Pistis Sophia
Anonymous Gnostic authors; Askew Codex
The longest surviving Gnostic scripture: post-resurrection dialogues in which Jesus recounts the fall and redemption of the aeon Sophia and maps the unseen architecture of the cosmos.
- Composed
- 3rd to 4th century CE
- Original language
- Coptic
- In the SOL library
- 305 searchable passages
- Rights
- Public domain
What this text is
Pistis Sophia is an extended Gnostic scripture preserved in the Askew Codex, a Coptic manuscript the British Museum acquired in 1785, more than a century and a half before Nag Hammadi. It presents the risen Jesus teaching his disciples for eleven years, answering questions from Mary Magdalene, John, and others about the fall of the aeon Pistis Sophia from the realms of light and her long repentance and rescue.
The text is effectively a guided tour of the Gnostic cosmos: its realms, powers, and the fate of souls moving through them. Mary Magdalene asks the majority of the questions, a prominence that has made the text a key document for studying her role in early Christian communities.
Why researchers read it
Where the shorter Gnostic texts give fragments of a worldview, Pistis Sophia gives the system at full length: how consciousness falls into matter and how it is recovered. For SOL’s comparative work on descent-and-return narratives across traditions, it is the most complete Gnostic witness available.
He acquired the name of Father; and because His offspring was _true_, the name of Truth; and because he wished to appear in human form, he was called Man; and because He assembled His attributes in His mind and _chose_ from them those best fitted for His purpose, they were called the _Church_.[97] I have shown elsewhere that all the names of the male and female members of the Decad and Dodecad attributed to Valentinus can in like manner be read so as to make a connected sentence;[98] and the way in which the Fathers deceived themselves in such matters has lately been shown by the brilliant discovery of an American scholar that thirty words of apparent gibberish which Epiphanius gives as the names of the thirty Æons of Valentinus’ Pleroma, are really the fragments of a Valentinian hymn describing how the Celestial Light came to be in every Place and restored tranquillity to the worlds.[99…
Pistis Sophia, Anonymous Gnostic authors; Askew Codex · Public domain
Research that draws on this text
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