“the cause of sin,” which in the Third Document is laid upon the shoulders of “the Five Rulers of Great Destiny,”[59] is in the Fourth assigned to certain demons from the Middle Way who enter into man.[60] These discrepancies are too great to be accounted for as merely clerical errors or mistakes in translation, and we can therefore only attribute them to the different documents being the work of different authors.[61] This being the case, we must, to get a true perspective of the work, seek for the earliest document in it, and then endeavour to arrange the others in their relative order of date; and I have no hesitation in deciding that in this, the scribes followed the usual practice in legal matters and that the earliest document is that which comes first in the MS. Not only has it a regular preface, an advantage which it shares with the Fourth, but it is the one of the four principal documents which alone gives an orderly and coherent account of the heavenly hierarchy and its “Places,”[62] and therefore affords the reader a sort of key to the system of its successors. Hence it must be considered as the mother document, so to speak, from which all the rest are derived, or to which they refer; and it will be found on examination that while all these contain what may be called supplemental information as to the different universes or worlds and their inhabitants, there is none which deals so exhaustively with the speculations that during the early centuries of our Era occupied the attention of orthodox and heretic alike, that is to say, the Constitution of the Godhead and the relation of the Saviour to the Supreme Being. It is also probable that anyone making extracts for judicial use from the books of a sect would begin with the most informative; and while Pistis Sophia is here described so fully as to leave no doubt in one’s mind that the author knows that he is here introducing her to his readers for the first time, the references to her in the other documents are so brief as to show that their writers knew that their readers had already heard about her. But the most conclusive proof at present of the anteriority of the First Document as compared with the others, is that it does not quote from the Fourth Gospel. The opening words of St. John would have been extremely useful to the author in expressing the relations between his Ineffable One and the First Mystery, and are in fact so used later both in the _Excerpta Theodoti_ and the _Bruce Papyrus_.[63] Ptolemy and Heracleon,[64] the leaders of the sect to which, as will be shown later, our text can with the greatest likelihood be attributed, both knew of this Gospel and discuss its words and especially its opening at length. Yet the author of our First Document not only makes no use of this, but he gives no quotation among the many from the New Testament to be found in this Document that can by any possibility be assigned to the Fourth Gospel, save those