Notice on the Bruce Gnostic Papyrus

THE
GNOSTIC
BRUCE
PAPYRUS.

possession of the papyrus in Upper Egypt. Indeed, the Coptic text relates to the dialect used in the Sa'ïd the Thebaid region of Egypt; it is thus beyond doubt that the papyrus comes from the Sa'ïd, even if Bruce had obtained it in the Delta. But if the origin of the manuscript is Theban, as Woïde asserts, it does not follow that the origin of the works contained in the manuscript is also Theban; I am convinced, on the contrary, that the original work was written in Greek. Indeed, the Gnostic doctors were men who had received, above all, a Hellenic culture; their systems prove peremptorily that they knew the works of the Greek philosophers, that they were imbued with them, and that they had allied them in their minds with purely Oriental ideas, stemming from the ancient religions of Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, or even India. The goal they proposed to themselves was to make an amalgam, as acceptable as they could, of ideas in vogue in the Orient, of Greek philosophy, and of nascent Christianity. To reach this goal, they had to use a language known to all cultivated minds; thus, according to everything we know from the Fathers of the Church or pagan authors, Gnostic works were written in the Greek language. Furthermore, the general texture of the Coptic sentence in the papyrus in question denotes a Greek influence; there are numerous periods that stem in a direct line from the Greek construction and which are absolutely unknown to the Egyptian construction. For those who are accustomed to texts of Egyptian origin, it is evident that the language is forced and that one makes it take forms to which it is not accustomed. For these reasons, therefore, I believe that the original of the double Gnostic treatise contained in the Bruce papyrus was written in Greek, then translated into Egyptian. I could find another proof of translation in the use of a