Kristine Rosland: Reconsidering the Apocryphon of John and Scripture

The Apocryphon of John (Ap. John) four times corrects the creations story from Genesis with the phrase "it is not as Moses said" or similar. Earlier scholarship on Gnosticism took this as evidence of a rejection of the Old Testament that Ap. John and (at least some of) the other Nag Hammadi works were meant to replace. This understanding is no longer tenable. Ap. John’s dependence on Genesis, even when rewriting the creation narrative, has been demonstrated by many, most recently David Creech in his 2017 study The Use of Scripture in the Apocryphon of John.However, discussing the work’s attitude towards ‘Old Testament, ‘the Bible’ or ‘Scripture’ is in itself problematic. Ap. John quotes Genesis and Isaiah, it alludes to John and other New Testament texts, but it also refers to a book of Zoroaster and it is clearly influenced by Plato. What is, then, the canon of Ap. John? Which works are authoritative and what does being authoritative imply?