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The Bruce Codex (Latin: Codex Brucianus) is a codex that contains Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic manuscripts.It contains rare Gnostic works; the Bruce Codex is the only known surviving copy of the Books of Jeu and another work simply called Untitled Text or the Untitled Apocalypse.
The Untitled Text [1] [2] in the Bruce Codex—also called the Untitled Treatise, [3] the Untitled Apocalypse, [4] and The Gnosis of the Light [4] —is a Gnostic text. When James Bruce acquired the codex in Egypt in 1769, [5] "very little knowledge" was available about this period of Gnostic Christianity. [4]
The date of the Bruce Codex, which contains the sole surviving copy of the work, is unknown and disputed, with estimates ranging from the 3rd to the 10th century. It is believed that the Sahidic Coptic of the Codex version is a translation, however, and the original was written in Koine Greek in the early 3rd century.
Bruce Codex contains the first and second Books of Jeu and three fragments – an untitled text, an untitled hymn, and the text "On the Passage of the Soul Through the Archons of the Midst". Codex Tchacos , 4th century, contains the Gospel of Judas , the First Apocalypse of James , the Letter of Peter to Philip , and a fragment of Allogenes .
The ancient Gnostic text known as the Bruce Codex was discovered near Alexandria, Egypt in 1769 and translated into German in 1892 by Carl Schmidt. [1] An English translation of the text with Schmidt's commentary was published in 1978, with translation and notes by Violet Macdermot. [1]
In 1769, the Bruce Codex was brought to England from Upper Egypt by the Scottish traveller James Bruce, and subsequently bequeathed to the care of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Sometime prior to 1785, The Askew Codex (a.k.a. Pistis Sophia) was bought by the British Museum from the heirs of
7th-century liturgical codex from the White Monastery. The earliest translation of the Church Fathers into Coptic also date from the period of the first biblical translations, the 2nd and 3rd centuries. One of the earliest manuscripts of such works is the Crosby-Schøyen Codex. [30]
For the purposes of this compilation, as in philology, a "codex" is a manuscript book published from the late Antiquity period through the Middle Ages. (The majority of the books in both the list of manuscripts and list of illuminated manuscripts are codices.)