The same remarks apply with but little modification to some other fragments of Gnostic writings which have come down to us. In the Bodleian Library at Oxford is to be seen a MS. written on papyrus, which was brought to this country by the Abyssinian traveller, Bruce. This also is in the Sahidic dialect of Coptic, and although it has been badly damaged and the ink is rapidly disappearing in the damp climate of Oxford, yet a copy taken nearly a century ago by Woide makes its decipherment possible in most places. The Bruce Papyrus, like the British Museum parchment MS., contains more than one document. Unfortunately the arrangement of the leaves is by no means certain, and the two scholars who have studied it most thoroughly differ almost as widely as possible as to the order of its contents. M. Amélineau, a celebrated Egyptologist and Coptic scholar, who published in 1882 a copy of the text with a French translation in the _Notices et Extraits_ of the Académie des Inscriptions, considers that the treatises contained in it are only two in number, the first being called by the author in what seems to be its heading The _Book of the Knowledge of the Invisible God_ and the second _The Book of the Great Word in Every Mystery_. Dr Carl Schmidt, of the University of Berlin, on the other hand, who, like M. Amélineau, has studied the Papyrus at Oxford, thinks that he can distinguish in the Bruce Papyrus no less than six documents, of which the first two are according to him the two books of Jeû referred to in the _Pistis Sophia_, two others, fragments of Gnostic prayers, the fifth a fragment on the passage of the soul through the Archons of the Middle Way, and the sixth, an extract from an otherwise unknown Gnostic work which he does not venture to identify further[647]. To enter into the controversy raised by this diversity of opinion would take one outside the limits of the present work; but it may be said that at least one, and that the most important, of the documents in question must be later than the _Pistis Sophia_. Not only does this—which M. Amélineau calls the _Book of the Knowledge of the Invisible God_ and Dr Schmidt “Unbekanntes Altgnostisches Werk”—quote the opening words of St John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God without whom nothing was made[648],” which, as has been said, the author of the _Pistis Sophia_ was unable to do; but it mentions in briefer form than this last the heavenly origin of the souls of the Twelve Apostles[649]. There is also in the same document a description of what appears to be the “emanation of the universe,” in which the following passage occurs: