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

INTRODUCTION.

The explanation given by Köstlin see below cannot be verified. It is not stated when the Museum purchased it. It was clearly before the major sale of the Askew library, which lasted twenty days in 1785, because the Pistis Sophia Faith Wisdom is not mentioned in the catalogue original Latin: "Bibliotheca Askeviana Manuscripta, etc., 1785"; Manuscript Library of Askew; see Askew, A., British Museum Catalogue. The manuscript is written on vellum in Greek uncial rounded capital letters used in ancient manuscripts letters and is in the Upper Egyptian dialect, called Thebaidic or Sahidic. It consists of 346 quarto pages written in double columns. For the most part, it is in an excellent state of preservation, though several pages are badly defaced and a number are faint. Perhaps the most competent expert who has yet given a decided opinion regarding its date is Woide, whose knowledge of such matters was very extensive and is difficult to surpass. It was Woide who edited the New Testament based on the text of the famous Codex Alexandrinus Alexandrian Book using uncial types cast to imitate those of the manuscript in 1786. In an appendix to this great undertaking in 1799, he added certain fragments of the New Testament in the Thebaic-Coptic dialect, along with a dissertation on the Coptic version of the New Testament. The date of the Codex Alexandrinus is generally assigned to the fifth century. With the exception of the Codex Vaticanus Vatican Book and the Codex Sinaiticus Sinai Book, which are sometimes assigned to the fourth century, it is the oldest extant manuscript of the New Testament. Given this context, it is interesting to read Woide’s description and opinion of the manuscript of Pistis Sophia, which was lent to him so he could copy it from the first word to the last. Woide was, therefore, uniquely qualified to form an opinion. Indeed, no one of equal fitness seems to have appeared in the field since his time. In Cramer’s Beyträge the work cited below, pages 82 and following, Woide wrote the following in 1778: "It [Pistis Sophia] is a very old manuscript in quarto on parchment in Greek uncial characters, which are not as round as those in the Alexandrine manuscript in London, and in the Claromontain manuscript in Paris the Codex Regius Parisiensis, also an Alexandrine text.

INTRODUCTION.

The characters of the manuscript [Pistis Sophia] are somewhat longer and more angular. Therefore, I consider them to be older than both the latter manuscripts, in which the letters eta, theta, omicron, rho, and sigma are much rounder. There are no capital letters in the entire book. The letters are all equal, except at the ends of lines where there are sometimes smaller letters to fit the word in. There are no other marks of distinction beyond a full stop or colon. The words are not separated from each other. The paragraphs are not distinguished by breaks, but by full stops. At the beginning of the book, the second part, and the two appendices, the first letter does not project from the line. If a paragraph begins with the line, I have sometimes, though seldom, observed that the first letter projects. If a paragraph begins in the middle of a line, the first letter of the following line is sometimes, but not often, somewhat advanced. Here and there, a section is also noted on the edge by a mark that looks almost like a Greek zeta the letter Z, or by a line from the edge to above the word. If the paragraph starts at the beginning of the line, the marks are on the same line. If it begins in the middle of the line, they are at the beginning of the following line. The folios are numbered in Greek letters."

Thus, we see that Woide dates the manuscript to the late fourth century at the latest. It is also quite evident that the entire manuscript, from start to finish, is by the same hand and is a copy of another manuscript. There are also a few corrections at the top or bottom of the columns by a hand from the same period. An inspection of its contents reveals the further undeniable fact that the Coptic text was not only a translation from a Greek original, but that it has preserved an enormous quantity of the original Greek terms without any attempt at translation. This is immediately visible from Schwartze’s Latin version, in which he also preserved these innumerable Greek words without translation.

The entire style of the work, moreover, is foreign to