The Askew Codex is a parchment manuscript now held by the British Library (BL Additional MS 5114) which contains Coptic

Coptic language

Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...

 translations of the Gnostic Pistis Sophia

Pistis Sophia

Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text, possibly written as early as the 2nd century. The five remaining copies, which scholars place in the 5th or 6th centuries, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples , when the risen Christ had accomplished eleven...

and parts of what G. R. S. Mead

G. R. S. Mead

George Robert Stowe Mead was an author, editor, translator, and an influential member of the Theosophical Society as well as the founder of the Quest Society.-Birth and family:...

 referred to as "extracts from The Books of the Savior." It was purchased by the British Museum (now British Library) in 1795 from Dr. Anthony Askew

Anthony Askew

Anthony Askew was an English physician and book collector.-Life and work:Askew was born in Kendal, Westmorland, the son of Dr. Adam Askew, a well-known physician of Newcastle. His early education was at Sedbergh School and The Royal Free Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne, where by all accounts...

. Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library

Nag Hammadi library

The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman...

 in 1945, the Askew Codex was one of three surviving codices contained all of the gnostic writings that had survived until recent times; the other two being the Bruce Codex

Bruce Codex

The Bruce Codex is a gnostic manuscript acquired by the British Museum. In 1769, James Bruce purchased the codex in Upper Egypt. It was transferred to the museum with a number of other Oriental texts in 1842...

 and the Berlin Codex

Berlin Codex

The Berlin Codex , given the accession number Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, is a Coptic manuscript from the 5th century AD, unearthed in Akhmim, Egypt. In Cairo, in January 1896, Carl Reinhardt bought the codex, which had been recently discovered, wrapped in feathers, in a niche in a wall at a...

.

Internal links

• British Library
  British Library
  The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
  
  
• British Museum
  British Museum
  The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
  
  
• parchment
  Parchment
  Parchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned; therefore, it is very...
  
  
• manuscript
  Manuscript
  A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...