The library · Edition and sources
The Secret Book of John
Samuel Zinner, edited by Mark M. Mattison; Other Gospels · Translated text
Reading appearance
Accessibility options
Saved in this browser and shared between texts. Labels and line patterns remain in every theme.
About this reading layout
Source wording, punctuation, paragraph boundaries and supplied line breaks are retained. Long prose also has editorial reading breaks at sentence boundaries. Substantial passages already enclosed in double quotation marks are set apart; this does not identify their source or establish a connection.
These added breaks are reading aids, not claims about the original manuscript’s layout. Poetry is lineated only where the downloaded text supplies line breaks. References and edition notes remain with their text.
Chapter 4 — Codex III
1. To the degree I can understand, I will speak. His aeon is beyond destruction, in repose, resting in silence, the one existing before everything, the leader of all aeons, because his goodness supplies all aeons, if anything indeed exists beside him. Not one of us knows the attributes of that one beyond measure with the exception ⟦page 7⟧ [of him who has dwelt inside himself], who [explained it to us].
2. He is the [only] one who studies [himself inside his light] that surrounds [him, that is, the spring] of [living] water, the [light full] of purity, [and the] spring [of the Spirit] that poured forth living water from [it]. He supplied [all] aeons as well as their worlds, and all at once he observes his own image inside the pure light-water that surrounds [him], and his (potential) thought became actual, and [she] approached and attended him inside his glow of [light].
3. She is the power who [is] before the All,
4. the Providence [of the] All, who shines inside the light of [the image] of the unseen one,
5. the perfect power, Barbelon, the perfect aeon,
6. the extolment that extols him, because she had issued forth on account [of] him, and she extolled [him].
7. She is the first thought, [his] (own) image.