson, Tara Baldrick-Marone, RC Griffin, Andrew Gardner, James Walters, Philip Forness, Thomas Whitley, Yonatan Binyam, David Skelton, Grace Hall. And thanks to those scholars who have mentored me in a variety of ways and have helped me think through various aspects of this project: Trevor Thompson, Tony Burke, Janet Spittler, Stanley Jones, Rebecca Falcasantos. All of you have been instrumental in helping me finish this project whether you realized it or not.
A very important thanks to Jeff Childers, who taught me Syriac and fostered in me an interest in Christianity in the East that has blossomed into a passion. Finally, thanks to my wife Sarah for working so hard to put me through graduate school (you are my champion) and thanks to my daughters, Kora and Maryn, for teaching me discipline and for teaching me how to love. This book is for you.
PREFACE
In the autumn of 2012 I was finishing my Master’s degree in the Graduate School of Theology at Abilene Christian University. I was taking Intermediate Syriac and simultaneously working on my first conference presentation which had nothing to do with Syriac, but focused on the Greek Acts of John. While reading through J.K. Elliot’s Apocryphal New Testament, I noticed a passing reference to acts of John in Syriac translation. Since I was learning Syriac at the time, the reference caught my attention. Thankfully, due to the ongoing work of Jeff Childers, ACU has an ever-growing library dedicated to the Syriac Christian traditions and they happened to have a copy of William Wright’s Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in Syriac. There, unexpectedly, I first discovered the History of John the Son of Zebedee.
Like most of the pieces in Wright’s collection, the History of John had largely been overlooked in favor of “the jewel” of Wright’s volume: a Syriac version of the Acts of Thomas. In Wright’s assessment, the History of John was of little value from a historical point of view and he thought it only useful for purposes of philological comparison to its assumed Greek Vorlage. This attitude was, of course, typical of a methodological obsession with trying to get back to an original, Urtext for any given narrative. As a result, Wright gave little thought or attention to the contextual conditions that gave rise to the History of John within Syriac communities regardless of its origins in Greek or Syriac.
Since Wright, several other witnesses have come to light that have called most of his assumptions into question. Moreover, the work of Eric Junod and Jean-Daniel Kaestli has begun to sort out the place of the History of John within the larger Acta Iohannis corpus.
This volume is the culmination of text-critical work as much as it is a venture into what I would call “contextual criticism”, building on the work of Junod and Kaestli. No one, until now, has offered any strong cases for the date, authorship and provenance of the History of John, and thus my own inquiry must begin with such basic, but foundational, questions.
Along the way, a few methodological questions have guided my thinking in the course of this project. When I first encountered the History of John, I was struck that a Christian group in a post-Nicaea (and post-Eusebian) context would write and continue to read and copy this text. Who would write such a text? Why would they write it? What type of literature is this? What was the intended function of this text? Whose interests was it intended to serve? Who was trying to convince whom of what with this narrative? How does this text help contribute to our understanding of Christian literature in Syriac?
I started with these fundamental questions that had yet to be asked of this particular narrative, many of which were stimulated by religion scholars like Bruce Lincoln. These questions and others have been the driving force behind my inquiry. In the end, I must admit that I have merely scratched the surface of this text. With this book, however, I provide a solid foundation for further investigation by offering some preliminary hypotheses about its origins and functions. It is my hope that this initial work will stimulate further interest in this text that has been the object of my curiosity for so long.
The layout of the book is quite straightforward. I begin with a history of scholarship which is quite brief, given the text has received little attention. Most of the critical investigation surrounding the History of John has focused on its relationship to other literature in the Acta Iohannis corpus. This is a discussion that needs to continue beyond the confines of this book and I offer here a mere summary of the important arguments. Some material incorporated into later versions of the narrative which is published here for the first time may have a bearing on the discussion of how this text fits into the traditions about John writ large.
Chapter two addresses the manuscripts, focusing particularly on how they might relate to one another. Again, more work here
needs to be done, as I have not been able to compare the Syriac versions to the Arabic or the Armenian versions. Chapter three turns to the questions about provenance, date and authorship. Much of this material has grown out of investigations from my dissertation. I have left out the more speculative hypotheses to save for other venues. Here, I think it is important to address the fundamental questions as critically as possible before moving into speculative investigation.
