“You are blessed beyond every woman on the earth,” the risen Jesus tells Mary Magdalene: and Peter complains she will not stop talking. The Gnostic gospel where a woman does the interpreting, in the Coptic it survived in.
The Mary volume, complete: 26 chapters in Sahidic Coptic, word by word, with pronunciation, fluent English and a clickable dictionary. Her first question, the blessing beyond all women, both of Peter’s protests, the fall and repentances of Sophia, all five Odes of Solomon quotations, the speck-of-dust ladder, and the saying that seats her highest of all: I am they, and they are I.
❦ Read Pistis Sophia in CopticA taste of the format — open the reader above to read all of Pistis Sophia word by word.
A gospel the Church never included, in a language almost no one can read, in which the person who understands Jesus best is a woman. You are holding the actual Coptic of the Askew Codex, word by word.
The manuscript was bought by a London doctor, Anthony Askew, in 1773 and sat for eighty years before anyone printed it. It tells of the eleven years after the resurrection: Jesus ascends through the heavens, returns clothed in light, and explains to his disciples how Pistis Sophia: Faith-Wisdom, a power of the upper world: fell into chaos by trusting a false light, sang thirteen repentances, and was drawn back up. The disciples interpret her songs through the Psalms and the Odes of Solomon; Mary Magdalene interprets more than all the rest together.
Jesus tells Mary she will become the fullness of all fullnesses. When Peter darts forward to protest that ‘this woman’ has let none of the men speak, Jesus does not silence her: he says whoever’s spirit seethes may speak, and hands Peter the floor to prove his does. Mary the mother of Jesus is told she will be called blessed from one end of the earth to the other. And the book preserves, nowhere else on earth, the lost first Ode of Solomon.
The Coptic keeps what every translation flattens: the Greek words for faith, wisdom, mystery, repentance and blessing sitting inside Egyptian sentences, each one a door. Read it word by word and the most famous quarrel in Gnostic literature turns out to be about who is allowed to interpret: and the book’s answer is anyone whose power has reached a boil.
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