The Use of Scripture in the Apocryphon of John

Beschreibung

The Apocryphon of John occupies a central place in Gnostic theologizing. The text's ambivalent attitude towards Moses offers a glimpse into the tensions between various Christian groups in the second to fourth centuries CE. David Creech explores the complex dynamics of textual interpretation and identity formation in those ancient Christian communities.
David Creech explores at length the Apocryphon of John's ambivalent treatment of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Although Moses is explicitly corrected at five points in the text, Genesis' account of creation is nonetheless the basis for the Apocryphon's cosmogony and anthropogony. Its uneven treatment of the biblical text is the result of a dispute between the authors of the Apocryphon and other early Catholics. At the earliest stage of the text the Christians who wrote and read the Apocryphon worshiped alongside other early catholic Christians without any sense of contradiction or inconsistency. The key shift in the Apocryphon occurred after Irenaeus of Lyons' assault on "Knowledge Falsely So-Called." In response to his concerted effort to bring the church under the authority of early catholic bishops, the framers inserted corrections to Moses. The corrections are primarily rhetorical and used to refute early catholic identity markers.

Autor*in

David Creech
Born 1976; 1999 BA; 2002 MDiv; 2011 PhD; 2008-12 Program Director for Hunger Education for ELCA World Hunger; 2012-13 Teaching Fellow at Loyola University Chicago; since 2013 Assistant Professor of Religion at Concordia College, Moorhead.

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Gnosticism Early Christianity Ancient Hermeneutics

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