The rest of the book consists of the texts and translations. I have followed current trends in publishing Syriac texts and have opted to use the earliest extant manuscript as the base text. I have made every effort to present the base text as it appears in the manuscript. The same may be said of the recorded variants. In the appendices I have included longer portions of added material from later witnesses, which could not reasonably be included in footnotes. In the case of one manuscript, which is an abridgment of the narrative, I have included the entire Syriac text with a translation.
William Wright did not see much value in this text. Nevertheless, the History of John has been an academic gold mine for me over the last several years and will likely continue to be so for years to come.
LIST OF PLATES
Plate I : Remains of Artemision in Ephesus (Selçuk, Turkey) with ruins of the Church of St. John on the hill behind it. ã Livius.org | Jona Lendering. Used with permission.
Plate II: Remains of Artemision with Church of St. John on the hill behind it. ã Livius.org | Jona Lendering. Used with permission.
Plate III: Theatre of Ephesus from the Arcadian road. ã Livius.org | Jona Lendering. Used with permission.
Plate IV: View of the top most seat of theatre, the easternmost point of the complex. ã Livius.org | Jona Lendering. Used with permission.
Plate V: BnF syr. 236. The name “Satan” is inverted. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Plate VI : BnF syr. 236. Photo by the author. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Plate VII : BnF syr. 235. Photo by the author. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Plate VIII : Trichur, India, Chaldean Syrian Church, HMML Proj. Num. APSTCH THRI 00009 folios 168r to 180r. Photo courtesy of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University, Minnesota, USA. Published with permission of the Chaldean Syrian Church. All rights reserved.
xv
Plate IX: Manuscript E, fol. 169r with examples of word-length lacunae left by the copyist. Trichur, India, Chaldean Syrian Church, HMML Proj. Num. APSTCH THRI 00009 folios 168r to 180r. Photo courtesy of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University, Minnesota, USA. Published with permission of the Chaldean Syrian Church. All rights reserved.
C HAPTER 1.
HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP
The study of Christian apocrypha has advanced our understanding of the late-antique Mediterranean world regarding the diversity of Christianity and its manifestations, but also of the social, political, and epistemological issues that Christians faced. As a subfield of the study of Christian apocrypha, however, those texts that originated in the Syriac language have received comparably less attention from scholars than their Greek and Latin counterparts. Despite the fact that Syriac apocrypha have been edited and in circulation since the nineteenth century, those interested in Christian apocrypha have generally overlooked Syriac sources.1 This is in part due to the fact that the study of Christian apocrypha has typically focused on their relationship to “canonical” texts. The further away the apocrypha are from the first two or three centuries of the common era, the less val-
1 The collections of apocrypha by Hennecke and Schneemelcher and by J.K. Elliot include the Acts of Thomas, which may have originated in Syriac. They both also include the Abgar-Jesus correspondence, but not the full narrative of the Doctrina Addai. To his credit, Hans-Josef Klauck mentions several of the Syriac versions of apocrypha, including the History of John, and he at least footnotes the Syriac versions of the Acts of Thekla. He does not mention the History of Philip or the Syriac versions of the Acts of Andrew and Mattathias
ue they are assumed to have for purposes of comparison to New Testament sources.2
Regrettably, this tendency to overlook Syriac apocrypha has also been true of scholars of Syriac Christianity, to some extent.3 Some of the early pioneers of Syriac scholarship focused their efforts on attempting to reconstruct the origins of Christianity in the Syrian and Persian frontiers and often passed over sources they deemed to be purely fictional. Thankfully, more recent scholarship has begun to alter this trend, especially European scholarship which has led the way in this regard. 4 Broadly speaking, this book aims to join in this effort by (re)introducing an important narrative from the Syriac tradition into discussion about Syriac studies, Christian apocrypha, and late antique studies in general.
The present work focuses on a text known as the History of John (other scholars have called it the “Syriac Acts of John”), although I have also included some other Syriac works dealing with the life of John the son of Zebedee in the appendices. The history of scholarship on this text may be separated into two broad fields of
2 For a response to this trend, see the recent essay by Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Scriptural Trajectories Through Early Christianity, Late Antiquity, and Beyond”, pp. 95-110.
