Notice on the Bruce Gnostic Papyrus (1891) - Page 18

THE
GNOSTIC
BRUCE
PAPYRUS.

considerable number of Greek words: this proof might please and seem good to a number of serious minds; but frequent commerce with Coptic works has shown me that this use cannot provide a base for a serious argument, because the use of Greek words was considered by Coptic authors as an ornament of style, just as among their ancestors of the Pharaonic times the use of Semitic words was. As for the epoch when this translation was made, I cannot fix it; there is no data to resolve the problem; but it seems necessary to me to admit that this translation must have been made at a time when Gnosticism was in Egypt in all its efflorescence and vogue, that is to say in the second and third century of our era. The two great Egyptian Gnostics, Basilides and Valentinus, we know this with certainty, traveled the nomes districts of Egypt to recruit adherents to their systems: likely they did not address themselves only to Greeks or to indigenous people knowing Greek: they themselves must have known Egyptian, and the use of several words of Egyptian origin in certain formulas of their works shows that they knew it; they must have therefore taken care that their works were translated and perhaps they translated them themselves. As regards the author of the double work that I publish and translate, he certainly knew the ancient symbolic and monumental writing of Egypt, the hieroglyphs; for in several places, in the seals of his aeons eternal realms/divine emanations, he uses hieroglyphic signs having barely undergone a slight deformation or having undergone none at all; such are the signs of the lyre, of the basin, of the water, etc. 1.

I will develop, moreover,

1) These signs are found in the seals, that is to say, the Gnostic amulets, that the disciples had to hold in their hand while penetrating into each aeon. One will easily recognize the hieroglyphs an ankh or crux ansata, a horizontal rectangle representing a basin or stone block, and three horizontal wavy lines representing water, etc.