Pistis Sophia is the longest surviving Gnostic Christian scripture. It survives in a single fourth-century Coptic manuscript, the Askew Codex, acquired by the British Museum in 1785 and translated into English by G. R. S. Mead in two editions, 1896 and (substantially revised) 1921.
The text presents itself as the secret teaching of Christ to the disciples in the eleven years between the Resurrection and the Ascension. Where the canonical gospels close with the empty tomb, Pistis Sophia opens after it: Christ has been gone for eleven years and now returns, in a body of glory, to teach the inner doctrine that he could not yet speak in his earthly ministry. The disciples (Mary Magdalene foremost among them) ask their questions, and he answers in long mythic narratives.
The central narrative is the fall and restoration of Sophia, the personification of Wisdom and the youngest of the heavenly aeons. Sophia, deceived by a false light, descends from her place in the divine fullness into the chaos below, where the rulers of the lower aeons strip her of her light and torment her. From the depths she sings thirteen long penitential hymns of repentance, which Mead’s translation reproduces in full. Christ descends to her aid, raises her step by step out of chaos, and restores her to her place in the aeon. The narrative is at once cosmological (the structure of the universe in twelve aeons), soteriological (the rescue of fallen soul-substance from the matter that imprisons it), and contemplative (the path the practitioner walks in re-ascending the aeons).
Around this central narrative cluster long expositions on the architecture of the heavens, the mysteries of the Ineffable, the names and seals required to pass each aeonic guardian, and the question of which souls are saved and which are not. The text is densely repetitive in the manner of liturgical literature: the same teaching is given again and again from slightly different angles, the same hymns of Sophia recited and then expounded verse by verse. Reading it is closer to participating in a long contemplative liturgy than to reading a treatise.
Mead translated Pistis Sophia at the height of the Theosophical engagement with early Christian Gnosticism. His introduction situates the text in the wider Gnostic literature he had spent his career retrieving, and his copious footnotes draw on the Coptic, the Greek vocabulary preserved in the manuscript, and the parallels in Hippolytus, Irenaeus, and the Bruce Codex. The 1921 second edition is the one preserved here.
Because the work runs to roughly six hundred dense pages, we have not ingested it as a full-text page on this site. Read it in its original form here: