CHURCH AND GNOSIS

AMS PRESS
NEW YORK
CHURCH @ GNOSIS
cA studyof
Christian
thought and speculation
in the Second Century

THE MORSE LECTURES FOR 1931

BY

F. C. BURKITT, D.D.
Hon. D.Litt. (Durban)

CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1932
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Burkitt, Francis Crawford, 1864-1935.

Church & gnosis.

Reprint of the 1932 ed. published by the University

Press, Cambridge, which was the Morse lecture for 1931.
Includes index.
1. Gnosticism. 2. Theology, Doctrinial—History—
Early church, ca. 30-600. I. Title. II. Series:
The Morse lectures; 1931.
BT1390.B83 1978 230'.1'3 77-84696
ISBN 0-404-16104-9

Reprinted from an original in the collections

of the Union Theological Seminary Library

From the edition of 1932, Cambridge

First AMS edition published in 1978

Manufactured in the United States of America

AMS PRESS, INC.

NEW YORK, N.Y.
 TO

PRESIDENT HENRY S. COFFIN

AND THE PROFESSORS OF
UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
NEW YORK

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE DELIGHTFUL
KINDNESS AND HOSPITALITY SHEWN
TO MY WIFE AND MYSELF
DURING OUR STAY AMONG THEM IN
OCTOBER, 1931
 PREFACE

HE five Lectures in this volume were de-

| livered in October 1931 at Union Theo-
logical Seminary, New York, as the Morse
Lectures for that year. The question with which
they deal is not so remote from present-day
problems as might appear at first sight. From one
point of view the problem which beset the Christian
thinker of the second century is similar to that
which confronts us now, how to express in terms
appropriate to our modern world the Gospel
Message that was proclaimed in a society so far
away from us and so different in outlook. And
doubtless it is not only a question of words and
names, of mere appropriateness of terms, that
confronts us. Our world, our conception of the
world, is different from the horizon of Galilee and
Judaea in the days of Jesus. How are we to con-
serve the value of the ‘treasure’, seeing that the
‘earthen vessels’ in which it was first stored are
so unsuitable, and in some cases worn out and
broken by the lapse of time? This also was the
problem before the men of the second century,
when the Gospel had been transferred from Pales-
vu
 PREFACE
tine to Europe and froma Semitic environment
into the cultivated, scientific, philosophical civiliza-
tion of the Graeco-Roman world.
The Graeco-Roman world has passed away. Its
philosophy and its science is antiquated, mere
milestones on the road by which man has reached
his present outlook, an outlook vaster, stranger,
mistier, yet we believe truer than ever before
attained. But at the time the claims of that philo-
sophy and science were as imperious as those of
our modern astronomy, biology, economics are
to us. Anything that claimed to be true religion
had to take account of that philosophy and science.
It seemed to me, therefore, not uninteresting to
consider in detail some of the efforts of second-
century Christians to effect a synthesis, even if they
serve as much as a warning as an encouragement.
In a certain sense, of course, this little book is
controversial. A main thesis has been to up-
hold the old-fashioned view that ‘the Gnostics’
were Christians, heretics no doubt, but Christian
heretics, rather than pagans with a few Christian
traits. To the Gnostics, as I view them, the Figure
of Jesus the Saviour was central, and their inten-
tion was not so much syncretistic, as an effort to
represent Jesus and the ‘salvation’ which He
brought in an aspect suitable for the acceptance
of educated and cultivated men and women. The
viii
 PREFACE
culture and education of that day is alien to us,
but that only teaches us that the effort made by
the Gnostics is an effort we also should make.
The goal is not a static perfection of statement,
which (if achieved) would only mean ossification.
What is necessary is the effort to express in our
own tongues the wagnalia Dei, in language that
really means something to us, though it may be
different from the hallowed syllables of antiquity.
F, C. BURKITT
CAMBRIDGE
February 1932

ix
 NOTE

The founder of the Morse Lectures

was the celebrated artist and pioneer
in telegraphy. In his honour I com-
posed the Border round the Title-page
of this book. I suppose that every
Boy Scout or Girl Guide who reads
this book can make it out, but for
the benefit of others it is here tran-
scribed.
Top
MORSE LECTURES
Left side, down
UNION THEOL, SEMINARY
Bottom
NEW YORK
Right side, up
ANNO DOMINI 193f
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. Introduction . page %
Gnosis :
Primitive Christian Beliefs . To

Paul 13
The Problem of‘the Old Testament 22

CHAPTER II. Philosophical Gnosticism . 29

Astrology. 30

Soma—-Sema_.. : . 33
Magic : 35
The two kinds of Gnostic Lote 40
Valentinus 42
The Barbelo-Gnostics 53
Note on the Name Barbelo . 58

CHAPTER III. Epyptian Gnostic Works 62

Pistis Sophia. . 66
God troubling himself about man 77
Mammon . . . 79
Aberamenthou . . 81
The Books of Jeu (‘leod) 83
Basilides and Abrasax 86
CHAPTER IV. The Fourth Gospel: Mandaism
and Christianity 92
The Fourth Gospel and John the Baptis 96
The Mandaeans 100
Note on the phrase Manda d’Hayyé 120

CHAPTER V. The Church and theOld Testament 123

INDEX 149
 ‘However much obscurity surrounds the rise of Gnosticism,
the one thing that is certain is that Christian-Hellenistic Gnosis
arose out of Christian Eschatological Gnosis.’
A. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of S. Paul, p. 74.

‘He who possesses a heart that is sanctified, and that shines

with light, is blest with the vision of God.
Fragment of Valentinus, quoted by E. F. Scott (ERE vr 231)
from Clement of Alexandria.
 Chapter I
INTRODUCTION
They thought that the Kingdom of God should
immediately appear. Lé&. xix 11.

Men the subjects suggested to me by

friends as appropriate for this series of Lec-
tures was the connexion between the Gos-
pel according to S. John and the religion of the
Mandaeans. I did not accept the suggestion for my
main subject, because I felt that a full treatment of
this question would be somewhat too technical
and detailed, though I hope to touch upon it in
the course of what I have to say. But the fact
that the suggestion was made may be used to
explain my actual choice of subject and what I
mean by it.
It is a paradox that there should be learned men
who do actually hold that any significant connexion
should exist between the Fourth Gospel and Man-
daean documents. The Fourth Gospel was written
at the end of the first century of our era, or at
latest very early in the second century; it has been
canonical Scripture among Christians for some
eighteen and a half centuries. The Mandaeans, who
still exist on the lower reaches of the Tigris and
the Euphrates, profess a peculiar religion, neither
BC I I
 INTRODUCTION
Christian nor Jewish, though not altogether dis-
connected with these; their sacred writings were
not collected together into their present form be-
fore the middle of the seventh century a.p. In
some of these writings John the Baptist is particu-
larly honoured, and a paradoxical theory has been
started, supported by some distinguished German
theologians, that these Mandaeans are partly de-
tived from non-Christian followers of John the
Baptist. What is still more paradoxical, it has
actually been held that our Gospel ‘of John’ is
only a Christianized rewriting of an original Gospel
of John the Baptist, which had the Baptist and not
Jesus Christ for its Hero. “There was a man sent
from God whose name was John’—this is the first
statement made in the Fourth Gospel when it de-
scends to earth and comes to speak of the world
of men: it has been suggested that in the original
form it was John, and not Jesus, who was set forth
as the Word of Gop!
It is a paradox that such a view should have been
put forward, and I for one do not believe that there
is any truth in the view. But that the view should
have been held at all by responsible and learned
investigators of early Christianity is both signifi-
cant and instructive. It shews us that these learned
men feel that there is something odd and strange
in the development of the Christian Religion and
the Christian Church, that the actual history of the
Christian Church does not seem to them to be
naturally illustrated by the surviving documents.
2
 THE GOSPEL AND CHURCH DOCTRINE

The documents themselves seem to be in need

of fresh explanation. The Catholic Church, as it
actually took shape during the second century,
does not, to many people, seem naturally to grow
out of the original Gospel. There is a gap, a dis-
continuity, somewhere; where are we to place it,
and what is its nature? This is the great question in
the study of the rise of Christianity. That eccentri-
cities, such as the attempted correlation of the
Fourth Gospel with Mandaean doctrines, can still
find favour, seems to me to shew that no satis-
factory answer to the great question has yet been
generally arrived at.
Any elementary text-book of Church History
will tell us that the special preoccupation of Church
thinkers during the second century was the struggle
with ‘Gnostic’ heresies, in the course of which a
firmer and clearer orthodox presentation of Chris-
tianity emerged. Mandaean ideas have undoubtedly
a certain kinship with some Gnostic ideas; the
Fourth Gospel has always hitherto been regarded
as a mine of orthodox Church doctrine. It has
seemed to me therefore that a general considera-
tion of some of the main problems that exercised
Christian thought in the second century will be the
most suitable way of considering both the ideas of
the Fourth Gospel and those of the Mandaeans.
The title ‘Church and Gnosis’ includes this special
question under a more general heading.
 INTRODUCTION

GNOSIS

Before considering any particular Gnostic theory,

ot describing what Christians had believed before
the Gnostics appeared on the scene, it will be well
to define what we mean by Gnosis. ‘Gnosis’
sounds very much more formidable and technical
in Englishor German than it does in Greek. yudaro
is ‘knowledge’. The word occurs in the Old and
the New Testaments in all sorts of connotations,
good and bad; as the Bible is so predominantly
occupied with religion it is not surprising that
yvaoic is mostly used of religious knowledge.
Timothy is warned against the vain babblings of
the knowledge falsely so called (1 Tim. vi 20): in
the Greek it is ‘the pseudonymous Gnosis’
(tiie euBcovpou yvacewo). Many scholars haveseen
in this a direct reference to forms of what we call
Gnostic heresy, but be that as it may we should
remember that the phrase is not so technical in
Greek as it sounds to us. In any case the familiar
words of the Benedictus tell us that John the Baptist
was to give gnosis of salvation to Gop’s people
(yvéowv owtnpiac, Lk. i 77). And if indeed we are
to find a Scripture phrase for what the Gnostics
professed to give, we cannot do better than 2 Tim.
iii 15, teaching ‘to make thee wise unto salvation’.
What Timothy had was holy writings, i.e. the Old
Testament: the Gnostics had other lore, but the
idea of its value to the believer was the same.
If we go on to ask on what authority the Gnostic
4
 THE GNOSTIC METHOD
teachers based their doctrines, it is not very easy
to give an answer. A great deal of pains has been
taken by modern scholars to correlate the ideas of
the various teachers with this or that feature of
ancient Greek or Egyptian or Iranian religion. The
Christian Fathers are never tired of asking where
Valentinus or Basilides got their ideas from, and on
what authority they teach their doctrines. I do not
suppose that the disciples of Valentinus or Basili-
des asked such questions. Ipse dixit, they said;
our Master taught so-and-so. They believed in
Valentinus, or whoever it may have been.
Gnosis is based, therefore, on two main factors.
One is the personal authority of the teacher; the
other is, indeed must be, the self-consistency of the
new teaching. ‘It is a poor hypothesis’, said some-
one once, ‘which does not explain more than the
set of conditions for which it was originally in-
vented.’ An hypothesis which really is based on a
more or less sound knowledge of the constitution
of the world and the nature of man will commend
itself for a considerable time. The length of the
solar year is about 365 days: a year of 365 days will
remain approximately correct by the sun for very
much longer than a year of 360 days; and as the
true length is very nearly 365} days, a year of 365
days with every fourth year lengthened to 366 days
can be accepted as truth for centuries before the
efror is apparent. So the Gnostic systems which
we are to examine claimed not only to be true
knowledge in themselves but also to explain other
5
 INTRODUCTION
mysteries. In the words of Bishop Christopher
Wordsworth’s well-known hymn the Gnostic feels
that he can
all truth and knowledge see
In the beatific vision of the blessed Trinity.
For the Gnostic of the second century it was not
the doctrine of the Trinity, but of the Divine
Pleroma or of the First Mystery taught in Péstis
Sophia. But the principle is the same: the know-
ledge of the true nature of Divine things seems to
the initiate to light everything up and make every-
thing clear.
This mention of the orthodox, Catholic, doc-
trine of the Trinity may serve to remind us that the
Gnostic method of teaching is not so unfamiliar,
strange as the contents of some of the Gnostic
systems may sound. At a later period Mani, the
founder of the Manichaean Religion, taught in the
same way, and he is rightly to be considered as a
Gnostic. The Church writers preferred on the
whole to trust to the tradition preserved in ‘Holy
Scriptures’,* but when we examine these we find
that they are themselves examples of the Gnostic
method. ‘Thus saith the LoRD’ say the Prophets:
in what does this essentially differ from the Ipse
dixit of Pythagoras? Nay more, the ‘Amen, I say
unto you’, of Jesus is essentially the Gnostic way
of teaching. And we cannot stop even here.
1 ‘Hark! the sound of holy voices’ (E. Hymnal 198).
2 fepk ypé&upata, 2 Tim. iii 15.
6
 SOCRATES THE PHILO-SOPHER
Thales, Heraclitus, Empedocles, all the great
Ionian Greeks, taught like the almost mythical
Pythagoras a Gnosis.
Was there any exception in antiquity? Yes, there
was one great exception, one pioneer of a new way
of teaching, a man who disclaimed to have any’
special Gnosis or Wisdom. He was, he said, no
teacher of Wisdom but only a lover of Wisdom, a
‘philo-sopher’. Socrates believed that Truth was
self-evident to every sane and unprejudiced man.
The trouble was that men were full of prejudices,
which obstructed true notions from coming out
from the depths of their consciences into the open:
his business was that of a midwife, to help men to
bring their true notions to the birth by removing
the obstructions. This was a new thing in the
world, a new way of regarding Truth altogether,
which has not yet reached its final concordat with
what may be summed up as Sacred Tradition.
The ‘maieutic’ method of Socrates had an im-
mense influence on civilized thought, but there is
very little of it in our second-century Gnostics.
They ate, we may say, like Ionian seers and
speculators born out of due time. It must be
clearly remembered that the Gnostics come before
us historically as Christians. The victorious school
of Church writers regarded Valentinus and the
other ‘Gnostic’ thinkers as heretics, and such they
were. They set forth views about the manifestation
of Jesus in the world and the salvation for men to
be obtained through Him, which were different
7
 INTRODUCTION
from those of the main body of Christians. In
many ways the judgement of history supports the
Catholic writers, such as Irenaeus: much of the
Gnostic teaching was fantastic and in direct oppo-
sition to fact. But Valentinus and his fellows
started from Christian ideas, they were attempting
to formulate a Christian theory of Gop and man;
the contest between Catholics and Gnostics was a
struggle between persons who felt themselves to be
Christians, not between Christians and heathens.
We are accustomed to think of orthodox Chris-
tianity as a more or less definite system. Perhaps
we may not quite accept it for ourselves, but at
least we ate conscious of the standard by which we
can measure our own unorthodoxy or heterodoxy.
Christianity, we feel, és that which is set forth in the
Thirty-nine Articles, or the Shorter Catechism, or
the Summa of S. Thomas Aquinas. After all, these
venerable documents do agree a good deal to-
gether; a set of statements embodying the points
in which these essentially agree would make a
theological document of respectable length. Ro-
mans, Anglicans and Presbyterians might each
severally say that very important points had been
passed over or inadequately set forth, but so far as
the document went it would express their view of
Christian doctrine. But though it might, on care-
ful examination, be approved by Irenaeus and
Tertullian, I do not think it would sound familiar
to them. Christian doctrine during the second
century was still in a process of formulation. The
8
 WERE THE GNOSTICS CHRISTIANS?
great Gnostic thinkers were Heretics, not in the
sense that they left the high road, but in the sense
that the track along which they went was not the
direction along which the high road was afterwards
constructed.
I have said that the Gnostics come before us
historically as Christians. This is the traditional
view, but it is not the view which has been current
in quite modern times. The view which has found
a great deal of favour in recent years is to regard
‘the Gnosis’ as a kind of philosophy derived from
the Orient, from that East which was only super-
- ficially influenced by Greek thought and clarity, a
philosophy which is supposed to have been current
in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire during
the centuries that followed Alexander the Great,
and particularly during the first two centuries of
out era. This view has been upheld with great
learning by such scholars as Bousset and Reitzen-
stein; if I take the other side it is not only because I
think the several systems are best understood when
considered as Christian systems, however aberrant,
but because I wish above all to point out that the
dominant cause, the moving factor which led to
the excogitation of these systems, was something
inherent in Christianity and the beliefs of the
earliest Christians. We come back to the gap or
discontinuity or crisis in Christian thought of
which I have already spoken, which I have called
the great question in the study of the rise of
Christianity. The view I am going to put before
9
 INTRODUCTION
you in these Lectures is that the prime factor in
the rise of the Gnostic systems is connected with
what is commonly now called Eschatology, that
is to say, the problem raised for the Christian
Church by the non-arrival of the Last Day and of
the confidently expected Second Coming of Christ.
PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN BELIEFS

