Goebel, “If you cannot fight it, slander it”, a convenient way to reject disturbing and puzzling books revealing the early Christian thought and the diversity of beliefs in the early Church.
If the “secret book of John, or the Apocryphon, or the Egyptian Gospel” which was written in the 2nd century, was indeed written by the apostle John, then his Gospel should have also been rejected as “heretic” since he himself wrote a heretic book. The same occurs with the other apostles to whom also such secret or apocryphal books are attributed. But it seems that since almost all of them wrote such “heretic” books, there wouldn’t be anybody left to venerate, not even Jesus himself, if the latter seems to have said and done such things.
The Apocryphon of John that was found in the Gnostic Nag Hammadi collection among the texts of Hermes Trismegistus in 1945, confirms not only the polytheism of the early Christians and the influence of the Greco-Egyptian theology in Christianity, but also that the gospels were “corrected” and rewritten many times in the last 1800 years.
In brief, this Apocryphon reveals that the original Trinity was composed of “Father-Son-Mother”, and that the cosmos was created by a multitude of deities with the “One”, or “The Monad” (see Parmenides’ theology) presiding upon them. The spiritual world is created by Barbelo, the first thought of the “One” (the Platonic Demiurge, or the Autogenes) and the visible world by the flawed creator Yaldabaoth, son of Sophia (the wife of the Demiurge). Yaldabaoth created six Archons, or Dark Angels -among them Yahweh- who together with demons and spirits created the natural world and the protoplasts.
Since the biblical texts themselves confirm the existence of other gods, why the Christians insist in monotheism while their early beliefs allude to polytheism?