How the Christian Tradition Is Attested

What this entry calls the Christian conception of God rests on two kinds of evidence that do not always point the same way. The Nicene Creed is the tradition's own primary witness to its Trinitarian doctrine, a text every major Christian communion, Catholic, Orthodox and the great majority of Protestant bodies, still recites largely unchanged nearly seventeen centuries after it was drawn up; that continuity is itself part of the evidence for how settled the doctrine has been within institutional Christianity, whatever disagreement survives about the filioque clause the Latin church later added to it.

Sophia is attested by a different, less institutional route. The strongest textual witnesses to her as a figure in her own right survive outside the New Testament altogether, in Gnostic Christian writings such as the Apocryphon of John and the Pistis Sophia, both discussed at length in Elaine Pagels' study of the Gnostic gospels; those texts were themselves excluded from the canon that later Christianity settled on, which is part of why Sophia's status stayed genuinely disputed rather than becoming doctrine the way the Trinity did. Reading her only through Proverbs and the wisdom literature, without that Gnostic material, would understate how far the figure was actually taken by some early Christians, and reading her only through the Gnostic texts would overstate how central she ever became to the mainstream tradition that survived. This entry cites both routes because neither alone represents what the historical record actually shows.