The Acts of John: a Two-Stage Initiation into Johannine Gnosticism (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha)

This study was defended as a dissertation in Groningen (1998). The first monograph in the series, it studies the Acts of John in its second-century context and sheds new light on the text, which was probably written in Asia Minor before the year 150 AD. Lalleman shows that both the Gnostic and the non-Gnostic sections of the Acts of John owe much more to the canonical books of the New Testament than has been assumed. The enigma of the Gnostic section is solved by the discovery that it forms the second stage of initiation into a Gnostic form of Christianity. Read in this way, both sections of the Acts of John turn out to be important steps on the trajectory from the Fourth Gospel to Gnosticism. Penetrating investigations of the Christology and the attitude towards asceticism in the Acts of John complete the book