Pistis Sophia is hard going, and specialists say so. The repentances repeat, the interpretations repeat, formulae of praise run for pages, and long stretches consist of strings of names and vowel sequences intended for ritual recitation. It has none of the compression of the Gospel of Thomas or the argumentative drive of the Apocryphon of John. The system it assumes is broadly the one found in the Sethian or Barbeloite texts, with an unknowable first principle, a hierarchy of aeons and rulers, and a fallen wisdom, but it is a late and heavily ritualised development of it, closer to a manual of mysteries than to a cosmology.
Its influence has been out of proportion to its readability. G. R. S. Mead published an English version in 1896 and a revised one in 1921, issued through Theosophical channels, and through him the book entered the vocabulary of late Victorian and Edwardian occultism. Theosophists, members of the Golden Dawn and their successors treated it as a surviving fragment of a secret teaching, and its terminology, its ascending aeons and its ranks of rulers passed into a body of esoteric writing that had little interest in Coptic manuscripts as such.
The result is that the text now carries two histories. As a historical source it is a late Egyptian Christian composition of limited representativeness. As a cultural object it is one of the main channels by which the idea of a suppressed inner Christianity reached the modern imagination, and the confidence with which that idea is still asserted owes more to Mead's readers than to the manuscript.