[20] So in the Bruce Papyrus, “Jeû,” which name I have suggested is an abbreviation of Jehovah, is called “the great Man, King of the great Aeon of light.” See Forerunners, II, 193.
[21] Eph. iii. 15. Cf. the address of Jesus to His Father in the last document of the Pistis Sophia, Forerunners, II, p. 180, n. 4.
[22] Why is he to be punished? In the Manichæan story (for which see Forerunners, II, pp. 292 ff.) the First Man is taken prisoner by the powers of darkness. Both this and that in the text are doubtless survivals of some legend current throughout Western Asia at a very early date. Cf. Bousset’s Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, Leipzig, 1907, c. 4, Der Urmensch.
[23] So the cryptogram in the Pistis Sophia professes to give “the word by which the Perfect Man is moved.” Forerunners, II, 188, n. 2.
[24] οὐσία: perhaps “essence” or “being.” It is the word for which hypostasis was later substituted according to Hatch. See his Hibbert Lectures, pp. 269 ff.
[25] So Miller, Cruice, and Schneidewin. I should be inclined to read φάος, “light,” as in the Naassene hymn at the end of this chapter. No Gnostic sect can have taught that the soul came from Chaos.
[26] This, as always at this period, means “Syrians.” See Maury, Rev. Archéol., lviii, p. 242.
[27] ἔμψυχοι. He is punning on the likeness between this and ψυχή, “soul.”
[28] And between “nourished” and “reared.”
[29] τὸ τοιοῦτον. Not φύσις or ψυχή. At this point the author begins his commentary on the Hymn of the Mysteries of Cybele, for which see p. [141] infra.