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...

In an English library, there is a Coptic manuscript whose first lines read like the opening of a cosmic drama. The risen Jesus has been with his disciples for eleven years after the resurrection. On a mountain, a great light descends, the sky trembles, and he rises to the heavens in a blaze. When he returns, he begins to teach. The book that records this teaching is called the Pistis Sophia , the "Faith-Wisdom," and it holds the most detailed Gnostic account of the soul's ascent through the spheres that has survived in full. A Manuscript from the Askew Codex The only surviving copy is in the British Library, in a codex named for Dr. Anthony Askew, a London physician and book collector who acquired it before 1773. It is written in Coptic, the late language of Egypt, and the manuscript is dated to the fourth century, though scholars think the text was composed earlier, in Greek, perhaps in the third century. The codex is a collection: the first three books are the Pis...