The third is a Wisdom of Jesus Christ: revelations made after the resurrection to the Twelve and to seven holy women, on a mountain in Galilee.
The last thing in the manuscript is an episode from the Acts of Peter, which has been published and will be found in its proper place among the Acts.
A manuscript, probably of the fifth century, in the British Museum, called Codex Askewianus from a former owner Askew, contains a bulky work, or works (for not all the treatises of which it is composed are of one date) known as the Pistis Sophia (Faith(ful) Wisdom) from the spiritual being of that name with whose progress through the universe it is largely concerned. This also is in the form of revelations given to the apostles and holy women after the resurrection. It is of the third century, has been more than once edited, and has been translated into English.
A very mutilated papyrus manuscript in the Bodleian Library, brought from Egypt by the famous traveller Bruce, and called the Codex Brucianus, contains two Gnostic treatises. One is the Two Books of Jeû (a spiritual being), the other, which is older, has lost its title. These are somewhat earlier in date than the Pistis Sophia. The whole manuscript has been finely edited by C. Schmidt.
While the Pistis Sophia is just readable, the Books of Jeû are not. The revelations they contain are conveyed in mystic diagrams, and numbers, and meaningless collections of letters, and it requires a vast deal of historical imagination and sympathy to put oneself in the place of anybody who could tolerate, let alone reverence, the dreary stuff.
A second large group of books omitted here consists of those which deal with Church order and with liturgy.
The earliest of these is the Teaching of the Apostles or Didache already mentioned, discovered about forty years ago and repeatedly edited and translated since.
Ultimately this short book was incorporated into a large work, the Apostolic Constitutions, in eight books, compiled by an Arian of Palestine in the fourth century. These eight books are compounded, with additions, out of the Didascalia (extant in Syriac and partly in Latin, and of the third century), which underlie Books I–VI of the Constitutions; the Didache and other early material (Book VII): the Church Order of Hippolytus, and additions by the compiler (Book