3 There is no entry for “apocrypha” in the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, although there is an entry for “Hagiography” and one for “Martyrs and persecutions.” They do include individual entries on the Doctrina Addai, the Acts of Mar Mari, and the Acts of Thomas. Though, see the essay by H.J.W. Drijvers, “Apocryphal Literature in the Cultural Milieu of Osrhoëne”, pp. 231-247. He does not mention the History of John.
4 See especially Muriel Debié, Christelle and Florence Jullien, and Alain Desreumaux, eds. Les apocryphes syriaques; Muriel Debié, “Les apocryphes et l’histoire en syriaque”, pp. 63-76. Ground-breaking studies on Syriac apocrypha continue to come out of Europe. See Desreumaux, Histoire du roi Abgar et de Jésus; Jullien and Jullien, Les Actes des Mar Mari. Flavia Ruani and Émilie Villey are currently working on a critical edition of the History of Philip for the CCSA series. On the general trends of North American scholarship on Apocrypha, see J.-M. Roessli, “North American Approaches to the Study of the Christian Apocrypha on the World Stage”, pp. 34-49.
inquiry. The first deals with the text itself and its origins as an original Syriac narrative. The second deals with the relationship of the History of John to other legends about John the son of Zebedee. The following survey will treat these two fields separately for the sake of organization.
T HE HISTORY OF JOHN AS A SYRIAC T EXT
In 1871, British Orientalist William Wright published a collection of apocryphal acts of apostles in Syriac.5 The crown jewel of this collection both from Wright’s own point of view and within the history of Syriac apocrypha scholarship was a version of the Syriac Acts of Thomas, which became a focal point for scholarship for over a century afterward.6 The other texts in Wright’s collection have received far less attention by comparison. Most, in fact, appeared to be Syriac translations of already known Greek works, such as the Acts of Thekla and the Acts of Mattathias and Andrew. The first text in Wright’s volume was a work entitled in Syriac The History of John the Son of Zebedee. For his introductory comments he wrote:
These Acts, which are obviously translated from the Greek, being of comparatively late date, and to all appearance destitute of any historical basis, are chiefly valuable from the linguistic point of view…The Greek original, however, is, so far as I am aware, unpublished, if indeed it be still extant. 7
Wright’s judgment about the usefulness of the History of John notwithstanding, the most intriguing observation he offered was his opinion about a Greek Vorlage. Upon reading the narrative, it is im-
5 William Wright, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.
6 The bibliography on the Acts of Thomas is immense. For quick reference, see the one compiled by Henry, Jonathan. “Acts of Thomas.” e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha. Accessed 19 September 2018. http://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/acts-of-thomas/.
7 Wright, Apocryphal Acts, p. ix.
mediately clear that the History of John is quite distinct from the Greek Acts of John. The Syriac narrative begins at Pentecost where John is led by the Spirit of Holiness ( ܪܘ#$ ܕ&'ܕ($ ) to Ephesus, which is described as the head of idolatry. John travels to Ephesus in Palestinian raiment and converts a few people along the way. He enters the city at the height of a festival and takes on a job as a bathkeeper under a man named Secundus, who becomes John's first convert in Ephesus. After a run-in with an adulterous youth named Menelaus, during which the youth is killed by an angel of the Lord, John comes to the attention of the local governor and father of Menelaus. The governor, Tyrannus, is inclined to allow the mob to lynch John until John raises Menelaus back to life and the youth stops the mob by testifying to John’s legitimacy.
Based on the testimony of Menelaus and his vision, Tyrannus and his entourage agree to hear John’s message. They are convinced and agree to abandon worship of the goddess Artemis. They make a baptistry in the theatre and John baptizes Tyrannus and the nobles of the city. The priests of Artemis retaliate by calling people to worship. John asks for a hut to be built for him on a hill overlooking the Temple of Artemis. When the priests inquire of the goddess how to respond to John, it is revealed that Artemis’ image is inhabited by a demon named Legion. The demon warns the priests that John’s Lord is more powerful than they are and recommends that the priests acquiesce to his teachings. The priests come to John and beg for baptism. After their conversion, Nero hears of these events and has John arrested. An angel of the Lord visits Nero and threatens him to release John. Out of fear, Nero orders John’s release. Peter and Paul come to Ephesus to see John and beg him to write his gospel. He writes it in an hour and gives it to the other Apostles. John lives out the rest of his life in peace and dies in his hut at the age of 120 years old.
