Introduction
1. The Manuscript and Its History
The Manuscript known as the Pistis Sophia and now in the British Museum was bought by the authorities in 1785 for the sum of ten guineas at the sale of the library of the antiquary, Dr. Anthony Askew. How it came into Dr. Askew’s possession is not accurately known. It is written throughout in Coptic of the dialect of the Sahid or Upper Egypt, and is on vellum in an excellent state of preservation. In appearance it singularly resembles a modern book, being written on small quarto leaves measuring 8⅜ inches by 6½, in double columns on both sides of the skins. It contains 174 leaves in all, and the pages are numbered consecutively in Coptic2 letters, at first on one side of the page only, but later on both sides. We are therefore able to establish that there are no leaves missing from the body of the MS. since its pagination, until we come to the 337th page (p. 379 of Schwartze’s printed text),[3] after which four leaves are wanting, the next page in the volume being numbered 344. On the 114th page (p. 125 of Schwartze), the scribe had left the last two-thirds of the page blank, and this was filled at some later time by the cryptogram given on p. 62, infra, in a different hand and in blacker ink than the foregoing part of the MS. The original writing is resumed on p. 115, but above the point at which the other pages begin is written:
“The Second Tome of the Pistis Sophia,” from which the whole MS. has taken the title by which it is known. At the foot of the first column of the front or recto of p. 233 (p. 252 of Schwartze), there is also written after a line of ornament,
“A part of the Books of the Saviour,” and the same words (omitting one word) occur at the foot of the first column of the back or verso of p. 317 (p. 357 of Schwartze). On the last leaf in the book has been left a blank, which some later writer has used for a sentence about the Apostles going to the four quarters of the world to preach the Gospel, which has no apparent connection with our text.4 Two lines at the foot, now become so faint as to be illegible, may have contained the names of the scribes or owners of the MS.
Apart from this incidental use of the parchment on which it is written, all who have studied the MS. are of opinion that it is the work of more than one scribe. Uncial letters are used throughout, and for the first score or so of pages are so carefully and elegantly formed as to compare not unfavourably with those of the calligraphically perfect Codex Alexandrinus, also on exhibition in the British Museum. According to Mr. Crum, whose acquaintance with nearly every Coptic MS. yet brought to light is unrivalled, the second hand begins at the twenty-second page, after which the writing not only becomes more careless and the letters less well formed, but the method of correction for misspelt or omitted words alters. This second hand continues, according to the same authority, up to p. 210, when the first hand resumes and continues up to p. 386, but Mr. Crum says nothing as to the writing of the few remaining pages. Dr. Carl Schmidt of Berlin, whose work in connection with the MS. will be noticed at length later, agrees in the main with this, and would apparently put the termination of the second scribe’s task at p. 195 of the manuscript, and he says that the first scribe here resumes and continues to the end. A note, however, taken by the present writer on his first inspection of the MS. thirty years ago, records that while the writing of the Second Document, which begins at p. 125, on the whole resembles the writing of the preceding pages, yet a change takes place on the verso of p. 210 which indicates yet a third hand, and this is confirmed by his later scrutiny for the purpose of this edition.5 Save for this, there is no serious doubt as to the number of hands which have worked on the MS.; and Mr. Crum, in confirming Dr. Schmidt’s view that the alternative work of the scribes shows that the whole of the MS. must have been written at one time, adds that the corrections of the work of the second scribe seem to be in the hand-writing of the first.6 This is of importance when we come to consider the purpose with which the MS. was made.
The date at which the MS. was written is the subject of a much greater difference of opinion. Woide, who was the first to call attention to it, thought that this was at latest the fourth century, the Abbé Hyvernat the seventh,7 Amélineau—whose work upon it will presently be noticed—the ninth or tenth, and Dr. Schmidt the fifth. All these conclusions were apparently arrived at on paleographic grounds and I do not feel myself qualified to discuss them; but the dates of the different documents from which the MS. was copied will be dealt with later. Nearly all those who have studied it are of opinion that these documents were originally written in Greek, and that our MS. is therefore only a translation.8
After its purchase by the Museum, the MS. remained unnoticed until Woide, then minister at the German Chapel at St. James’ Palace and subsequently the editor of the Codex Alexandrinus, called attention to it in Cramer’s Beiträge for 1778. Later, he appears to have copied out the whole MS., to which he refers in his Appendix to the Alexandrian Codex in 1799. The extracts that he there gave from it were sufficient to enable the Danish Bishop Münter to publish in 1812 the five “Odes of Solomon” quoted in it, of which no other copy was known until Dr. Rendel Harris’ recent discovery of them in a Syriac MS. The learned Academician, Dulaurier, when on a visit to England, in 1838, also made a copy of our MS., and proposed to publish it with a French translation, but died before doing so; and the MS. would probably have remained unknown even to scholars but for the pains of Maurice George Schwartze, a young German, who was sent over here in 1848 by the generosity of the King of Prussia, to study such of our MSS. as seemed to him valuable. Schwartze completed a fairly accurate copy of the text, and also translated it into Latin retaining untranslated the Greek words which occur on every page; but he too died before the result of his labours could be printed, and the task of editing and correcting his translation fell upon his friend Petermann, who published both Schwartze’s Coptic text and his Latin (and Greek) translation in 1853. Unfortunately, Petermann, though a competent Coptic scholar for his time, did not feel called upon to contribute anything more than textual criticism to his predecessor’s work.9 Schwartze’s text was therefore published without introduction or notes other than corrections of mistranslated words and suggestions for alternative readings; and this prevented the book from obtaining such general notice as was given to the Philosophumena of Hippolytus which appeared at nearly the same time. Bunsen, who had begun the controversy between Catholic and Protestant scholars which sprang up round Hippolytus’ work,10 poured contempt upon the Pistis Sophia as “a most worthless offshoot of the Marcosian heresy,” and, although Köstlin contributed a long discussion of the work to a Tübingen theological annual in 1854,11 it remained practically unknown to English readers for more than thirty years.12
At length in 1887, Lipsius published a detailed study of it in Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of Christian Biography, in which full use was made of Köstlin’s analysis, and he agreed with that writer in assigning to it an Ophite origin, although he also drew attention to certain peculiarities which appeared to him Manichæan. In the same year there also appeared the second edition of C. W. King’s Gnostics and their Remains, which gave for the first time to English readers translations of a great part of the work. The late Mr. King, then Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, had hitherto been known chiefly as a collector of ancient gems on which he had published many useful volumes, and he proposed, like his predecessors, to publish a full translation of the Pistis Sophia. At his death such a translation was found among his papers; but the failure of his eyesight, which had taken place even before the issue of the second edition of his Gnostics, had left it in such a condition that his executors decided against giving it to the public. It was confessedly made from Schwartze’s Græco-Latin version only; but Mr. King did much to attract public notice to the Pistis Sophia by the excellent and dignified English in which his extracts from it were clothed, and the erudition which he brought to bear upon points like the less-known religions of the Roman Empire and the barbarous names and words left entirely unexplained in Schwartze’s version. He also asserted in his Preface, with much show of reason, that it was the statements made by him in his first edition that led Madame Blavatsky, whom he describes as “the Sibyl of Esoteric Buddhism,” to include the relics of Gnosticism among the foundations of what he refers to as “her new religion.”
Before this hint was taken, the MS. again received attention from a scholar in many respects well fitted to deal with it. M. Amélineau, who had for many years devoted himself to the study of Coptic religious texts, and had also a very considerable working knowledge of Egyptology, published in the same year of 1887, in the Annales du Musée Guimet an “Essai sur le Gnosticisme Egyptien,” in which he dealt at great length with the Pistis Sophia, and compared it for the first time to the Papyrus Bruce of the Bodleian Library at Oxford which had hitherto defied interpretation. Both these works he assigned to the school of Valentinus, the heresiarch whom the Ante-Nicene Fathers considered the most dangerous enemy of the Catholic Church, and he followed this up in 1891 by publishing in the Notices et Extraits of the Académie des Inscriptions, the text and translation into French of the Oxford Papyrus. These two publications were both made at the expense of the French Government and were therefore produced in a style worthy of the subject, and with all the notes, references, and illustrations that they seemed to demand. But the Pistis Sophia remained untouched by M. Amélineau save for the excerpts from it to be found in his Essai, until in 1895 he astonished the learned world by publishing in a series called “Les Classiques de l’Occulte,” a low-priced translation into French of the whole Pistis Sophia with a comparatively brief introduction devoted almost entirely to the vindication of the opinion formerly advanced by him as to its authorship. M. Amélineau will be remembered by many as the first explorer of the Protodynastic Tombs at Abydos which entirely revolutionised all our ideas of early Egyptian history; and it was probably only the difficulties under which he laboured all his life which prevented him from publishing the results of this—his first and only excavation—in a manner which would have gained him the full credit of his really epoch-making discovery.13 It was doubtless the same difficulties which compelled him to produce his translation of the Pistis Sophia in the form in which he did; and although he states in his Introduction that he inspected the MS. at the British Museum during a visit to London shortly before his translation appeared, it is plain that this translation was made from Schwartze’s text only, that the work was executed throughout in so hasty a fashion as to leave nearly all the faults of Schwartze’s version uncorrected, and that it passes by most of the difficulties presented by the MS. without attempt at solution. It was in consequence very severely criticised first by Dr. Schmidt, and then by Dr. Andersson, the editor of the Swedish Egyptological periodical, Sphinx, and most of these criticisms appear unfortunately to be well founded.
