A Late Gnostic Revelation in a Coptic Codex

Pistis Sophia is a lengthy Gnostic scripture surviving in the Askew Codex, a Coptic manuscript acquired by the British Museum in 1785, so, unlike the Gospel of Thomas, it was known to scholars long before the Nag Hammadi find. In it the risen Christ, over eleven or twelve years of post-resurrection teaching, reveals to his disciples (with Mary Magdalene prominent among the questioners) the structure of the higher realms, the aeons, and the fall and repentance of the divine being Sophia ("Wisdom"), much of the text consisting of her penitential hymns and their allegorical interpretation. It is a late work, generally dated to the third or fourth century CE, and represents a developed, systematising phase of Gnostic thought rather than its beginnings. Its elaborate cosmology, numerology and long ritual and astrological passages made it a favourite of nineteenth- and twentieth-century occultists and Theosophists, for whom it was one of the few substantial Gnostic texts available; G. R. S. Mead's English translation (1896) carried it into the esoteric revival.