Pistis Sophia 96.13 · 96.13

A gospel reader will feel the ground shift under two familiar sayings. "To sit on my right and on my left" is exactly what James and John asked for in Mark 10 — and were refused: "it is not mine to give." Here it is given, and not to two ambitious brothers but to "all men who will receive mysteries in the Ineffable," each on a throne. The thrones-saying itself ("you will sit on your thrones… and reign with me") is the promise of Matthew 19:28, where the Twelve are to judge the twelve tribes; the coinage that carries it here is one Coptic word, <em>shbr-rro</em>, "fellow-king" — royalty as a compound noun, the way this book earlier made "fellow-disciple" and "light-fellow." Sovereignty, which every throne-room in history treats as the thing that cannot be shared, is built into the vocabulary as something that only exists shared.

The warrant for it all is the identity statement, now widened from the singular: "those men are I, and I am they." And then the sentence that gives the chapter its warmth, an almost verbatim cousin of Hebrews 2:11 — "he is not ashamed to call them brothers." The word order matters: not held back, not ashamed. Shame is what a king risks by calling commoners his kin; this king says the kinship was the point. The litany that spent ten passages raising a man above every power ends, deliberately, at eye level — brothers, companions, fellow-kings.

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