INTRODUCTION

When in 1901 I was working in London at the British Museum describing the works of Jacob of Sarug, and by chance happened to look at the catalog of Syriac manuscripts compiled by Wright, my eyes settled on page 810. There, in the description of manuscript Add. 14,613, the preface of the scribe of the manuscript is cited, who calls the author of the work he described, the Book of Steps, a man close to the times of the Apostles. Although this bold assertion initially seemed ridiculous to me, I was troubled by curiosity and had the manuscript presented to me. To my great astonishment, I realized that while it is futile to speak of the work as belonging to the apostolic age, nevertheless the places taken from the Gospels argue for the extreme antiquity of the work. For, having cursorily read only a few pages, I found there many passages which I remembered reading only in the Demonstrations of Aphraates.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land of life the living"
"Feed my lambs and my little sheep and my flock" along with many similar readings, for which you will find no witnesses other than the Syrians.

But the ascetic doctrine of the work also seemed unique. Initially, I suspected that I had discovered a Manichaean work. However, having examined the fragments of the aforementioned manuscript more accurately, I realized that the doctrine of the Book of Steps closely approaches the commentaries of the Messallians an ascetic sect accused of quietism and heresy, although the author's sentiments seemed far removed from the nefarious hypocrisy of the Messallian monks by the very sincerity of his asceticism, his pursuit of virtues, and the honest candor of the author's mind. Likewise, some passages attributed to St. Paul, which show scholarly corruptions of the canonical text, and then many testimonies taken from apocryphal books, confirmed the suspicion conceived about the antiquity of the work. Meanwhile, having examined Wright's catalog more accurately, besides the various fragments already noted in the catalog's index, I found other parts of the work placed among the writings of Evagrius, and contained in very ancient manuscripts. The oldest of these, Add. 14,578, exhibiting the discourse "On the Just and the Perfect," according to Wright, was written in the 6th–7th century and openly shows that the Syrians at that time had no certain tradition at all about the author of the work.

Having described these, little by little, the suspicion occurred to me that the Book of Steps, redolent with many Gnostic ideas, is nothing but an intermediate member in that evolution of the doctrine of the Encratites an ascetic sect favoring abstinence, which degenerated from the hyper-asceticism of the Apotactites and Hieracites to the libertine tenets of the Messallians.