The Acts Of John.

        Not long after the appearance of the romantic Acts of Paul (A.D. 160-70), some Docetist, probably in Asia, undertook to embody his views in an imaginative account of the wonders, discourses, and travels of John. He doubtless took his cue from the Acts of Paul; certainly he agreed with its author in his disapproval of marriage. John had been a comparatively neglected figure, of whom the Acts of the Apostles had little to say, but to whom tradition was already ascribing the Fourth Gospel and the Revelation. Who the writer of these Acts of John was we cannot say. Later writers spoke of him as Leucius Charinus. He certainly represented himself as a personal disciple of John, who accompanied him on his journeys and witnessed his wonders.

        Clement of Alexandria in his Outlines (On I John 1:1), which may have been written as early as A.D. 189, quotes some sentences that are found in these Acts, ascribing them to the “Traditions.” If he means the Acts of John, as he probably does, they must have been written about A.D. 170-80. The Nicephorus list, gives its length at 2,500 lines, or about the size of the Gospel of Matthew. The Greek Acts of John as we know it today, however, including the scattered fragments from various sources, is only about twothirds that size. A good deal is evidently lost from the beginning (the first seventeen chapters, as ordinarily numbered, following the example of Bonnet's edition, are from a form of the Greek text very much later than the original), and there are places where gaps are apparent, as in chapter 37 and before chapter 58. A complete text of the Acts has yet to be found.

        Chapters 18-55 describe John's journey from Miletus to Ephesus and his first stay there. In chapters 58-86 John returns from Laodicea to Ephesus for a second stay. In chapters 87-105 John tells of his first meeting with Jesus; of the transfiguration; of the strange hymn Jesus taught them (the English composer Holst set this to music); of the dance in which he led them; of the strange changes in his body, now hard, now soft, and again quite immaterial; of his appearance to John in a cave on the Mount of Olives, when his body was apparently being crucified across the valley outside Jerusalem; of Jesus' discourse about the cross; and of his ascension. At this point should perhaps be introduced some accounts of John's discourses and wonders preserved in other sources, chiefly Latin. John converts a philosopher, condemns wealth, raises a widow's son, drinks a deadly poison unharmed, and converts the heathen priest. The fourth-century Oxyrhynchus fragment (Oxyrhynchus Papyri vi. 850) must belong here; John is threatened with arrest by a soldier and receives a letter, probably a summons, from the emperor.

        The Greek text of the Acts (chaps. I06-15) concludes with the peaceful death of John. He shows his disciples where to dig his grave, steps into it, and after a prayer lies down in it and quietly expires.

        Although some of this may not have appeared in the Acts ofjohn as they first existed, about A.D. 175 (the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, for example [chap. 42], did not fall until A.D. 262, when the Goths destroyed it), on the whole it is probably a fair picture of the work. It is clearly docetic, with its description of Jesus appearing to James as a little child, while John on the same occasion sees him as a full-grown man (chaps. 88 and 89), with its representation of his body as sometimes immaterial, and with his conversation with John on the Mount of Olives at the very moment of the crucifixion (chap. 97). At some points it sounds decidedly Gnostic, however; for example, the curious hymn before the betrayal:

The number Eight sings praise with us. Amen.

The number Twelve dances on high. Amen.

The Whole on high joins in dancing. Amen.

This hymn, with its crude paradoxes (chap. 95), certainly reflects mystery forms of worship and Gnostic ideas:

I would eat, and I would be eaten,

I would hear, and I would be heard,

I would be thought, being wholly thought.

The closing lines of the final prayer have a Gnostic sound too:

As I come unto thee, let the fire go backward, let the darkness be overcome, let the gulf be without strength, let the furnace die out, let Gehenna be quenched. Let angels follow, let devils fear, let rulers be broken, let powers fall, let the places of the right hand stand fast, let them of the left hand not remain... and grant that I may accomplish the journey unto thee without suffering insolence or provocation... [chap. 114].

It will be remembered that the Gnostics claimed to know the formulas that would turn aside the demons that beset the soul's way to God. The book is strongly ascetic; marriage is sternly rejected, and John in his dying prayer thanks God that he has been providentially kept from any union with a woman.

        The story is full of marvels; and its author was eager to use sensational materials. When Drusiana died, in protest against the marriage relation, a disappointed admirer makes his way into her tomb to outrage her dead body. The author even makes some ponderous attempts at humor-in an abandoned inn a swarm of bedbugs is miraculously halted by the apostle's command (chaps. 60-61).

        The story of John playing with the partridge or watching it playing in the dust probably also formed part of the Acts of John. There is some doubt about Domitian's having John plunged in boiling oil, apparently at Rome, although the episode appears in late forms of the Acts, and Tertullian was familiar with it, for in his book On Prescription ofHeretics (chap. 36), written about A.D. 200, he speaks of Rome as the place “where the apostle John was first plunged unhurt into boiling oil, and then sent back to his island exile.” Curiously enough this story has never been found in Greek, or in Greek writers, although the emperor's summons in the Oxyrhynchus fragment may have been leading up to it.

        The story of St. John and the Robber Captain, whom he seeks out and leads to repentance, is as old as Clement of Alexandria (What Rich Man Can Be Saved? 42), but it has never been found in the Acts of John. It is difficult to believe that so good a story about the apostle did not form part of the original Acts.

        Some scholars seek to date the Acts of John even before the Acts of Paul, but this loses sight of important literary facts: (1) The Acts of Paul forms a far more natural sequel to the Acts of the Apostles than does the Acts of John; when Acts breaks off, interest in Paul is at its height, while John is almost forgotten; he has long since disappeared from the narrative. (2) The Acts of Paul is conceivably a counterattack to the Pastoral Letters to Timothy and Titus. It is the views they assert as Paul's that the Acts of Paul denies. (3) The Acts of John is more easily understood as suggested by the Acts of Paul than by the Acts of the Apostles; the sequence may have been: Acts of the Apostles, Pastoral Letters, Acts of Paul, Acts of John.

        In the fourth century the Acts of Paul and the Acts of John were combined with those of Peter, Andrew, and Thomas into a collection by the Manicheans, who substituted them for the Acts of the Apostles because of their strong ascetic tone. Photius, the famous patriarch of Constantinople, who read and reviewed this collection about A.D. 890 in his Bibliotheca (cod. 114), says that they were all attributed to Leucius Charinus. Their order as known to Photius seems to have been Peter, John, Andrew, Thomas, Paul. The collection was entitled the “Travels [periodoi] of the Apostles.”

        In the first half of the fifth century, a Life of John was written under the name of his supposed disciple Prochorus that made much use of the Acts of John. This work often throws important light upon the Greek text of the Acts.

        The Acts of John was condemned by the Second Council of Nicaea, A.D. 787, as it had been appealed to by the Iconoclasts, apparently because of its teaching about the immateriality of Jesus' body. It also has played a notable part in popular literature and Christian art; painters and sculptors have shown John holding the poison cup, while the poison leaps out of the cup in the form of a snake.