The story has it that in 1804–the year Napoleon became Emperor and Thomas Jefferson became president–a young French doctor named Bernard- Raymond Fabré-Palaprat (1777-1838) found, in a Paris bookseller’s cart, an ancient manuscript, reportedly medieval. The brief preface to the text claimed to have been penned by one Nicephorus of Athens, a monk. The document, in Greek, was for the most part a com...mon copy of the Gospel of John.
For the most part.
There are certain critical additions to and omissions from the conventional telling. It ends at the Nineteenth Gospel and not the Twenty First (neglecting to include any resurrection narrative). It is not merely incomplete; it deliberately concludes with the entombment of Jesus, a teaching about the remission of sins usually found in the Twentieth Gospel, and this resolution:John the Disciple that Jesus loved gives testimony to the truth of this scripture so that you believe it, and so that you will teach it.
There are other interesting additions. In the Sixth Gospel, when the Jews question Jesus’ claims to have come down from heaven, the customary confusion is that his parents are known to the crowd: “Do we not know his mother and father?” However, in this curious text, the question is posed;
Is it because he lived with the Greeks that he has come thus to converse with us? What is there in common with what he learned from the Egyptians, and that which our fathers taught us?
This presents Jesus as a bearer of alien information –he carries with him a source of teachings outside of Torah. This portrayal of Jesus as outsider, misunderstood by his ambient culture, becomes critical later on, and characterizes the entire Gospel.
Of specific note, and the hinge to the whole affair, is this peculiar passage inserted at the end of the Seventeenth Gospel;
In truth, I say unto you that I am not of this world, but John will be your father until he comes to be with me in Paradise, and he will anoint in the Holy Spirit.
John will be your father. Not Peter. John. This purportedly authentic medieval manuscript claims that Jesus was an initiate of secret Egyptian teachings, unknown to the Church of St. Peter, and that these teachings were preserved by the Church of St. John – the Johannites.
Up to the year 1118 the mysteries and the hierarchic Order of the initiation of Egypt, transmitted to the Jews by Moses, then to the Christians by Jesus Christ, were preserved by the successors of St. John. These mysteries and initiations ... were a sacred trust ... preserved from all adulteration ... These Christians, appreciating the courage and piety of the [Templar] Crusaders ... held it their duty to trust to hands so pure the knowledge acquired over so many centuries. ... Hugues de Payens (the Templar Grand Master) was invested with the Apostolic Patriarchal Power and placed in the legitimate order of the successors of St. John...
Such is the origin of the foundation of the Order of the Temple and of the fusion in this Order of the different kinds of initiation ... designated under the title of Primitive Christians or Johannites.’
– Manuel des Chevaliers du Temple (1811)
Fabré-Palaprat reconstituted both the Order of the Temple and the Primitive Christian Church of St. John, organized and illustrated through the vessel of nineteenth century Freemasonry. Assisting the doctor was the Monsignor Mauviel, a Haitian bishop consecrated in 1800, who bestowed both ecclesiastical legitimacy and Apostolic Succession upon this resuscitated venture.
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Neither the Johannite Church nor the associated Templar Order seem to have survived Fabré-Palaprat's death in 1838, but members of the Johannite clergy appear to have continued to exercise their ecclesiastic prerogatives in other venues. The 21st-century Lévitikon is issued under the imprimatur of the Apostolic Johannite Church, a Neognostic sect operating in the French tradition for which Jules Doinel was a major founding figure. The current AJC Patriarch Iohannes IV offers a foreword here, and the introduction and translation are supplied by other AJC clergy. Although there is an international reach claimed by this church, the main figures of the hierarchy represented in this volume appear to be in western Canada.
AJC Prefect Jordan Stratford's introduction seeks to place the enigmatic Johannite gospel in a historical context, discussing its etiology (subject to an "official" discovery yarn similar to that of the Golden Dawn cipher manuscripts in England later in the 19th century), contemporary scholarship on the orthodox Fourth Gospel (to which this one bears a closer similarity than the synoptic gospels do to one another), and the historical phenomena of initiatic transmission and Templarism addressed in the original Lévitikon (again, a text not actually furnished under the current use of that title). Stratford's conclusions ("Possibilities") are reasonably skeptical, and include a comparison between the Evangelikon and the successful fraud of the Donation of Constantine.
The gospel itself is a pleasant and interesting read. Like the French original, it lacks the verse numberings of modern bibles, but the biblical pericopes sit squarely in the chapter structure parallel to its canonical model or cousin. As Stratford remarks, it emphasizes the alien quality of Jesus and his teachings, often implying or stating his relationship to Greek and Egyptian culture. With these small additions, some of the features of the canonical John stood out for me. For example in John 8:33 (as in the present text), the "Jews who had believed" Jesus say, "We are the seed of Abraham, and we have never been slaves to any man: how sayest thou: you shall be free?" So these Jews and/or the gospel author seem to have been ironically ignorant of the substance of the first half of Exodus. There is no resurrection narrative in this gospel, but there is a concluding attestation.
This book is published chiefly as an inspirational text for Christian Neognostics. I do not fall within that classification, but I found it worthwhile for my interest in the history of modern Neognosticism.