This story, while unique insofar as its Greek Vorlage was undetermined, was only interesting to Wright as an example of Syriac translation of Greek. As far as he was concerned, the History of John had not originated in Syriac and was simply an apocryphon that had been coopted by Syriac churches. Compared to the Acts of Thomas whose origins in either Greek or Syriac have yet to be completely settled this text was, for Wright, derivative and less worthy of at-
tention. This was, thankfully, not the final assessment of the narrative.
Three decades after Wright published the History of John, R.H. Connolly devoted two essays to its contents, including one in which he argued against Wright that Syriac was, in fact, the original language of the narrative. 8 Connolly pointed to the affinities between certain Syriac expressions from third- and fourth-century Syriac literature (which was Wright’s proposed period of provenance for the History of John). I will briefly summarize them here.9 First, in ch. 1, the History of John refers to demons and devils as “children of the left hand” ( ) -./$ ). This symbolic representation of evil on the left hand and good on the right hand appears in the works of St. Ephrem the Syrian († 373), in particular, in the Hymns against Julian, which were written in his Edessene period (363-373 CE).10 Second, in three instances (chs. 2, 14, 18) John mentions that Christ “entered by the ear of the Virgin” ( ܘ01 ܐܕ5$ ܕ)6ܘ768 ), an idea also echoed by Ephrem in his commentary on the Diatessaron. It also appears in the Revelation of the Magi, which only survives in Syriac and might be an original Syriac composition.11 Third, a favorite expression for the incarnation in the History of John is the symbolic notion that Christ “put on the body” ( 79: ;<=> ). The phrase
8 R.H. Connolly, “The Diatessaron in the Syriac Acts of John”, pp. 571-581; Connolly, “The Original Language of the Syriac Acts of John”, pp. 249-261.
9 See Connolly, “Original Language”, pp. 250-255.
10 Ephrem, Cont. Jul. 1.2, 7, 14. The context of these references is the emperor Julian as the head of the forces of evil, i.e., the “left hand.” See Kathleen McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, pp. 226-232.
11 Comm. 20.32 “Death entered through Eve’s ear; consequently life entered through Mary’s ear.” Translation from Carmel McCarthy, Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron, p. 311. In the Revelation of the Magi Mary says to the infant Christ, “I have rejoiced that I have seen the treasury of salvation, and my light, and the holy child, who is the obedience of my ears.” See Brent Landau, The Revelation of the Magi, p. 75. Landau says (note 221 on p. 141) that this statement “seems to demonstrate a familiarity with the ancient Christian doctrine that Mary’s conception happened through auditory channels i.e., through her ear. Although the doctrine becomes especially popular in the mid-fifth century and beyond, traces of it appear as early as the second-century Protevangelium of James [cf. 11:5].”
occurs in chs. 18 and 28 and is a favorite metaphor for the incarnation in the Acts of Thomas,12 Ephrem,13 Aphrahat, the Persian Sage (early fourth century),14 and also appears in the Doctrina Addai. 15
Fourth, the baptism sequences include a signing of the cross ( ܪܘ(.$ ܕܨ7@9$ ) over the initiates prior to baptism (chs. 21, 27).
This was an early Syrian baptismal rite mentioned in the Odes of Solomon, the Acts of Thomas, Aphrahat, and Ephrem.16 The baptismal scenes overall are comparable to the earliest known Syrian rites and are particularly related to those found in the Acts of Thomas. Finally, in a few places in the History of John, Connolly suggested that specific Syriac phrases imitate St. Ephrem. For example, in ch. 18 we find “while he was forming children in wombs he was with his Father,” a phrase similar to one from Ephrem’s Hymn on Nativity 4: “While the fetus of the Son was being formed in the womb, He himself was forming babes in the womb.”17
Connolly went so far as to suggest that “the author of these Acts was acquainted with the writings of St. Ephraim, or, vice versa, that Ephraim knew the Acts.”18 After providing several examples of Syriac word play in the History of John, Connolly concluded that the History of John is an original Syriac composition belonging to the earliest extant idiom of Syriac Christian literature. It is immersed in