Such as it was, however, it gave rise to the only complete English translation of our MS. which has yet appeared in print. Mr. G. R. S. Mead, then secretary of the Theosophical Society, the year after the appearance of Amélineau’s French translation, published with the Theosophical Publishing Company an English translation of the Pistis Sophia, which on its title-page is expressed to be made from “Schwartze’s Latin Version... checked by Amélineau’s French Version.” Mr. Mead laid no claims to proficiency in Coptic, and had already published more than half his work in a Theosophical magazine before Amélineau’s version saw the light. His attitude towards the original may be guessed by the statement in his Preface that the comprehensive treatment of Gnosticism “requires not only a writer who at least believes in the possibilities of magic, but also a mystic or at least a person who is in sympathy with mysticism,” and by the fact that he had already attempted to explain the Cabalistic Cryptogram on p. 125 by Sanskrit words. He further states in his Introduction that he proposes to publish a commentary on the whole book, his Introduction dealing only with the date and authorship; but up to the present this has not appeared. It is also evident that in his translation from Schwartze’s Latin version he has omitted in more than one instance to notice Petermann’s emendations, which in some cases completely change the meaning of the passage; and altogether it may be said that the most valuable part of his work is the short bibliography appended, in which he gives fairly long extracts from the authors whom he quotes.
The way was therefore still left open for a translation of the Pistis Sophia by competent hands, and the appearance of Dr. Schmidt’s work in 1905 at first sight gave hopes that this was at last accomplished. The book, which bears the somewhat clumsy title of Koptisch-Gnostischen Schriften, Ersten Buch only, is one of the excellent series of translations of Christian writers of the first three centuries published by the Church Fathers Committee of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science, and contains a full German translation of both the Pistis Sophia and the Bruce Papyrus. Dr. Schmidt is a scholar whose competence in the Coptic language is probably only surpassed by that of Mr. Crum, he has all his’ countrymen’s taste for philology and grammar, and his acquaintance with the Christian literature of the early centuries of our Era is profound. It is not therefore to be wondered at that his translation of our text is from the etymological point of view as nearly perfect as our present knowledge of Coptic—still limited by the paucity of MSS. other than Biblical—allows it to be, and that very little complaint can be made against it on the score of verbal accuracy. The addition to it of a translation of the Bruce Papyrus is also most convenient for purposes of reference; but perhaps by reason of this, Dr. Schmidt’s notes on his translation of the British Museum MS. are confined to Scripture references and verbal matters only, while in his Introduction he only gives seventeen pages to consideration of its history, writing, language, composition, source, and date. This cursory treatment is doubtless in part due to his having in the text and translation of the Bruce Papyrus, published by him in 1892 in Harnack and Gebhardt’s well-known series of “Texte und Untersuchungen,” already given his views on these matters, most of which he reiterates in the Introduction last mentioned. These views may be briefly stated as follows:
1. The Pistis Sophia is not Valentinian, but comes from an obscure sect of what he calls Barbelo-Gnostics, known as Severiani.
2. Its title should not be Pistis Sophia but Τεύχη τοῦ Σωτῆρος.
3. While admitting that the whole work is a “Miszellenhandschrift,” he thinks that the Fourth Document is the oldest in the collection and, as it were, the root of the other three, which in their turn form a connected whole.
Dr. Schmidt’s fellow-countrymen Drs. Lichtenhau and Preuschen have already attacked some of these positions in the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie14 and elsewhere, and after mature consideration, the present writer feels himself compelled to dissent from all three. The reasons for doing so will be best given when we come to consider the composition and authorship of the MS. Before leaving this branch of the subject, however, it may be said that beside the work of Köstlin, Lipsius, and Dr. Schmidt, the Pistis Sophia has been treated of at some length in Father Giraud’s Ophitus (1884), and in a special work by Prof. Harnack in the Texte und Untersuchungen above mentioned (1891). More recently, it has also been dealt with by M. Eugène de Faye in his Introduction à l’Etude du Gnosticisme (1903) and his Gnostiques et Gnosticisme (1913), by Dr. James Moffat in his article under its name in Hastings’ Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, and by the present writer in his Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity (1915).15 The late Sir Gaston Maspero and Prof. Lieblein (of Christiania) have also stated their conviction that it could only have been written by persons intimately acquainted with the old Egyptian religion, on which point none could speak with greater authority than they.16
2. The Documents in the Ms
As has been said above, Dr. Schmidt speaks of our text as a miscellany, and the phrase by no means overstates the case. It contains indeed no less than six documents, only the two first of which are directly connected or can be taken as necessarily intended to be read consecutively. The second of these breaks off in the middle of a conversation, the third has neither beginning nor end. The opening sentence of the fourth implies that it is the continuation of a conversation which cannot be certainly identified with any that has gone before, and the same document concludes with a sentence which does not seem likely to be the end of the extract. The fifth begins with what is clearly a fresh narrative without reference to anything that has preceded it and must have ended in the lacuna caused by the missing pages, while the sixth, whose beginning has been lost in the same lacuna, ends in the middle of a phrase. Of these six documents, the third only covers one and a half pages of the MS. and is manifestly a fragment of some document which has somehow strayed over into this place; but as it appears directly after the words: “A Part of the Books of the Saviour,” I hesitate to say that it never formed part of any of the other documents in the text, and I shall therefore speak of it hereafter as “The Interpolated Fragment” merely. Only the two first of the six, also, can claim to be included under the title of the Pistis Sophia, but they are by far the largest and take up between them more than half the volume. This arrangement follows strictly the rule of stichometry observed by writers of the period, which prescribes that the longest document shall come first. Thus in this translation:—
| Document | Begin page | End page |
| 1st | 63 | 126 |
| 2nd | 63 | 126 |
| Interpolated | 127 | 128 |
| 3rd | 128 | 179 |
| 4th | 180 | 192 |
| 5th | 193 | 199 |
Taking these in this order, we will summarise them as briefly as possible.
The First Document, then, tells how Jesus spent twelve years after the Resurrection teaching His disciples the mysteries of the heavenly “places,”17 but that their instruction did not extend beyond this visible, or more accurately, this sensible, universe which corresponds, it would seem, to the Third Chorema or Space of the “First Mystery” or God Manifest, of Whom Jesus is the Incarnation. This Chorema is under the governance of a Power called the First Law, under whom are eleven others called the Five Marks, the Great Light, and the Five Parastatai or Helpers; and all these twelve came from still higher states of being from which, we are told later, they voluntarily descended to take part in the scheme of salvation. When the First Document opens, however, Jesus has only told His disciples of the existence of those Powers, but has not revealed to them their origin, function, or arrangement; and all the action in this Document passes in the lower part of this Chorema which is called the Kerasmos or Confusion, because in it Light is mingled with Matter. The highest part of the Kerasmos is the Treasure house where the Light as it is won from Matter is stored up; and then come a great number of inferior Places inhabited by Powers concerned with the administration of our universe’s more material parts, especially the heavenly bodies or sun, moon, and stars. Below these again is our earth with its firmament or “Height,” and outside this Chaos or the dark and unformed mass of Matter which has received no Light.18
While Jesus is sitting with His disciples on the Mount of Olives, the Document goes on to say, there descends upon Him a “Great Power of Light,” which is in fact the “vesture” or Heavenly Nature which He had left in the Limit or Lower Boundary of the upper worlds on His descent to earth in “the shape of Gabriel.” This vesture enables Him to rise to the Boundary and there assume two other vestures which are necessary for the continuation of the journey to the two transcendental “Spaces” which are higher than this. In this first vesture, also, He finds five mysterious words written which are here interpreted as an address from the higher powers hailing Him as the First Mystery, and the catalogue of names which follows enables us to form a fairly correct idea of the arrangement of this Chorema as well as of the higher ones which are known as the “Spaces” of the First Mystery and of the “Ineffable” or Supreme Unmanifested God respectively.19
On assuming this vesture, Jesus flies into the Height, but returns the next day clad in three vestures of dazzling light, and tells His disciples how He provided for the births of Himself and them by casting into their respective mothers Powers from the higher parts of the Kerasmos instead of the material souls which they would otherwise have received from the Rulers of the stars. In like manner also, He tells how He caused the soul of Elijah to become incarnate in the body of John the Baptist. He then goes on to describe His journey upward through the First Sphere directly above the firmament, the Second Sphere called Destiny, and the Twelve Æons,20 which appear to be the signs of the Zodiac. The Kings or Tyrants of these last rebel against Him, and He punishes them by taking away part of their power and altering their course, so that mankind will no longer be able to foretell the future by means of the astrology and magic taught them by the sinning angels. Leaving their Place, He ascends to the thirteenth Æon, and finds below it Pistis Sophia, the heroine of the book. She is, it appears, one of the twenty-four Unseen or Invisible Ones put forth in pairs by the head of the Left Hand or most material part of the Kerasmos, and had left her spouse and her work to pursue a light which she saw below her and which she thought would enable her to mount to the Treasure-house. This light, however, was a snare sent into Chaos by one of the material Powers immediately above her; and on her advancing to seize it, she was set upon by several material Powers that her persecutor had put forth and deprived of her own light, so that she could not return to her own Place in the thirteenth Æon.
In this plight, she sings hymns of penitence to the “Light of Lights” or Light of the Treasure-house, and these are all recited at full length by Jesus to His disciples, who identify them at His instance with passages from the Canonical Psalms, and from those “Odes of Solomon” which are mentioned above. These Penitences are twelve in number, and in the course of their recital and the conversation that takes place on them, we learn something more about the arrangement of the different worlds and the process of the redemption of Light from Matter which it is apparently the object of the book to describe. Finally, after this tenth “Penitence,” Jesus, who has throughout her affliction procured for Pistis Sophia certain alleviations in her misery, calls into existence several new Powers who go into Chaos to her assistance and form a crown of light to her head, so that her tormentors dare not come near to her.
With this the Document ends, and it is manifest from the appearance of the MS. that the scribes who wrote it, at this point thought that they had come to the end of their task and did not then expect to carry it further.