Primitive Christian Beliefs are nowhere summed

up better than in the familiar words of the First
Epistle to the Thessalonians: ‘Ye turned to Gop
from idols to serve a living and true GoD, and to
wait for His Son from heaven whom He raised
from the dead—Jesus who delivers us from the
wrath to come’ (i 9, 10). To wait for Jesus; and,
as you know, the converted Thessalonians ex-
pected Jesus to come so soon, that they had to be
warned not to leave off working altogether, and to
be told that of the actual time and season of the
Coming no one knew.
Scholars have come to realize for themselves
that the Thessalonians had more excuse for their
mistaken way of life than was formerly taught. If
what is called the Eschatological view of early
Christianity has made great progress during the
present century it is not due merely to the eloquence
and brilliance of such writers as Johannes Weiss
and Albert Schweitzer. They did not invent the so-
called Eschatological view: what they did was to
allow the New Testament to speak for itself. ‘The
Kingdom of Gop is at hand’, said Jesus. The Good
10
 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AT HAND?
News, the Gospel, was that it was at hand. We read
in the tradition that various counsels were given
by Jesus to His ‘apostles’, His missionaries—what
they were to take, or not take, for their journeys,
how they were to behave in towns and villages
friendly and unfriendly, how they were to endure
opposition, persecution, and even imprisonment.
It 1s often supposed by critics that some of these
directions and anticipations—those, for example,
which speak of standing before kings and gover-
nors and of being a testimony to all the nations—
reflect the experiences of later times. It may indeed
be so, but the message these missionaries are told
to deliver remains unexpanded. It is still that the
Kingdom of Gop is at hand and therefore that men
should repent,—that, and no more!
The Kingdom of Gop did not arrive, and the
missionaries returned before the Son of Man had
come. Jesus, if we may follow the indications
given us by Mark, spent the summer and autumn
after His first public activity in semi-retirement to
the north and east of the Holy Land. When He
comes forward again it is what Wellhausen so
finely called ‘a transfigured Jesus’,? who is deter-
mined to go up to Jerusalem on a forlorn hope,
ready to give His life as a ransom for many. When
He arrives in Jerusalem He does do something
public in the Temple Courts, and with some suc-
cess and public favour. But the heavens do not
t Matt. x 7, Lk. x 9, 11; Mk. vi 12.
2 Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Marci (1909), p. 62.
Ir
 INTRODUCTION
move; neither from heaven nor from men is the
response at all of a kind which gives Him, Jesus,
assurance of support, and—here again I am follow-
ing what Mark tells us—He gives up all worldly
hope. He does not abandon His claims to autho-
rity, but He deliberately dashes the enthusiasm of
the crowds by telling those who ask Him about
tribute to give Caesar his due, and He leaves the
Temple, never to return. And, according to
Mark, He then not only anticipates His own im-
mediate death (Mk. xiv 8), but also warns His
intimate friends not to be too hasty and eager in
expecting the Coming of the Son of Man (Mk. xiii
5-37).
In this famous ‘eschatological’ discourse, what
is teally remarkable is not the prediction that the
Son of Man would come, but the warning that
there may be a painful delay. The great Day will be
in that generation indeed, but not yet. Much has
yet to happen, there is even danger that the
disciples may forget it and be caught unawares.
This is a new note in the Gospel story. As it
comes in Mark, it sounds to me genuine, words in
their historical setting, the voice of one who had
learned, not from holy oracles but from bitter
experience, that the End would not be yet.
Then came the tragedy of Good Friday; but it
was followed by the conviction of Peter and those
who joined Peter that the Master had risen from
the dead and would soon, very soon, come again
in glory as the Messiah, as the Son of Man coming
12
 S. PAUL AND THE COMING
with the clouds and all the holy angels with Him
to inaugurate the Kingdom of Gop. In these
terms the Gospel was reformulated. In the words
that I have already quoted from the First Epistle to
the Thessalonians the believers were to wait for
GOD’s Son from heaven, even Jesus who would be
their deliverer from the wrath to come.
When would He come?
They thought, says a passage in the Gospel, that
the Kingdom of Gop should immediately appear.
This passage (Lk. xix 11) might very well stand as
a motto for the whole of the New Testament. Even
the writer of the First Epistle of John warns those
to whom he speaks that it was then ‘the last hour’.
PAUL

In sketching the development of thought within

the Christian community, however hastily and
sketchily, it is necessary to take each leader of
thought separately. It is in individuals, not in
societies, that thought progresses, and the thought
of great men outruns that of their contemporaries.
It is true that later disciples may imitate the works
of original leaders of thought, but such composi-
tions re-echo rather than produce new tones, or
else they are different altogether. To come to the
concrete instances to which these general remarks
are meant to apply, I find it difficult to believe that
the Epistles to the Philippians, Colossians, Ephe-
sians were written by a school of followers and
imitators of S. Paul, of whom we otherwise know
13
 INTRODUCTION
nothing. They are not centos of Pauline phrases,
nor mere echoes of his earlier teaching, but press
forward into new problems with true Pauline
daring and insight, yet with enough marks of
Pauline style, both in language and sentiment, to
justify the traditional ascription to the great Apostle
of the Gentiles. The Pastoral Epistles, on the other
hand, seem to me ina different category. Not only
ate the linguistic marks of Pauline authorship ab-
sent, but the stress. laid on the deposit (1 Tim. vi
20)! is not characteristic of the pioneer but of the
man of the second generation.
In the matter of the Second Coming, of Escha-
tology and all the problems connected with it, I
feel most strongly that Paul was a pioneer, and a
lonely pioneer. He began, like all the early Chris-
tians, with an expectation of the Parusia of Christ
in the immediate future. This is obvious from
1 Cor. xv 50 ff., whichever readings we adopt as
correct. The matter is even clearer in 1 Thess. tv 17
(‘we the living who survive’), but this very definite
phraseology may come not so much from Paul
himself as from Silvanus, i.e. Silas the Jerusalem-
ite,? whom I regard as ‘the actual writer of the
Thessalonian Letters. Still in any case it was
approved by S. Paul, and indeed no one doubts that
he, like the other early believers, was expecting the
End in that generation. It is surely the expectation
© And, I would add, the new birth (Tit. iii 5).
2 Acts xv 22 (2€ ovtév): see my Christian Beginnings, pp.
128-33.

14
 S. PAUL AND THE COMING
of a speedy consummation of all human affairs
tather than an ascetic theory of morals that makes
Paul discourage his Corinthian friends from mar-
tiage. It is because of the present unfavourable
state of things (1 Cor. vii 26). What indeed is
implied, both there and in the whole New Testa-
ment, is that a man may marry and have children,
but hardly grandchildren. The notion that there
may be successive generations of Christians, and
that one of the most solemn duties of a God-
fearing man is to do the best for those that shall
come after him, is conspicuous by its absence. In
its place we find ‘Be not anxious for the morrow’.
But the thought of the coming Parusia did not
fill S. Paul’s mind at any time. He was more
occupied with Gop’s plan of salvation. A most
important part of this, according to his view, lay
already in the Past. The disciples of Jesus had
confidence in their Master. They became con-
vinced that He was Gop’s chosen Messiah, and
they expected His speedy return to set all wrongs
right. Such an attitude of mind can be called
Faith: it might equally well be called Hope. Either
word not unfairly sums up their general attitude.
This is the religious theory expressed in the early
chapters of Acts. Herod and Pontius Pilate may
have conspired ‘against the LorD and His Christ’,
but it had been all foretold and the evil deed had
been overruled for good.
S. Paul had, as we all know, a more profound
view of the significance of the career of Jesus and
15
 INTRODUCTION
His Crucifixion. The ‘word of the Cross’ that Paul
proclaimed was more than the tale of a tragic
crime. Christ had died for us; through the Cruci-
fixion we had somehow been bought with a price
away from the dominion of evil, even though at
the time we were still sinners, and the experience
of Christ’s death we must sacramentally—that is,
really but not sensibly—undergo when we join the
Christian Society. I need not further elaborate the
Pauline doctrine, so familiar to all of us. But we
may notice that the acceptance of these ideas,
which S. Paul calls Faith, refers to the Past. It is
distinct from the common Christian belief in and
expectation of the Parusia. Paul therefore had
need of two words: there was Faith which refers to
the Past, and Hope which refers to the Future.
Moreover there was another element. It was not
enough, according to S. Paul, to believe in the
tedemption from evil accomplished by the Cross
and all that the Cross signified, and further to look
forward to an ultimate attainment of a Kingdom
of Gop which was not eating and drinking but
righteousness and peace and joy in holy spirit.
More was required: the Christian was required not
only to believe in this and to hope for this, but also
to like it. Gop loves a cheerful giver, and also a
cheerful receiver of His inestimable benefits: this
temper of mind is Charity, I feel convinced that
the Agape described in 1 Cor. xiii is neither
philanthropy nor enthusiastic devotion, but the
attitude towards Gop which Paul exemplifies when
16
 THE DELAY OF THE PARUSIA
he says ‘Thanks be to Gop for His unspeakable
gift!’ (2 Cor. ix 15).
Thus the major part, one might say two-thirds,
of S. Paul’s religion was not concentrated on the
Christian Hope of the Coming of Christ, even when
his hope of its speedy fulfilment was most vivid.
Meanwhile time went on and Paul found himself
getting on in years, faced moreover with the pros-
pect of death at the hands of the civil power if not
from old age. Young converts like Timothy were
now in the prime of life, men whose whole active
career had been passed in the Christian Society, in
Christian conditions; indeed there must have been
not a few children, born of Christian parents, who
had been brought up in the Faith, who had been
received into the Church, and had died. Yet the
Lord had not yet come.
The conclusion which S. Paul drew was that the
Church in itself must be of more significance than
was at first realized. It was itself an important
thing in Gop’s sight, and therefore something
eternal.
It is in the circular letter which we call the
Epistle to the Ephesians that this view of the
Church is most clearly set forth, but the doctrine
that the Church is the body of the Christ is clearly
laid down in Colossians (i 18, 24), including the
very remarkable idea that the sufferings of himself,
Paul, and therefore of other faithful Christians, are
a sort of requited supplement (Gotépnya) to Christ’s
own sufferings. The doctrine taught in Ephesians
BC 17 2
 INTRODUCTION
is only an amplification of this, and I for one regard
Ephesians as the genuine work of Paul himself.
We are so accustomed to the familiar phrases of
Ephesians and Colossians that we hardly see what
a revolution in Christian thought they represent.
Or rather we ought to say that they represent a
development of Christian ideas, that opened out
a passage along which Christian thought could
travel when the old avenue of the hope of a speedy
arrival of the End was beginning to close up.
The Thessalonian believers had acted consistently
with their beliefs. They had been content to ‘wait
for Jesus’ and to take no thought for the morrow.
Why should they? The things of this world, as
they believed, were transitory and worthless.
Cur mundus militat sub vana gloria
cuius prosperitas est transitoria?
tam cito labitur eius potentia
quam uasa figuli que sunt fragilia.
The practical instinct of Paul would have none
of this line of conduct, though I do not find that
he and Silas had yet found a satisfactory theoretical
critique of the Thessalonians’ konsequente Eschato-
/ogie. But after some ten or twelve years more of
varied Christian experience, with the End of all
earthly things not yet come and his own death in
sight, he found his new theory of the place of the
Church, here and now, in the scheme of things.
Unlike a large number of critical scholars, I
believe (as I said just now) in the Pauline authorship
of the Epistle to the Ephesians. The main weight
18
 EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS
of the objections to the Pauline authorship I think
is not linguistic, as is the case with the Pastoral
Epistles, but the difficulty of fitting the ideas of the
Ephesian Epistle into ‘Paulinism’, The Paulinism
expounded by theologians has for its basal axiom
the notion that Paul had a closed system of thought,
the same or nearly the same from soon after his
conversion to the day of his death. This seems to
me highly improbable. I think Paul was much
influenced both by the mere lapse of time and by
the greatness of his own work. In one case we
know of a change: in 1 Corinthians he was expect-
ing to be alive at the Parusia (1 Cor. xv 51), in
Philippians he calmly contemplates his probable
death. I cannot but think that Paul’s active mind
must in any case, apart from the evidence offered
by Ephesians, have considered what was the signi-
ficance of this present time, when the Christian
Society was ever growing and developing, and
nevertheless the End was not yet come.
My main theme is the Gnostics and theit Gnosis,
and I do not want to delay too long on the familiar
ground of Pauline ideas. They are familiar to us,
because they are included in the New Testament,
but at the time of writing ‘Ephesians’ had no such
authority. So far as we can judge from the evidence,
the letter—a circular one, not a mere local missive
—made a good impression, and it appears never to
have been quite forgotten. The general conclusion
to be drawn from the admirable tables at the end
of the book compiled by the Oxford Society of
19 2-2
 INTRODUCTION
Historical Theology on the ‘Apostolic Fathers’*
is that the writings of Paul which remained in
circulation during the fifty years or so which
followed his death were 1 Corinthians, Romans,
and Ephesians. The evidence is consistent with
the theory that makes the resuscitation of the
others, notably 2 Corinthians and Galatians, to be
due to the energy of Marcion, but it is evident
that our ‘First Epistle to the Corinthians’ with
‘Romans’ and ‘Ephesians’ had never dropped out
of memory.
But this did not mean more than that they were
honoured writings of a great Missionary, to be
studied and imitated, and here and there (where
the application was obvious) to be quoted (Clement
xivii 1 = 1 Cor.i11 ff.). The influence of Paul as a
Doctor of the Church came later, and none of the
Apostolic Fathers is a Paulinist in the sort of way
that S. Augustine or Luther or Pascal may be
called Paulinists.
As I view the matter, the age of looking back,
of appeal to the pure beliefs of ‘primitive’ times, had
not yet arrived. It was a time of the rapid develop-
ment of new customs, new organization, ideas new
to some extent, at least. The Church, the Christian
Society, was rapidly becoming an almost exclu-
sively Greek-speaking body. Latin Christianity
was hardly yet in existence, and the Destruction of
Jerusalem in a.p. 70 had shattered for ever the con-
t The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers (Oxford,
1905), pp. 137 f.
20
 CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION
trolling influence of Jerusalemite and Judaistic
Christianity, as a living active force. Judaic in-
fluence in the future would be a literary force,
derived from the Old Testament as understood by
Christian Greeks.
And meanwhile the old ‘eschatological’ view of
the world and its fate continued to persist in almost
unabated strength. Indeed the Jewish War and the
collapse of the Jewish State must have helped to
keep it alive both among Jews, as witnessed by
4 Ezta and the Apocalypse of Baruch, and also
among Christians, as witnessed by the Revelation
of John and the Ascension of Isaiah. Beliefs, such
as the return of Nero from the East and the advent
of fresh world-wide calamities ushering in the End,
were current and have laid their mark on con-
temporary literature. Yet still the End did not
come. The world went jolting along its accustomed
course; in fact, with the second century of our era
there arrived that prosperous period of Roman
history when Trajan and his successors were on the
throneand civilization, Graeco-Roman civilization,
seemed to be established firmer than ever. Could
the Christian theory of the world stand the strain
of an age of prosperity? The Church still continued
to increase, but did it teach a theory, a theology, fit
for an enlightened, educated man? Was there not
a call fora new theology, something which would
explain the true nature of the ‘Salvation’ attained
mysteriously by Christians in terms of current
‘enlightened’ ideas? Could not this ordinary
21
 INTRODUCTION
Christianity be more properly expressed in terms
which cultured people could use? Was not such a
cultured expression more near to absolute truth
than the vulgar enunciation of the new Religion
that was sufficient for the uneducated common
folk? It was only natural that such questions
should begin to be asked: in due time they gave
rise to such ‘Gnostic’ systems as those of Valen-
tinus and Basilides. Meanwhile there was an even
more pressing theological problem for Church-
men. They had to make up their minds how they
were to regard the Old Testament.
THE PROBLEM OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

