A woman falls from the heights of heaven, trapped in a dark and chaotic region where lion-faced beings torment her. She cries out to the Light she once saw, and she does not stop crying out. Thirteen times she sings a prayer of repentance, and thirteen times her voice rises. This is Pistis Sophia, "Faith-Wisdom," the heroine of one of the longest and most colorful Gnostic books, and her thirteen songs are the center of the story. The book that bears her name is a long conversation between the risen Jesus and his followers, and it is among the main sources for ancient Gnostic belief. A Codex Bought in London The Pistis Sophia survives in a single Coptic manuscript, called the Askew Codex, after Dr. Anthony Askew, a London physician who bought it in the 1770s. It is now in the British Library. The Coptic text is a translation of a Greek original, which scholars place in the third or fourth century. For a long time the book was known only to specialists. A Latin edition a...
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