Part 3

A great part of the Document is likewise taken up by the questions of Mary Magdalene and the other disciples, among whom John is the most insistent, as to the sinners to whom they shall give their mysteries and the effect which they will have on them. We who hear in this Document of a mystery or secret whereby the dead can be raised, the sick healed, and other wonders performed, although Jesus tells His disciples that this mystery belongs to the Archons or wicked Rulers of the Stars and is not to be used save for the purpose of establishing the faith throughout the world.[30] We also have much in this Document as to the soul or incorporeal part of man which the disciples are told consists of the Power, the Soul proper, the Spirit Counterfeit, and the Fate. Of these, the Power is the most worthy and causes the man to seek after the mysteries, and the soul is really the Life or Breath and is made either out of the _ejecta_ of the Rulers or from the dregs or grosser parts of the Light which is at certain periods squeezed out of them by certain powers appointed for that purpose. The Spirit Counterfeit, on the other hand, is the envelope or mask of the soul which constantly leads it to commit sin and bears witness after death to its having done so, while the Fate is the death to which the man is predestined, and which he can never escape while uninitiate.[31] Incidentally, too, we hear a good deal in this Document as to the Gnostic belief in the transmigration of souls, reincarnation being obligatory on such souls as have not found the more sublime mysteries.[32] Several formulas are also given whereby the soul can cut itself loose from the Spirit Counterfeit and the Fate, and we are told that even an uninitiated person can escape from the torments of the Dragon of Outer Darkness if one of the names of the reptile be said by or for him. Throughout this Document the tortures of the different hells and the beast-shaped demons who administer them are much dwelt upon. Finally, Jesus tells His disciples that He came to earth to bring these mysteries, and that had He not done so neither Patriarchs nor Prophets would have entered into the Light.[33]

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The opening sentence of the FOURTH DOCUMENT shows plainly that it comes from a book written independently of the preceding ones and not as their continuation. It ignores completely the tradition held in the time of the Antonines by orthodox and heretic alike, that Jesus spent many years on earth after the Resurrection,[34] and announces that after He “rose from among the dead the third day,” His disciples gathered round Him reminding Him that they had left the whole world to follow Him.[35] Then begins a scene that reminds one irresistibly of the magical practices rife during the first three centuries of our Era, some details of which have come down to us in the _Philosophumena_ and in the different Magic Papyri to be found in the Museums of Paris, London, Leyden, and Berlin. Jesus, standing by an altar by the side of the sea “Ocean,” makes invocation to His Father in words which are not gibberish, as at first sight they appear to be, but a jumble of Hebrew, Egyptian, and perhaps Persian words copied and re-copied by scribes ignorant of these languages until they are all but unrecognisable. He calls upon the name of the Father of the Treasurehouse of Light, whereupon the heavens open revealing the “true shapes” of the sun and moon, and Jesus and His disciples are uplifted to “the Middle Way which is below the Sphere.” Here the arrangement of the stars is explained to them and they learn that the rebellious Rulers who persisted in copulation were bound to the Sphere to the number of 1800 for each sign of the Zodiac, under the rule of 360 of that number, who are themselves under the sway of the five Planets, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter. Yet the author of this Document must have known, although he varies, the tradition of the First Document, for Jesus tells His hearers that these planets were strengthened by the infusion into Saturn of a Power from the Great Unseen God who projected Pistis Sophia, into Mars of a similar Power from one of the three Triple-powered Gods, into Mercury of one from another of the Triple Powers, and into Venus of one from “Pistis Sophia the daughter of Barbelo”[36]; while one from the “Little Sabaoth the Good,” a Power of higher rank than these last, who in the story of Pistis Sophia proper is described as supplying the Power which takes the place of Jesus’ own earthly soul, is cast into the planet Jupiter and is given rule over all the others. All these planets are given barbarous names in addition to their Greek ones, as are the Great Unseen God and the two Triple Powers, these last names appearing also in the Magic Papyri, while the names of both planets and Powers appear to have a real meaning.

