Page:The Apocryphal New Testament (1924).djvu/50

, Heresy lxii. 2 (Sabellians). Their whole deceit (error) and the strength of it they draw from some apocryphal books, especially from what is called the Egyptian Gospel, to which some have given that name. For in it many suchlike things are recorded (or attributed) as from the person of the Saviour, said in a corner, purporting that he showed his disciples that the same person was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

All this goes to show that this Gospel was a secondary work with a distinct doctrinal tendency. It resembles the later Gnostic books such as the Pistis Sophia in assigning an important rôle in the dialogues with Christ to the female disciples.

One mention and citation of this occurs in Epiphanius, Heresy xxvi. 13. Speaking of the ‘Gnostics’ of Egypt in his time (fourth century) he says:

They produce a Gospel forged in the name of Philip the holy disciple, which says:

The Lord revealed unto me what the soul must say as it goeth up into heaven, and how it must answer each of the Powers above. ‘I have taken knowledge (it saith) of myself, and have gathered myself together out of every quarter and have not begotten (sown) children unto the Ruler, but have rooted out his roots and gathered together the members that were scattered abroad. And I know thee who thou art, for I (it saith) am of them that are from above.’

A very leading Gnostic doctrine was that the soul contained sparks of the Divine, which were dispersed about among the world of matter, and must be collected, destined as they were some day to be removed out of the influence of matter and taken up into the higher world. This is enunciated here.

In the Pistis Sophia Philip is one of the disciples who are specially ordered to write the revelations uttered by Christ.

Origen on Luke (Hom. 1) says that he knows of a Gospel according to Matthias. Ambrose and Jerome, it seems, repeat his statement. Eusebius also mentions the book: none of these give more than the bare name. In the Gelasian Decree it is condemned, which need not mean that it was known to the condemner. It also occurs in the Greek ‘List of the Sixty Books’.

It is possible that this book was identical with the Traditions of Matthias, a writing of which Clement of Alexandria speaks in the following passages:

Strom. ii. 9. 45. The beginning (of truth) is to wonder at things, as Plato says in the Theaetetus, and Matthias in the