Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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]