It is easy to forget that the Old Testament and

its significance was to the second generation of
Christians very much of a problem. They came in
the end to conclusions which seemed so satisfactory
that it has been only in our day, in the light of the
new knowledge derived from science and historical
criticism, that they have been disturbed and new
problems have arisen. What I mean can best be
understood from a consideration of the long-lost
work of S. Irenaeus known as the Epideixis,
happily now found to be extant in an Armenian
translation and published in 1907."
This work is by the author of the famous
tefutation of Gnostic heresies, a refutation which
t Des Al. Irendus Schrift... .es twi8afwv... herausgegeben
von Dr Karapet Ter-Mekerttschian (T. und U. xxx,
Heft 1), Leipzig, 1907.
22
 THE EPIDEIXIS
is also the most ancient and faithful account of the
chief systems that are usually reckoned as Gnostic.
The Epideixis does not describe or refute unortho-
dox errors, but gives a sort of epitome of the
orthodox Christian system, representing it as pre-
pared for by the Old Dispensation of which the
Old Testament is the record, the author illustrating
his thesis by copious citations from the Old Testa-
ment itself. Read carefully, the peculiar tendencies
of S. Irenaeus are everywhere to be seen: no one
doubts the genuineness of the discovery, and
specialists have given it most of the attention it
deserves. But the general theological public, the
sort of public that is interested in the Didache or the
Oxyrhynchus so-called Lagia, took very little in-
terest in the Epideixis. Why? I think some of the
older readers of it knew very well. They recognized
in it the Bible teaching of their youth, of ‘Line
upon Line’, of countless Scripture manuals, of
the Shorter Catechism. It was a teaching which
annexed the Hebrew Bible to the Christian Church,
with the corollary that the meaning of that Bible
was in every part the doctrine of the Church, and
that those parts of the Bible that did not seem to
set forth the doctrine of the Church might be
practically (but not formally) ignored as being of
only temporary significance. This masterful solu-
tion—both parts of it—had not been arrived at all
at once. Let me hasten to add that as compared
with some of the alternative theories, there is
something to be said for it. We still hear from
23
 INTRODUCTION
time to time in some quarters that there is too
much of the Old Testament in Christianity. The
best answer to this is that many scholars tend now-
adays to treat Christianity as one of the pagan
Mystery-Religions. If the Church had not been
determined to claim the Old Testament for its own,
to declare itself the true Israel and the heir of the
Old Testament anticipations, I think it would have
been swept away from an historical view of Reli-
gion altogether.
It is difficult to conceive historical Catholicism
without the Old Testament; perhaps the best way
to proceed is to consider some of the solutions of
the Old Testament problem which were not
adopted by the Church. First, then, let us take the
Epistle of Barnabas. Here we are not far from
otthodoxy: we are considering a work that at one
time in some quarters found a place in the New
Testament itself. We see, too, how the problem of
the Old Testament tended to present itself to very
ordinary minds. The difficulty was that the Old
Testament plainly commanded certain things which
Christians did not obey, for example, not to eat
hare. This is explained by ‘Barnabas’ as really
condemning this or that vicious practice, enforcing
his exegesis with false natural history. According
to this view, then, the Old Testament was moral
from covet to cover, but was absurdly worded. The
Church had the good sense to reject this view as a
whole, though retaining it in certain places. It is
T ud yévn, pnol, red0gOdpoe (Barn. x).
24
 MARCION
suicidal to accept 2 Book as sacred and at the same
time to declare the natural meaning of its words
not to be the meaning.™
Another solution, even more radical than that of
‘Barnabas’, is specially associated with the great
heretic teacher Marcion. Marcion is commonly
teckoned among the Gnostics, but I venture to
think he is distinct from these and is best regarded
as a separate thinker. He was impressed above all
things by the newness of the religion announced
by Jesus and its difference from that which had
gone before. To him the God of the Old Testament
was very nearly the Devil of the New. The God of
the Old Testament was to Marcion a God of ruth-
less Justice, and no more. Marcion rejected that
God, and regarded the Old Testament as the Book
of this ruthless Being. The special weakness of
Marcion’s view of the Old Testament is that it is
inconsistent with the historical Jesus, and as
Marcion based his own religion upon Jesus his
views about the Old Testament are a jumble of
inconsistency, as the Church Fathers were not
slow to point out.
But between these radical extremes there were
many other theories, one of which at least is
t I do not mean that authors, sacred or profane, may not
from time to time express themselves in a metaphorical or
cryptic style, so that the real meaning may be different from
what appears at first sight, but in such cases the metaphori-
cal cryptic meaning is the meaning intended by the author.
No one could seriously maintain this with reference to the
food laws of Deuteronomy.

25
 INTRODUCTION
associated with a distinguished Gnostic teacher.
The ‘Letter of Ptolemaeus to Flora’, preserved by
Epiphanius, gives us an excellent idea of the kind
of quality in the Old Testament which made it
to cultivated Christians of the second century a
problem and a difficulty.
The solution of Ptolemaeus is that we must
distinguish various elements in the Old Testament.
There is a truly Divine nucleus, but there are also
inferior elements. Some things were added by
Moses because of the hardness of the Israelites’
hearts, and so are not part of the perfect ideal
legislation. Some things were added by the Elders
not by Moses, and are therefore (according to
Ptolemaeus) not approved by our Saviour. Other
things are truly Gop’s Laws, but even here we
must distinguish. The Decalogue is Divine, but
“eye for eye, tooth for tooth’, is not legislation for
alltime: Jesus taught us to forgive our enemies, and
also that Gop will forgive His penitent children.
Further, there are other things, like circumcision
and the sacrifices, that are typical: in themselves
they are irrational, but they signified the true
salvation that was to come through Jesus.
A modification of this theory is to be found in
the ancient early Christian, non-Gnostic work,
called the Didascalia. Possibly the Didascalia is
independent altogether of Ptolemaeus, but both
systems recognize a temporary element in the Law,
an clement which is not obligatory for Christians
either to obey or to defend.
26
 PTOLEMAEUS AND THE LAW
In this Introductory Lecture I have emphasized
two things, the Eschatological Hope of the Second
Coming of Jesus and the authority of the Old
Testament. I do so, because I think that these two
things were the main possessions, the visible pro-
perty, the main stock-in-trade, so to speak, with
which Gentile Christianity started. There was the
germ of much else, some of which is of the highest
importance, but these two things bulked largest.
You see them put forward, with admirable histori-
cal tact, in the discourse put into the mouth of
S. Paul at Athens by the writer of the Book of Acts.
The first part of Paul’s discourse is an attack on
‘idolatry’ quite in the manner of the Old Testa-
ment: this leads up to an announcement of the Last
Judgement and the Parusia of Jesus (Acts xvii 30f.).
To the Greek both parts were strange, foreign,
uncouth, barbarous. But if he felt the power and
the attraction of the new Religion he had to come
to terms with both parts. They were, each of them,
a challenge. When, after more than a century of
thought and controversy, a ‘Catholic’ philosophy
had grown up, a long-enduring synthesis came to
be generally accepted by very nearly all who pro-
fessed and called themselves Christians. But this
interval, this century, is the era of the so-called
‘Gnostic’ teachers, of Valentinus, of Basilides, and
many another. It seems to me that the first condi-
tion of rightly regarding them is to consider them
as Christians who were striving to set forth the
living essence of their Religion in a form uncon-
27
 INTRODUCTION
taminated by the Jewish envelope in which they
had received it, and expressed in terms more suited
(as they might say) to the cosmogony and philo-
sophy of their enlightened age.

28
 Chapter IT
PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM

* Der Gnosticismus...war eine tief religiose Bewegung, die, von hel-

lenischem Geiste getragen, die hellenistisch gebildete Gesellschaft
der alten Welt ftir thre eigentimlich gefarbte christliche Religion zu
gewinnen suchte und in der That eine Zeit lang diese ibre ‘Aufyabe
mit grossem Erfolg durchgesetzt hat
C. Schmidt, Gnostische Schriften. ..aus dem Codex Brucianus
(T. und U. vim), p. 528, 1892.

[: the previous introductory chapter I have

attempted to sketch the salient characteristics of
the earliest Christianity, as they might be ex-
pected to strike a Gentile inquirer. He would find
a belief that the God or Cult-Hero worshipped by
the Christians had appeared in Judaea a generation
or two ago, and that He was expected soon to
come again in glory; and he also would find that
the Christians reverenced a Sacred Book, viz. what
we call the Old Testament.
We may now go on to consider some of the ideas
or prejudices which it would be likely for this in-
quirer himself to hold. Some features of resem-
blance are to be found in certain very widely
separated ‘Gnostic’ systems. They must have a
common origin, but I venture to think that the
common origin is to be found in certain widely
spread notions or ideas rather than in particular
systems of religion or philosophy.
29
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM

