After its purchase by the Museum, the MS. remained unnoticed until Woide, then minister at the German Chapel at St. James’ Palace and subsequently the editor of the _Codex Alexandrinus_, called attention to it in Cramer’s Beiträge for 1778. Later, he appears to have copied out the whole MS., to which he refers in his _Appendix to the Alexandrian Codex_ in 1799. The extracts that he there gave from it were sufficient to enable the Danish Bishop Münter to publish in 1812 the five “Odes of Solomon” quoted in it, of which no other copy was known until Dr. Rendel Harris’ recent discovery of them in a Syriac MS. The learned Academician, Dulaurier, when on a visit to England, in 1838, also made a copy of our MS., and proposed to publish it with a French translation, but died before doing so; and the MS. would probably have remained unknown even to scholars but for the pains of Maurice George Schwartze, a young German, who was sent over here in 1848 by the generosity of the King of Prussia, to study such of our MSS. as seemed to him valuable. Schwartze completed a fairly accurate copy of the text, and also translated it into Latin retaining untranslated the Greek words which occur on every page; but he too died before the result of his labours could be printed, and the task of editing and correcting his translation fell upon his friend Petermann, who published both Schwartze’s Coptic text and his Latin (and Greek) translation in 1853. Unfortunately, Petermann, though a competent Coptic scholar for his time, did not feel called upon to contribute anything more than textual criticism to his predecessor’s work.[9] Schwartze’s text was therefore published without introduction or notes other than corrections of mistranslated words and suggestions for alternative readings; and this prevented the book from obtaining such general notice as was given to the _Philosophumena_ of Hippolytus which appeared at nearly the same time. Bunsen, who had begun the controversy between Catholic and Protestant scholars which sprang up round Hippolytus’ work,[10] poured contempt upon the _Pistis Sophia_ as “a most worthless offshoot of the Marcosian heresy,” and, although Köstlin contributed a long discussion of the work to a Tübingen theological annual in 1854,[11] it remained practically unknown to English readers for more than thirty years.[12]