12 Acts of Thomas 10, 48, 76, 80, 143. See also A.F.J. Klijn, The Acts of Thomas, p. 35.
13 This phrase occurs all over Ephrem’s writings and is his favorite metaphor for the incarnation. Cf. Sebastian P. Brock, “Clothing Metaphors as a Means of Theological Expression in Syriac Tradition”, pp. 11-38; Brock, The Luminous Eye, pp. 32, 36-43; Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, 73-82.
14 Dems. 21, 22, 23. See Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, pp.69-73.
15 DA 36-37. George Howard, The Teaching of Addai, pp. 38-39; Desreumaux, Histoire du roi Abgar, pp. 76-77.
16 See Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, p. 21; Klijn Acts of Thomas, pp. 54-61; OdeSol 27; 42.1-2.
17 Translation from McVey, Ephrem the Syrian, p. 101. Connolly listed this phrase in Hymn 3.
18 Connolly, “Original Language”, p. 253.
the style, imagery, symbolism, metaphors, and liturgical rites of the third and fourth century Syriac literary epoch.
As a result of Connolly’s study, we can no longer take for granted Wright’s original observation that the History of John was “obviously translated from the Greek”.19 Rather, it appears to be an original Syriac work distinct from the Greek Acts of John, though sharing some traditions in common with it. Scholarship since Connolly continues to consider the History of John an original Syriac composition.
In 1904, right around the same time that Connolly was studying the text, Agnes Smith Lewis published an Arabic version of the History of John, which is shorter than the extant Syriac versions (with the exception of manuscript E).20 Lewis relied to a large extent on the prior work of R.A. Lipsius and raised some interesting questions worth mentioning, although her hypotheses remain largely unexplored. First, she maintained that the Arabic was “probably a translation of the Syriac version of this story,” which may bolster the argument that the History of John is an original Syriac composition.21 Second, she suggested that the Arabic version was based on an earlier version of the Syriac than what is found in the extant versions.
The Syriac version contains traces of the Nicene Creed which are less distinct in the Arabic, such as “Light of light”; “the Son of God, Who was eternally with His Father” ; “the Spirit of holiness, Who proceeded from the Father.” The baptism of children, described in the Syriac but wanting in the Arabic, was not yet customary in the East at the close of the fourth century. The anointing with oil before baptism…is in accordance with a Catholic form of the rite used since the fourth century. The Lord’s Supper is not called the “Body of God” in the Arabic version, as it is in Dr. Wright’s text. These things, together with the greater consciousness of the Arabic, suggest that our text is translated from a Syriac MS older than Add. MS. 17,192 of the
19 Wright, Apocryphal Acts, p. ix.
20 Agnes Smith Lewis, Acta Mythologica Apostolorum.
21 Lewis, Acta Mythologica Apostolorum, p. xxxii.
British Museum, or even than the sixth century St Petersburg MS used by Dr. Wright.22
It is possible, Lewis argued, that the Arabic version represents an older version of the text. It contains shorter prayers and speeches than the Syriac versions; it omits some of the ascetic terminology used to characterize John; it leaves out some of the specific Syriac phrases used as evidence by Connolly, such as Christ entering “the ear of the Virgin.” In other words, the extant Syriac witnesses contain a more elaborate version of the story than the Arabic. Overall, Lewis regarded this as evidence that the story preserved in the Arabic manuscript may pre-date the known Syriac versions.
While this is an interesting hypothesis, there are reasons to suspect that the Arabic version actually represents a later, abridged recension. Syriac manuscripts E and F preserve a paraphrased version of the History of John, which is evidence for the editing of the Syriac narrative in the later stages of its transmission. In fact, we notice many of the same excisions and omissions in ms E (and possibly F, which is only a fragment) as we see in the Arabic text edited by Lewis, including missing ascetic terminology and pared down prayers and speeches. It may be the case, therefore, that the Arabic text was based on a later, edited Syriac version similar to ms E. In their assessment of Lewis’ hypothesis, Eric Junod and Jean-Daniel Kaestli reviewed further discrepancies between the Syriac and the Arabic and came to a similar conclusion that, instead of the Arabic representing an earlier version, rather, the editor of the Arabic has intentionally paraphrased the more verbose Syriac.
