Before this hint was taken, the MS. again received attention from a scholar in many respects well fitted to deal with it. M. Amélineau, who had for many years devoted himself to the study of Coptic religious texts, and had also a very considerable working knowledge of Egyptology, published in the same year of 1887, in the _Annales du Musée Guimet_ an “Essai sur le Gnosticisme Egyptien,” in which he dealt at great length with the _Pistis Sophia_, and compared it for the first time to the _Papyrus Bruce_ of the Bodleian Library at Oxford which had hitherto defied interpretation. Both these works he assigned to the school of Valentinus, the heresiarch whom the Ante-Nicene Fathers considered the most dangerous enemy of the Catholic Church, and he followed this up in 1891 by publishing in the _Notices et Extraits_ of the Académie des Inscriptions, the text and translation into French of the Oxford Papyrus. These two publications were both made at the expense of the French Government and were therefore produced in a style worthy of the subject, and with all the notes, references, and illustrations that they seemed to demand. But the _Pistis Sophia_ remained untouched by M. Amélineau save for the excerpts from it to be found in his _Essai_, until in 1895 he astonished the learned world by publishing in a series called “_Les Classiques de l’Occulte_,” a low-priced translation into French of the whole _Pistis Sophia_ with a comparatively brief introduction devoted almost entirely to the vindication of the opinion formerly advanced by him as to its authorship. M. Amélineau will be remembered by many as the first explorer of the Protodynastic Tombs at Abydos which entirely revolutionised all our ideas of early Egyptian history; and it was probably only the difficulties under which he laboured all his life which prevented him from publishing the results of this—his first and only excavation—in a manner which would have gained him the full credit of his really epoch-making discovery.[13] It was doubtless the same difficulties which compelled him to produce his translation of the _Pistis Sophia_ in the form in which he did; and although he states in his Introduction that he inspected the MS. at the British Museum during a visit to London shortly before his translation appeared, it is plain that this translation was made from Schwartze’s text only, that the work was executed throughout in so hasty a fashion as to leave nearly all the faults of Schwartze’s version uncorrected, and that it passes by most of the difficulties presented by the MS. without attempt at solution. It was in consequence very severely criticised first by Dr. Schmidt, and then by Dr. Andersson, the editor of the Swedish Egyptological periodical, _Sphinx_, and most of these criticisms appear unfortunately to be well founded.