DeConick A.D

140
JOHN AND THE DARK COSMOS
So was the fourth Gospel penned by an early Apostolic Catholic or a
Gnostic Christian? This is a tough question to answer, given that the New
Testament Bible was not original to emergent Christianity. It is a particular
collection of Christian books that was given authority in the fourth
century by the Christians who called themselves catholic (universal) and
apostolic, by which they meant that they were worldwide followers of
the teaching of the twelve disciples. Apostolic Catholic Christianity was
not the same as Catholicism or Orthodoxy today, or any other form of
contemporary Christianity. The Apostolic Catholics are best characterized
as the ancestors or forebears of what would become Catholicism and
Orthodoxy, and eventually also Protestantism.
Because of this triumphant genealogy, it is generally assumed that the
New Testament books were actually written by and for Apostolic Catholics,
representing the Apostolic Catholic point of view from the moment
the books were penned. It is generally accepted that later Gnostics used
New Testament texts and interpreted them in directions unintended by
the original Apostolic Catholic authors. Any attempt to reexamine the
New Testament texts as possible sites of Gnostic spirituality has met with
very little enthusiasm in academia.
Yet the individual New Testament books from Matthew to Revelation
were not written to be included in an Apostolic Catholic New Testament.
Except for some of the letters of Paul, the actual authorship of most of
the New Testament books is disputed even in our earliest sources. With
unknown authors and early Christian movements that were more diverse
than similar, we have to wonder about the prehistory of individual New
Testament texts. The people who wrote these texts may or may not have
been Apostolic Catholic Christians.
So, what if the fourth Gospel was not originally an Apostolic Catholic
scripture? What if it originally wasn’t even called the Gospel of John? We
know that, early on, there were competing claims about its authorship.
Although by the end of the second century the majority of Christians accepted
the opinion that John the disciple wrote the fourth Gospel, a minority
of Christians disagreed. They knew and believed an old story that
Cerinthus, a Gnostic Christian, was its actual author (Eusebius, History
of the Church 2.25.6, 3.28.1–2; Dionysius Bar-Salibi 101.1.30; cf. Irenaeus,
Against the Heresies 3.2.9; Epiphanius, Panarion 51).