ASTROLOGY
First of all we have to consider the ideas that are
grouped round the word Astrology. In our days
‘Astrology’ means the traditional pseudo-science
of the influence of the stars, in contrast to the real
science of ‘Astronomy’, based on continual fresh
observation and on hypotheses which are made to
conform to the results of observation. Astronomers
have excogitated the Solar System, not because
they like it or because it ministers to human vanity,
but because that arrangement of things alone
accounts for the actual observed positions of sun,
moon, and stars. But in the first and second cen-
turies of our era what we now call astrology repre-
sented a real advance of scientific theory over
ancient tradition. Astrology is bound up with
what is generally known as the Ptolemaic System;
and this, compared with antique views of the shape
of the world, was a great scientific advance.
What is the shape of the world? What did the
ancients think was the shape of the world? The best
general discussion I know ts that very learned work
of Dr Robert Eisler, published in 1910, called
Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt. Dr Eisler is surely
right in warning us against the assumption, so
commonly made, that the ancients, and notably the
writers of the Old Testament, conceived of any-
thing like the Ptolemaic system with its orderly
arrangement of concentric revolving spheres. What
they thought of was more like a tent with its
30
 THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD
supporting pillars or framework. Indeed the dia-
grams in the work of Cosmas Indicopleustes, a
writer of the sixth century who rejected the
Ptolemaic scheme as being un-Biblical, shew us the
world as not unlike a ‘Saratoga trunk’. Up above,
covered by a curved top, was the Kingdom of
Heaven. Below was the Earth, with pillars at the
corners supporting the heavens. The Sun goes
round and round from the East to the South, then
to the West, and then to the North behind the
gteat Mountain (the shadow of which causes
Night), and so to the East again.
It is not necessary to consider this ancient view
of the world in any detail. The important thing is
to recognize, as Eisler does (p. 631), that the choice
between the two theories, that which regarded the
Earth asa ball and that which regarded it as the flat
floor of a tent, was not between two rival myths
but between what we nowadays call Science and
Religion. The strength of what may be called the
Tent-view lay in ancient tradition, in its easy
allegorization, in the obvious analogy between this
view of the Universe and a human dwelling; the
strength of the Ball-view lay solely in its better
agreement with observed facts.
Towards the end of the first century of our era
this new, scientific, ‘Ptolemaic’ view of the world
had come to be held by most cultivated persons in
much the same sort of way as most cultivated
persons now believe in ‘Evolution’. There were
difficulties, of course. If the Earth were a sphere
31
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
and there were men at the antipodes, would they
not fall off? This, and other similar questions,
then unanswerable, were often put. But there re-
mained always the impressive spectacie of the fixed
stars, revolving night after night rourid the Pole.
These, at least, once their invariable configuration
had been noted, must be thought of as fixed in a
tigid though transparent sphere rotating round
the Earth. And if the stars are fixed in a sphere of
this kind it seemed reasonable to explain the more
unaccountable movements of the other heavenly
bodies in a similar way. There must be similar
spheres for the Sun and for the Moon and for the
Five Planets, with this difference, however, that
these were not fixed at a particular point on their
sphere. Or else, if so fixed, their several spheres
revolved irregularly.
The point which is of importance for us is this,
that in any case men’s thoughts had come to con-
ceive of the Earth on which they lived as sur-
rounded by crystal, transparent, but rigid, spheres,
very much as the heart of an onion is encased by
its outer layers. This view immensely enhanced the
importance of each planet. It was no longer a tiny
point of light mysteriously wandering among the
other heavenly bodies. To the believer in the
Ptolemaic astronomy it was the Lord of a Sphere
which encased the Earth itself. If it was high or
low above the ground, nearer or further from other
heavenly bodies, it seemed reasonable to suppose
that it exerted a special influence on the Earth and
32
 THE BODY A TOMB
its inhabitants. And along with this belief there
was another, intimately bound up with the scien-
tific character of the Ptolemaic system. ‘Planets’
might indeed be ‘wandering stars’, and the rules of
their courses were very imperfectly known even to
the most learned astronomers, but the very obser-
vations that had led to the excogitation of the
system had taught the comparative regularity and
inevitableness with which the heavenly bodies,
planets included, do move. If then the planets (or
their spheres) had an influence on men, that in-
fluence came inevitably and inexorably. Astrology
as a doctrine is a doctrine of Fate, of inevitable and
inexorable Fate.
SOMA—SEMA
We shall come back to Astrology, but it will be
convenient to go on now to another leading idea
of cultivated thought in late Pagan times. It is
most conveniently formulated in a Greek catch-
word, odpa ofjua, ‘the body a tomb’.
What does this imply? I think, in the first place,
that the soma-sema doctrine may be described as the
reverse or back-view of ‘the Immortality of the
Soul’. The immortality of the human soul is not a
doctrine taught in the Bible, either in the Old or
the New Testament. Gop alone ‘hath immot-
tality’. He may confer it on others, but it is no
t A modern expression of the same idea is to be found in
Schleiermacher’s exclamation ‘All who belong to a better
world must for the present pine in dismal servitude’
(Schheiermacher’s Solitoquies, ed. H. L. Friess, p. 56).
BC 33 3
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
necessaty and natural postulate of human exist-
ence. A vivid belief in Gop’s justice, a belief that
the Gop of all the earth will in the end do right, led
most Jews to believe, from the time of the Macca-
baean rising onwards, that martyred saints would
not be untewarded and that notorious sinners and
persecutors, such as Antiochus Epiphanes, would
receive in theit own persons the due punishment
for their evil deeds. So arose the belief in the
Resurrection of the Dead. It is a moral doctrine,
not a physical theory. The Greek notion of the
immortality of the soul, on the other hand, is not
in itself moral but logical and psychological, “Tt
must be so,’ says Addison’s Cato, ‘Plato, thou
reasonest well’; these well-known words most faith-
fully describe the nature of the notion and its
intellectual basis.
The soul of man, then, the Psyche, the queer
inhabitant of the human body that in dreams seems
to be able to wander outside at will, only to be
imperiously called back on waking, was held by
many Greeks to be immortal. But it was tied toa
mortal body, like a bird in a cage. This body was of
earth, of the same or similar substance as stones
and mud and other inanimate things. The soul, on
the other hand, was ‘ethereal’—what does that
mean? It meant that its true nature and abode was
the Upper Air, in the pure region high above the
clouds. The body enclosed it like a tomb: if only
the body were dissolved, the immortal soul was
free to mount up to its true home.
34
 MAGIC WORDS
How did this group of ideas stand to Astrology
and the victorious Ptolemaic system? The Pto-
lemaic system had brought in the Spheres, trans-
lucent walls of crystal cutting off Earth from Hea-
ven beyond, cutting off the Soul in its upward
flight. How could the Soul get through?
My point in emphasizing the Ptolemaic system
and the soma-sema view of human life thus at the
outset of our study of Gnosticism is that these two
things are something wider and more general than
any of the ‘Mystery-Religions’, something wider
and more general than the reconstructed specula-
tions of a Posidonius. As I said just now, a view
of the Universe conditioned by these two ideas
corresponds more or less to the position that an
evolutionary philosophy has with us. It is quite
possible to retain belief in an old religion without
much reference to these things, but a new religion
or a new philosophy will have had to take account
of them.
MAGIC
One other factor in many Gnostic systems calls for
notice here. This is Magic and the use of magical
or ‘barbarous’ names. We shall hear of Barbelo, of
Jaldabaoth, of Aberamenth6u, not to mention
Sabaoth and Melchisedec and other genuine Bibli-
cal words. How are we to regard these?
It should be remembered that there is a whole
branch of study, often called ‘Gnostic’, which has
really very little directly to do with Valentinus and
35 3-2
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
Basilides and other such Christian thinkers, I mean
the study of so-called ‘Gnostic’ gems and charms.
Some of the names and figures on these gems, e.g.
Abrasax, play a part in some Gnostic systems, but
there is no evidence that the gems were once owned
by Valentinians or Basilidians. Some of the gems
may be even older than the Christian era, and in any
case I do not think that they have very much to do
with Gnosticism in our sense of the word. There
are also magical texts on papyrus, which are akin
to the gems, but hardly belong to any Christian
Gnostic school.
What the outlandish names in magical formulae
and on gems attest is the belief, from which the
Bible is almost free, that the use of particular
names or syllables will cause the Deity or the
Demon to attend to an invocation. And it seems
the general rule among all nations, including the
Greeks notwithstanding their general contempt
for ‘barbarians’, that foreign, outlandish names
were considered the most potent. Let us begin by
the familiar word Sabaoth. There can be little doubt
that this is merely the Hebrew for ‘hosts’ or
‘armies’, and that the ancient Israelites spoke of
their Gop as the God of the hosts of Israel (see
e.g. Amos iii 13, vir4). But the phrase nigay my
was in some of the more ancient (and worse trans-
lated) parts of the Greek Bible rendered by KyPioc
CABAWO, notably in the Book of Isaiah. This seems
to have been understood by persons ignorant of
Hebrew to mean the Lord Sabaoth, a Divine Per-
36
 SABAOTH
sonage whose Name was Sabaoth.t Wherever,
therefore, we find the name, or personage, of
emanation, or deity, called Sabaoth, we may infer,
firstly, a knowledge of the Greek Bible (generally,
no doubt, at second or third hand); and secondly,
ignorance of Hebrew. Where we find the proper
name Sabaoth we must beware of ascribing any
Jewish origin to the beliefs or traditions (for Jews
would know better), and at the same time we
ate in touch with circles that ascribed value and
potency to names found in the Old Testament in
Greek. In other words these circles were neither
Jewish nor Pagan, but some sort of Christian.
Let me illustrate this conclusion by a counter-
illustration. When Gop appeared to Moses, ac-
cording to the story told in Exodus, and Moses
asked Him what His Name was, Gon said ‘I will
be what I will be’. It is clearly a sort of play upon
one pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton, and its
meaning in the context may be safely deduced from
the ‘Certainly I wi// be with thee’ of Exod. iii 12.
The Septuagint has for the mysterious phrase ty®
celui 6 dv, ‘I am He that is’. This is sufficiently
impressive and philosophical, even if philologically
inaccurate. But it is useless for Magic. The magi-
cian, the man who occupied himself in transcribing
spells which would compel the unseen Powers to
listen, was not interested in the nature of Being
ot in ontological speculation. He wanted a com-
pelling formula. On the other hand the Peshitta,
t See on this Epiphanius, Haer. xxvi, p. 92.
37
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
i.e. the Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible,
transcribed the Hebrew syllables, making A/yah-
asharahyah: this word is meaningless in Syriac, and
therefore is much used in Syriac charms.1
Side by side with Sabaoth, which is a genuine
Hebrew word unintelligently used, may be placed
Taldabaoth, which in some Gnostic systems is the
name of the Demiurge. No proper derivation for
this name can be found: I doubt if any rational
derivation ever existed. It seems to me to be
formed after the analogy of Sabaoth. Possibly also
the first inventor of the name had heard that Ia/d
ot Yeled meant ‘child’ or ‘boy’ and that Ad or
Abba meant ‘father’. But the rules of philology,
which are undeviating in genuine natural forma-
tions, do not hold for artificial names.?
Taking the magical names as a whole, it is pretty
clear that we can divide them into three main
classes. There are the names just considered, which
are accurate or inaccurate Biblical words. Then
there are genuine non-Biblical names, whether of
Gods or men. Of these perhaps the most curious
is the Babylonian Goddess of the Underworld
Eresh-ki-gal, who appears in the Leiden Papyrus
as epecoriwad, and on a gem as epegicar.3 It is
worth while to lay some stress on this isolated
fact, for Erechigag on the gem looked very much
1 See e.g. H. Gollancz, The Book of Protection, §§ 4, 5.
2 Personally, I find it difficult to separate Ialdabaoth
altogether from saw cahawe, but neither in sound nor
in writing does -Aa- resemble -we-.
3 C. W. King, The Gnostics and their Remains, p. 318.
38
 ABLANATHANALBA
like one of the many nonsense-names which form
the third class. Another non-Biblical name is the
God Chnoub ot Chnoum (another form of ‘ Anubis’),
figured like a worm or snake with a crest—prob-
ably a sort of cobra-form. It is noteworthy that
neither ‘ Ereshkigal’ nor ‘Khnum’ plays any part in
Christian Gnostic angelology. On the other hand
ahepamenowos, which occurs with Ereshkigal in
the Leiden Papyrus, is equated in Pistis Sophia
with Jesus. In the next chapter a provisional deri-
vation of Aberamenthou will be put forward.
But besides these two classes of names, which,
however much corrupted, do represent a real termi-
nology, wemeet on gems and insome Gnostic books
with mere nonsense-names, often unpronounce-
able, such as the name of the ‘True God’ in the
Books of Ieu, viz. Ioeiadthduikhdlmio, or con-
sisting of all the vowels in succession. These names
sometimes tread both ways, like Ablanathanalba,
or another of 59 letters which is said to be a name
of ‘Khnib’! Some of these nonsense-names may,
as I have just said, be corruptions of real words,
but we must allow for an element of mere jingle and
mystification. In parts of Pistis Sophia and other
Gnostic works in Coptic there are a good many of
these nonsense-names: it is beside the mark to seek
for derivations, unless they recur in different works
with some stability of form. My chief reason for
bringing these names forward at this point is to
insist that they are not peculiar to works or systems
which have some claim to be classed as Christian
39
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
Gnostic, but are a general feature of magical
literature.
THE TWO KINDS OF GNOSTIC LORE

All this being premised, we come at last to the

main Gnostic documents, and it is easy to see that
they fall into two classes. There is a Gnosticism
which is mainly a philosophy, and there is a
Gnosticism which is mainly a mythology. In the
first class the terms are mainly Greek, in the
second class the terms are largely pseudo-Hebraic,
akin to the names used in Magic.
Which of these classes is the more original and
which derivative? The question is different from
the more general one which asks Which comes
first, Magic or Religion? A very slight acquaint-
ance with our Gnostic writings is enough to shew
that they all have the same general aim, and that is
to present the rdle of Jesus in a new way. The
presentations are most diverse, and some of them
are to our taste childish, but in the opinion of their
authors they were something satisfactory, more
satisfactory than the common account. In other
words, they are not developments of Religion in
general, but explanations of the particular mystery
presented by Christianity. Only a philosophy can
explain a mystery: a mythology may embody a
philosophy, but does not in itself explain it. For
this reason I regard the mote or less philosophical
Gnosticism—that is to say, Valentinus—as ori-
ginal and the mythological Gnosticism as on the
40
 PHILOSOPHY OR MYTHOLOGY
whole derivative and degenerate. The mythological
tale of the Fall of Sophia is a mere embodiment of
the philosophical sofon as it appears in Valentinus’s
system,
One isolated point from the tracts associated
with Pistis Sophia is worth notice by the way. No
doubt these Coptic documents are later and deri-
vative, but they have the advantage of being com-
plete, and certain ideas are there preserved which
afte not equally preserved in the accounts we
possess of earlier Gnostic systems, simply because
they afforded no controversial point to orthodox
apologists. I am especially thinking of the use of
the Coptic word crvadrr Muos in the Pistis Sophia
literature. This word is an adaptation of oxWAAeoOan,
“to trouble oneself’. Because men were sinners
they were in trouble, but Jesus in the highest
Heaven ‘troubled Himself’? about them, and so
came down to bring them the means of salvation.
The Gnostic cannot explain why this came to pass,
any more than the Catholic, but both Gnostic and
Catholic recognize it as the foundation of their
belief. They differ considerably about the nature of
sin and defilement, they differ about the human
body of Jesus and its nature, but they agree about
the Divine Compassion and that its embodiment
was found in Jesus the Saviour.
t As in pi oxuAdou, Lk. vii 6. This explanation of the
Coptic word, first pointed out in Jourz. Theol. Stud. xxun,
p. 272, has been adopted by Schmidt in his revised transla-
tion (1925): Schmidt now renders it ‘sich abmithen’.
41
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM

