Abstract

My doctoral dissertation focuses on one of the most puzzling examples of syncretistic recombination of ideas in the Hellenistic and Roman periods--the Gnostic treatise Apocryphon of John, which provides the clearest version of the classic Gnostic myth. Whereas the majority of scholars have concentrated on the legacy of Judaism and Christianity in the text, I have examined the Apocryphon as an artfully constructed narrative, informed by a creative use of Plato's cosmogonic account in the Timaeus. ;The author of the Apocryphon contests Moses' account of cosmologic events in Genesis, and proposes instead a new, more comprehensive version of cosmogony. On my interpretation, this rival version follows the narrative composition of Plato's Timaeus, and builds its cosmological model on the Platonic dichotomy of eternal paradigm and transitory copy. However, perfect congruence between the Timaeus and the Gnostic text does not exist: partly because of the dynamics of mutual interaction between the Biblical and Platonic components in the Apocryphon; and partly because the Gnostic author makes use of other intellectual traditions--particularly the Hellenistic Wisdom literature , and the Alexandrian allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament --while shaping his own interpretation of the Mosaic story of creation. ;In my analysis of the Apocryphon I have confronted three separate problems: the philological problem of determining the relationship between three preserved Coptic redactions of the text; the exegetical problem of explaining the interaction of the Jewish, Christian, and pagan elements in the narrative composition of the Gnostic text ; most important, the philosophical problem of distinguishing between the genuine influence of Plato and the impact of subsequent Platonist interpretations of the Timaeus, as well as of assessing the exact contribution of other philosophical traditions--from the Stoic physics and theory of knowledge to contemporary astrological doctrines, medical theories, Alexandrian Neopythagoreanism , and non-Christian revelatory cosmogonies of the second century A.D.