The Second Document begins with the caption “The Second Tome of Pistis Sophia” in a handwriting which Mr. Crum has no hesitation in declaring to be the same as that of the first seventy pages of the Document. Whereas the First Document ends, however, with Jesus’ approval of Mary Magdalene’s interpretation of the quotation from the Psalms about Mercy and Truth kissing each other, the Second Document opens with another interpretation of the same text offered by John. Coupled with the caption given above, this seems sufficient to show that the Second Document was intended to be taken for a continuation of the First, although this by no means proves that they were written at the same time or by the same author. The Document goes on to elaborate the story of the rescue of Pistis Sophia, and tells with great detail how Gabriel and Michael being summoned for that purpose go to her assistance. This provokes a fresh display of anger on the part of the “Self-willed God” who is Pistis Sophia’s chief persecutor, and the powers of Chaos make a fresh assault upon her. On this, Jesus orders Gabriel and Michael to bear her on their hands out of Chaos, while He Himself descends thither, smites her tormentors, and renders them powerless to follow her. He then leads her into the “Place below the thirteenth Æon” where He finds her on His ascension from the Mount of Olives, and warns her that she will again be tormented when the Gate of the Treasure-house is set open. This apparently happens just before Jesus’ ascension in the vesture of light, and He then routs her enemies for the last time and restores her to her original Place in the thirteenth Æon, where she sings a final song of praise to Him for the wonders which He has wrought for her “in the world of men.”
This ends the episode of Pistis Sophia, who is not again mentioned until we come to the Fourth Document. The author now turns to what was probably the main reason for attempting the continuation of the First Document, which is the questioning of Mary Magdalene and the other disciples upon the order and use of the Heavenly Places, and the Saviour’s replies thereto.21 Beginning with the answer to Mary’s question as to the nature of the twenty-four Unseen Ones of whom Pistis Sophia was one, the Saviour promises Himself to lead the disciples through all the Upper worlds right up to that of the Ineffable One Himself, each successive world and even Place being, it is said, so greatly superior in size and in light to the lower ones, that they will appear like grains of dust when viewed from it. He also tells them that the beatitudes in store for them will be progressive, beginning with the Millenium which will ensue when the number of perfect souls is accomplished, the Kerasmos purified and “caught up,” and the Twelve Disciples established with Jesus as joint Kings reigning over the blessed in the Last Parastates or Helper—a name given to the world which is placed in our universe immediately over the Treasure-house. Here they will apparently receive further instruction and be given “mysteries” which will enable them to mount to the upper universes before, it is expressly said, the “Projections” or emanations of the Treasure-house who are concerned with the administration of the scheme of salvation. The details of this scheme are extremely complicated, the Saviour several times promising to explain further in a subsequent revelation constantly referred to as “the Distribution of the Universe.”
But its final aim is indicated without ambiguity. Jesus, who as we have seen was hailed in the First Document as the First Mystery in the address of the Spirits written on the vesture of light sent to Him on the Mount of Olives, is throughout this part of the Second Document always spoken of by that title; and we are told that those who receive the highest mystery of all, called the “Mystery of the Ineffable One,” will be absorbed into His being. “That Man is I, and I am that Man,” are the words in which this announcement is made, and the full meaning of the phrase can be appreciated by other sentences in the narrative which go to show that this First Mystery is the first Being to come forth from the Ineffable One, and is regarded as a “Twin Mystery” or Father and Son, the first-named or “First Mystery looking inwards” being alone capable of remaining in contemplation of the greatness of the Ineffable One, while the Son or “First Mystery looking outwards” is sent to earth in the Person of Jesus Himself.22
The way to obtain this elevation in the scale of being is, perhaps, left purposely obscure, but it can apparently be gained by certain initiations or mysteries, which like the Mysteries of Eleusis will give the initiate the knowledge of the universe, how it came to be, and how it will end. These also are progressive and culminate in the “One Word of the Ineffable One,” the effect of which is so tremendous that if it be spoken over the dying, or for the dead, whether partly initiate or wholly uninitiate, it will expedite his passage to the heaven to which his initiation entitles him, or, in the case of one wholly uninitiate, will ensure his reincarnation in a “righteous” body, which will “find the God of Truth and the exalted mysteries, and will inherit them and the Light for ever and ever.”23 The way to this and to the Mysteries in general is “the renunciation of the whole world and all the matter therein.”
Beside this, however, there are lesser mysteries which will admit the faithful recipient to heaven and privileges less exalted indeed than that last described, but will yet confer on him great beatitude after death. These, known collectively as the “Mysteries of the third Space,” involve a “Defence” a “Password” and a “Symbol” which have to be handed in by the dead in his flight upward so as to procure him uninterrupted passage to the heaven of which he has received the mystery. Of these, it is said that the disciples have no need, because nothing of the sort is required by the recipients of the higher mysteries, but Jesus adds that they are to be found in “the two great Books of Jeu” which “Enoch wrote when I spake with him out of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life in the Paradise of Adam.”24 In spite of these assurances, Andrew provokes the Saviour by asking how “men of this world” can be expected to adventure after death upon the long and dangerous journey among all the Great Powers of the Treasurehouse and their subordinates, and the Saviour reminds him in reply that they and He are all of the same origin, being made from “the same mass and the same matter and the same substance” and are all “out of the same Confusion.”25 On this, the other disciples successfully implore Jesus to pardon Andrew, and this Document ends in the middle of a sentence in which He declares that He has been sent for the remission of sins.
Before leaving this Document, it must be noted that in it there appear long rhetorical statements in a form which has no parallel in the other documents of our text. They repeat the same phrase with the variation of two or three words at each repetition, the object being apparently to give the hearer an idea which he could not otherwise obtain—except, perhaps, by a picture or diagram26 of the different hierarchies of Powers or arrangement of Places which the speaker is describing. Thus in one place, Jesus, after speaking of the “Mystery of the Ineffable One,” goes on to declare that “that Mystery knoweth why the Darkness came to be and why the Light,” and then after going through a string of similar antitheses in which the Treasurehouse is contrasted with Chaos, murder with the quickening of souls, Death with Life and all sorts of natural phenomena with one another, continues with “That Mystery knoweth why the Triple Powers came to be and why the Unseen Ones,” and so on through an incredible number of Spirits and Powers until He at last reaches the First Emanation of the Ineffable One which is in fact Himself. This is amplified when He says later that “That Mystery knoweth” why these higher Powers “despoiled” themselves (or stripped themselves of their exalted natures), when a great part of the Places and Powers of the highest worlds are enumerated all over again. Not long after this, He has occasion to speak of the man who receives this same Mystery of the Ineffable One, when He says that “He is a man in the world, but he excelleth all the Angels and is more excellent than them all,” and then repeats the same phrase with regard to Archangels, Unseen Ones, Triple Powers, and all the Projections of the Treasurehouse and its dependencies for the third time.27 This kind of rhapsody does not seem to be cast into any rhythmical form, yet seems to be intended for repetition by word of mouth rather than by writing. The only likeness that I can find to this practice is in one of the Chapters of the Book of the Dead, where all the different parts of the Hall of Two Truths demand to be told their names, or those in the Book of Gates where the parts of the Bark of Ra make the like demand. It therefore seems to be a purely Egyptian feature and may be connected with the fact that the early Egyptian Church, like the colleges formed for the worship of gods like Amen in earlier times, had “prophets,” who seem to have occupied a position in the Church next after the bishop.
The Interpolated Fragment which occupies most of the first leaf of the Third Document is entirely taken up with the relation of the Ineffable one to His “members”; but is too short and disconnected to give us much information on the subject. It is put into the mouth of Jesus and it makes allusion to other revelations which Jesus is said to have previously made or “written,” or which He promises. The style is not unlike that of the First Document, so that I do not see why it may not be an extract from the same book if, as may be probable, Jesus continued in it the account of His upward journey after leaving Pistis Sophia in the thirteenth Æon.28
The Third Document may perhaps be called without fear of contradiction “Part of the Books of the Saviour,” because it bears that title both at its head and at its foot. It begins by an exhortation to the disciples to preach “to the whole world” a series of ἀποτάγματα or renunciations of sin which may be connected with Jesus’ speech to Andrew at the end of the Second Document. It should be noted, however, that while in the Second Document mankind is to be entreated to renounce the world and its matter so that they may “go unto the Light,” the author of this Document presses them to abjure sin lest they suffer the torments of hell. These torments are also dealt with in considerable detail, and we can gather from the description that there are four Places of Punishment called respectively Amente, Chaos, the Middle Way, and the Outer Darkness.29 This seems to be a sort of amalgam of different traditional beliefs, for while Amente appears in the Book of the Dead, Chaos in the First Document does not seem to be thought of as necessarily a Place of Punishment, and we have seen Pistis Sophia speaking of it in the Second Document as “the world of men.” So, too, the location of these different hells shows some confusion of thought. Amente is probably in the West or beyond the earth as it is in the Book of the Dead, Chaos is either the earth itself or beneath it, while the Middle Way is, like the Place of Punishment in the Enochian literature, in the firmament or “below the Sphere.” As for the Outer Darkness, its name shows it to be a relic of Pagan Egypt where it was held that beyond the confines of the earth, the air became so thick as to be actually tangible and concrete. Among the tormentors in these various hells we find Ariel, Pistis Sophia’s persecutor Ialdabaoth, one “Iakhthanabas the Merciless” and the Dragon of Outer Darkness who is depicted as a great serpent coiled round the world having his tail in his mouth and containing places of torment within him where ice and cold come to supplement the tortures of fire and smoke.