VALENTINUS

I begin with Valentinus, for the same reason as

S. Irenaeus does, because of his general importance.
Here at least we have a thinker, who impressed the
Christian world, though in the end the Catholic
Church rejected the special form in which he and
his disciples expressed his doctrine. His name was
known all over the Christian churches from the
Euphrates to the Rhéne: he is the only Gnostic,
except Marcion, named by Aphraates.
At the beginning of the great work of Irenaeus!
an account is given of the Valentinian theory of
the origin of things. Valentinus taught that there
was an original Forefather (Npotérwp), called also
The Deep (Bv8do). With this primordial essence
dwelt a Thought (“Evvoia), called also Grace (Xdpic),
for it was not conditioned, and Silence (Z1yi), for
it made no sign of its existence. Somehow the
immeasurable Deep made its own Thought fecund,
and so Mind (Noto) came into being; and though it
was called Unique (Movoyevic) it had a correlative
side to it called Trath CAAnSex). It will be noticed
that the Pairs are very much like the Hegelian
Thesis and Antithesis that between them bring
forth a Synthesis. In other words, the Valentinian
heavenly hierarchy, known as the Pleroma, is not
in essence Mythology but Philosophy. After all,
human beings only know of two kinds of fresh
t Trenaeus, adv. Haer. 1 i, 1-3 (Harvey, pp. 8 ff.): see
Journ. Theol. Stud, xxv, pp. 64-7.
42
 VALENTINIAN GNOSIS
production: there is the thought or idea that seems
to be self-produced from a man’s consciousness,
and there is the new individual that comes from
generation in plants and animals. By the first pro-
cess the ultimate Forefather of Valentinian theo-
logy conceived His original Thought, and by
something analogous to the second the dumb
Thought produced what could be called Nous. In
other words Nous was ‘begotten, not made’.
‘Nous’ is an intelligent Understanding, the inevi-
table counterpart of which is Truth. For if there
be nothing true to understand there can be no
intelligent understanding.
It must also be pointed out that the original
Bythos, the hidden Deep that produced the first
Thought out of itself, corresponds in many ways
to the Subliminal Self as conceived by some modern
psychologists. What I mean is well put in Dr
Sanday’s book, Christologies Ancient and Modern.
Whether we use the phraseology of the older school
which talks about ‘unconscious cerebration’,* or
the newer one which uses the term ‘Subliminal
Self’, there is in the human personality an inner
cornucopia, a treasute-house, something within us
more ‘profound’, impulses good and bad which
‘come flickering up from below’,3 in a word there
is from time to time a ‘thought’ or ‘notion’ which
proceeds not so much from our conscious reason-
1 See Sanday, p. 192.
2 Sanday, p. 140 (quoting F. W. H. Myers).
3 Sanday, p. 157.
43
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
ing powers as from what is sometimes called ‘the
abysmal depths of personality’. Abysmal is a word
often misused, but here it is technically correct; it
corresponds to the Valentinian word Bythos. It was
by a process analogous to that by which new
notions come into our minds out of the unknown
activities of our unconscious selves that the Valen-
tinian ‘Forefather’ produced His first unexpres-
sed Thought. I have elaborated this analogy at
some length, because I wish to point out that the
ideas of Valentinus are not so very far removed
from some of the conceptions of modern thinking,
different as is the terminology.
Many more pairs according to Valentinus were
formed in this way, the last of which was Design
(©eAntdc) and Wisdom (Zopia). For the last name
I venture to suggest a change from the usual
English tendering. As we ate soon to learn,
Sophia’s conduct was not marked by true Wisdom:
what in modern terminology would be a much
nearer equivalent is Philosophy. The name of her
consort may best be seen from Malachi iii 12,
where the Holy Land in which Gop takes pleasure
(éres béphes) is called y# GeAnt}. So here, Gop took
pleasure in the consort of Sophia, he was her
“Intended’.
But according to Valentinus what was intended
did not take place. The first Forefather was not
visible to the whole family of Aeons: He could
properly be perceived by Nous alone, by the pure
Intelligence. But somehow Sophia got a glimpse
44
 SOPHIA IS PHILOSOPHY
of this exalted Forefather, and she desired to have
direct intercourse with Him. This was not in-
tended for her: her search for the Unsearchable
was labour and sorrow, and, to continue the tale,
her unauthorized passion somehow made her
fecund with a formless monster. In pain and
terror Sophia cried out for help to be sent to
her from the Father and all the Aeons, and the
Father sent to her a new Being called Horos,
who separated her from the monster that she
had conceived, and restored her to her proper
condition among the Aeons. Her monstrous
offspring, on the other hand, fell outside the
heavenly Society (the Pleroma) altogether, and
became the cause of this sensible and material
world.
I have dropped into Myth, as Valentinus does,
but it is quite evident all the time that he is de-
scribing the first origin of things under the figure
of a myth, and not only the origin of things but
also the mixture of good and evil found in this our
world; and further, that his idea of the origin
of things was psychological, akin to the mental
processes of our own mind, which indeed are the
only mental processes we know of. ‘ Sophia’, as I
said, is Philosophy. Philosophy sometimes seems
to have a glimpse of the Deep, that is, of Ultimate
Reality: it desires to have direct touch with Ulti-
mate Reality. The vision of what is ultimate is
entrancing but intoxicating: Philosophy cannot
conceive it intelligently and produces only dis-
45
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
ordered Fancies.t What physician, or rather sur-
geon, can treat the disordered fancies of Philo-
sophy? Valentinus’s name for him is Horos, i.e.
‘Boundary’, in other words true Definition.
Here we come to the most interesting, and at the
same time the most Christian, feature of Valen-
tinian doctrine. Horos, we ate told, had other
names meaning Emancipator, Redeemer, etc., but
it is also called ‘Cross’ (otavpdc), because it
‘crucified away’ (émoctoupwéfjven) the disordered
fancy of Philosophy. This is nothing more nor less
than the Pauline doctrine that the believer in
Christ Jesus has ‘crucified’ the flesh with the
affections (tra®ypata) and lusts,?—a point that has
often been missed by expounders of the Valen-
tinian system, who have been driven to suppose
that by orovpdéo, the common word for Cross,
familiar to every Christian, Valentinus meant
‘stake’ or ‘paling’, and that what Horos did was to
fence Sophia off from her offspring! But the dis-
covery of the Acts of John makes the interpretation
given above certain. In that work, which is itself
a product of ‘Gnostic’ ways of thought, we are
told that the real effective Cross is the marking-off
(Siopioués) of all things.3 Further, it seems that
the figure thought of 1s not + but T—something
which divides everything below it into ‘right’ and

1 The word used by Valentinus is Enthymesis.

2 Gal. v 24.
3 See M.R. James, Apocryphal N.T. §§ 98-100 = ‘Acts of
John’ xiii in Apocrypha Anecdota, 11.
46
 HOROS IS THE CROSS
‘left’, but above it there is no division. We know
from other sources, e.g. from the ‘Epistle of
Barnabas’, chap. ix, that when Early Christians
thought of the shape of the Cross it was as some-
thing like the letter T rather than the shape we now
conventionally give to it.
The essence of Christianity is contained in the
Cross and what Christians have associated with the
Cross. No religious theory that does not contain
a doctrine of the Cross has a right to the name
‘Christian’. But from the beginning it was a stumb-
ling-block, a ‘scandal’. Here we see how Valen-
tinus incorporates the Cross as the decisive factor
in his drama of salvation: it is just this that makes
his heresy, however erratic and however heretical,
a Christian heresy.
It will not be necessary to follow in any detail
the further ramifications of Valentinian cosmo-
gony; of the production of the heavenly pre-
existent Jesus by all the Aeons, so that He has the
virtues of all of them; of the stages in the pro-
duction of the visible world and of the world of
men; of the ultimate redemption of ‘Achamoth’
(for so they named the Disordered Fancy of
Sophia) and of those of her offspring who attained
to some measure of true knowledge (yvéoic). It
will not be necessary, for in the evolution, the fall,
and the subsequent reinstatement of ‘Sophia’ or
Philosophy, the essential ideas of Valentinus are
expressed.
1 Iren. (ed. Harvey, p. 53 = M 29).
47
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
The two points I wish to emphasize are that
these ideas are essentially philosophical, not mytho-
logical; and that they are an attempt at formulating
a Christian philosophy. Not indeed that it was a
philosophy in the Socratic sense, of which I spoke
in the previous discourse. It is from that point of
view thoroughly ‘gnostic’ and authoritarian. But
I feel that it is a thoughtful attempt to express the
ever-recurring problems of philosophy in accord-
ance with something very like the Christian view
of things by means of concepts borrowed from the
processes of human thought. Unde malum, et quare?
Unde homo, et quomodo? And, Unde Deus?: The last
question, Tertullian adds, especially concerns the
Valentinians.
In this Tertullian is not quite fair. Valentinus
does not ask whence the primordial Forefather
came, the Cause and Origin of everything. What
he was concerned with was the problem of how
Two could come from the original undifferentiated
One, how the multifarious world, multifarious and
variegated both in thought and sense, could have
otiginated from the One original Existence. He
solves it by telling his disciples that a sort of
Thought or Notion of it came up out of the depth
of the Forefather’s being, just as notions swim
into out own consciousness. The Forefather con-
sidered His Notion, He had now Something to
contemplate: He understood it, and what He
understood was the truth. There was now both
« Tert. de Praescriptione, VII.
48
 VALENTINUS AND THE FALL
Understanding and something to understand, Noxs
and Aletheia. The natural result, cate puawv, of this
family of ideas was a whole brood of fairly distinct
conceptions, harmoniously developing from the
original notion.
So far, so good. But now we come to the story
of Sophia, to the collapse of Philosophy. In
Biblical language we have advanced as far as
Gen. i 31, or the fourth verse of the Fourth Gospel.
We must remember that Valentinus was a Chris-
tian, that to him Jesus was the Saviour, and that
‘Saviour’ implies something to be ‘saved’. What
was Valentinus’s doctrine of the Fall?
There is no intellectual necessity for the fall of
Sophia, but Valentinus, both as a Greek and as a
Christian, believed in the empirical fact. As a
Greek he held the soma-sema theory, viz. that the
better, ‘ethereal’, part of him was imprisoned in
gross matter; while as a Christian he found a
doctrine of the Fall of Man, from the effects of
which the Son of God had come down to earth to
deliver those who received Him. Like Mani after
him, he felt that the Fall must have happened in
essence before this world, this mixed world, came
into being. The world is the resa/t of the Fall, not
a regrettable accident which occurred soon after
it came into being.
Let us remember that orthodox Christian specu-
lation has also, in its own fashion, attempted to go
behind the story of the Fall of Adam. ‘The Serpent
beguiled me’: obviously, therefore, Christians
BC 49 4
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
came to think of the Serpent of Genesis as a demon,
as Satan, as Lucifer. How then are we to explain
the fall of Lucifer? What was the first sin? The
oldest answer given to this question, a pre-
Christian answer supplied by the Book of Enoch,
makes the sin of fallen Angels to be Last, because
they saw the daughters of Man that they were
fair. But this is no answer at all, for Adam and
Eve had already been expelled from Paradise be-
fore the daughters of Men were born. The great
opponent of Valentinus had a different theory: the
sin of Lucifer was Envy of Man created in the image
of God. Man, according to this preposterous
idea, was the innocent cause of his own mis-
fortunes. Psychologically less unsatisfactory is the
theory, championed especially by S. Augustine,
that the sin of Lucifer was Pride, and that his pride
came (like the original Thought of the Forefather)
from his own being. This is a better theory,
because it is not concerned with this human world
at all: ‘evil’, though latent, was already in exist-
ence when man came into being.
The theory of Valentinus is somewhat similar to
this, but it combines a certain element of the first
theory. What was the sin of Sophia, for which she
herself and her irregular offspring paid so dear?
What is ‘Lust’? Essentially it is unregulated
desire. What is ‘Pride’? A self-confidence not
borne out by facts. Sophia had had a glimpse of
t Irenaeus, adv. Haer. rv (Harvey, 11, p. 303): see also a
Note by W. Crum in J.T.S. rv, p. 396.
5°
 UNREGULATED DESIRE
something better than she had been able to imagine,
and she wanted it for herself: Philosophy has an
inkling of the ultimate Reality, but cannot and does
not properly conceive it, and so gives birth to what
Thave called ‘disordered fancies’, which had better
not have been ever conceived. Yet once these
fancies have come into being the ultimate Intelli-
gence which orders everything is able and willing
to bring good out of evil. Philosophy can be
refined and purified, and all that is good in the
disordered fancies will ultimately find a place in
the universal harmony. And further, according to
Valentinus, this is somehow accomplished by the
Cross.
I feel certain that the system of Valentinus, as
formulated by Ptolemaeus and summarized by
Irenaeus,! was consciously a Christian philosophy,
designed to exhibit the essential truth of the
Christian Religion to Greek-thinking men who
regarded the soma-sema theory of human life as
obvious, and who desired to have their religion
freed from the materialistic shackles of a barbarian
allegory.
I use the word ‘allegory’, because Valentinus, at
least as represented. by Ptolemaeus his disciple,
seems not so much to try to supersede the Scrip-
tures of the Old and New Testaments as to inter-
pret them. Of course he is profoundly unhistorical
and entirely arbitrary according to our ideas of true
interpretation, but he seems to have thought that
t Irenaeus, adv. Haer. 1, pp. 5, 80.

5 4-2
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
he was really giving the true meaning, as when, for
instance, he declares that by Christ and the Woman
with an Issue is signified the passion of Sophia and
her cure, for the ‘virtue’ which went forth from
Jesus was that Horos-Stauros, which separated her
from her pathological issue.t Valentinus has all the
mote right to allegorize in this way, inasmuch as
the theory of the heavenly Aeons, their production
and the fall of one of them with its subsequent
redemption, is an universal process, a mirror of all
concrete happenings, somewhat after the manner
of the universality, according to Hegel, of thesis
and antithesis.

