Pistis sophia. A gnostic gospel (with extracts from the books of the saviour appended)

This work has been carried out by scholars such as Massuet, Beausobre, and Mosheim in the last century, and in the present by Neander, Matter, Baur, Möller, Lipsius, and others who will be mentioned later.

The general literature on this subject includes Church Histories by Neander, Baur, and Schaff. Specific titles include Neander's Genetic Development of Gnosticism original: "Genet. Entw. d. Gnost." (Tübingen, 1831); Burton's Bampton Lectures on Heresies of the Apostolic Age (Oxford, 1830); Möhler's Origin of Gnosticism original: "Ursprung d. Gnost." (Tübingen, 1831); Baur's The Christian Gnosis original: "D. christl. Gnosis" (Tübingen, 1835); Norton's History of the Gnostics (Boston, 1845); Möller's History of Cosmology original: "Gesch. d. Kosmologie" (Halle, 1860); Lipsius's Gnosticism original: "D. Gnosticismus" (Leipzig, 1860); Harnack's Source Criticism of the History of Gnosticism original: "Zur Quellencritik d. Gesch. d. Gnost." (Leipzig, 1873); and Mansel's Gnostic Heresies (London, 1875).

Research into this obscure subject has produced one of the most brilliant examples of scholarship ever recorded. R. A. Lipsius, a professor of divinity at the University of Jena, achieved this in his Source Criticism of Epiphanius original: "Quellencritik des Epiphanios" (1865). Using the accounts of Epiphanius and Philaster, he partially reconstructed the lost Syntagma collection of treatises of Hippolytus, which was described by Photius. This treatise was based on certain discourses by Irenæus. By comparing the works of Philaster, Epiphanius, and the author known as Pseudo-Tertullian, Lipsius recovered the ideas of Hippolytus. By comparing this restored work with Irenæus, he identified a common source, likely the lost Syntagma of Justin. I also suggested in my 1892 essay on Simon Magus that it might be the work from which Justin originally obtained his information.

This brilliant academic effort was prompted by a renewed interest in Gnostic studies following a lucky discovery. In 1842, Minoides Mynas, a Greek scholar on a mission for the French government, found a fourteenth-century manuscript in a monastery on Mount Athos. This manuscript claimed to be a Refutation of All Heresies in ten books, though the first three and a half books were missing. Emmanuel Miller published the first edition of this find at Oxford in 1851.

Miller incorrectly attributed the work to Origen. However, further research proved the author was actually Hippolytus Romanus, the Bishop of Ostia, during the first quarter of the third century. See Bunsen, Hippolytus and His Age, 1852; Döllinger, Hippolytus and Kallistus, 1853, translated into English by Plummer; and Wordsworth, St. Hippolytus and the Church of Rome, 1880. This treatise is titled Philosophumena Philosophical Teachings or the Refutation of All Heresies. It is the most important work on Gnosticism written by a Church Father because it contains long quotations from original Gnostic documents. In 1859, Duncker published an excellent version of the text with a Latin translation. In 1860, Cruice published a less reliable version in Paris. English readers can find a translation by J. H. Macmahon in the Ante-Nicene Christian Library titled The Writings of Hippolytus (1868).

Interestingly, the Pistis Sophia Faith-Wisdom, the document we are now studying, first gained general attention in 1851, the same year the Philosophumena was published.

Among the Gnostic works that have survived, this Coptic codex manuscript book is the most valuable. The only other major Gnostic relic known to have survived time and the destruction caused by religious vandalism is a Coptic papyrus called the Codex Brucianus, kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. That same library also holds another Coptic manuscript, a small book of 236 pages titled Treatise on the Mysteries of the Greek Letters, which includes an Arabic translation. The author was a priest named Atasius. Like the Gnostic teacher Marcus, Atasius used the shapes and names of the Greek alphabet to explain the development of doctrines.