Jesus then shows to His disciples the five torture-chambers of the Middle Way, each of them presided over by an “Authority,” who with his (or her) assistants has been chosen from among the rebellious Rulers. Each of these Authorities sees to the punishment of particular sins, which sins his or her ministers have “entered into man” and caused him to commit. Three of these presiding demons are females, one of them being the triple-faced Hecate still famous in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and among them we find the merciless Iakhthanabas already mentioned in the Third Document, and the Egyptian God Typhon. The different terms of punishment from 150 years downwards which sinful souls will suffer in these tortures of the Middle Way are all given, and it is expressly said that these places of torment will be dissolved when the two beneficent planets, Venus and Jupiter, come into certain positions in the Zodiac.[37] These Places are, it would seem, actually shown to the disciples, Jesus thereby in part fulfilling the promise made in the First Document to lead them through all the heavenly Places. He then restores the heavens to their normal condition, and returns with the disciples to the “Mountain of Galilee,” where he celebrates for them a sacrament with “fire and water, wine and blood.” The distribution of bread also forms part of this sacrament, and it is accompanied by a “sign” which we know from other sources was the conversion of one of the cups of wine into the water of baptism.[38] This “mystery” or sacrament is said to have the effect of remitting all the sins of the disciples, and they are told to perform the same ceremony for all those who will listen to their preaching. They remind Him that there are other Baptisms of Fire and the Holy Spirit of Light respectively, and He tells them that these are more excellent than any Mystery save only those of the Seven Sounds and of the Great Name of God, which if spoken to any demon will destroy him with all his tortures. He is apparently about to perform these for the benefit of the disciples when the Document abruptly ends with the gap left by the tearing-away of the four pages already noticed.

It must be noted that nearly all the first part of this Document is full of invocations or prayers couched in the apparent gibberish before mentioned, that “Mary”—whether the Mother of Jesus or the Magdalene is not stated—asks one question only, that the planet Venus is called “Bubastis,” Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew magic and astrology being present in nearly every line, while there is some little trace of Persian influence as well. It is also closely connected with one of the documents of the _Bruce Papyrus_, where the peculiar sacrament here celebrated by Jesus is described on similar lines and is followed by the celebration of the other already mentioned; while in another Document of the same Papyrus the name of Pistis Sophia is given in connection with a place of repentance. The story of the Samaritan woman and of the spear thrust at the Crucifixion is also mentioned in this Fourth Document, these being the first unmistakable quotations from the Fourth Gospel to be found in our text.

