The library · Edition and sources
Hypostasis of the Archons
Samuel Zinner, edited by Mark M. Mattison; Other Gospels · Translated text
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Chapter 3
1. The archons brought together all of the animals of the earth, and all of the birds of the sky, even bringing them before Adam to learn what Adam might call them, so that he could assign names to all of the birds and to all the animals.
2. The archons conveyed Adam, even placing him in the garden, so that he might tend it and guard it.
3. They ordered him, and said: “You are allowed to eat from [all] the trees in the garden, but eat not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
4. [Touch] it not, because on the day you eat from it, you certainly will die.”
5. [This] they [said to him], yet they understood not what [they had said] to him.
6. Instead, it was according to the will of the Father ⟦page 89⟧ that they said this in the way they did, so that Adam would (indeed) eat, and so that Adam would ‹not› think of them in the way a thoroughly material man would.
7. The archons schemed with one another, and said: “Come, let us cause a deep sleep to fall upon Adam,” so that Adam slept.
8. The deep sleep they caused to fall upon him, and which he slept, is ignorance.
9. They opened up his side, like a living woman.
10. Then they closed up his side with flesh in its place, and Adam became merely soulish.
11. The spiritual woman approached him, and she spoke with him, saying: “Arise, Adam.”
12. When he gazed on her, he said: “You have granted me life; you will be called the Mother of the living, because she is my mother. She is the physician, the woman, the one who has given birth.”
13. The authorities approached their Adam.
14. When they saw his female counterpart talking with him, they were aroused and lusted for her.
15. They said to one another: “Come, let us sow our semen into her,” and they pursued her.
16. She, however, laughed at them on account of their stupidity and blindness.
17. As they grabbed her, she became a tree, and as she placed before them a shadowy likeness of herself, they defiled it most vilely, defiling the signet of her voice.
18. And thus they brought judgment on themselves by means of the shape they had modeled in their own image.