DeConick A.D

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JOHN AND THE DARK COSMOS
We also know that the interpretation of the fourth Gospel was hotly
contested as early as the first decade of the second century, only a few
years after the Gospel’s final revision, when it came into its present format.
At this time, an elder of an Apostolic Catholic church wrote a letter
against some parishioners in his fellowship who were rallying around a
Gnostic understanding of the fourth Gospel. The elder defends his Apostolic
Catholic understanding of the fourth Gospel against their Gnostic
interpretation (see Brown 1982). Today we call this letter 1 John, although
the author remains anonymous in the letter itself.
Clearly, in our earliest primary sources, there are Gnostic footprints
circling the fourth Gospel. In fact, one of the most famous interpreters
of the Gospel of John, Rudolph Bultmann (1971), was convinced that the
fourth Gospel is dependent on Gnostic sources. Although Bultmann’s
commentary is well known, he certainly was not the first to note such
footprints. As early as the nineteenth century, scholars had already conjectured
along these lines.
But what does this primary evidence mean? If the footprints came late,
then we might have an Apostolic Catholic Gospel that was simply reinterpreted
by Gnostics in aberrant ways, as most historians suggest (see Hill
2004; Keefer 2006; Rasimus 2010). But if they came early, then we might
have Gnostic sensibilities woven into the very fabric of the fourth Gospel.
If this is the case, then the fourth Gospel would have had its origin outside
the Apostolic Catholic movement, in a religious buffer much more
complicated than we have been able to imagine previously.
Could it have emerged in a moment when Gnostic spirituality collided
with emergent Christian mythology and the Jewish scriptures? If this is
what happened, then its orthodoxy would have come later, as the result of
a secondary interpretation that was imposed upon the Gospel by Apostolic
Catholics who read into it their own view of the biblical God. If so, this
would have ended up domesticating the Gospel, taming its wild Gnostic
proclivities and bringing it in line with Apostolic Catholic Christianity.
Where in the Devil Is the Father?
Can we identify the original predisposition of the fourth Gospel? I think
it is possible, although it may require some “undoing” on our part to