Quand l’écart entre un texte long et un texte court devient soudain tellement large, il est difficile de croire que les premier puisse être une amplification du second. On admettra plus volontiers que le traducteur arabe s’est lassé de la verbosité du syriaque.23
22 Lewis, Acta Mythologica, p. xxxiii. 23 Eric Junod and Jean-Daniel Kaestli. Acta Iohannis, vol. 2, p. 717.
While an intriguing hypothesis, it is unlikely that the Arabic text contains an earlier recension of the History of John than that preserved in extant Syriac witnesses. Since Lewis published her text, another Arabic witness has come to light that, to my knowledge, has not been edited or compared with Lewis’ manuscript. More work is needed to fully respond to Agnes Smith Lewis’ hypothesis.
Based on the scholarship after Wright’s initial publication of the text, it appears that the History of John is an original Syriac work. I see no reason to doubt this conclusion. The late Robert Murray briefly mentioned the work in his study of the early Syriac tradition.24 In fact, he hinted that it belonged alongside other early Syriac apocrypha, such as the Doctrina Addai and, if originally from Syriac, the Acts of Thomas. The History of John, therefore, may be considered as a witness to the early invention of apostolic apocryphal legends specific to the Syriac-speaking Christian traditions.
T HE HISTORY OF JOHN IN THE A CTA IOHANNIS TRADITIONS
These early publications focused primarily on the text of the History of John and its origins as an original Syriac text. Parallel to these discussions were hypotheses concerning the History of John’s relationship to earlier Greek traditions about John. The most obvious of these relationships is found between the History of John and the Acts of John by Ps. Prochorus (just Prochorus from here on). Prochorus probably comes from the sixth century and the roughly 150 manuscripts were edited by Theodor Zahn in the nineteenth century.25 The History of John and Prochorus share some important details with one another:26
• the narratives begin with the dispersion of the Apostles at Pentecost
• when John arrives at Ephesus he first procures employment at a bathhouse
24 Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom, p. 37.
25 Theodor Zahn, Acta Ioannis. See Klauck, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, pp. 43-4.
26 Junod and Kaestli, Acta Iohannis, p. 2.708.
• the son of an official dies at the bathhouse and is raised by John
• the cult of Artemis becomes a focal point after the bathhouse scene and John eventually defeats the goddess.
The amount of overlap between the two texts led some scholars to posit a literary relationship. For his part, Zahn downplayed the significance of their shared material and said that, since the overlap only occurs for the first part of Prochorus (which is significantly longer than the History of John), the comparisons could not be explained by dependency on a common source, but by the diffusion of general traditions about John (presumably both oral and written).27
A few years later, R.A. Lipsius provided his take on the matter. Lipsius argued that since both narratives follow such a close sequence even if only at the beginning they both must share a common source, which he concluded must have been the Greek Acts of John. 28 He suggested that the two narratives displayed different degrees of dependency on the Acts of John, beginning with the journey from Jerusalem to Ephesus, the shipwreck (found in Prochorus), and the death of the young man in the bathhouse.29 Lipsius admitted that the Syriac narrative borrowed much more loosely from the Acts of John, but he maintained that there were still clear parallels.
In 1911, V.C. Macmunn advanced a brief hypothesis based on Lipsius and another work (which I have not been able to locate30)
27 Zahn, Acta Joannis, pp. lvi-lvii.
28 Richard A. Lipsius, Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten und Apostellegenden, pp. 1.433-441.
29 Lipsius, Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten und Apostellegenden, 1.435-438.
30 The book was evidently published in London in 1910 (by Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.) by “the author of ‘Resurrectio Christi’.” A description from the Journal of Religious Psychology 4 p. 315 describes, “The author treats the visions of men who are raised from the dead, the visions of young men, the double view of Pentecost, how the five hundred were brought to Jerusalem, the first, second, and third psychological question, were all the Christophanies subliminal? our theory in the light of St. Paul, the compressibility of events.”
