A text critic will see at once on which side the balance lies.

It is impossible that [Greek: ek sou] could have been the reading of the autograph copy, and it is not, I believe, admitted into the text by any recent editor.

But if it was present in the copy made use of by the Gnostic writer, whoever he was, that copy must have been already far enough removed from the original to admit of this corruption; in other words, it has lineage enough to throw the original some way behind it.

We shall come to more of such phenomena in the next chapter.
I said just now that the quotation could not with certainty be referred to Valentinus, but it is at least considerably earlier than the contemporaries of Hippolytus.

It appears that there was a division in the Valentinian School upon the interpretation of this very passage.