Secret Books and Corporate Oaths. Coping with the Danger of Circulating ‘Sacred’ Texts in Some Early Christian Writings (2nd - 4th Century C.E.)

Whenever and wherever the adjectives ‘secret’ and ‘mysterious’ are used practically as synonymous with ‘sacred’ and ‘authoritative’, as it was customary in Late Antiquity, the need to commit to writing and spread ‘sacred’ and ‘mysterious’ lore and thereby produce ‘authoritative’ and ‘secret’ books ends up pairing as well as colliding with the danger of publishing them ‒ that is, potentially trusting them to uninitiated hands ‒ and thereby profaning them: ‘sacred’ secret books seem thus to be doomed to a fate of exposure and derision, defilement and desecration. All in all, then, books so conceived and produced are intrinsically threatening. The present paper will investigate how different early Christian groups dealt with such a threat by imposing an oath of secrecy on the initiates before they got to handle textual artifacts produced by or circulating in the group they were entering. The inquiry will be focusing on The Book of Baruch by Justin the so called Gnostic, The Secret “Gospel according to John”, better known as ‘long version of the Apocryphon of John’, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, and the Second Book of Jeu transmitted by the Codex Brucianus. Moreover, the attempt will be made to ascertain whether, as it is to be expected, diverging conceptions of ‘sacred’, authority, and secret were at work to invest such disparate textual production with ideological and ritual power ‒ acknowledged and effective as much as it was constantly under the threat of being unveiled to a wide public and so defiled and lost.