called The Vision of the Young Man Menelaus. 31 Macmunn argued that the author of the History of John must have had a copy of the common source (for Macmunn the “Leucian” Acts of John) in front of him. This is clear, he argued, from the murder/resurrection of Menelaus which, in the narrative, takes place after Menelaus and the harlot exit the bathhouse. However, when Menelaus recounts his after-death experience and reveals to the crowd what happened between him and John, Menelaus says he perished inside the bathhouse. Macmunn hypothesized that the author’s source placed the altercation inside the bathhouse, where the characters would have been nude. This “outraged [the author’s] sense of propriety” so that he moved the scene outside of the bathhouse after Menelaus and his female consort had dressed themselves (see ch. 10).
To some degree, Lipsius and Macmunn were not unjustified in their conclusions. One place Lipsius overlooked that could demonstrate distinct knowledge of the Acts of John is in History of John 24. John attempts to leave Ephesus to go to Phrygia and other parts of Asia to promote his gospel. The Ephesians beg him to stay, which John reluctantly agrees to do. Right after this, John goes head to head with the cult of Artemis. In Acts of John 37 a similar scene takes place. Here, John’s followers want to depart to Smyrna, having been in Ephesus for some time. John responds, “First let us go to the temple of Artemis! For if we are seen there we shall be able to find ministers of the Lord.”32 The sequence here of plans to leave Ephesus followed by confronting and dismantling the cult of Artemis may indicate that the author of the History of John at least knew about the Acts of John and perhaps used it as a source.
In their authoritative volumes on the Acta Iohannis traditions, Eric Junod and Jean-Daniel Kaestli also agreed with Lipsius that there must be some common source behind the History of John and the acts by Ps. Prochorus. 33 In their assessment, however, the two texts must be treated distinctly, even though their common elements
31 V.C. Macmunn, “The Menelaus Episode in the Syriac Acts of John”, pp. 463-465.
32 Translation from Elliot, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 322.
33 Acta Iohannis, pp. 2.705–17.
probably go back to a shared source tradition. However, Junod and Kaestli rejected the arguments of Lipsius and Macmunn that this common source was the Acts of John. Rather, Junod and Kaestli were content to say that the source is no longer extant, if it was even a written source at all. 34 They note (a la Zahn) that the two texts only share common material in the early parts of the narratives while the later parts in which John goes to Patmos in Prochorus and writes his gospel in History of John have seemingly very little connection with the earlier parts of the narratives. They write, C’est comme si les deux textes, depuis l’exil, étaient soudain lâchés par un cadre narratif auquel ils s’étaient jusque-là très librement rattachés.35
Following Junod and Kaestli, Alain Desreumaux says that the narrative of the History of John is distinct from Ps. Prochorus, “avec lesquels elle pourrait remonter à une source commune.”36 Desreumaux does not elaborate on the type of source he imagines behind the two texts. He does, however, acknowledge the attempts in the History of John to bridge traditions between Ephesus and Edessa.37 With this in mind, Desreumaux concludes, …on perçoit dans ce simple exemple, un rôle que certains textes apocryphes au moins ont pu jouer dans l’histoire de Églises et dans les conceptions ecclésiales.38
Desreumaux is therefore attuned to the role of the History of John and Christian apocrypha in general in contributing to the formation and structuring of Syriac ecclesiastical institutions, rituals, histories, and ideologies. This is a potentially fruitful direction for
34 Junod and Kaestli, Acta Iohannis, p. 2.710.
35 Junod and Kaestli, Acts Iohannis, p. 2.711.
36 Alain Desreumaux, “Les apocryphes apostoliques”, p. 79.
37 Desreumaux, “Les apocryphes apostoliques”, p. 81-82.
38 Desreumaux, “Les apocryphes apostoliques”, p. 82.
scholarship on Syriac apocrypha and my hope is that this book will contribute to this methodological trend.
