Pistis Sophia: The First Book

The Pistis Sophia ("Faith-Wisdom"), a Coptic Gnostic work in which the risen Jesus, on the Mount of Olives, teaches his disciples the structure of the heavens and the mysteries that lead souls through it. It survives in one manuscript, the Askew Codex (British Library Add. MS. 5114, bought by the British Museum in 1785), in Sahidic Coptic translated from a lost Greek original; the author is unknown, and scholars date the work to the second or (more often) the third century AD. The codex is not one book: its own headings divide it into sections that Mead's edition calls the First Book to A Sixth Book, and its scribe's title for the whole is a portion of "the Books of the Saviour". The First Book (chapters 1-62) opens eleven years after the resurrection: Jesus is taken up in a great light, the powers of the heavens are shaken, and on his return he tells the disciples how he passed through the spheres of the rulers, took a third of their power and altered their courses. From chapter 30 he begins the story of Pistis Sophia, the being who fell out of the thirteenth æon and was tormented in the chaos; her songs of repentance are given in the words of the Psalms and the Odes of Solomon, and the disciples interpret them in turn. This is G.R.S. Mead's English of 1921 (second edition); his Preface, Introduction, marginal captions and footnote are not reproduced, and his square brackets (supplied words) and "sc." glosses are kept. Mead's chapter numbers run on through all six books, and each paragraph is a verse. The book ends with a note added by a later hand ("the note of a scribe"), which is kept as its own verse. Not part of any church's canon.