A great part of the Document is likewise taken up by the questions of Mary Magdalene and the other disciples, among whom John is the most insistent, as to the sinners to whom they shall give their mysteries and the effect which they will have on them. We who hear in this Document of a mystery or secret whereby the dead can be raised, the sick healed, and other wonders performed, although Jesus tells His disciples that this mystery belongs to the Archons or wicked Rulers of the Stars and is not to be used save for the purpose of establishing the faith throughout the world.30 We also have much in this Document as to the soul or incorporeal part of man which the disciples are told consists of the Power, the Soul proper, the Spirit Counterfeit, and the Fate. Of these, the Power is the most worthy and causes the man to seek after the mysteries, and the soul is really the Life or Breath and is made either out of the ejecta of the Rulers or from the dregs or grosser parts of the Light which is at certain periods squeezed out of them by certain powers appointed for that purpose. The Spirit Counterfeit, on the other hand, is the envelope or mask of the soul which constantly leads it to commit sin and bears witness after death to its having done so, while the Fate is the death to which the man is predestined, and which he can never escape while uninitiate.31 Incidentally, too, we hear a good deal in this Document as to the Gnostic belief in the transmigration of souls, reincarnation being obligatory on such souls as have not found the more sublime mysteries.32 Several formulas are also given whereby the soul can cut itself loose from the Spirit Counterfeit and the Fate, and we are told that even an uninitiated person can escape from the torments of the Dragon of Outer Darkness if one of the names of the reptile be said by or for him. Throughout this Document the tortures of the different hells and the beast-shaped demons who administer them are much dwelt upon. Finally, Jesus tells His disciples that He came to earth to bring these mysteries, and that had He not done so neither Patriarchs nor Prophets would have entered into the Light.33
The opening sentence of the Fourth Document shows plainly that it comes from a book written independently of the preceding ones and not as their continuation. It ignores completely the tradition held in the time of the Antonines by orthodox and heretic alike, that Jesus spent many years on earth after the Resurrection,34 and announces that after He “rose from among the dead the third day,” His disciples gathered round Him reminding Him that they had left the whole world to follow Him.35 Then begins a scene that reminds one irresistibly of the magical practices rife during the first three centuries of our Era, some details of which have come down to us in the Philosophumena and in the different Magic Papyri to be found in the Museums of Paris, London, Leyden, and Berlin. Jesus, standing by an altar by the side of the sea “Ocean,” makes invocation to His Father in words which are not gibberish, as at first sight they appear to be, but a jumble of Hebrew, Egyptian, and perhaps Persian words copied and re-copied by scribes ignorant of these languages until they are all but unrecognisable. He calls upon the name of the Father of the Treasurehouse of Light, whereupon the heavens open revealing the “true shapes” of the sun and moon, and Jesus and His disciples are uplifted to “the Middle Way which is below the Sphere.” Here the arrangement of the stars is explained to them and they learn that the rebellious Rulers who persisted in copulation were bound to the Sphere to the number of 1800 for each sign of the Zodiac, under the rule of 360 of that number, who are themselves under the sway of the five Planets, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter. Yet the author of this Document must have known, although he varies, the tradition of the First Document, for Jesus tells His hearers that these planets were strengthened by the infusion into Saturn of a Power from the Great Unseen God who projected Pistis Sophia, into Mars of a similar Power from one of the three Triple-powered Gods, into Mercury of one from another of the Triple Powers, and into Venus of one from “Pistis Sophia the daughter of Barbelo”36; while one from the “Little Sabaoth the Good,” a Power of higher rank than these last, who in the story of Pistis Sophia proper is described as supplying the Power which takes the place of Jesus’ own earthly soul, is cast into the planet Jupiter and is given rule over all the others. All these planets are given barbarous names in addition to their Greek ones, as are the Great Unseen God and the two Triple Powers, these last names appearing also in the Magic Papyri, while the names of both planets and Powers appear to have a real meaning.
Jesus then shows to His disciples the five torture-chambers of the Middle Way, each of them presided over by an “Authority,” who with his (or her) assistants has been chosen from among the rebellious Rulers. Each of these Authorities sees to the punishment of particular sins, which sins his or her ministers have “entered into man” and caused him to commit. Three of these presiding demons are females, one of them being the triple-faced Hecate still famous in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and among them we find the merciless Iakhthanabas already mentioned in the Third Document, and the Egyptian God Typhon. The different terms of punishment from 150 years downwards which sinful souls will suffer in these tortures of the Middle Way are all given, and it is expressly said that these places of torment will be dissolved when the two beneficent planets, Venus and Jupiter, come into certain positions in the Zodiac.37 These Places are, it would seem, actually shown to the disciples, Jesus thereby in part fulfilling the promise made in the First Document to lead them through all the heavenly Places. He then restores the heavens to their normal condition, and returns with the disciples to the “Mountain of Galilee,” where he celebrates for them a sacrament with “fire and water, wine and blood.” The distribution of bread also forms part of this sacrament, and it is accompanied by a “sign” which we know from other sources was the conversion of one of the cups of wine into the water of baptism.38 This “mystery” or sacrament is said to have the effect of remitting all the sins of the disciples, and they are told to perform the same ceremony for all those who will listen to their preaching. They remind Him that there are other Baptisms of Fire and the Holy Spirit of Light respectively, and He tells them that these are more excellent than any Mystery save only those of the Seven Sounds and of the Great Name of God, which if spoken to any demon will destroy him with all his tortures. He is apparently about to perform these for the benefit of the disciples when the Document abruptly ends with the gap left by the tearing-away of the four pages already noticed.
It must be noted that nearly all the first part of this Document is full of invocations or prayers couched in the apparent gibberish before mentioned, that “Mary”—whether the Mother of Jesus or the Magdalene is not stated—asks one question only, that the planet Venus is called “Bubastis,” Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew magic and astrology being present in nearly every line, while there is some little trace of Persian influence as well. It is also closely connected with one of the documents of the Bruce Papyrus, where the peculiar sacrament here celebrated by Jesus is described on similar lines and is followed by the celebration of the other already mentioned; while in another Document of the same Papyrus the name of Pistis Sophia is given in connection with a place of repentance. The story of the Samaritan woman and of the spear thrust at the Crucifixion is also mentioned in this Fourth Document, these being the first unmistakable quotations from the Fourth Gospel to be found in our text.
The Fifth Document is, as has been said above, the shortest of all, and has lost its title in the gap of four leaves in the British Museum MS. It is entirely concerned with the punishments assigned to different sins; and as sedition, lust, and robbery with violence appear in the Fourth Document as sins punishable in the Middle Way, but are not mentioned in the present fragment, we may presume that they were dealt with in the part lacking, and probably occupied at least three of the missing pages. But the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit which Jesus is going to celebrate when the lacuna occurs, if treated at the same length as in the Bruce Papyrus, can hardly have taken up less than the other five missing pages, and it is therefore plain that nothing in addition to these punishments can have occupied the missing beginning of this Document. After this the Fifth Document begins with a broken sentence containing the punishment of the man who curses, and then goes on to describe the punishment of the evil speaker, the murderer, the habitual thief, the proud man, the blasphemer, the sodomite, and the celebrant of the filthy parody of the Eucharist known as the Black Mass.39 In one or other of those cases, the four hells of Amente, Chaos, the Middle Way, and the Outer Darkness are introduced, the punishments in them being successive, and we read again here the names of Ariel and Ialdabaoth who are mentioned in the Third Document, as those of torturers in Amente and Chaos respectively. So, too, we hear again of the cup of forgetfulness which in the Third Document is administered to the soul after it has been shown the punishments in order that it may profit nothing on reincarnation by its knowledge of their terrors. But here the punishments are so different from those formerly described that we see at once we are dealing with a different author. The sum total of the periods of punishment for cursing which are administered in all the different hells does not amount to more than four years as against the 133 assigned to it in the Fourth Document; and the penalty for slander is here given as no more than 30 years as against the same period of 133. The Receiver of Sabaoth Adamas, leader of the rebellious Rulers, now administers the cup of oblivion instead of as in the Third Document, the “Rulers of the head of the Æons,” and he is given the name of Ialuham, while the Receivers of Ariel, who are here mentioned for the first time in our text, are named Abiuth and Kharmon. The case of the uninitiated but righteous dead is also dealt with in answer to a question from John, but in a different manner from its treatment in the Third Document, as here the soul on coming out of the body is met by the Receivers of Bainkhookh or the planet Mercury, while the cup which takes away the baleful effect of the cup of oblivion is administered by a Receiver of the planet Jupiter40. It is also to be noted that in this Document for the first time the division of mankind into “righteous” and “wicked” bodies, which find or do not find, as the case may be, the mysteries of light, is made to depend entirely on the periodic disposition of the stars. When, it is said, the two beneficent planets Jupiter and Venus come before the Virgin of Light and the two maleficent Saturn and Mars behind her in the revolution of the Sphere, all the souls sent into the world will be good, and when the position is reversed, all will be wicked.41 Here, too, for the first time, we are told that the form of the body on reincarnation depends on the sins committed by the soul in its last life,—that the soul of the proud man will be put into a body dumb and deformed, the soul of the thief into one lame and maimed and blind—and so on.
It will therefore be seen that this Document is sufficiently connected with some of the preceding ones to warrant the supposition that it comes from the same school or sect, although it is noteworthy that neither in our Fourth nor our Fifth Document are the Ineffable One or the First Mystery ever referred to. The chief point in common between this Fifth Document and the Bruce Papyrus is the mention of the Black Mass which appears in both Documents. A feature peculiar to this Document alone is the open reference to the Pagan Gods as fiends; and besides Typhon and Hecate, who have in truth a more or less malevolent character in the later Egyptian and Greek mythology, Adonis, one of the forms under which Osiris was worshipped at Alexandria, is made to take the soul of the thief to Amente, while “the high goddess” of Homer, Persephone, the much-loved daughter of the Eleusinian Demeter, figures as one of the tormentors in Chaos. The sentence about the journeys of the Apostles written on the blank leaf bound in with the rest of the volume has no perceptible connection with our text and may possibly be the work of some one who, suddenly coming across it in some other document and wishing to preserve it, seized upon this leaf as the only piece of parchment available.
To sum up then: the MS. contains five principal documents together with a fragment which may or may not once have formed part of one of them. All are imperfect and are extracts from longer and possibly more coherent writings. Two of them—the Pistis Sophia proper, and our Fourth Document—can be clearly distinguished as written by different authors, and the same can be said with nearly as much certainty with regard to the Third and Fifth. Yet the book from which the tale of Pistis Sophia was extracted must have been old enough to have gone through more than one recension, as is shown by the number of alternative readings duly noted in the MS. There are also in the details of the same story, blunders or contradictions which go to show that the translator or scribe had more than one MS. to work from; and these may have differed as much as do, for instance, the two versions of the (Coptic) Book of the Resurrection attributed to St. Bartholomew and published by M. Lacau and Sir Ernest Wallis Budge from the MSS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Museum respectively. This is the view taken by the German commentators on our text; but they are by no means in accord upon it, and it therefore does not seem necessary to do more here than refer to it.
