Note 549 — Chapter X · THE SYSTEM OF THE PISTIS SOPHIA AND ITS RELATED TEXTS[459]
Reading edition
As mentioned in the Scottish Review article referred to in n. 1, p. 135 supra, there is no passage but one in the Pistis Sophia which affords any colour for supposing that the author was acquainted with St John’s Gospel. All the quotations set forth by Harnack in his treatise Über das gnostische Buch Pistis-Sophia, Leipzig, 1891, p. 27, on which he relies to prove the converse of this proposition, turn out on analysis to appear also in one or other of the Synoptics, from which the author may well have taken them. The single exception is this (Pistis Sophia, p. 11, Copt.), “Wherefore I said unto you from the beginning, Ye are not from the Cosmos; I likewise am not from it”; John xvii. 14: “(O Father) I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” The parallel does not seem so close as to make it certain that one document is copying from the other. Both may very possibly be taken from some collection of Logia now lost, but at one time current in Alexandrian circles; or from the Gospel of the Egyptians, from which the Pistis Sophia afterwards quotes.