The first time someone asked me whether the apostle John actually wrote the Secret Book of John, I said “no” too fast. I was right, more or less. But I couldn’t have told you why, and a quick “no” from a guy who runs a Gnosticism blog isn’t worth much more than a quick “yes” from somebody who wants the book to be scripture.

So I went back and did it properly. I’ve already written a reader’s map of the book itself, so I won’t retell the myth here. This post is only about the evidence for when it was written and by whom, and what you can honestly say about it.

Four Copies, Two Versions

Start with the physical evidence. The Secret Book of John survives in four Coptic manuscripts. Three came out of the Nag Hammadi jar in 1945 (Codices II, III and IV), and the fourth is in the Berlin Gnostic Codex 8502, which turned up in 1896 and wasn’t published until 1955. Bentley Layton puts the manuscripts at roughly 350 AD.

That’s a lot of copies for a Gnostic text. Most Gnostic texts survive once, often in tatters. And in all three Nag Hammadi codices that carry it, the Secret Book is the first text copied in. Somebody thought it belonged at the front.

The four copies don’t agree, though. Codices II and IV have a longer version, while Codex III and the Berlin Codex have a shorter one. John Turner, who wrote the introduction in Marvin Meyer’s edition, follows Frederik Wisse in treating them as separate Coptic translations from two lost Greek originals, one long and one short.

Compared with the short one, the long version adds two big blocks. One is a passage credited to a “Book of Zoroaster,” which assigns an angel to each part of Adam’s body. The other is the closing hymn of Forethought (Pronoia) descending three times into the dark.

A text that exists in two versions got edited. And a text that was edited, translated, and then translated again had been around for a while before anyone made the copies we have. So the fourth-century date tells you when the book was copied, and only that it was written earlier.

The Bishop Who Never Mentions John

The next piece of evidence is the one I lean on most. Around 180, Irenaeus of Lyons summarized the beliefs of a group he simply calls “gnostics,” in Book 1, chapter 29, of Against Heresies. In Layton’s translation he says they’ve sprung up “like mushrooms growing out of the ground.” Then he describes an unnameable parent, a first Thought called Barbelo, a line of emanating aeons, and eventually a lower ruler who declares himself the only god.

If you’ve read the Secret Book, you know that story. Layton prints the Irenaeus passage with the matching page numbers of the Secret Book running down the margin, and the parallels keep coming for page after page.

That gives us a ceiling. Some form of this myth existed by about 180.

Layton adds a useful caution, though. The resemblance isn’t perfect, which suggests Irenaeus knew a different version of the text from the ones we have. Turner points out that chapter 29 matches only the first part of the book, the divine realm and the making of the world. The retelling of Genesis that fills the second part looks more like what Irenaeus describes in his next chapter, which he credits to certain “others.”

Here’s the detail I find telling. Irenaeus doesn’t mention John at all. There’s no apostle, no mountain, and no revelation after the resurrection.

He was a man who’d have loved to point out that heretics were forging an apostle’s name, so if the frame story had been there, you’d expect him to pounce on it. I wrote about how far you can trust him in Reading Gnosticism Through Its Enemies, and on summaries like this one he tends to hold up.

The Seams in the Frame

Now read the opening of the book with that in mind. In Meyer’s translation, it starts in the third person: “One day when John the brother of James, who are the sons of Zebedee, went up to the temple.” A Pharisee named Arimanios (a name, Meyer’s note says, that recalls the evil Zoroastrian god Ahriman) taunts him, and suddenly the narrator is talking in the first person. “I said to him.”

The book then closes in the third person again, with John going off to tell the other disciples.

That shift is pretty normal in ancient storytelling, so I wouldn’t hang anything on it alone. What makes it interesting is how loosely the frame holds what’s inside it. John asks questions that are mostly about the Savior and the Father. The answer he gets is a vast cosmology of aeons and luminaries that rarely needs him there.

Layton notes something odd here too. In the logic of the myth itself, the being who reveals all this isn’t Jesus but Barbelo, the second principle.

Turner puts these clues together into a rough history of the text. He conjectures that the oldest recoverable layer had no dialogue at all. It was just the account of the divine realm and the world’s making that the Secret Book shares with Irenaeus and with another Sethian text, Three Forms of First Thought.

Then, around 150, someone set it inside a conversation between the risen Christ and John, which gave us the shorter version. The longer version, with the Zoroaster material and the Pronoia hymn, may have been finished in the last quarter of the second century.

Those are his dates, and he flags them as conjectures. But they fit everything above, and I haven’t found a better account in the library.

A Sequel to the Fourth Gospel

There’s one more reason the book can’t come from John’s own lifetime, and it’s built into the plot. Turner reads the Secret Book as a continuation of the Gospel of John. In that gospel, Jesus tells his confused disciples he’s going back to the Father and preparing rooms in his Father’s house. The Secret Book has him come back after the ascension and describe those rooms in detail.

Turner also points out that it quietly corrects John 21, where Peter gets the leadership role. Here it’s John who’s appointed to teach the others.

A sequel needs an original. The Gospel of John is usually dated to the 90s, and a book that answers it, and assumes readers already treat it as authoritative, belongs after that, probably well after.

The philosophy points the same way. Turner quotes Michael Waldstein on how the book splits the God of Israel in two, with a supreme God drawn from Middle Platonist theology and a lower creator who’s a parody of Plato’s demiurge. That’s the vocabulary of the second century’s schools.

Is It a Forgery, Then?

Layton’s verdict is one flat sentence. The work is attributed to John son of Zebedee “recording words spoken by the savior; it is thus an example of pseudepigraphy.” Pseudepigraphy just means writing under the name of a respected figure from the past. Layton notes that most Gnostic scripture works this way, and that the other branches of early Christianity did it too.

That doesn’t make the book worthless, and it doesn’t make it a con in the modern sense. Secret teachings from the risen Jesus to his disciples were a recognized form, and the library has others, like the Secret Book of James and the Wisdom of Jesus Christ. I went through the broader “forgery” charge, and why it cuts against some canonical books as well, in Are the Gnostic Gospels Just Late Forgeries?

What You Can Actually Say

If someone asks you who wrote the Secret Book of John, here’s what the evidence supports:

  • The author is unknown, and so is the place it was written. It was composed in Greek.
  • The apostle John didn’t write it. The book presents itself as his record, and that’s a literary convention of the period.
  • Its core myth existed in some form by about 180, because Irenaeus summarized it without mentioning John.
  • The John frame was probably added to older material, maybe around 150, and the longer version came later in the century.
  • The copies we have are Coptic, from around the middle of the fourth century, and they show signs of a long editorial life.

Notice what that list leaves open. The ideas inside the book may be older than the book, possibly by decades.

Layton mentions that some scholars think the Christian elements in this whole family of texts were added to something that wasn’t Christian to begin with. That’s where the next post in this series picks up, with where the Sophia story itself came from. If you want to hear the same story told from the canon instead, I’d start with The Wisdom Who Did Not Fall.

If a friend asked me now, I’d give them one sentence. The Secret Book of John was written by the late second century, it draws on traditions that may be older still, and it presents its teaching as a revelation to John.

The Secret Book of John and John D. Turner’s introduction, including his summaries of Frederik Wisse and Michael Waldstein, are quoted from The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2010). Layton’s remarks on the date, the revealer and pseudepigraphy, and his translation of Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.29, come from The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, with David Brakke (Yale University Press, 2021).