3. Purpose and Composition of the Ms
Why now was this miscellany made? Not certainly for edification or the use of the sect or school42 whose doctrines it sets forth. Every Coptic inscription on tombstone or wall and nearly every Coptic religious text has at its head the words [Coptic], with God, generally accompanied by the so-called Coptic or Orbed Cross, itself an adaptation of the ankh or symbol of life in Pagan Egypt. That this was the practice with heretics as well as orthodox Christians is shown by the Bruce Papyrus, which actually bears as its frontispiece such words and such a cross with the letters Α and Ω and which seems to be a reproduction of the Constantinian Labarum.43 If, too, we put side by side the passages in our MS. and the Bruce Papyrus which are practically identical—as is the case with the three sacraments or baptisms mentioned in the Fourth Document of our text—we find that the “seals” or diagrams, passwords, and names given in the Oxford MS. have all been omitted from the London book. No one who is familiar with the beliefs current in Pagan Egypt can mistake the reason of this omission, which is obviously to avoid the risk of their being used in magic.44 A like precaution was taken with many chapters of the Book of the Dead and becomes more insistent with every successive recension. It is absent from the Pyramid texts, doubtless because when these were once carved on the inside of a royal burying-place and the entrance closed, there was little risk of these being seen by unauthorised persons. The same reason doubtless operated in the same way with the wooden coffins of the eleventh dynasty on which the next recension was inscribed. But with the Theban recension of the New Empire, the case was changed. “Let no one outside know it. It is a mystery which is not known to the common people,” says the hundred and sixty-first chapter after directions to engrave it on the coffin of the dead. “Reveal it not to anyone, may he be thy father or thy son except thyself. It is a real mystery.”45 So, too, with the Saite recension. “This book is most secret,” says the hundred and sixty-second chapter, which M. Pierret thinks was intended to be the last. “Let it not be seen by any man, for it is forbidden to know it. Let it be hidden. It is called the mistress of the hidden abode. This is the end.”46 That similar ideas persisted into Christian times may be guessed from the Homily de Magis ascribed to St. Ephraim in which the Homilist tells his hearers that in his day (circa A.D. 450) even the clergy resorted to magicians for these mysterious writings. “Instead of the blessings of the Saints,” he says, “they carry about the incantations of the magicians, and instead of the Holy Cross, they carry the books of devils... and a child who knows nothing at all, carries about devil’s names and comes to church.”47
It was evidently, therefore, for the information of orthodox persons that our MS. was made, but not for that of the orthodox public generally, whether clerical or lay. Had it been so, it would have been weighted with a running commentary casting scorn upon its erroneous doctrines, or by so-called refutations like those which encumber the pages of heresiologists such as Irenæus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius. Had it been written by an ecclesiastic, moreover, it would certainly have borne some preface, or colophon, as does the Philosophumena, claiming merit for, and giving the date of the completion of the work.48 Yet there is nothing in the present text to show that it was written by an ecclesiastic of any kind, while it follows from what has been said above that it was begun by a scribe who took unusual pains to ensure an accurate copy, and that when he handed over for a time the continuation of his work to a subordinate, he yet went over and corrected the latter’s work with as much care as he bestowed upon his own. All this suggests that it was made for official or judicial use; and the most reasonable guess is that it was the draft or copy of a legal document made for the enlightenment of some conciliar, episcopal, or even secular tribunal concerned in the suppression of heresy, such as the Inquisitors of the Faith set up by Theodosius. This would solve the problem which has so vexed the minds of commentators like Prof. Harnack and Dr. Schmidt as to the occurrence of the colophon “Part of the Books of the Saviour” at the foot of the Second and Third Documents. It is natural enough that the second or subaltern scribe, continuing the work of which only the first part was once thought sufficient, should preface the continuation by the title “The Second Tome of Pistis Sophia”; but that as he completed the copying of each subsequent extract stichometrically arranged, should add the words: “Part of the Books of the Saviour” to indicate the collection of MSS., probably seized in a raid by the Imperial authorities on some heretic’s library, from which they were all taken.
If this be admitted, it certainly alters materially the view which recent German scholars, following, perhaps, after their manner, the first German commentator Köstlin, have formed of the whole text, and in which we might be inclined to acquiesce if we considered it a mere Encyclopædia or, as Epiphanius calls his own collection, a “bread-basket,” in which heterogeneous scraps of doctrine were thrown together anyhow. If, on the other hand, it was made for the use of a tribunal, it would be in the order of things concerned with the tenets of one school or sect alone, and this we find on investigation to be the case. Although the episode of Pistis Sophia comes to a stop about halfway, she is, as has been said, mentioned in the Fourth Document as well as in the First and Second, and even in the Third there are phrases which show that its author has the same general conception of the constitution of the universe, of the Person and Mission of Jesus, and of the means of salvation as the writers of the earlier parts. Yet it is equally plain that no two of the documents are by the same hand. While the First Document makes the Power which Jesus received from Barbelo “the body which He wore in the Height,”49 and His soul another power received from one of the great leaders of “the Height,”50 the Second Document attributes the Incarnation to a lesser power of “the Middle” who casts what came from the same leader into “the matter of Barbelo,” which thereupon becomes the earthly and not the heavenly body of the Saviour.51 In like manner, while the First Document puts into the mouth of Mary the Mother a story not traceable to any other source about the Holy Spirit coming down from the First Mystery in the exact likeness of Jesus’ earthly body, and says that after kissing each other, they become one,52 the Second Document makes St. John say that the First Mystery himself came down upon Jesus in the form of a dove, but in a “vesture of light” received from Barbelo.53 So, again, the First Document especially declares that “the disciples” (not the Apostles) were endowed by Jesus at His coming with twelve powers from the Treasure-house of Light instead of the souls which they would otherwise have received from the Rulers,54 while the Second makes Jesus tell them that their souls instead of coming straight from the Treasure-house have suffered much from transmigration into different bodies.55 So, too, the Sphere of Destiny, which in the First Document is described as “the Second Sphere”56 (or the one which is reached from the earth next after passing through the First Sphere, below which is the visible firmament), is in the Third Document transformed into a Place called “Great Destiny,”57 which is in the Place of the head of the Æons [or Zodiac] which Place they call “the Place of the Kingdom of Adamas,” the Ruler of the twelve Æons or signs, and in the Fourth Document is made equivalent to the Sphere or visible firmament only.58 And so again “the cause of sin,” which in the Third Document is laid upon the shoulders of “the Five Rulers of Great Destiny,”59 is in the Fourth assigned to certain demons from the Middle Way who enter into man.60 These discrepancies are too great to be accounted for as merely clerical errors or mistakes in translation, and we can therefore only attribute them to the different documents being the work of different authors.61
This being the case, we must, to get a true perspective of the work, seek for the earliest document in it, and then endeavour to arrange the others in their relative order of date; and I have no hesitation in deciding that in this, the scribes followed the usual practice in legal matters and that the earliest document is that which comes first in the MS. Not only has it a regular preface, an advantage which it shares with the Fourth, but it is the one of the four principal documents which alone gives an orderly and coherent account of the heavenly hierarchy and its “Places,”62 and therefore affords the reader a sort of key to the system of its successors. Hence it must be considered as the mother document, so to speak, from which all the rest are derived, or to which they refer; and it will be found on examination that while all these contain what may be called supplemental information as to the different universes or worlds and their inhabitants, there is none which deals so exhaustively with the speculations that during the early centuries of our Era occupied the attention of orthodox and heretic alike, that is to say, the Constitution of the Godhead and the relation of the Saviour to the Supreme Being. It is also probable that anyone making extracts for judicial use from the books of a sect would begin with the most informative; and while Pistis Sophia is here described so fully as to leave no doubt in one’s mind that the author knows that he is here introducing her to his readers for the first time, the references to her in the other documents are so brief as to show that their writers knew that their readers had already heard about her. But the most conclusive proof at present of the anteriority of the First Document as compared with the others, is that it does not quote from the Fourth Gospel. The opening words of St. John would have been extremely useful to the author in expressing the relations between his Ineffable One and the First Mystery, and are in fact so used later both in the Excerpta Theodoti and the Bruce Papyrus.63 Ptolemy and Heracleon,64 the leaders of the sect to which, as will be shown later, our text can with the greatest likelihood be attributed, both knew of this Gospel and discuss its words and especially its opening at length. Yet the author of our First Document not only makes no use of this, but he gives no quotation among the many from the New Testament to be found in this Document that can by any possibility be assigned to the Fourth Gospel, save those which may equally well be taken from the Synoptics. The one apparent exception to this statement is neither conclusive in itself, nor strong enough to found any argument upon it.65 In the later part of the Second Document, however, the words of St. John: “Where I am, there shall my servants be,” may possibly be thought to underlie the sentence in our text: “Wherefore I said unto you aforetime: Where I shall be, there will be with Me my Twelve servants,”66 the word διάκονος being used in both cases; and in the Fourth Document there appear unmistakably the conversation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman,67 and the spear thrust in His side at the Crucifixion,68 neither of which incidents are recorded in the Synoptics. The conclusion, therefore, seems irresistible that while the author of the First Document did not know of St. John’s Gospel, the writer of part of the Second may have done so, and the writer of the Fourth was fully acquainted with it.
Yet the literary critic, especially he who is acquainted with the literature of the early Christian centuries, will hardly require further proof of the relative dates of our four chief Documents than that afforded by a comparison of their contents. In the First, apart from a sketch of—to use a comprehensive word—the uranography of the sect, and the speculations about the Divine Nature before referred to, the author devotes nearly all his space to the episode of Pistis Sophia, which may fairly be looked upon as an allegory pointing out to man the penalty of transgressing the Divine Law, and the necessity of repentance. Thus, in one of the “Penitences” addressed to the highest Power that she knew, Pistis Sophia confesses that she has offended “the Law of the Light” and attributes her deliverance from Chaos to her consequent repentance.69 There is more than one hint in the text that both the fall and the repentance take place within what is called “the world of humanity,” and we can without any overstraining of the allegory consider Pistis Sophia as representing the heathen world before the light of Christianity raised it from the degradation into which it had fallen by its material luxury, and restored it to something like what was supposed to be its primeval innocence.70 Hence we have a fairly close parallel to stories like that of Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress, who leaves the city of Mansoul to strive upward to the Heavenly City; and allowing for the difference of time and place, there is no reason why we should consider the Coptic version as the more ignoble allegory of the two. It should also be noticed that in this Document, the terrors of hell are hardly touched upon, and the “afflictions” of Sophia are spoken of throughout as confined to the loss of “light” and her consequent impotence to return without Divine aid to the Place which she had wilfully abandoned. Lastly magic and astrology are expressly if briefly condemned as unlawful knowledge brought to men by the sinning angels.
From this fairly lofty standard of thought, the remaining Documents show one long and successive degradation. The author of the Second Document, after making a somewhat clumsy effort to conclude the history of Pistis Sophia, does not, as we might expect him to do, continue the account of Jesus’ upward journey, but dismisses it to plunge into a series of inquiries as to the exact nature of the heavenly hierarchies and the amount of “Light” which each of them enjoys; and the answers of the Saviour not only describe these at great length, but indicate, though obscurely, the various steps by which man can approach divinity. But the benefits there promised are to be confined evidently to a small and privileged class chosen out of the main body of Christians. The use of these means, moreover, is a good deal more magical than religious—that is to say, they apparently act by compulsion rather than by propitiation of the celestial powers—and was perhaps bound up with the different “arrays” of stars in a fashion which shows a distinct leaning towards the astrology of the time.71 The rebel Rulers of the stars are here made for the first time the instruments in the punishment of sinful souls,72 and the terrors of hell are held out as a menace which may induce mankind to accept initiation into the mysteries offered. In all this, we cannot but see the reversion to Pagan practices, to the dualistic theory of the universe, and to the tendency to appeal to ignoble motives into which post-Christian gnosticism sank in its decadence, and which finds, perhaps, its fullest expression in Manichaeism.
The Interpolated Fragment is, it is true, markedly free from these objections. The gaze of the author of this is indeed turned upwards instead of downwards, and we find him indulging in unrestrained speculation as to the “members” of the Supreme Being which are still unmanifested but existed before even the First Mystery, and have apparently remained without emanation.73 The fragment is too short for us to guess of what practical use these pretended revelations are supposed to be; but Jesus is represented as saying with regard to the “Members,” that “He is the Treasure-house of them all.” Something of the kind is hinted at in the long catalogue of transcendental powers given in the Second Document; and it is therefore possible that this Fragment may once have formed part of some continuation of the account of Jesus’ journey upwards which was in course of narration when broken off to recount the episode of Pistis Sophia.
The Third Document, however, resumes the descent of the slope of degradation with increased speed. As with the Egyptian funerary texts which succeeded and in some measure supplanted the Book of the Dead,74 the punishments after death and the way to escape them form the principal theme of this Document. As for magic, the gifts of healing and working of miracles, here explained as the raising of the dead and the casting out of devils, which the Epistle to the Corinthians puts among the Charismata or gifts of the Spirit,75 are here said to belong to the Rulers or wicked Archons, and to be only lawfully exercised by the disciples for the purpose of spreading the faith throughout the world.76 So, too, the information as to the fourfold division of man’s incorporeal part: Power, Soul, Spirit Counterfeit, and Fate, is all taken from the popular beliefs of Pagan Egypt; and the formulas enabling the initiate to “loose the bonds” which bind the soul to the worst of these, are as clearly to be referred to the belief in the power of names and in the compulsion of the spirit-world which Iamblichus tells us was the main peculiarity of Egyptian magic.77 The divisions of the place of punishment into four hells of graduated intensity and the final doom of annihilation for the worst sinners are also taken from the same literature.78 So far does this go, that even the uninitiated dead when in the worst of all the hells can escape from his torments and enjoy a qualified beatitude, if he then repeats certain names which he has learned during his life.79 It is quite true that we hear in this Document about the Love of God and the initiates doing things worthy of the mysteries and praying prayers in certain forms; but its general tendency remains almost entirely magical.
With the Fourth Document, we seem to have reached the bottom of the slope. The disciples here know nothing—it will be remembered that the scene is supposed to take place directly after the Resurrection—of the higher worlds and their mysteries, or even of the parts of this Chorema or Space which are above the Treasure-house; and their flight upward with Jesus has for its object merely the exhibition of the terrors of one of the Places of Punishment. So, too, the information which they obtain both by sight and by word of mouth as to the disposition and names of the stars and planets can hardly have been of use to them except for the purpose of magic and astrology. Of the joys prepared for the faithful and of the glories of the Divine Presence described in the Book of Enoch and other Apocrypha, they are told nothing. The sacraments that Jesus celebrates for them are, it would seem, to be given to them in return for leaving all and following Him;80 but are entirely magical in character, and nothing is said of any abandonment of sinful practices or of any repentance being necessary for their efficacy. The sign that He asks for from His Father,81 here called merely the Father of the Treasure-house, although not here specifically described, is, as we know from the parallel passage in the Bruce Papyrus, the conversion of the wine in one of the wine-cups into the “water of baptism,”82 in a way which strongly reminds us of the juggling sacraments attributed by Irenæus and the other heresiologists to the magician Marcus. The formal remission of sins which precedes this sacrament is accomplished by the invocation of many powers with incomprehensible names, and, if we read the passage correctly, only extends to sins of the flesh.83 They are told to “hide this mystery and give it to none” save those who observe His commandments in words which almost repeat those of the Book of the Dead.84 Yet even these sacraments would appear not to be needed by those who know the Great Name, the utterance of which will put to flight all demons, dissolve their houses of torment, and subjugate the highest material powers of the universe.85 Nothing is wanting to show that the sect which put forth this Document had slipped back into the preoccupation with the terrors of hell which is the prevailing feature of the Egyptian religion of the last native dynasties,86 and that the belief in magic and astrology into which Hellenic Paganism had sunk during the third and fourth centuries had taken the place of the loftier if vain speculations of the earlier Documents of our text. So much is this the case that the Ineffable One and the First Mystery of the first three Documents are not even mentioned here, and the only link connecting this with the story of Pistis Sophia is the casual mention of her name as supplying a “Power” for the planet Venus.87
With the Fifth Document a still lower level is reached. Hell and its torments form the only subject of this book, which as has been said above, is probably nearly complete, only a few pages of the conclusion being beyond recall. More proper-names of fiends are given here than in any of the preceding documents; and as has been said, these now include many of the Pagan gods such as the Egyptian Typhon, the Syrian Adonis, and the Greek Persephone and Hecate. These may possibly have been included among the subordinate “gods” several times referred to in the First Document, but the fact that their names are here openly given, seems to point to a time when the Pagans were in a minority in the Eastern world. The increasing influence of the belief in astrology with which even the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria did not disdain to meddle, is also shown by the answer already mentioned of Jesus to an inquiry of Mary Magdalene wherein He tells her that the allotment of souls to “righteous” and “wicked” bodies respectively is periodic and depends wholly on the disposition of the stars.
The bearing that all this has on the absolute as distinct from the relative dating of the five Documents will be dealt with presently.
