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 Coptic[2] 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 viiileaf 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 ixmuch 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 xintroduction 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, xiwhom 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 xiihe 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 xiiiFathers 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 Theologie[14] and elsewhere, and after mature consideration, the present writer feels himself compelled to dissent from all three. The reasons for doing so xivwill 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]