Pistis Sophia

Pistis Sophia — G. R. S. Mead — Section 14

erroneously attributing it to Origen. Further research, however, demonstrated beyond a doubt that the autlior was Hippolytus Romauus, Bishop of Ostia, in the first quarter of the third century. (See Bunsen, Hippolytus and His Age, 1852; Dollinger, Hippolytus und Kallistus, 1853, of which there is an English translation by Plummer ; and Words- worth, St. Hippolytus and the Church of Rome, 1880, 2nd ed.) As this treatise, entitled Philosophumena or the Refu- tation of all Heresies, is by far the most important work on Gnosticism from the pen of any Church Father, owing to its lengthy quotations from original Gnostic documents, it may be useful to state here that in 1859 Duncker, after Schneidewin's death, edited and published his colleague's excellent text and moderate Latin translation at Gottingen ; in 1860 Cruice published a less reliable text and Latin translation at Paris ; and that the English reader will find a passable translation by J. H. Macmahou in the Ante- Nicene Christian Library entitled The Writings of Hippo- lytus, vol. i., 1868. Curiously enough it was in the same year in which the text of the Philosophumena was published, 1851, that our present document, Pistis Sophia, was first brought into general notice. Of Gnostic works that have come down to us, undoubtedly the most valuable is the Coptic codex, of which we are treating in the present work. In fact, the only other im- portant relic of the Gnosis w^hich is so far known to have withstood the ravages of time and escaped the destruction of Christian and Mohammedan vandalism, is the Coptic papyrus, known as the Codex Brucianus and preserved in the Bodleian at Oxford, to which reference will be made later on. In the same library there is also another Coptic MS., a small quarto of 236 pages, entitled Treatise on the Mysteries of the Greek Letters, to which an Arabic translation is appended. The author was a priest called Atasius, who, somewhat in the fashion of the Gnostic doctor Marcus, deduces from the form of the letters of the Greek alphabet XX INTRODUCTION.