One Prayer, Surviving in Greek, Latin and Coptic

This prayer's survival in three separate ancient language traditions, Greek within the broader Hermetic manuscript tradition, Latin within the Asclepius, and Coptic among the Nag Hammadi texts discussed in relation to Gnosticism elsewhere in this atlas, gives scholars unusually strong evidence that it circulated widely across different linguistic and religious communities in late antiquity, from pagan Hermetic philosophical circles to Gnostic Christian communities in Egypt, a breadth of circulation relatively unusual for a text of this length and specificity and suggesting it held recognized devotional value across religious boundaries that were otherwise often sharply drawn in this period. The presence of essentially the same prayer within both an explicitly pagan Hermetic context and among texts associated with Christian Gnostic communities illustrates the considerable degree of shared theological vocabulary and devotional practice that could cross what might otherwise appear to be firm religious boundaries in late antique Egypt and the wider eastern Mediterranean, a fluidity scholars of the period increasingly emphasize over older models that treated these traditions as more sharply and consistently separated from one another than the actual surviving evidence supports.