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 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 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 school[42] 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.