Pistis Sophia

Pistis Sophia — G. R. S. Mead — Section 29

were made, and mistakes may have crept in. One of these copies was carried up the Nile and translated into the vernacular, Greek being but little understood so high up the river. The translator was evidently not a very accurate person, as may be seen from his casual insertion of scraps from other books ; moreover, his knowledge of the subject was so superficial that he had to leave many terms in the original, and doubtless made guesses at others. It is also probable that he added some things and subtracted others on the score of orthodoxy, as may be seen by an inspection of the rest of the fragments of Valentinus. The wearisome length of the Psalms, for instance, which Pistis Sophia recites in her repentances, followed by the shorter excerpts from the Salomonic Odes, leads one to suppose that Valen- tinus quoted only a few striking verses from each Psalm ; and that the more orthodox translator, with that love of wearisome repetition so characteristic of monkish piety, added the other less apposite verses, with which he was very familiar, while he was compelled to leave the Salomonic Odes as they stood owing to his lack of acquaintance with the originals. Moreover, the translator must have either translated, or possessed a translation of. The Books of the Saviour and The Books of leou. These were also most probably a com- pilation of Valentinus, or perhaps The Books of the Saviour were a compilation of Valentinus from the older Books of leou, which may have belonged to the .Ethiopic Euochian literature, for they are stated in the Pistis Sophia (pages 246 and 354) to have been written down in Paradise by Enoch, and preserved from the Flood. The MS. of the Coptic translator was copied towards the end of the foui'th century by some ignorant copyist, who made many mistakes of orthography. It was copied by one man, as a task, and hun'iedly executed ; and I should suggest that two copies were then made and occasionally a page of one copy substituted for a page of the other ; and, as the pages were not quite exact to a word or phrase, INTRODUCTION. XXXV