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The FIFTH DOCUMENT is, as has been said above, the shortest of all, and has lost its title in the gap of four leaves in the British Museum MS. It is entirely concerned with the punishments assigned to different sins; and as sedition, lust, and robbery with violence appear in the Fourth Document as sins punishable in the Middle Way, but are not mentioned in the present fragment, we may presume that they were dealt with in the part lacking, and probably occupied at least three of the missing pages. But the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit which Jesus is going to celebrate when the _lacuna_ occurs, if treated at the same length as in the _Bruce Papyrus_, can hardly have taken up less than the other five missing pages, and it is therefore plain that nothing in addition to these punishments can have occupied the missing beginning of this Document. After this the Fifth Document begins with a broken sentence containing the punishment of the man who curses, and then goes on to describe the punishment of the evil speaker, the murderer, the habitual thief, the proud man, the blasphemer, the sodomite, and the celebrant of the filthy parody of the Eucharist known as the Black Mass.[39] In one or other of those cases, the four hells of Amente, Chaos, the Middle Way, and the Outer Darkness are introduced, the punishments in them being successive, and we read again here the names of Ariel and Ialdabaoth who are mentioned in the Third Document, as those of torturers in Amente and Chaos respectively. So, too, we hear again of the cup of forgetfulness which in the Third Document is administered to the soul after it has been shown the punishments in order that it may profit nothing on reincarnation by its knowledge of their terrors. But here the punishments are so different from those formerly described that we see at once we are dealing with a different author. The sum total of the periods of punishment for cursing which are administered in all the different hells does not amount to more than four years as against the 133 assigned to it in the Fourth Document; and the penalty for slander is here given as no more than 30 years as against the same period of 133. The Receiver of Sabaoth Adamas, leader of the rebellious Rulers, now administers the cup of oblivion instead of as in the Third Document, the “Rulers of the head of the Æons,” and he is given the name of Ialuham, while the Receivers of Ariel, who are here mentioned for the first time in our text, are named Abiuth and Kharmon. The case of the uninitiated but righteous dead is also dealt with in answer to a question from John, but in a different manner from its treatment in the Third Document, as here the soul on coming out of the body is met by the Receivers of Bainkhookh or the planet Mercury, while the cup which takes away the baleful effect of the cup of oblivion is administered by a Receiver of the planet Jupiter[40]. It is also to be noted that in this Document for the first time the division of mankind into “righteous” and “wicked” bodies, which find or do not find, as the case may be, the mysteries of light, is made to depend entirely on the periodic disposition of the stars. When, it is said, the two beneficent planets Jupiter and Venus come before the Virgin of Light and the two maleficent Saturn and Mars behind her in the revolution of the Sphere, all the souls sent into the world will be good, and when the position is reversed, all will be wicked.[41] Here, too, for the first time, we are told that the form of the body on reincarnation depends on the sins committed by the soul in its last life,—that the soul of the proud man will be put into a body dumb and deformed, the soul of the thief into one lame and maimed and blind—and so on.

It will therefore be seen that this Document is sufficiently connected with some of the preceding ones to warrant the supposition that it comes from the same school or sect, although it is noteworthy that neither in our Fourth nor our Fifth Document are the Ineffable One or the First Mystery ever referred to. The chief point in common between this Fifth Document and the _Bruce Papyrus_ is the mention of the Black Mass which appears in both Documents. A feature peculiar to this Document alone is the open reference to the Pagan Gods as fiends; and besides Typhon and Hecate, who have in truth a more or less malevolent character in the later Egyptian and Greek mythology, Adonis, one of the forms under which Osiris was worshipped at Alexandria, is made to take the soul of the thief to Amente, while “the high goddess” of Homer, Persephone, the much-loved daughter of the Eleusinian Demeter, figures as one of the tormentors in Chaos. The sentence about the journeys of the Apostles written on the blank leaf bound in with the rest of the volume has no perceptible connection with our text and may possibly be the work of some one who, suddenly coming across it in some other document and wishing to preserve it, seized upon this leaf as the only piece of parchment available.

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To sum up then: the MS. contains five principal documents together with a fragment which may or may not once have formed part of one of them. All are imperfect and are extracts from longer and possibly more coherent writings. Two of them—the _Pistis Sophia_ proper, and our Fourth Document—can be clearly distinguished as written by different authors, and the same can be said with nearly as much certainty with regard to the Third and Fifth. Yet the book from which the tale of Pistis Sophia was extracted must have been old enough to have gone through more than one recension, as is shown by the number of alternative readings duly noted in the MS. There are also in the details of the same story, blunders or contradictions which go to show that the translator or scribe had more than one MS. to work from; and these may have differed as much as do, for instance, the two versions of the (Coptic) _Book of the Resurrection_ attributed to St. Bartholomew and published by M. Lacau and Sir Ernest Wallis Budge from the MSS. in the _Bibliothèque Nationale_ and the British Museum respectively. This is the view taken by the German commentators on our text; but they are by no means in accord upon it, and it therefore does not seem necessary to do more here than refer to it.