4. The Authorship and Date of the Documents
We now have to consider by whom and at what date the Documents making up our text were composed. That they were written in Egypt and for Egyptian readers there can be no doubt, nor is it seriously disputed by any commentator who has dealt with them. The use of the Egyptian calendar evidenced by the placing of the opening scene of the story of Pistis Sophia in the Egyptian month Tybi, the employment of psalms and hymns as a means of expounding doctrine, and the peculiar form of rhetoric which I have called rhapsody, all point to the First and Second Documents being written by an Egyptian for Egyptians, while to an Egyptologist the likeness of the long array of Powers here enumerated to the three successive Enneads or “Companies of Gods” known to Pharaonic Egypt is too close for us to seek further for its source. Yet the writer shows an acquaintance with the Platonic philosophy and also with those Synoptic Gospels which were admittedly written in Greek, which we should not expect from an inhabitant of the Sahid or Upper Egypt, and this is unlikely in the earliest period of Christianity to have been possible outside Alexandria. In this university of the Western world, as it has been justly called, philosophy was so universal during the first and second centuries that, not only did the Catholic Church have to set up about the year 200 the school for the teaching of its officers of whom Clement of Alexandria was afterwards the head, but Philo, a leader of the Alexandrian synagogue a hundred years earlier had found himself obliged to discover Plato’s teaching in the Hebrew Scriptures in a way that is almost an exact parallel to that used by the author of our First Document. We have therefore, if we wish to find an author for that Document, to look for an Alexandrian teacher of Christianity who, although a heretic, did not take up the uncompromising opposition to the Catholic Church that Marcion and others did, and who taught before St. John’s Gospel was generally known. I have said elsewhere that there is no one who fulfils all those qualifications so well as Valentinus, the heresiarch who taught in the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, or from about A.D. 135 to 160.88
Of Valentinus’ own teaching we know very little directly because the Fathers who denounced him as the heresiarch who had attracted the largest number of followers, have yet given us the doctrines of his successors rather than of himself. Thus, Irenæus, who wrote at least a generation after Valentinus, records the teaching of Valentinus’ immediate successor, Ptolemy; Hippolytus, half a century after Irenæus, the teaching probably of Axionicus,89 while Tertullian and Epiphanius merely copy the statements of the two earlier heresiologists, and Origen quotes from the writings of Ptolemy’s contemporary Heracleon. Only Clement of Alexandria, Valentinus’ fellow countryman, who must have been born about the time when Valentinus was endeavouring to convert the Church of Rome to his views, quotes directly from Valentinus’ own words; and from these, it appears that Valentinus’ theology differed little in outward appearance from that of the Catholic Church of his time.90 That this must have been so is indeed manifest when we read in Tertullian that Valentinus came to Rome expecting to be made bishop,91 as one might now say, Pope, because of his genius and eloquence. Hippolytus, who probably drew his account from Axionicus, says that he declared the Supreme God to be “all Love” who created subsequent things that He might have something to love.92 According to his opponents, Valentinus also taught that the Supreme God’s first and greatest creation was Nous or Mind, called also Monogenes or the Only One, or the Father, who was “like and equal to Himself,”93 and from whom came Logos or the Word, from whom came Anthropos or Man. Yet none of these three last-named Powers produced offspring without female assistance, being, according to one account, themselves both male and female, or, according to another, having spouses called respectively Aletheia or Truth, Zoe or Life, and Ecclesia or the Church. It was even said that the Supreme God or Abyss, who was the source of all being, had in like manner a spouse named Sige “Silence,” or Charis “Grace,” although the Fathers admit that the followers of Valentinus, whose tenets they denounce, held various opinions as to this. They are, however, agreed that from these three syzygies or pairs, making with the Supreme God a Hebdomad or Ogdoad as the case may be, come forth at separate removes a Decad and a Dodecad or two groups of five and six syzygies respectively; and that this collection of Divine beings made up the Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead. The same writers agree that all Valentinians also taught that the lowest member of the Pleroma fell away from the Godhead from ambition or some similar cause, strayed outside the Pleroma and necessitated the creation of another Divine syzygy called Christ and the Holy Spirit to restore her to her place, and of a solitary Power called Horos or Stauros the “Limit” or the “Cross” to preserve the Pleroma from further contact with the Kenoma or the Void outside it. Before returning to the Pleroma, moreover, Sophia had given birth without male assistance to a being expressly compared to the “earth without form and void” of Genesis, which the last Divine Syzygy of Christ and the Holy Spirit before returning to the Godhead fashioned into an Æon as perfect as those within it.94 On finding herself alone, however, this Sophia Without, as she was called, suffered several “passions” or emotions:—fear, grief, perplexity, and supplication—and she prayed to the Syzygy which had given her form for deliverance from them. In answer to her prayers, yet another Divine Emanation came forth from the Godhead. This was “Jesus, the Great High Priest,” to whose formation every one of its members had contributed whatever was best and brightest in the nature of each. Jesus in His emanation went immediately to the consolation of Sophia Without, stripped her of her passions and remained with her as her spouse in what is called the Heavenly Jerusalem to reign with her over all that is without the Godhead. As for her passions, since they could not be destroyed, they were made, say the Valentinians quoted by Hippolytus, into different substances or essences—her fear into the essence of the soul, her grief into that of matter, and her perplexity into that of demons, while of her supplication He made “a path for repentance.” The essence of the soul, which is called by several names suggesting the God of Moses, became the Architect of the Cosmos or ordered world, and rules, without being aware of the existence of the Powers superior to himself, in the Heavenly Jerusalem or Ogdoad, over the Seven Heavens. The more material Cosmos or ordered world of matter is, according to the same writer, ruled by a Power called Diabolos, perhaps the Accuser or Adversary, and the Chaos, which is below all, by Beelzebub the prince of the devils.95
It may, of course, be thought that by putting forth ideas so much opposed to our modern ideas of Christianity, Valentinus was irreconcilably cutting himself off from the Catholic Church. But is it certain that the Fathers, who report the doctrine of his successors, really understood Valentinus in this respect? The idea of allegory in an Oriental mind is not exactly the same as in our own, and with the Egyptian especially, it is always difficult to tell whether he is not taking what we see at once to be metaphor as the narration of actual fact. Thus, the rise of the Nile is, as every ancient Egyptian very well knew, caused by the sudden influx of water coming down after the seasonal rains from the Abyssinian highlands. Yet the way in which he chose to describe it was that the goddess Isis let drop a tear into the river which went on swelling in volume until it reached the sea. Nor is the reverse process unknown. In the Coptic text known as the Book of Resurrection, Judas Iscariot when in Amente has his mouth filled with thirty snakes “so that they might devour him,” and if this statement stood by itself, we might believe that it was actual snakes which were meant. But the writer (supposed to be St. Bartholomew the Apostle) goes on to say that the name of the first snake is “Remoteness from God,” of the seventh “Haughtiness of Heart,” of the twelfth “Hypocrisy,” of the eighteenth “Treachery” and so on.96 Irenæus and Tertullian are agreed that certain Valentinians explained the names of their Supreme Ogdoad as a mere figure of speech showing the steps by which the Divine Nature became appreciable by man. When, they said, God thought of producing offspring He acquired the name of Father; and because His offspring was true, the name of Truth; and because he wished to appear in human form, he was called Man; and because He assembled His attributes in His mind and chose from them those best fitted for His purpose, they were called the Church.97 I have shown elsewhere that all the names of the male and female members of the Decad and Dodecad attributed to Valentinus can in like manner be read so as to make a connected sentence;98 and the way in which the Fathers deceived themselves in such matters has lately been shown by the brilliant discovery of an American scholar that thirty words of apparent gibberish which Epiphanius gives as the names of the thirty Æons of Valentinus’ Pleroma, are really the fragments of a Valentinian hymn describing how the Celestial Light came to be in every Place and restored tranquillity to the worlds.99 There is therefore considerable reason to think that the statements of Irenæus and the other heresiologists on Valentinus’ division of the Godhead need not be taken as literally and exactly accurate; and it is noticeable that while the number of beings within the Pleroma is sometimes represented by them as thirty, it is sometimes twenty-eight and sometimes thirty-three. The same discrepancies are marked in the old Egyptian religion from which, if I am right, Valentinus drew his phraseology. All that we can say, therefore, with certainty as to Valentinus’ views regarding the Godhead is that he believed it manifested itself in three successive stages of emanation. The most convincing proof that this was the fundamental point of his teaching can perhaps be found in the manner in which Hippolytus, at the end of his account of it, drags in the second epistle of Plato about the Good Source of All and its secondary and tertiary developments as evidence of Valentinus’ Platonizing.100
The other great and distinguishing feature of Valentinus’ teaching was the story of Sophia. This is found in no other heresy but the Ophite, where it takes a form so much grosser and coarser than that of Valentinus as to betray its connection with the myths current in Western Asia long before our Era; and I have before suggested that it was probably from Ophite sources that Valentinus constructed his story. In doing so, he refined it, and instead of making Sophia’s fall from the Godhead a mere accident, he portrayed it as the result of disobedience and emulation, while her eventual return thereto was the result of her repentance. That the Demiurge or Architect of the Universe was brought into being by her, and that Matter is his creation, while the Divine spark in man comes from Sophia Without, who in her turn depends upon the Sophia within the Pleroma, appears plainly from a “psalm” by Valentinus himself quoted by Hippolytus.101 We see, then, that the fundamental points of Valentinus’ teaching were the manifestation of the Godhead in three successive stages, the story of Sophia’s Fall through error and her restoration by repentance, and the dependence of the lower and more material parts of the Universe upon the higher ones. We shall see later that these are also the foundations of the system disclosed in the earlier documents of the Pistis Sophia.
Before considering this, however, it will be well to see if our text was so entirely unknown to the Fathers as has been generally assumed. We know from Eusebius that it was the policy of the triumphant Church after the pact with Constantine to destroy all the writings of the heretics, and that this policy was continuous is shown by the advice given by St. Augustine to burn, without regard for their volume or beauty, all the manuscripts of the Manichæans. Hence we can hardly expect quotations to be as direct and as accurate as those which the Fathers made, as I have said elsewhere, from the different summaries of heathen philosophers then current, and could not have been suppressed by them had they tried to do so. But there are many allusions to phrases and words peculiar to our MS. which seem to support the view that it was used in some form or other by the early heresiologists and especially by Tertullian, who both as a lawyer striving to prove his case at all hazards and as a rebel (as he finally proved to be) against ecclesiastical discipline, would be less likely to be cautious in such matters than high officers of the Church like Irenæus and Hippolytus. We find Tertullian in his attack on the Valentinians quoting a remark about those who seek God in simplicity of heart from “the Sophia not of Valentinus, but of Solomon.” The quotation is of course from the extra-Canonical Book of Wisdom to be found in the Apocrypha of the Thirty-nine Articles; and it is, as Amélineau has well said, most natural that a book should be compared to a book. But it would be contrary to the whole tenour of Valentinian ideas as they have come down to us, that the “æon” or emanation or goddess Sophia should be supposed to write books, and it results that Tertullian must have been referring to a book by Valentinus bearing the title of Sophia.102 We may fairly look, then, on the hypothesis just stated, in our MS. for expressions attributed by Tertullian to Valentinus, and of these we find a fair number. Thus in the same book Adversus Valentinianos (c. 27), Tertullian says that the Valentinians spoke of Christ coming upon Jesus “in the form of a dove,” which are the very words which the opening of our Second Document puts into the mouth of St. John. Later, he speaks of the Pneumatici or Spiritual Ones “despoiling” themselves by putting off their earthly souls, which is the expression used ad nauseam in the same Second Document for the process used by the higher Powers and by Jesus Himself with regard to these heavenly natures. So, again, in the treatise de Resurrectione Carnis (c. 32), Tertullian speaks of the flesh of man being created ex faecibus terrae “from the dregs of the earth,” which is the explanation made by Jesus to St. Andrew in the last words of the same Document; and the parallel is more close because one or other of the many Sophias in the Valentinian system was always identified with the earth. Again, in the treatise de Scorpiace (c. 4), he speaks of the hidden sacraments of the heretics—by which phrase the ante-Nicene Fathers nearly always mean the Valentinians—and the answers which the soul must make when arraigned before the veras potestates et veros homines, “powers and men of Truth,” the “Teleti and Abascanti and Akineti of Valentinus,” of which names some are to be found in the long catalogue of transcendental Powers inhabiting the heaven of Truth in the Second Document. So, too, in the Adversus Valentinianos (c. 35), he speaks of many Powers distinguished by prefixes like Prae and An which according to him occupied a very high place in the Valentinian Pantheon, and which correspond fairly to the Proachoreti, the Protripneumata, and the Hypertripneumata in the last-mentioned catalogue. Nor is Tertullian here entirely alone among the Fathers of the period. Irenæus, cautious as he is not to quote the name of powers reverenced by the heretics, says (II. xlvii. p. 368 H.) that there is no Pleroma of thirty Æons... nec lumen virginale, nec Æon innominabilis, under cover of which general expressions it is plain that he is referring to the Virgin of Light and the “Great Unseen Forefather” of our First Document. So, too, Hippolytus (Philosophumena, VI. 30, p. 283, Cr.), by a sort of slip of the pen, calls Sophia “the youngest of all the twenty-four” (not thirty or twenty-eight or thirty-three) Æons which she is indeed said to be in our First Document. Finally, Origen writing long after Valentinus and his immediate successors had passed away, speaks of the heretical stories of “doors opening of their own accord,” an episode which occurs nowhere else, so far as I know, than in Jesus’ account of His upward journey in the same Document.103
We see, then, that there are adequate grounds for supposing that the main documents of our MS. or perhaps those upon which, according to the German commentators,104 they are themselves based, are by Valentinus, and that in any case the Greek original from which the Coptic translation was made, must be earlier than A.D. 170. This, however, does not apply to the Interpolated Fragment, which in its present form it is impossible to date, although, as I have before said, I should myself be inclined to guess that it once formed part of the story of Jesus’ upward flight. To continue this until it described the Saviour’s entry into the realms of the Ineffable One would hardly have seemed too daring to a writer acquainted, as ours evidently was, with the literature that passes under the name of Enoch, and the author of the part of the Bruce Papyrus which Dr. Schmidt calls “Unbekanntes altgnostiche Werk,” plunges into a description of the Source of All Being which leaves nothing to be desired on the ground of temerity. But this last is, on the face of it, a much later document than the history of Pistis Sophia, and on the whole it is better to say nothing further as to the authorship or date of the Fragment.
