Notice on the Bruce Gnostic Papyrus

THE GNOSTIC BRUCE PAPYRUS.

Amen, amen, amen, O God, my immutable [one]. I hymn you, O God, my immutable [one], for you have gathered me, etc. Of the two sigla, ☧ is most often used; the second is quite rare. As for the other two ☧ and ☧ which follow each other, they only occur once and seem to form a single word; they recall certain hieratic and demotic sigla quite strongly. I believe that they are used in the cited passage so as not to write the sacred name of the ineffable, unknowable, and incomprehensible God. As to knowing this name, that is a more difficult matter and one upon which I do not have an idea clear and settled enough to record here. When this document is studied, one will undoubtedly not fail to search for it; perhaps one will succeed! It is much more probable that one will fail.

I will be finished with the preliminary questions by saying that Woide's text is riddled with errors: there is not a single page that does not contain several, sometimes a great number. I have already said it above, but it is good to return to it here at greater length. The primary cause of these very numerous errors is twofold, and Woide is only partially responsible. The state of the manuscript at the time he copied it explains the errors of reading most often, for the signs were so faded that one could hardly read them with certainty, unless one had a very great knowledge of Gnostic systems and a profound science of the Coptic language. At the end of the last century, one could have neither one nor the other. It is therefore not surprising that a copyist, even a learned one, in such conditions, could have extracted from the original only a very imperfect copy. Moreover, it is evident, from Woide's own copy, that the scribe himself made a great number of errors; for, in the formulas that recur and that Woide had perfectly noticed, the scribe made gross errors.