Pistis Sophia

Pistis Sophia — G. R. S. Mead — Section 23

the Coptic idiom, as may be seen from Amelineau's Intro- duction to his French version (p. x), where he writes : " Whoever has any knowledge of the Coptic language knows that this idiom is foreign to long sentences ; that it is a tongue eminently analytic and by no means syn- thetic ; that its sentences are composed of small clauses exceedingly precise, and almost independent of each other. Of course all Coptic authors are not equally easy, some of them are even exceedingly difficult to understand ; but this much is certain, that never under any circumstances in Coptic do we come across those j.eriods with complicated incidental sentences, of three or four different clauses, whose elements are synthetically united together so that the sense of the entire sentence cannot be grasped before we arrive at the last clause. Nevertheless, this is just what the reader meets with in this work. The sentences are so entangled with incidental and complicated propo- sitions, that often, indeed very often, the Coptic translator has lost the thread, so to say, and made main propositions out of incidental cla\xses, so that we find the continuation of the fii'st proposition three or four pages further on. This peculiarity is not calculated to facilitate the trans- lation of a work, the ideas in which are in themselves very difficult to comprehend ; the one thing that it conclusively proves is that the book was originally written in a learned language ; that consequently none of the idioms spoken in the Orient could have been the original language in which the work in question was conceived and written ; that we must accordingly choose between Greek and Latin ; that only one of these languages at this peinod, the second century [the date assigned to the original by Amelineau] , is at all likely in Egypt, namely, Greek." Amelineau makes rather too much of the abstruse nature of the subject ; for, though many passages are transcendent- ally mystical, nevertheless the whole is conceived in a narrative or descriptive style. There is no attempt at philosophical argument, no involved logical propositions ; INTRODUCTION. XXIX