If this be admitted, it certainly alters materially the view which recent German scholars, following, perhaps, after their manner, the first German commentator Köstlin, have formed of the whole text, and in which we might be inclined to acquiesce if we considered it a mere Encyclopædia or, as Epiphanius calls his own collection, a “bread-basket,” in which heterogeneous scraps of doctrine were thrown together anyhow. If, on the other hand, it was made for the use of a tribunal, it would be in the order of things concerned with the tenets of one school or sect alone, and this we find on investigation to be the case. Although the episode of Pistis Sophia comes to a stop about halfway, she is, as has been said, mentioned in the Fourth Document as well as in the First and Second, and even in the Third there are phrases which show that its author has the same general conception of the constitution of the universe, of the Person and Mission of Jesus, and of the means of salvation as the writers of the earlier parts. Yet it is equally plain that no two of the documents are by the same hand. While the First Document makes the Power which Jesus received from Barbelo “the body which He wore in the Height,”[49] and His soul another power received from one of the great leaders of “the Height,”[50] the Second Document attributes the Incarnation to a lesser power of “the Middle” who casts what came from the same leader into “the matter of Barbelo,” which thereupon becomes the earthly and not the heavenly body of the Saviour.[51] In like manner, while the First Document puts into the mouth of Mary the Mother a story not traceable to any other source about the Holy Spirit coming down from the First Mystery in the exact likeness of Jesus’ earthly body, and says that after kissing each other, they become one,[52] the Second Document makes St. John say that the First Mystery himself came down upon Jesus in the form of a dove, but in a “vesture of light” received from Barbelo.[53] So, again, the First Document especially declares that “the disciples” (not the Apostles) were endowed by Jesus at His coming with twelve powers from the Treasure-house of Light instead of the souls which they would otherwise have received from the Rulers,[54] while the Second makes Jesus tell them that their souls instead of coming straight from the Treasure-house have suffered much from transmigration into different bodies.[55] So, too, the Sphere of Destiny, which in the First Document is described as “the Second Sphere”[56] (or the one which is reached from the earth next after passing through the First Sphere, below which is the visible firmament), is in the Third Document transformed into a Place called “Great Destiny,”[57] which is in the Place of the head of the Æons [or Zodiac] which Place they call “the Place of the Kingdom of Adamas,” the Ruler of the twelve Æons or signs, and in the Fourth Document is made equivalent to the Sphere or visible firmament only.[58] And so again