3. PURPOSE AND COMPOSITION OF THE MS.

Why now was this miscellany made? Not certainly for edification or the use of the sect or school[42] whose doctrines it sets forth. Every Coptic inscription on tombstone or wall and nearly every Coptic religious text has at its head the words [Coptic], with God, generally accompanied by the so-called Coptic or Orbed Cross, itself an adaptation of the _ankh_ or symbol of life in Pagan Egypt. That this was the practice with heretics as well as orthodox Christians is shown by the _Bruce Papyrus_, which actually bears as its frontispiece such words and such a cross with the letters Α and Ω and which seems to be a reproduction of the Constantinian Labarum.[43] If, too, we put side by side the passages in our MS. and the _Bruce Papyrus_ which are practically identical—as is the case with the three sacraments or baptisms mentioned in the Fourth Document of our text—we find that the “seals” or diagrams, passwords, and names given in the Oxford MS. have all been omitted from the London book. No one who is familiar with the beliefs current in Pagan Egypt can mistake the reason of this omission, which is obviously to avoid the risk of their being used in magic.[44] A like precaution was taken with many chapters of the _Book of the Dead_ and becomes more insistent with every successive recension. It is absent from the Pyramid texts, doubtless because when these were once carved on the inside of a royal burying-place and the entrance closed, there was little risk of these being seen by unauthorised persons. The same reason doubtless operated in the same way with the wooden coffins of the eleventh dynasty on which the next recension was inscribed. But with the Theban recension of the New Empire, the case was changed. “Let no one outside know it. It is a mystery which is not known to the common people,” says the hundred and sixty-first chapter after directions to engrave it on the coffin of the dead. “Reveal it not to anyone, may he be thy father or thy son except thyself. It is a real mystery.”[45] So, too, with the Saite recension. “This book is most secret,” says the hundred and sixty-second chapter, which M. Pierret thinks was intended to be the last. “Let it not be seen by any man, for it is forbidden to know it. Let it be hidden. It is called the mistress of the hidden abode. This is the end.”[46] That similar ideas persisted into Christian times may be guessed from the Homily _de Magis_ ascribed to St. Ephraim in which the Homilist tells his hearers that in his day (circa A.D. 450) even the clergy resorted to magicians for these mysterious writings. “Instead of the blessings of the Saints,” he says, “they carry about the incantations of the magicians, and instead of the Holy Cross, they carry the books of devils ... and a child who knows nothing at all, carries about devil’s names and comes to church.”[47]

It was evidently, therefore, for the information of orthodox persons that our MS. was made, but not for that of the orthodox public generally, whether clerical or lay. Had it been so, it would have been weighted with a running commentary casting scorn upon its erroneous doctrines, or by so-called refutations like those which encumber the pages of heresiologists such as Irenæus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius. Had it been written by an ecclesiastic, moreover, it would certainly have borne some preface, or colophon, as does the _Philosophumena_, claiming merit for, and giving the date of the completion of the work.[48] Yet there is nothing in the present text to show that it was written by an ecclesiastic of any kind, while it follows from what has been said above that it was begun by a scribe who took unusual pains to ensure an accurate copy, and that when he handed over for a time the continuation of his work to a subordinate, he yet went over and corrected the latter’s work with as much care as he bestowed upon his own. All this suggests that it was made for official or judicial use; and the most reasonable guess is that it was the draft or copy of a legal document made for the enlightenment of some conciliar, episcopal, or even secular tribunal concerned in the suppression of heresy, such as the Inquisitors of the Faith set up by Theodosius. This would solve the problem which has so vexed the minds of commentators like Prof. Harnack and Dr. Schmidt as to the occurrence of the colophon “Part of the Books of the Saviour” at the foot of the Second and Third Documents. It is natural enough that the second or subaltern scribe, continuing the work of which only the first part was once thought sufficient, should preface the continuation by the title “The Second Tome of Pistis Sophia”; but that as he completed the copying of each subsequent extract stichometrically arranged, should add the words: “Part of the Books of the Saviour” to indicate the collection of MSS., probably seized in a raid by the Imperial authorities on some heretic’s library, from which they were all taken.