Dr. Anthony Askew, a classical scholar, bought the manuscript at a London auction in 1772, reportedly for a few guineas, and the British Museum acquired it from his estate in 1785, shelving it as Codex Askewianus. The Coptic text, dated to the 3rd or 4th century, records the risen Jesus, eleven years after the resurrection, teaching the disciples the architecture of the aeons, the fall and repentance of Pistis Sophia, Faith-Wisdom, her thirteen repentances, and the soul's passage past the archons, in a question-and-answer format where Mary Magdalene dominates so completely that Peter complains she monopolizes the Lord's time. G.R.S. Mead's 1896 translation introduced it to the esoteric revival, where it has lived ever since.
The folk reading prizes the text's staffing: the risen Christ as a seminar leader, the disciples as persistent students, and Mary Magdalene as the star pupil, commended by Jesus as the one whose heart is set on heaven more than all the brothers, while Peter's complaint, my Lord, we cannot endure this woman, is the earliest documented instance of the archive's favorite motif, the best questioner in the room being told to yield the floor. The Pistis Sophia thus became the proof-text for every later argument about who got the real teaching, the answer being, per the text itself, whoever kept asking.
The claim: the Pistis Sophia's biography is its teaching enacted, wisdom falling through the realms, miscataloged, priced at auction, shelved wrong, rescued by amateurs, translated by a Theosophist, the text's own story of Sophia's fall and recovery replaying as the manuscript's survival, and the eleven-year seminar a model of what the archive calls the long catechism: truth available to anyone willing to stay after class for a decade. Verdict: the archive endorses the parable and notes the price data: the most detailed surviving gnostic cosmology cost two guineas, because the auction room did not know what it was selling, which is the definition of every suppressed text's market phase. The seminar is still running. The questions are still the credential. Peter is still tired. Mary is still asking. Sit in.
If the risen Christ's longest seminar survived only as a miscataloged auction lot, what else is sitting in the wrong box, and who is mislabeling on purpose?