It seems to me that there is very little Mythology

in the Valentinian theology. ‘Sophia’ is not a sort
of Angel, but means philosophy or rather philo-
sophic theology. Even in the orthodox diction of
the Creeds we talk about ‘begotten’, but mean
something less materialistic than the term naturally
implies. Valentinus is no more materialistic in in-
tention than the Nicene Creed, and in judging him
to-day we ought to be as sympathetic to his
phraseology as we are to the wording of the
historic Creeds.
The chief difference between Valentinus and the
orthodox was that the orthodox theology was much
more careful to retain Biblical terms. The Church,
with a true instinct, was afraid of mythology: in
the sequel we shall see that it had good reason to be
t Irenaeus (Harvey, I, p. 27).
52
 THE APOCRYPHON OF JOHN
afraid. Churchmen had reason to be afraid not so
much of Valentinus, as of what Valentinianism
would inevitably lead to.
THE BARBELO-GNOSTICS

The account of Valentinus’s doctrine given above

follows the description given by S. Irenaeus, who
appears to follow the account given by one
Ptolemaeus, a disciple of Valentinus, no doubt the
same as the Ptolemaeus who wrote the ‘Epistle to
Flora’, Another branch of the same, or very
similar, teaching should be mentioned here. This
is the sect or sects whose doctrines are described by
Irenaeus at the end of his first Book (i 29).! The
text of Irenaeus is here preserved in the Latin
translation, which we know to be an extremely
faithful and literal rendering, and it is also re-
produced by Theodoret in Greek, not always with
perfect accuracy. But in addition to Irenaeus we
now have fragments of the original from which
Irenaeus drew his information. They are to be
found in a Coptic Ms which has been at Berlin for
the last 35 years and is not even now published, but
a very full account of it was given by Carl Schmidt
in 1907 in the volume called Philotesia.? The Coptic
fragments are often obscure, but they contain the
exposition of a theology, not its confutation.
The true title of this work, not given by
1 Harvey, I, pp. 221-6.
3 Pbhilotesia, a Festschrift in honour of Paul Kleinert
(Berlin, 1907), pp. 317-36.
53
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
Irenaeus, is the ‘Apocryphon of John’, ie. the
secret revelation given to S. John the Apostle, a
similar title to that of the canonical Apocalypse.
Jesus appears in a vision to John and reveals
Himself as ‘the Father, the Mother, and the Son’,
in a word as the unmixed Godhead, the cause of
all things. It will not be necessary to describe the
system fully: three points only need to be con-
sidered, viz. the name of the All-Mother, the origin
of Evil, and the central rdle of ‘Jesus’.
The name of the All-Mother is Barbe/o. The
original Source of all things, corresponding to the
Valentinian Bythos or Deep, is depicted as dwelling
in His own clear and tranquil Light, which is the
Fountain of the Water of Life. Out of the depths
of His own pure essence comes His own “Evvoic or
Thought, just as in the system of Valentinus, but
She is given (without explanation) the name
Barbelo. It is not the only ‘barbaric’ name in the
‘Apocryphon of John’, but it is in many ways the
most noteworthy, Unlike Sabaoth (and its corrup-
tions) it does not appear to come directly or in-
directly from the Old Testament, indeed it does not
appear to have a Semitic derivation. It is also
worth temartk that Barbelo is always a kindly,
sympathetic personage. Ialdabaoth and Sabaoth,
Demiurge and Archon, often come before us as the
names of heavenly Tyrants, rebels like Lucifer
against the Supreme Gop and tyrants to man, but
Barbelo is never so degraded. I have ventured
elsewhere to conjecture that the word ‘Barbelo’ is
34
 BARBELO THE ORIGINAL SEED
adapted from the Coptic e/bile, a ‘seed’ or ‘grain’,
so that while Greek speculation traced the first
beginnings of things to a Thought or Notion the
more concrete Egyptian mind thought of a Seed.
In any case, with the name Barbelo we come to
Egyptian, as distinct from merely Alexandrian
ground, and we begin to pass from philosophy to
mythology.t
The origin of Evil, or of Matter—the two to the
Gnostic are almost synonymous—is similar to the
Valentinian account. The trouble came through
the misdirected desires of ‘Sophia’, but here Sophia
is distinctly a more mythological figure than in the
true Valentinian representation. She, like the other
products of Barbelo, is spoken of by the revealing
Jesus to John as ‘our fellow-sister’, but she failed
to find her proper consort and the virtue that went
out from her turned into a monster called Ialda-
baoth, the First Archon, from whom in turn came
the visible material Universe with all the ills that
Gnostics associated with the visible material Uni-
verse. All this, of course, is in essential accordance
with Valentinus, but we may notice the emergence
of a new key-word, which is not, I think, found in
Ptolemaeus. The trouble in Sophia came from 1
tpovvixoy, the lustful disposition in her, according
to the Coptic account,” while Irenaeus seems to
understand that these Gnostics called Sophia her-
self 4 Mpovvixoc. This term Prunicus is in any case
t See the separate Note, p. 58.
2 Philotesia, p. 329.
55
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
a last relic of the psychological terminology of the
earlier Christian Gnostics; in what follows it is all
mythology.
Finally, the central rdle assigned to ‘Jesus’ in
the Apocryphon Iohannis must be recognized. It is
difficult not to go into some detail in explaining
Gnostic theologies and cosmologies. The study is
obscure, and yet fascinating to the investigator,
but to the ordinary sensible man and woman of the
twentieth century the detailed investigation of the
alleged relation of imaginary beings to one another
is apt to seem confusing if not tedious. We may
therefore bring ourselves up at this point and ask
what all this is about? What is the point of Barbelo-
Gnosticism? What is the aim of the Gnostic writer
who wrote the Apocryphon Iohannis?
Of course it may be answered that the aim is
the propagation (among a suitable audience) of
‘Gnosis’, that it gives an answer to the great
questions ‘ Whence comes eviland why?’ ‘ Whence
comes man and how?’, once again to use Tertul-
lian’s famous words. But it is Jesus who is the
revealer and the saviour. He is to John the full
incorporation of the Godhead, and it is through
His action that the Divine Spark in man is enabled
in the end to escape from the evil in which it is
enmeshed.
In other words this system, like every other
system historically included under the name of
Gnostic, considers itself to be Christian, to be a
philosophy of Christianity, an exposition of Chris-
56
 JESUS AND THE GNOSIS
tianity in terms more enlightened, and therefore
more true, than Christianity as understood by
vulgar believers. The figure of ‘ Jesus who appeared
in Judaea’, to quote the phrase afterwards used by
Mani, is central to it; without this figure the whole
system falls to pieces.
“The Gnosis’, to use the fashionable modern
term, does not precede Christianity but is a new
formulation of Christianity, as understood by some
second-century Christians who shared the physical
and biological ideas most widely spread among
“the educated classes’ of the Mediterranean civili-
zation of their day. What they had dropped from
ordinary Christianity was Christian Eschatology,
the belief that this world was quickly coming
to an end by the advent of Jesus Christ to
judge the living and the resurrected dead on this
earth. This belief, explicable as an expression or
development of the Jewish religion, was wholly
alien to Greek thought. On the other hand the
Gnostics had not, in their own opinion, rejected
the Old Testament or the Gospel record, but they
claimed to interpret it in their own sense. They
considered that they had received an enlighten-
ment which shewed them the true meaning that
lay behind the sacred Writings which ordinary
Christians misunderstood. Even Marcion derived
an important element in his teaching from the
story of Adam and Eve, though he regarded the
God of Judaism as the enemy of Jesus. Without
Christianity, without the growth and success of
37
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
the Christian Church, there would have been no
Gnosticism, The various forms of Gnosticism are
attempts to reformulate and express the ordinary
Christianity in terms and categories which suited
the science and philosophy of the day. And fur-
ther, when we get behind the unfamiliar imagery
to the ideas which they attempt to express, some of
these forms are really thoughtful and shew kinship
with some modern philosophical and psychological
conceptions.

NOTE
ON THE NAME BARBELO

The name Barbelo (hapudw) is given as the

proper name of the First Thought or Notion
(2vvoia) of the Ultimate Forefather in the ‘ Apocry-
phon of John’, which is also the work upon which
the account in Irenaeus, adv. Haer. 1 29 is based. It
is also the name given for the corresponding
petsonage by Epiphanius when describing the
Simonians (Haer. xx1 56 fin.), the Nicolaitans (Haer.
XXV 77 med.), and those called ‘Gnostics’ (Haer.
XXVI 92 init.). Of these we may at once omit the
Simonians, i.e. according to Epiphanius the fol-
lowers of Simon Magus, because Epiphanius does
not assert that they used the name Barbelo, but
only that the Power which they call Prunicus is
called by other heresies Barbero or Barbelo
58
 BARBELO
(BapBnpe& Ato BapBnAw): he obviously means the
“Gnostics’ of Haer. xxvI.
Nicolaitans are in Epiphanius’s terminology the
followers of Nicolas of Antioch, the companion
of Stephen, who was supposed to have fallen from
grace and abandoned himself to an evil life. From
what Epiphanius says in the second paragraph of
Haer. xxv it is clear that there were no Nicolaitans
directly derived from Nicolas, but Epiphanius
groups a number of sects or schools as ‘Nico-
laitans’ because they all practise a relaxed morality.
Of these sects ‘some’, he says, use the name
Barbelo. But it is all, so to speak, prefatory
matter to what he has to say in Haer, xxvi about
the ‘so-called Gnostics’, who were a sect with
whom Epiphanius himself had dealings in his
youth. I do not think it proved, therefore, that the
name Barbelo is attested by Epiphanius except for
these ‘Gnostics’.
These Gnostics of Haer. xxv1 were clearly
domiciled in Egypt, apparently not far from
Alexandria (tijs 1éAewo, p. 100 med.). The ‘Apocry-
phon of John’ is preserved in a Coptic version, and
it has various affinities with the Pistis Sophia
literature and the Books of Jed. It is reasonable
therefore to postulate for it a geographically
Egyptian origin, though it was doubtless com-
posed in Greek. When therefore we find in these
a term like Barbelo, which is neither Greek nor
Semitic, it may be conjectured that its origin is
Egyptian.
39
 PHILOSOPHICAL GNOSTICISM
It is right to say at the outset that there can be no
doubt about the spelling of the name as adopted by
Gnostic theology. It is Hap&ndw in the Apocry-
phon of John, in Pistis Sophia and in the Latin
version of Irenaeus. Theodoret has BapBnAwé, but
such appended letters to ‘barbarous’ names mean
nothing, as in Sirach and Aceldemach. Barbelo, as it
stands, means nothing, but we learn from Epipha-
nius that the name, as pronounced by his Egyptian
Gnostic acquaintances, sounded as much like
Barbéro as Barbélo (BapBnpe ror BapBnaw, p. 92
init.). This suggests that the true transcription of
the liquids was uncertain, which is often the case
in old Egyptian words, and is exemplified in one of
the main differences between Fayyumic and other
Egyptian dialects.
I suggest therefore that Barbe/o is derived from
the Coptic word #Aarae, ‘a seed’, ‘a single grain’.
This word, like ‘Barbelo’, is feminine. It accords
well with the concrete tendencies of Egyptian
thought, in which (as in Pist. Soph. 121) a trveGpa
could be bound to a bed, that the first product of
the undifferentiated Deep, from which in due
coutse all other things would come, should be
regarded as a Seed, whereas to the more Hellenic
imagination of Valentinus it was regarded as a
Thought.
It is worth recording that, as noted above (p.
§4), Barbelo is never represented as unfriendly
to man. ‘To Barbelo’, says C. Schmidt (Jes, p.
393), ‘a hostile attitude to mankind is never
6o
 BARBELO

asctibed.” When therefore we read in Péist. Soph.

359 a prayer of Jesus for His Disciples that ‘all the
powers of the Unseen God Agrammachamareg
and the Barbelo the Bdella’ may be the reverse of
sinister we know something is wrong. faeddAa
cannot be the Greek word BdéAAa, ‘leech’. I ven-
ture to suggest (1) that in the letters thaphudw
tefaears the first half is a correction of the
second, correct so far as the meaning goes, and (2)
that tefmeAdAa is a corrupt survival of another,
and really more correct, form of the name, viz.
tefAhrAa Or some such spelling.
I presume that the name of the ‘Unseen God? is
a corruption of é&ypéypyetoo (in the sense of ‘Not
to be expressed in letters’), modified by an effort to
make it repeat like ‘Ablanathanalba’, possibly with
a reminiscence of the ineffable ‘ Tetragrammaton’ of
the Jews. It occurs elsewhere as Akrammakram-
makanarissse.

61
 Chapter ITI
EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS

HE documents which we are to consider in

this chapter are rather difficult to place.
Ancient Egypt and the Egypt of the Graeco-
Roman world perished finally with the Moham-
medan Conquests. ‘Fhe curious amalgam presented
by the Levantine civilization of Greek-speaking
Alexandria has dissolved, and all that survives
directly of the old Egypt is the Coptic Church. In
earlier times, certainly down to the fifth century
A.D., there was a more variegated intellectual life in
Christian Egypt, and chance has preserved a few
old documents of a very different character from
the later literature of the Copts. The two chief
documents came to England at the end of the
eighteenth century: they are the Askew Ms? con-
taining Pistis Sophia with other writings, and the
Papyti brought back by James Bruce. Both are
ancient: the Askew ms is probably of the fifth
century, for at a later date its transcription in
Egypt is inconceivable and Prof. Carl Schmidt
even suggests a date before 4oo. The Bruce
Papyri, now at Oxford, were brought to Europe
by the celebrated traveller James Bruce. They
t Called after a former possessor, Anthony Askew, M.D.,
who died in 1774.
62
 THE DOCUMENTS
consist of a number of papyrus leaves with Coptic
writing of about the same age as the Askew as, if
not older. Schmidt, who has edited the texts,'
found that the leaves formed part of two different
works, viz. the first and second Books of Jex
(reos), and an unnamed Gnostic work which it is
convenient to call Setbeus (cueesc), The text of the
Askew Ms was edited by Schwartze and Peter-
mann in 1851, but the best translation is again by
C. Schmidt in the book called Pistis Sophia, pub-
lished in 1925. Schmidt distinguishes two works
in the Askew ms, viz. the three books called Pist#is
Sophia (or ‘The Rolls of the Saviour’), and an
anonymous Gnostic work which follows it. In
Schmidt’s opinion the chronological order of
these works is (1) Setheus, (2) Jeu, (3) the Anony-
mous work, (4) Pistis Sophia. Of these ‘Setheus’
is akin to the Apocryphon of John (see above,
pp. 53 ff.), but it is later and derivative, quoting
Scripture, even Ecclesiastes and Hebrews, and
does not need further notice here. I begin with
Pistis Sophia, as it may be used as an introduction
to the curious world of thought to which all
these works belong.
Let us begin by not expecting too much con-
sistency. We are dealing, in the last resort, with
the products of human fancy, a fanciful world,
‘moulded to the heart’s desire’, in which the
religious imagination was not tied down to histori-
t C. Schmidt, Guostische Schrifien...aus dem Codex Bru-
ctanus (T. und U. vim 1, 2), Leipzig, 1892.

