[125] So that the first work of the Mission of Jesus was the freeing of the whole universe—not only our earth—from the evil which had entered into it.
[126] ὑποστάτους οὐσίας; “underlying beings.” Here we have the two ideas of hypostasis, or “substance” in its etymological meaning, and “essence,” or “being,” side by side.
[127] ψυχικὴν οὐσίαν, i. e. the stuff of which the soul is made.
[128] Ps. cxi. 10; Prov. i. 7; ii. 10.
[129] That is Jehovah, the God of the Jews. Hebdomad as including the seven “planets.”
[130] Deut. ix. 3.
[131] The “below,” Ὑποκάτω, and “above,” ὑπεράνω, seem to have become inverted; but as I am not sure whether this is the scribe’s mistake or not, I have left the text as it is. If we consider (as we must) that the heaven of Sophia is the highest and those of the seven worlds below it like steps of a ladder, we have the conception of Sophia, her son Jaldabaoth, and his six sons, current among the Ophites as shown in Book V above. The figure of Sophia as a “day” is at once an instance of the curious habit among the Gnostics of confusing time and space, and an allusion to the O.T. name of “Ancient of Days.”
[132] I have sought to show elsewhere (P.S.B.A., 1901, pp. 48, 49) in opposition to the current explanations that this name, properly written Beelzebuth, is at once a sort of parody of Jabezebuth or “Jehovah (Lord) of Hosts,” and the name given to the “ruler of demons” by the parallelism which, as in Zoroastrianism, makes each good spirit have its evil counterpart of similar name.
[133] προβεβήκασιν. So in Homer (Iliad, VI, 125). Cruice translates “provenerunt,” Macmahon reading apparently προβεβλήκασιν, “there has been projected.”
[134] Gen. ii. 7.