The translation is frequently a matter of difficulty, for the text has been copied in a most careless and unintelligent fashion, so that the ingenuity of the editors has often been taxed to the utmost and has not infrequently completely broken down. It is of course quite natural that orthodox scribes should blunder when transcribing Gnostic documents, owing to their ignorance of the subject and their strangeness to the ideas; but this particular copyist is at times quite barbarous, and as the subject is deeply mystical and deals with the unexpected, the reconstruction of the original reading is a matter of great difficulty. With a number of passages I am still unsatisfied, though I hope they are somewhat nearer the spirit of the original than other reconstructions which have been attempted. It is always a matter of difficulty for the rigidly objective mind to understand the point of view of the Gnostic scripture-writers. One thing, however, is certain: they lived in times when the rigid orthodoxy of the canon was not yet established. They were in the closest touch with the living tradition of scripture-writing, and they knew the manner of it. The probability is that paragraphs 1-3 are from the pen of the redactor or compiler of the _Acts_, and that the narrative, beginning with the words "And my Lord stood in the midst of the Cave," is incorporated from prior material--a mystic vision or apocalypse circulated in the inner circles. The compiler knows the general Gospel-story, and seems prepared to admit its historical basis; at the same time he knows well that the story circulated among the people is but the outer veil of the mystery, and so he hands on what we may well believe was but one of many visions of the mystic crucifixion. The gentle contempt of those who had entered into the mystery, for those unknowing ones who would fain limit the crucifixion to one brief historic event, is brought out strongly, and savours, though mildly, of the bitterness of the struggle between the two great forces of the inner and spiritualizing and the outer and materializing traditions. 1. The disciples flee after beholding the inner mystery of the Passion and At-one-ment as set forth in the initiating drama of the Mystic Dance which formed the subject of our fourth volume. 2. Yet even John the Beloved, in spite of this initiation, cannot yet bear the thought that his Master did actually suffer historically as a malefactor on the physical cross. In his distress he flees unto the Mount of Olives, above Jerusalem. But to the Gnostic the Mount of Olives was no physical hill, though it was a mount in the physical, and Jerusalem no physical city, though a city in the physical. The Mount, however it might be distinguished locally, was the Height of Contemplation, and the bringing into activity of a certain inner consciousness; even as Jerusalem here was the Jerusalem below, the physical consciousness.