39
Based on the broader narrative trajectory of the History of John, I am inclined to agree with Junod and Kaestli and Desreumaux against Lipsius and Macmunn. I do not think that the Syriac narrative is directly dependent on the Acts of John as a source. I do think, however, that the author of the Syriac knew about the Acts of John in some form. In fact, it is possible, as some have argued, that portions of the Acts of John may have developed independently in Syria (perhaps even in Syriac) and may have been disseminated by Manichaeans in the region.
The textual history of the Acts of John is complex and will not be discussed in detail here. 40 In the 1964 edition of Hennecke and Schneemelcher’s Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, Knut Schäferdiek argued that the Acts of John belonged to Valentinian gnostic cirlces.41 Junod and Kaestli built on Schäferdiek’s hypothesis and proposed that Manichaeans had integrated the gnostic sections into other existing Acts of John traditions. 42 In a 1983 essay, Schäferdiek went further to suggest that portions of the Acts of John had originated in Syria (possibly in Syriac) and were in circulation as authoritative texts among Manichaeans in the region, as exemplified by the Manichaean Psalm-Book, which was originally written in Syriac. 43
39 For a good example of this type of approach see the recent book by JeanneNicole Saint-Laurent, Missionary Stories and the Formation of Syriac Churches.
40 See the discussion in Junod and Kaestli and also in Pieter J. Lalleman, Acts of John, pp. 5-24.
41 “Acts of John”, in Hennecke and Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, pp. 2.125-176. The “gnostic” origin of the Acts of John is also defended by Lallemann, Acts of John, and Luttikhuizen, “A Gnostic Reading of the Acts of John”.
42 Eric Junod and Jean-Daniel Kaestli, “L’histoire des Actes Apocryphes des Apôtres” ; Eric Junod and Jean-Daniel Kaestli, “Le Dossier des ‘Actes de Jean’”, pp. 4293-4362. Cf. Lalleman, Acts of John, pp. 59-68 who rejects this separation and argues that the two parts may have developed in the same group and area, but at slightly different times.
43 Knut Schäferdiek, “Herkunft und Interesse der altern Johannesakten”, pp. 247-267. For the Psalter, see Charles R.C. Allberry, A Manichaean Psalm-Book Allberry contended that the Psalter originated in Syriac and
Building on Schäferdiek, Cornelia Horn recently suggested that it was through Manichaeans that gnostic ideas travelled from the Acts of John and came to be incorporated into passages in the Qur’an.44 She briefly touches on the History of John, suggesting in passing that despite the possible existence of portions of the Acts of John in Syria among Manichaeans, the author of the History of John may have consciously rejected the majority of the Acts of John narrative, choosing, rather, to rewrite the legend of John altogether.
Ultimately the Syriac History of John, in the form in which it is available, represents a revised narrative of the adventures of the apostle, from which potentially offensive or heretical passages that could smack of Gnosticism were expurgated, or into which such material was not incorporated in the first place.45
This is an intriguing hypothesis. If the Acts of John had been a popular Manichaean text, then it is likely that some form of it had been widely disseminated throughout Syria, where Manichaeism made its entrance into the Roman world.46 It is plausible, therefore, that the author of the History of John would not only have known the Acts of John, but also would have known about its association with Manichaeans. Could the History of John have been composed with this in mind? That is, the author may have taken issue with the portrayal of John as a gnostic teacher and chosen to recalibrate the story of John to make him and his teachings more acceptable to his audience. After all, the History of John has a clear Trinitarian theolo-
was subsequently translated into Coptic. For the use of apocryphal acts by Manichaeans, see Jean-Daniel Kaestli, “L’utilisation des Actes Apocryphes des Apôtres dan le Manichéisme”, pp. 107-116; P/ Nagel, “Die apokryphen Apostelakten des 2. und 3. Jahrhunderts in der manichäischen Literatur”, pp. 149-182; Manfred Heuser and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, “The Use of Scripture in Manichaeism”, pp. 111-122.
44 Cornelia B. Horn, “Lines of Transmission”, pp. 337-355.
45 Horn, “Lines of Transmission”, p. 342.
46 Peter Brown, “The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire”, pp. 92-103. See also Samuel N.C. Lieu, “Christianity and Manichaeism”, p. 286: “It was missionary success in frontier cities like Edessa, Nisibis and Palmyra that brought the religion into the Roman empire.”
