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 xvsix 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:—

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 xviKerasmos 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 xviiappear 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 xviiiMr. 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 xixdisciples 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, xxhow 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 diagram[26] of the different hierarchies of Powers or xxiarrangement 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 xxiirelation 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 xxiiiof 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]

xxivThe 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 xxvGod 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,” xxviEgyptian, 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 xxviithat 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 Jupiter[40]. 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 xxviiiworshipped 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.