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

INTRODUCTION.

copies were made, and mistakes may have crept in. One of these copies was carried up the Nile and translated into the vernacular Coptic, Greek being but little understood so high up the river. The translator was evidently not a very accurate person, as may be seen from his casual insertion of scraps from other books; moreover, his knowledge of the subject was so superficial that he had to leave many terms in the original, and doubtless made guesses at others. It is also probable that he added some things and subtracted others on the score of orthodoxy, as may be seen by an inspection of the rest of the fragments of Valentinus a 2nd-century Gnostic teacher. The wearisome length of the Psalms, for instance, which Pistis Sophia Faith Wisdom recites in her repentances, followed by the shorter excerpts from the Salomonic Odes Odes of Solomon, leads one to suppose that Valentinus quoted only a few striking verses from each Psalm; and that the more orthodox translator, with that love of wearisome repetition so characteristic of monkish piety, added the other less apposite verses, with which he was very familiar, while he was compelled to leave the Salomonic Odes as they stood owing to his lack of acquaintance with the originals.

Moreover, the translator must have either translated, or possessed a translation of, The Books of the Saviour and The Books of Ieou. These were also most probably a compilation of Valentinus, or perhaps The Books of the Saviour were a compilation of Valentinus from the older Books of Ieou, which may have belonged to the Ethiopic Enochian literature, for they are stated in the Pistis Sophia (pages 246 and 354) to have been written down in Paradise by Enoch, and preserved from the Flood.

The manuscript of the Coptic translator was copied towards the end of the fourth century by some ignorant copyist, who made many mistakes of orthography. It was copied by one man, as a task, and hurriedly executed; and I should suggest that two copies were then made and occasionally a page of one copy substituted for a page of the other; and, as the pages were not quite exact to a word or phrase,

INTRODUCTION.

we thus may account for some puzzling repetitions and for equally puzzling lacunæ missing gaps in the text.

What was the history of the manuscript after that date is almost impossible even to conjecture. Its history must, however, have been exciting enough for it to have escaped the hands of fanatics both Christian and Mohammedan. It was during this period also that some of the pages, as we have seen, were lost. May we not also hope that Abyssinia modern-day Ethiopia and Upper Egypt may still preserve some manuscripts that may throw further light on this obscure but most interesting subject? In fact, I was told in 1891 by Achinoff, chief of the Free Cossacks and a resident in the country, that the monasteries of Abyssinia do actually contain a mass of very ancient manuscripts which would be of exceeding great value to the scholarship of Europe.

The translator's defense.

In presenting the following translation to the English-reading public, I may say that I should not have ventured on such an undertaking if any Coptic scholar had undertaken the task, or I had heard that such a task was contemplated. In a matter of such difficulty every possible liability to error should be eliminated, and it stands to reason that the translation of a translation must needs be but an apology for a first-hand version. Nevertheless I am not without predecessors. The Coptic manuscript itself is in the first place a translation, so that even Coptic scholars must give us the translation of a translation. I am persuaded also that the anonymous and imperfect French translation in the Appendix to Migne's Dictionary of the Apocrypha original: "Dictionnaire des Apocryphes" (vol. i.) is made from Schwartze's Latin version and not from the Coptic text. C. W. King in his Gnostics and their Remains has also translated a number of pages of the Pistis Sophia from Schwartze. Some three or four years ago Mr. Nutt, King's publisher, sent out a notice for the publication of the whole of King's translation, but the project fell through. Last year I offered to edit this translation of King's, but was informed that the literary legatee of the deceased scholar was of