The case is different when we come to our Third Document to which the Fragment has somehow been prefixed. While the first two Documents are, as has been said, probably by Valentinus, it is perfectly certain that this cannot be the case with the Third. Valentinus was, as his opponents admitted, a man of genius who for a time must have held a leading position in the Christian world, and had he been made Pope, might possibly have introduced a syncretistic religion like that of Manes two centuries later, and have attempted to fit into the Gospel narrative elements borrowed from the Egyptian, the Persian, and the Buddhist religions. But of these, the Egyptian, which Valentinus was naturally most anxious to amalgamate with Christianity, had long since sunk into what has been called “a systematised sorcery,” and the result of his attempt to pour new wine into old bottles was not long in showing itself. Between the times of Valentinus and of Irenæus a Jewish magician named Marcus produced a system which anticipates many of the childish processes of the Mediæval Cabala, and attempted to turn Valentinus’ account of the Pleroma into a senseless juggling with the numerical value of the Greek letters.105 Such foolishness seems to have been popular in Egypt, Catholic writers themselves not being entirely free from it,106 and to this Marcus added according to Irenæus, sacraments with invocations in some Hebrew jargon assisted by tricks which caused the consecrated wine to change colour and to overflow the cup. Our Third Document, though not going so far in this respect as the Fourth, tends manifestly in this direction, and although it resembles the story of Pistis Sophia in being in the form of a dialogue between Jesus and His disciples, it has very little in common with it. The constitution of the Universe, which it rather assumes than describes, is indeed the same, and the First Mystery and the Ineffable One are still mentioned with reverence as being “merciful and compassionate and forgiving sins alway.” Save for this, however, there is nothing to connect it with Valentinus’ more sublime ideas, and the whole purport of the questions asked by the disciples and the answers of the Saviour is how the “mysteries” which Jesus has brought with Him are to be used to enable their recipients to avoid the consequences of their sins and thus to go after death to “inherit the Kingdom of Light.” All this is reminiscent throughout of the Book of the Dead and the other Egyptian funerary texts, and the likeness is increased when, as before said, we read in it of “mysteries” which, when spoken into the ears of the dying or repeated over the dead, or even the knowledge gained during life of the names of certain Powers set over punishments, will afford the dwellers in Amente and the other hells deliverance from their tortures and will finally admit them into the Kingdom. These have already been sufficiently dealt with in the last part of the Introduction to make further reference to them unnecessary, and the conclusion there come to, that the whole of this Document is magical rather than religious must only be repeated. That the four-fold division of man’s incorporeal part comes from the belief of Pagan Egypt hardly needs demonstration when we see how closely the Spirit Counterfeit of our text corresponds to the Ka or double, while the Fate which leads every man to his appointed death is a familiar personage in Egyptian folk-lore. If in the description of the cup of oblivion, the author for once seems to borrow from Plato, it is by no means certain whence Plato drew his fable, if not from Egypt itself.107
One must see, then, I think, in the Third Document the work of a Valentinian, but of one of late date, who had slipped back, as the whole sect probably did, into the systematised sorcery of his ancestor’s faith, and whose Christianity mainly consisted in putting the account of the semi-magical “mysteries” or secrets by which he hoped to escape the horrors of hell, into the mouth of its Founder. But there are also many other signs that this must have been later in date than the two first Documents. The author shows a much greater acquaintance with the letter of the New Testament than his predecessors, and while those quote almost entirely from Matthew, the quotations in the Third Document are taken largely from Luke. The author goes so far in one place as to quote from the Epistle to the Romans as having been written by “our brother Paul,”108 which some writers think did not appear until well on in the second century. The author, too, frequently refers to the persecutions and the “torments which are in the law” as something imminent and pressing on all Christians alike, and this can hardly be said of any measures taken before the reign of Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211), when Valentinus had long been dead. The story of the woman who “came to repent” and the subsequent command to St. Peter to “perform the mystery which will cut off this soul from the Kingdom of Light,” together with the many mysteries enumerated as exercising a magical effect on the living and the dead, argue an established and regulated ritual which can hardly have been organised in the lifetime of Valentinus or of his immediate successors, Ptolemy and Heracleon.109
Lastly, Dr. Schmidt, following therein Prof. Harnack, attributes the curious argument in this Third Document as to “a King of to-day” who gives gifts to a man equal to himself, clothes him with “the vestures of a King,” and pardons him for the most heinous crimes, to an episode in the reign of Philip the Arabian recounted in the Augustan History.110 There seems the more reason in this contention that the argument—bad though it may be ethically—comparing the Emperor’s proceeding to the pardon extended by the Highest Powers to the worst of sinners, is dragged in, as it were, by the neck and heels. But if it be this episode which is really hinted at in our Third Document, this last cannot be put earlier than A.D. 244 or 250, the dates of Philip’s accession—and death.
Passing on to the Fourth Document, there is no need to emphasise what has been already said in the preceding chapter of this Introduction as to the ever-increasing use therein of the practices of magic and astrology as shown in the galimatias with which the prayers of Jesus are prefaced and the pre-ponderating part in man’s destiny assigned in it to the stars. Dr. Schmidt and Prof. Harnack follow their predecessor Köstlin in regarding this as evidence of a more primitive form of heresy than that which is taught in the earlier documents; but the argument is really the other way. The same galimatias is found in the Græco-Egyptian Magic Papyri none of which is assigned on palæographic grounds to an earlier date than the third century, and the various “magical prayers” which can be found in the Ethiopic MSS. published by Sir Ernest Wallis Budge reproduce the same feature ad nauseam. It is found, too, in the very late so-called “Gnostic” Papyrus of Turin, where the “Eli, Eli lama sabachthani” spoken on the Cross is numbered in entire ignorance of its context among “the glorious names of God”;111 while we know from other sources that the practice of astrology became so frequent under the Christian Emperors that its use had to be limited by law. The same assumption that words unintelligible to both writers and readers form part of a “Divine language” appears strongly marked in even orthodox Christian literature of the post-Constantinian centuries, as in the series of Coptic Apocrypha lately acquired for the British Museum which in their present form are not put earlier than the tenth century.112 Another proof of a late date for this Fourth Document can be found in its concluding words about the Great Name which, although the belief can be traced to the ancient Egyptian tale of the Illness of Râ, in the form here given already approaches the stories to the same effect in the Mediæval Cabala.
The Fifth Document need not detain us long, as nearly all that can be said about it has been said above. But the picture of the murderer’s soul tied by the tongue to a great demon in the shape of a horse is found again in the Coptic Life of Bishop Pisentius which mentions the invasion of the Persians in the reign of Heraclius and cannot therefore be earlier than the end of the seventh century.113 The descriptions of the torments of hell, without being identical, are cast in the same mould as those in the Apocalypse of Paul, which is attributed to the year 380 A.D. The doctrine that it is the nature of the sins committed by the soul which determine the bodily infirmities allotted to it in its next incarnation also first appears formally stated, so far as I am aware, in the Acta Archelai written for the refutation of the teaching of Manes, and therefore not earlier than the end of the third century. It was probably this which led Lipsius to think that he could perceive Manichaean features in our text.
To sum up, then, I believe that all the Documents in our text belong to the School of Valentinus. As to date, the First and the greatest part of the Second are probably taken from documents written by Valentinus himself, and therefore before A.D. 160, while the last part of the Second, and the whole of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth, are by the degenerate successors of his school and are arranged in date order. These last may be of any date between A.D. 245 and 388, when we last hear of the Valentinians as an organised sect, and some parts of them may not improbably be later still.