Pistis Sophia

Pistis Sophia — G. R. S. Mead — Section 16

Sidra Adma or The Book of Adam. The text, in a strange Chaldteo-Syriac idiom, was first published at Lund (1815, 1816), by Matth. Norberg, the learned Swede, together with a vocabulary and a Latin translation, in four quarto volumes. There is also a French translation by F. Tempes- tini in Migne's Dictionuaire des Apocryphes (1856). Compare also the thesis, Stellse Nasarteorum Ji^ones ex Sacro Gentis Codice, by Olof Svanander, presumably a pupil of Norberg (Lund, 1811). Finally we may mention the ^Ethiopic Enochian litera- ture. In 1773 Bruce brought back from Abyssinia three copies of the yEthiopic version of The Book of Enoch. Archbishop Laurence issued a translation in 1821 (2nd ed., 1833 ; 3rd, 1838), under the title The Book of Enoch. Hoflfman published a German translation, Das Buch Henoch (Jena, 1838), Gfrorer a Latin version of no value (Stuggart, 1840) ; Dillmann a critical text and also a German version (Leipzig, 1851; 2nd ed., 1853); Migne's Dictionuaire des Apocryphes (1856) contains an anonymous French transla- tion ; there is also an anonymous reprint of Laurence's translation, with a controversial introduction (London, 1883); and finally Charles recently (1893) published an English translation from Dillmann's text. This year Charles has also published The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (Oxford), a translation from Slavonic, which presents us with a new tradition entirely, namely, the Slavonic Enoch, from a Greek original which he places from B.C. 30 to a.d. 70, the Greek having in its turn a Hebrew background of a still earlier date. In an Appendix is a translation from the Slavonic of a fragment of Melchisedecian literature. For more than 1200 years this version of Enoch has been unknown save in Russia, and in Western Europe was not known to exist even in Russia till 1892. Outside of apocryphal scriptures and the world-bibles, these are all the documents connected directly or indirectly with the Gnosis, which, to my knowledge, we possess ; and, in spite of the good work that has been done since 1850, XXll INTRODUCTION.