63
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
cal facts preserved in an authoritative Book. In
these days J venture to think we are often not
sufficiently grateful to the orthodox Catholic theo-
logians who clung so doggedly to the literal truth
of the Scriptures. We have found out that some
things in the Bible are not, after all, historically
true, and we are easily persuaded to contrast our
scientific knowledge of the Solar System, of the
geological age of our Earth, of the wonderful
vistas of ancient Oriental History, with the cram-
ped ideas of the Church Fathers, drawn from the
Bible. But we ought never to forget that the alter-
native to the Bible in the days we are considering
was not Prof. Breasted’s Ancient History, or
Huxley and Lyell’s Geology, or the Astronomy of
Newton and Copernicus. The alternative to the
Bible was a mete fancy picture of the world we live
in, whereas the Bible did after all give materials for
constructing the course of events which led to the
Jewish Religion and the religious ideas that were
the intellectual atmosphere of the world in which
Christ and the Apostles moved.
And further, there is a generous prejudice often
felt in favour of those whom we know only by
tefutations. We can see that Hippolytus and Epi-
phanius, even Irenaeus, ate prejudiced and not
always intelligent. We have a kind of sentiment
that there must have been more in the systems of
their Gnostic opponents than the refutations of
them give us to understand. If only we could hear
the Gnostics speak for themselves! Was the whole
64
 GNOSTIC DISORDERED FANCIES
controversy a case of a victory of prejudice over
philosophy, of superstition over free thought?
If ‘the Gnostics’ had triumphed, might not the
result have been a more rational, a more intelli-
gent, Christian orthodoxy? Well, such pessimistic
doubts might easily be held in former centuries,
even a hundred years ago. In the documents we
are considering to-day we hear Gnosticism speak-
ing for itself. It is a curious study, a study in what
may be called ‘free’ thought, I mean thought very
little controlled by external considerations or
tational design. There are not wanting acute
remarks, ingenious combinations, a few striking,
even brilliant, ideas, but the whole is fantastic. It
is like nothing so much as the unhappy abortion
of Sophia in the Valentinian myth, the Exthymesis
or ‘disordered fancy’ that was not in accordance
with Design.
And there is one other feature which these
Coptic documents present. In Valentinus’s ideas,
especially as presented by his disciple Ptolemaeus
and summarized by Irenaeus, we did seem in the
presence of a thinker, who drew his notions (as the
primordial Deep did of which he speaks) out of
his inner consciousness. But in these Coptic docu-
ments there is a strong element of blind tradition,
of accepting an idea and then mythologizing it. It
is quite clear that if Valentinus had become a
Doctor of the Church, it would not have saved the
next generations from a superstitious and compli-
cated mythology.
BC 65 5
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS

PISTIS SOPHIA

I will now give a short account of the Three Books

of Pistis Sophia, confining myself mainly to the
general structure of the work. The scene is the
Mount of Olives (4, 15, 169 ff., 171); the time,
the eleventh year after the Resurrection. The idea
is that Jesus the Saviour remained teaching the
chief Disciples for twelve years after the Resur-
rection, after which they went forth to preach to
the world: our book professes to record the last
Revelation that Jesus gave them before His final
retirement to the realms of light. This twelve-year
sojourn of the Apostles near Jerusalem is no pecu-
liarity of our book but a feature of general Christian
tradition.?
On the 15th of Tybi, then, the moon being full,
Jesus was clothed with a marvellous Robe of Light
and straightway ascended into the highest Heaven:
then He returned to the Disciples to give them a
tevelation of what He had done. First, He had
modified the Fate on which Astrologers depend
(26 ff.): He took away a third from the powers of
the Rulers and made the spheres turn six months
this way and six months that, so that in future
t The numbers refer to the Coptic pages of Schwartze-
Petermann, which ate repeated in the margins of all the
editions.
2 The ultimate source may be historical: it was about
twelve years after the Crucifixion, in the reign of Herod
Agrippa, that Peter was imprisoned in Jerusalem, escaped,
and left the city (Acts xii).
66
 HYMNS OF PISTIS SOPHIA
astrologers cannot be sure of their horoscopes!
Here Mary Magdalene interposes, recognizing that
this is a fulfilment of Isaiah xix 3. Further, Jesus
tells them (42) that as He ascended through the
aeons—there ate twelve comparatively material
ones and a thirteenth above—He found the Pistis
Sophia exiled from her proper place in the thir-
teenth aeon and subjected to the persecutions of
the self-willed (aveé5no) and disobedient Demon.
This Sophia is the Valentinian Philosophy which
had gone astray in its endeavour to get into direct
touch with the supreme Reality,: but in our book
the figure has become entirely personified and
mythologized. Its fall has no inner rationality: it.
is merely a bit of esoteric doctrine to be accepted.
Whatever the date of this writing may be, it is on
quite another plane of thought to the system of
Valentinus as expounded by Ptolemaeus. The myth
itself remains; and a large section of our book,
from which indeed it gets the name by which it is
known in modern times, is occupied with it (43-
181). In this section, no doubt, we have our
author’s own imagination at work and we see
plainly how little there is of it. The only thing
Pistis Sophia can do is to sing excessively dreary
hymns, e.g. ‘On thee, O light, have I hoped.
Leave me not in the chaos, deliver me and save me
according to thy knowledge. Give heed unto me
and save me. Be unto me a saviour, O Light, and
save me and lead me to thy light....And in thy
tP. 45.
67 5-2
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
hands will I lay the purification of my light;
thou hast saved me, O Light, according to thy
knowledge’ (84). Then Matthew comes forward
and with remarkable perspicacity says to Jesus:
‘My Lord, thy power hath prophesied thereof
aforetime through David in the 30th Psalm, saying,
On thee, O Lord, have I hoped. Let me never be
put to shame, save me according to thy righteous-
ness. Incline thine ear unto me and save me
quickly. Be thou unto me a protecting God and
a house of refuge to save me....Into thy hands I
will render my spirit, thou hast redeemed me, O
Lord, God of truth’ (86). Of course one sees that
the hymn of Pistis Sophia is simply made up out of
the Psalm, the diction of which is much more
concrete and varied. There are about twenty of
these outpourings of Sophia, all constructed on the
same lines, and all equally jejune in expression.
As I say, in this section we see the Coptic author
of the book at work. The text of the quoted
Psalms is that of the Sa‘idic Psalter.1 The writer
takes the text, alters it by turning most words like
‘Lord’ or ‘God?’ into ‘Light’ (or occasionally in-
to ‘Saviour’), and words like ‘shame’ or ‘mis-
fortune’ into ‘Chaos’. This would be tolerable if
done once or twice, but it is done at length a score
of times. The principle, indeed, is good Gnostic
exegesis, for even in the earliest Valentinian
doctrine sayings and incidents in the Old and New
1 There are occasional variations, especially in Péstis
Sophia 86-110, but nothing of importance calls for remark.
68
 THE NAME PISTIS-SOPHIA
Testaments are interpreted to be adumbrations
of events in the Valentinian cosmogony. What is
peculiar to these paraphrases in Pistzs Sophia is the
dull way in which they are composed. Valentinus
invented the passion and the deliverance of Sophia,
and then ingeniously saw an adumbration or cryp-
tic allusion to it in the story of our Lord and the
Woman with an issue:! the author of Pistis Sophia
merely takes a Biblical Psalm and paraphrases it to
be a hymn for ‘Sophia’ to sing.
It may be remarked that the name Pistis-Sophia
is itself a ‘barbarous’ formation, not properly
paralleled in Greek. There is some evidence that
the Gnostic ‘Sophia’ (philosophy) was also named
by other Gnostics ‘Pistis’ (faith): it is only in Cop-
tic that we find the names run together. Similarly
we have ‘Zorokothora-Meljisedek’ (Pistis Sophia
369, sic) run together; Melchisedec, whose genea-
logy is not given in the Bible, is identified, not
with Shem as the Jews sometimes do, but with the
heathen Zoroaster, and the names are fantastically
coupled. We may add that the functions assigned
to Zorokothora-Meljisedek have nothing to do
with those of the Biblical Melchisedec or the
Persian Zoroaster! Only the mere names were
borrowed by the Gnostic.
But a demonstration that the immediate author
or authors of the ‘gnostic’ documents included in
the Askew Ms was a rather stupid Copt does not
exhaust the interest of the documents themselves,
1 See above (chap. 11, p. 52).
69
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
Our Copt cannot have lived later than the fifth
century: he must have been more or less con-
temporary with Epiphanius, who died in 403. We
have in the hymns of Sophia the measure of our
Copt’s intellectual feebleness, and there is much in
the rest of the same quality. When therefore we
find picturesque narrative or notable thoughts we
may fairly put it down to some other earlier and
more acute mind, whether that of Valentinus or
of another. The interest of the book known as
Pistis Sophia consists in this, that here and there
such interesting and more ancient matter is pre-
served in it.
One isolated point of interest is to be found in the
work of the compiler of Sophia’s hymns. Most of
them are founded on the Psalms of David, but in
five instances they are founded on the Odes of
Solomon. These Odes are extant in a Syriac trans-
lation, but appear to have been composed in Greek
in free imitation of the Greek Psalter. It is likely
that our Copt may have found them added as an
appendix to the Canonical Psalter. The date of
these Odes is much disputed, but the use of the
‘19th Ode’ by Lactantius shews that the collection
was known and esteemed in Nicomedia at the end
of the third century. That they should have been
known and esteemed in Egypt two or three
generations later is therefore not abnormal. The
existence of the Nitrian ms of the Odes in Syriac
(B.M. Add. 14538) indicates that the Syriac trans-
lation may have been made in Egypt itself: possibly
7o
 THE ODES OF SOLOMON
they were originally composed in Egypt, but they
shew no mote affinity to the doctrines found in
Pistis Sophia than the Psalms of David do.
Of picturesque narrative there is not much in
Pistis Sophia, but one queer tale stands out by
itself and is worth quoting. In Péstis Sophia 118
Jesus tells the Disciples that a great Light-power
came from on high to help the Pistis Sophia, and
another Light-power came out of Jesus Himself,
and these two Powers met one another and be-
came a great stream of Light. Mary, i.e. Mary
Magdalene, then quotes Psalm lxxxiv,' and declares
this meeting of the Light-powers to have been
signified in the words ‘Mercy and truth are met
together, righteousness and peace have kissed each
other’. On this, Mary the Mother of Jesus comes
forward and asks to be allowed to give a further
explanation. She says the Psalm-verse refers to
Jesus Himself, and goes on to say (120): ‘When
thou wert little, before the Spirit came over thee,
there came the Spirit from on high whilst thou
wert with Joseph in a vineyard. It came to me in
my house in thy likeness, and I had not recognized
it and I thought it was thou. And the Spirit said to
me “Where is Jesus my Brother, that I may meet
him?” And when it said that, I was in doubt and
thought it was a phantom come to tempt me. So
I took it and bound it at the foot of the bed in my
house, till I went out into the field to you, to thee
and Joseph, and found you in the vineyard with
t Psalm lxxxv, according to the English reckoning.
7t
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
Joseph putting up the stakes. And it came to pass
that when thou heardest me tell the matter to
Joseph thou didst understand and didst rejoice
and say “‘ Where is he, that I may see him, for lam
waiting for him in this place”. But when Joseph
had heard thee say these words he was troubled,
and we went back at once, we entered into the
house and found the Spirit bound on the bed. And
we looked at thee and it, and found thee like it;
and the one that was bound on the bed was untied,
he embraced thee and kissed thee and thou didst
kiss him: you became one’.
A strange tale, no doubt taken from some pre-
viously existing uncanonical source. But it is
noteworthy as illustrating a view of the Incarnation
intermediate between that which regarded the union
of Gop and Man as taking place at the Baptism in
Jordan, and that which regarded it as complete at
birth. It seems to me also to throw some light on
the curious saying from the Gospel of Thomas,
quoted in Hippolytus (Haer. v 7, p. 101), which
says “He who seeks me will find me in children
from seven years old, for there I shall be mani-
fested, hidden in the fourteenth aeon’ (alévi).
Hippolytus understands by ‘the fourteenth aeon’
the fourteenth year of a boy’s age,: but when we
find that the Light-power came to Jesus from above
the Thirteenth Aeon, and that then this story of the
earthly boyhood of Jesus is quoted, it does seem
t See e.g. Hieron. ig Ece/. rv (quoted by C. Taylor, Pirke
Aboth, 2nd ed. p. 150).
72
 HUMAN SOULS AND THEIR FATE
as if our prosaic Copt had been using previous
non-‘ gnostic’ material to eke out details in his tale
of Sophia. It is a pity that very little is known of
this ‘Gospel of Thomas’ or of its contents and
scope.
The rest of the ‘Rolls of the Saviour’, and also
the anonymous treatise at the end, is occupied by
the fate of human souls after death. Here we may
go back to what I said at the beginning of Chapter
11about the ideas or prejudices which permeated the
Graeco-Roman world generally, and especially the
two great ideas or notions of the Ptolemaic system
and of the body as a prison or tomb for the hu-
man soul. The general scheme set forth in Pzstis
Sophia is much the same as must be the case in any
theology dominated by these ideas. At death the
soul is separated from the body and flies upward,
but it has to pass through the crystal spheres
which surround the earth; unless it is provided with
the requisite passports the various guardians of the
spheres will not let it through, and it is liable to be
cast back and imprisoned again in a material body.
Tt should be noted that, as in the New Testament,
the contrast between flesh and spirit is a contrast
between two substances, one heavy and gross, the
other light and pure: it is a different kind of con-
trast from that which is attempted to be conceived
in modern times, the contrast between ‘matter’,
i.e. something which is subject to what are called
‘laws of nature’, and ‘spirit? which is thought of
as altogether non-material.
73
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
To go into all the details of the fantastic cosmo-
gony set forth in the Three Books of Pistis Sophia,
and in the Anonymous work which follows it,
would be both confusing and fatiguing, all the
more as the main principles are everywhere the
same. There is the same parade of ever fresh and
more powerful ‘mysteries’, which Schmidt so
rightly takes as a sign of decadence. ‘The greatest
care is directed towards obtaining the highest place
in the realms of Light by means of the Mysteries.
The former simple Mysteries are no longer enough,
and so in later times new Mysteries are invented’
(Pistis Sophia, p. lit), With unwearied diligence
Prof. Schmidt has made out the genealogy of our
documents. According to him the Three Books
of Pistis Sophia are later than the Anonymous
work at the end of the Askew ms, and this in turn
is later than the Two Books of Jeti in the Bruce
Papyrus.
At the same time there is nothing really fresh.
The ‘First Mystery” really contains everything.
In Pistis Sophia 198 ff. there is a sort of crescendo
of ‘mysteries’, there is the ‘first-mystery’ and the
mystery of the first Thrice-spiritual, and of the
second, and of the third, and finally we get to the
absolute authentic Mystery of the First Mystery
of the Ineffable (Pistis Sophia 205), which is so
exalted that the Disciples lose courage when they
hear about it and only Mary Magdalene dares
question Jesus further—then Jesus explains that
this is the easiest of all mysteries (Pistis Sophia 218),
74
 THE FIRST MYSTERY
about which He had said aforetime, ‘Come unto
Me all ye that are heavy under your burden, and I
will refresh you’. And He adds, ‘Amen, I say to
you, that mystery is yours and every one’s who
will renounce the whole world and all the matter
therein’. It is in fact ‘the only word of the In-
effable’ (226).
But what is this glorious mystery? The Jesus of
the Pistis Sophia makes it quite clear to the Dis-
ciples: it is Himself. ‘That mystery is 1, and I am
that mystery’ (231): ‘I am the knowledge of the
universe’ (233). In other words, what is ‘neces-
sary to everlasting salvation’ is that one shall
‘believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus
Christ’. We have travelled by another route, but
we have arrived at the end at something very much
like the Athanasian Creed! And, as I pointed out
at the beginning of these Lectures, the Gnostic
believed that in the full apprehension of the place
and nature of Jesus in the Universe all other
mysteries would resolve themselves. As I said,
‘the knowledge of the true nature of Divine things
seems to the initiate to make everything clear’.
Our Copt, with truly Egyptian and un-Hellenic
particularity, enumerates the mysteries of the uni-
verse in detail. The mystery of Jesus will explain
why there is darkness and light, why the impious
and the good, why cursing and blessing. And the
eighty-nine distinctions (206-16) which this great
mystery will explain are not confined to generali-
7 P. 6.

