Acts of John
The Acts of John refers to a collection of stories about John the Apostle that began circulating in written form as early as the 2nd-century AD. Translations of the Acts of John in modern languages have been reconstructed by scholars from a number of manuscripts of later date. The Acts of John are generally classified as New Testament apocrypha.
Not to be confused with Acts of John in Rome.The Acts of John and other stories about John[edit]
Numerous stories about John and other apostles began circulating in the 2nd century AD. These stories trace to a variety of different authors and contexts, and were revised and retold in many different forms and languages over the centuries. Sometimes episodes that had originally circulated independently were combined with other stories to form collections about an apostle, and sometimes episodes that had originally been part of multi-episode collections were detached and circulated independently. Most extant manuscripts of such stories also date to a period considerably after they first began circulating.
These factors can make it difficult to reconstruct the earliest forms of stories about the apostle John, and scholars continue to debate as to which episodes originally belonged together. One set of stories, in which John appears before Domitian in Rome and survives drinking deadly poison, appears in some old translations of the Acts of John, but is no longer considered to have the same origins as other episodes. It is now known as the Acts of John in Rome, and understood to be a separate tradition.
Content of modern versions of the Acts of John[edit]
Overview[edit]
Most current scholars agree that even the most recent versions of the Acts of John include episodes that trace to multiple different dates and origins. These versions contain roughly the following sections:
A. Stories about John in Ephesus (ActsJohn 18-55, 58-86). These consist of the following sections:
Dating and history[edit]
Many scholars think that versions of the episode considered to belong to the Acts of John were already circulating in the second century.[11]
The names of any authors involved in the project are unknown. One older tradition associated the texts with one Leucius Charinus, a companion of John, but his name does not appear in the text and modern scholars do not think he was involved in composing them.
Some version of the Acts of John containing at least portions of Section B and the Lycomedes episode was rejected as heretical by the Second Council of Nicaea in AD 787.[12] The exact contents of the Acts of John known to participants in the Council is unknown.
The Stichometry of Nicephorus, a ninth century stichometry, gives the length of an Acts of John text as 2,500 lines.
Polymorphic christology, seen in Section B, developed mostly during the second century, lending credence to the second century development date.