actually did write a book with some such title as the _Sophia_. Tertullian, in his declamation against the Valentinians, quotes a sentence from “the Wisdom (Lat. Sophia) not of Valentinus but of Solomon[609].” It has been suggested that he is here referring to some saying of the Valentinian aeon Sophia; but no writings would in the nature of things be attributed to her, and, as M. Amélineau points out, it is more natural to think that he was here comparing a book with a book[610]. This figure of rhetoric was a favourite one with Tertullian, for in his treatise _De Carne Christi_ we find him quoting in like manner the Psalms—“not the Psalms of Valentinus, the apostate, heretic, and Platonist, but the Psalms of David[611].” The fact that the story in the British Museum MS. is called _Pistis Sophia_ instead of _Sophia_ only need not hinder us from identifying this with the work presumably referred to by Tertullian, because this title is, as has been said, the work of another scribe than those who transcribed the original; and Pistis Sophia is sometimes spoken of in the MS. itself as Sophia only[612]. Moreover, there is some reason for thinking that certain of the Fathers and even their Pagan adversaries had seen and read the story of _Pistis Sophia_. The allusion quoted above from Origen to gates opening of their own accord seems to refer to one of its episodes, and Tertullian, in the treatise in which he says he is exposing the original tenets of the sect[613], uses many expressions that he can hardly have borrowed from any other source. Thus, he speaks of Sophia “breaking away from her spouse[614]” which is the expression used by Pistis Sophia in her first Metanoia and is in no way applicable to the Valentinian Sophia of Irenaeus or Hippolytus. He again speaks of the same Sophia as being all but swallowed up and dissolved in “the substance” evidently of Chaos, which is the fate which Pistis Sophia anticipates for herself in the MS. Tertullian, like the _Pistis Sophia_, also assigns to the psychic substance the place of honour or right hand in the _quasi_-material world, while the hylic is relegated in both to the left hand[615]. The Paradise of Adam is said by him to be fixed by Valentinus “above the third heaven[616]” as it is in the _Pistis Sophia_, if, as we may suppose, the soul of the protoplast dwelt in the same place as that of Elijah. The name of _Ecclesia_ or the Church is given not only to a particular aeon in the Pleroma, but also to the divine power breathed into man from a higher world in both Tertullian and the _Pistis Sophia_[617], and, in the treatise _De Carne Christi_, Tertullian alludes contemptuously to an heretical doctrine that Christ possessed “any new kind of flesh miraculously obtained from the stars[618],” which seems to refer to the taking by Jesus in the opening of the _Pistis Sophia_ of a body from “Barbelo” the goddess or Triple Power set over matter and inspiring the benefic planet Venus. For all which reasons it