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

INTRODUCTION.

the Coptic idiom, as can be seen from Amélineau's Introduction to his French version (page x), where he writes:

"Anyone with knowledge of the Coptic language knows that this idiom is foreign to long sentences. It is a language that is eminently analytic and not at all synthetic. Its sentences are composed of small clauses that are exceedingly precise and almost independent of each other. Of course, not all Coptic authors are equally easy; some are even extremely difficult to understand. However, it is certain that we never encounter those periods in Coptic with complicated incidental sentences of three or four different clauses whose elements are synthetically united so that the sense of the entire sentence cannot be grasped before arriving at the last clause. Nevertheless, this is exactly what the reader meets in this work. The sentences are so entangled with incidental and complicated propositions that often, indeed very often, the Coptic translator has lost the thread, so to speak, and turned incidental clauses into main propositions. Consequently, we find the continuation of the first proposition three or four pages later. This peculiarity does not make it easy to translate a work whose ideas are already very difficult to comprehend. The one thing it conclusively proves is that the book was originally written in a learned language. Therefore, none of the spoken idioms of the East could have been the original language in which the work was conceived and written. We must accordingly choose between Greek and Latin. Only one of these languages at this period, the second century the date assigned to the original by Amélineau, is at all likely in Egypt, namely, Greek."

Amélineau perhaps overemphasizes the abstruse nature of the subject. Although many passages are transcendently mystical, the whole is conceived in a narrative or descriptive style. There is no attempt at philosophical argument or involved logical propositions.

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INTRODUCTION.

There may also be another reason, as we shall suggest later, for the "losing of the thread." Nevertheless, the main argument of this learned Coptic scholar cannot be answered.

General analysis of contents.

It is evident that we are dealing with a translation into Coptic from Greek. It is also clear that we are not dealing with a single work, but with at least two treatises. Fragments of one have been inserted in two places within the main treatise, and a larger fragment is appended at the end of the manuscript. The main narrative is also broken by several important lacunæ missing sections or gaps. In one case, this is due to the loss of several leaves of the manuscript, but generally, it is due to the carelessness of the scribe. The manuscript is, moreover, evidently incomplete.

A general analysis of the contents reveals the following outline, with references to the page numbers of the manuscript used in Schwartze's text, which are kept in brackets in this translation.

However, there is no title for Book I. There does not seem to be any reason why the title "The Second Book of Pistis Sophia" is inserted where it is, right in the middle of the narrative.

Book II ends halfway down page 357. The entire subject then changes abruptly with the heading, "Extract from the Books of the Saviour."

In addition to these three main divisions of the manuscript, two pages (253-254) with the same heading, "Extract from the Books of the Saviour," are inserted randomly in the middle of Book II. They have no connection to what comes before or after. They are also not quite of the same nature as the longer extract at the end of the manuscript.

Furthermore, there is a note that occupies the last column of Book I. It has no reference to the rest of the narrative. Why it is inserted there remains a