75
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
ties. It will explain the winds and famines and the
cause of matter and the nature of metals, and (most
curious of all) ‘why the matter of glass has arisen
and why the matter of wax has arisen’. Here, at
least, we have the thought of some one who has
been struck with the curious diversity of the things
we see and touch. Glass is hard and impenetrable,
but you can see through it; wax, on the other hand,
is soft but opaque. It is interesting to know that
our Copt felt the anomaly, and also that he hoped
it would be resolved when he really understood
his Master!
The attainment of this high state of insight
demands, according to the doctrine of the book
Pistis Sophia, the renunciation of all worldly aims.
The Disciples are to teach the whole world to seek
the mysteries of the Light which will purify them
and make them refined light, but to attain this men
must renounce the whole world and the matter
therein and all its cares and sins and associations
(255). What this means in detail is explained in a
list of some thirty sins—cursing, thieving, robbery,
adultery, etc.—while on the other hand almsgiving,
gentleness, a loving disposition to GoD and man,
ate to be enjoined: to such the Gnostic mysteries
may be imparted, so that their sins may be forgiven
and they may be received into the Kingdom of
Light. There were other Gnostic sects that were
given to evil practices (cf. Pistis Sophia 387), but our
documents are moral even to asceticism.
And the reward of the true Gnostic, who has
76
 THE REWARD OF THE GNOSTIC
reached true insight, what is it? It is that when he
or she is set free from the body of matter such a
soul becomes a great light-stream or ray, which
cannot be seized by the intermediate Archons and
rulers of the lower heavens, it does not need to
ptoduce passports or tokens, but passes direct
through all the regions and goes to the region
where it belongs, that of the One Ineffable, and
becomes a part of the Ineffable itself: “Amen, I say
to you’, adds Jesus to the Disciples, ‘it will be in
all the regions in the time a man takes to shoot an
attow’ (228). Such a man, He adds, is a man in
the world, but in reality he is above all archangels
and even above the various dignitaries of the
heavenly hierarchy. ‘He is a man in the world, but
he is king in the Light. He is a man in the world,
but he is not one of the world,—and Amen, I say
to you, that man is I and I am that man’ (230).
Not, however, entirely: on the next page we learn
that though all these truly enlightened ones will be
fellow kings with Jesus in His kingdom, Mary
Magdalene and John the virgin will be on Jesus’
right and left, and the throne of Jesus will be
highest of all. It is remarkable what respect the
writer of Pistis Sophia has for the women-disciples:
is it not possible that the writer was a woman?

GOD TROUBLING HIMSELF ABOUT MAN

One or two detached points here deserve notice. I

have mentioned in Chapter 1 the use in Coptic of
77
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
the word cxvaas xaos (for oKUAAcoban).t It is
worth while to examine the context (248 f.). After
hearing the great privileges and dignity of the
perfect initiate, Andrew asks how men who ate in
the world and wrapped in matter can pass through
the regions of the celestial Archons and take their
place above them? To this Jesus answers that all
these Heavenly Powers are of the same nature and
stuff as the souls of men: these Powers are indeed
shining and glorious, but that is part of the
arrangements made by Providence, they them-
selves have not troubled themselves in the matter.
But men—at least, some men—though lower in
the scale, the mere dregs of Light, have struggled
towards a better state, they have not left off seek-
ing, and therefore Jesus for the sake of the race of
men troubled Himself (oxvAdeo8a) to come down
and teach the saving Mysteries.
Well, that is the Christian doctrine. The pagan
doctrine, whether true or false, taught that visible
matter is the great evil and that the human body is
the prison or tomb of an ethereal spirit, and this
pagan doctrine at least agreed with the New Testa-
ment doctrine that man was in an evil case, But it
is the peculiarly Christian doctrine that Gop was
not only sorry for man, but troubled Himself to
come down to earth to give man the help he
needed. The language of Pistis Sophia is different
from the language of Paul and of John, corre-
sponding to the difference between the view of
1 P. 41.
78
 GNOSTIC THEOLOGY
the Cosmos, visible and invisible, pictured by the
Egyptian Gnostic and the early Christian writers
respectively. But it seems to me that they have
very much the same theology, and that they give
the same place in the great scheme of Things to the
career of ‘Jesus who appeared in Judaea’.1 Or, to
put the matter from another point of view, these
Gnostic systems, even the fantastic mythology of
Pistis Sophia, do not exhibit a self-sufficient philo-
sophy, but an attempt to reformulate the Christian
Religion in terms of what was then more or less
current Astronomy and Physics. What makes it so
strange and fantastic to us is that the astronomy
and physics assumed in Pistis Sophia are so much
more out-of-date than its religious faith,
*‘MAMMON’

Another matter, which seems somehow to have

escaped attention, is the significance of the refer-
ence to the text about making a friend out of the
mammon of unrighteousness (Lk. xvi 9). This text
is quoted in Piéstis Sophia 334f. Jesus had been
asked what the fate is of one who has been initiated
and then become careless, when he dies and is
engulfed in the Dragon of the Outer Darkness.
He answers that such an one, if he does but know
one of the twelve names of the Dragon, will escape
out of torment and be received in the treasury of
souls, though in the lowest place. Mary then
answers that this is what Jesus had said aforetime
1 Mani’s phrase: see my Religion of the Manichees, p. 38.
79
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
in a similitude (i.e. in the Gospels), and adds, ‘Who
then is the Mamon of unrighteousness, if not the
Dragon of the outer darkness?’
I venture to think this fantastic piece of exegesis
is not the work of the Coptic compiler of Péstis
Sophia, but goes back to the second-century ad-
versaries of Irenaeus. Irenaeus, having set forth
the Gnostic doctrines in his first Book against
Heresies, having pointed out their weaknesses and
inconsistencies in his second, goes on in his third
Book to set forth the true Catholic faith founded
on the Four Gospels which are alone received at
Rome, a chutch whose leaders descend in unbroken
succession from S. Peter and S. Paul. He backs
this up by the general consent of the Christian
world, and shews that the Scriptures know of no
other Gop but the Father of all and His Word.
This takes up the first six chapters, and though
some of the argumentation may be fanciful it is
a continuous and reasoned theory. But before
Irenaeus goes on to examine the theology of the
Four Gospels he thinks it well to explain away
Paul’s odd phrase in 2 Cor. iv 4 about ‘the God of
this world’, a phrase which does give a handle to
any one who might hold that the true Gop was not
the immediate author of this world—and then
proceeds to explain ‘Mammon’ (Iten. Haer. 111 8).
It comes in oddly: one may well wonder why
Irenaeus pauses in his argument to explain that
Mammon is not a Divine Name. But if it was
already used by his opponents as the name equi-
80
 IRENAEUS AND MAMMON
valent almost to the Lord of Hell the explanation,
confused as it is, is not out of place.
ABERAMENTHO(U)
The Anonymous treatise at the end of the Askew
Ms (Pistis Sophia 357-90)! is a separate work from
the Three Books of Pistis Sophia which precede
it, with a separate independent Introduction. In
C. Schmidt’s opinion, which appears to be well
founded, it is earlier than Pistis Sophia, but comes
from much the same Gnostic circles. What is spe-
cial in it is a more definite Astrology. The ‘Sphere’,
ie. the visible heavens, and its rulers are described,
the chariot of the Sun, the ship of the Moon, and
the five Planets (with their ‘incorruptible’, i.e.
fanciful, names). Further we are told of five aérial
Demons, one of whom has the Greek name He-
cate, which seize the souls of sinners after their
death and torment them. But the particular point
of this whole revelation, put like the rest of the
contents of Pistis Sophia into the mouth of the risen
Jesus, is to explain that Jesus in mercy has arranged
that the several classes of sinners are released from
their torments whenever certain astronomical con-
junctions occur. For instance, when Jupiter is in
Scorpio and at the same time Venus is in Taurus,
then all the souls which have been tormented by
Hecate for over 105 years are released and (ap-
parently) given a new chance (368 f.). In other
« Schmidt, pp. 261-85; Mead, sth and 6th Books, pp.
295~325.
BC 81 6
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
words, what is described is a kindly arrangement
made to shorten the sufferings of those in Hell.
‘Three times in this section, and nowhere else in
the book, or indeed in Christian Gnostic literature
so far as I am aware, Jesus is called Aberamenthd
(358, 365, 373).1 The phrase used in each case is
‘Jesus, ie. Aberamenthd, said...’. The obvious
deduction is that the saga or legend belongs to
‘Aberamenth6’ (whoever he may be), but has been
transferred, perhaps with modifications, to the
gnostic Jesus.
What is the derivation of Aberamentho? Where
else does this curious name occur? With regard to
the first question it may be remarked that it does
not look like Coptic or Hebrew or Aramaic or
Iranian. The only other place I have come across it
is a magic invocation in what is known as the
Leiden Papyrus.” This invocation is a very curious
formula, transcribed in Greek in a non-Christian
Demotic (i.e. Egyptian) work, which seems to
have been written a little before or after A.D. 200.
The invocation is of Typhon,—he is called Typhor
Séth, a double name like Pistis Sophia,—who is
conjured to strike down so-and-so with frost and
fire. He is invoked by his ‘authentic’ name, in
terms which he cannot refuse to hear. These are:
‘Id erbéth, 16 pakerbéth, 16 bolchdséth, 16 pata-
t The occurrence in 373 is just outside the astronomical
section. I fancy it has been introduced by the final editor, to
join it up with what precedes.
2 F, Li, Griffith and Herbert Thompson, The Demotic
Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden, 3 vols. (London, 1904).
82
 ABERAMENTHO-RHADAMANTHUS
thanax, 16 s6r6, 16 nebutosualéth, Aktidphi Ereschi-
gal Nebuposoaléth, Aberamenthdu, Lerthexanax,
Ethrely6th, Nemareba, Aemina’.t
This is not all gibberish, though some of it may
be. Eresh-ki-gal is the old Sumerian Goddess of
the Underworld, andthe formula asc prog: epegciear
nehoseicomaAne, i.e. the same as in the Papyrus
except for a couple of mistakes, occurs on a gem.?
The inventor of the curse has clearly collected
foreign, that is to say non-Egyptian, Names for
the Lord of the Underworld, not always correctly
spelt. May not therefore atepamenewos be a de-
formation of ‘Rhadamanthus’? In Aeolic ‘Padé-
pavéuo is spelt BPAAAMANeYC. If the medial &
between two a’s was dropped or misread, some-
thing very much like Aberamentho is the result. A
culture that produced Jaldabaoth and Iabraoth
might easily produce such a form. Rhadamanthus
in Classical tradition was just and kindly, as is the
Aberamentho of Pistis Sophia.
THE BOOKS OF JEU ('leod)
The first part of the Bruce Papyrus, edited by C.
Schmidt in Teste and Untersuchungen, vol. vutt,3 is a
vety queer document. But Prof. Schmidt has
thrown some light ‘upon the jungle,+ and we can
follow with confidence the trail he has blazed out.
t Transl. p. 147.
7 C. W. King, The Gnostics and their Remains, p. 318.
3 Gnostische Schriften (T. und U. vit 1, 2): see above,
p. 63.
4 Schmidt, Pistis Sophia, p. \xxxi.
83 6-2
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
I venture to think that he is right in identifying the
Two Books of Jeu mentioned in Péstis Sophia
(245, 354) with the Two Books of the ‘Great
Mystery-treatise of Jeu’, i.e. the work in the Bruce
Papyrus, so that it is older than Péstis Sophia itself.
We are still in the same situation as in most of
these ‘gnostic’ revelations: Jesus is revealing the
higher mysteries to His Disciples after His resur-
rection. The main subject this time appears to be
Cosmogony. We are introduced to Ieu (ieou), ‘the
God of truth’, whose special Name is loeiadthé-
uikholmid. He is not the ultimate Unapproachable
GOD, but an emanation. It was Ieu’s duty to praise
this ultimate Gop, Whom Jesus calls His Father,
but apparently had no power to do so. So ‘a little
thought’ was sent from the Father of Jesus into
the ‘God of truth’, and this gave him the energy to
utter from himself, saying # ze ze. It does not seem
very much, but it was suflicient—enough to build
the Cosmos with! The poor little syllables (as I
understand the story) came from Jeu, not from the
ultimate Gop. It was something fresh, something
distinct. Where there had been only the One and its
direct emanations, there was now Two.
After this we read how the ‘God of truth’
evolved out of himself sixty emanations, all called
Ieu, and we are given their signs and seals: one
might call the diagrams their several family ar-
motial bearings. Further, there are the sixty
1 That of the original Ieu, ‘the Father of all Ieus’, has
three strokes in it, to represent the three original noises!
84
 IEU WHO SAID IE IE Iz
Treasuries of the Light-world, over which those
who follow Jesus and receive His Mysteries have
power, and there is a long Hymn of Praise chanted
by Jesus to the Ultimate unapproachable Gop, to
every clause of which the Disciples respond with
‘Amen, amen, amen’. There is an incredible
amount of verbiage and repetition, but the only
real action is the three impulsive cries of the first
Teu.
I feel that the author of this strange book has
deluded himself, and wishes to delude his readers,
into thinking that he has really explained how
multiplicity came out of unity, how heterogeneity
came out of undifferentiated uniformity, how shade
came out of light. I think he understood by Ieu’s
ze ie i@ a sound which was so unformed that it
needed no lungs, no mouth, no organs, vox et
praeterea nihil. But once these sounds were made
they could be magnified and strengthened, like the
Hertzian waves in aloud speaker! In other words,
our author was one of that numerous tribe of
human beings who believe in their hearts that you
can propel a boat in which you are sitting by
pressing against the sides (if you only knew the
trick)! What a good thing it was for Christian
thought that this account of ultimate origins did
not become canonical!
You have probably had enough of Gnostic
Cosmogony by this time. But I cannot take leave
of the subject without a guess—it is no more—at
the origin of the name ‘leot, and of the sounds ée
85
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
ze ie. The ‘God of truth’ suggests the Old Testa-
ment: it is actually an Old Testament expression
(Psalm xxx 6), and the God of the Jews was, at
least to some Gnostics,a real but inferior Deity. We
have further to consider the name seov itself:
what is its relation to aw, a form attested by
Gnostic gems, as well as by Pistis Sophia 358? law
does seem to have been the traditional pronun-
ciation of the Tetragrammaton. But if the real
pronunciation was in some sense a mystery, at
least the spelling could be known. I cannot help
feeling that teow is a sort of transcription of \n’
and that re is 7.
In any case the ‘praise’ offered to the ultimate,
unapproachable Gop by the ‘God of truth’,
though it consisted only in the utterance of the
syllables ée #e ze, is the only thing that really happens
in the Books of Ieu: the rest, like the paraphrases of
Psalms uttered by Péstis Sophia, is nothing more
than a measute of the poverty of imagination ex-
hibited by Coptic-speaking Gnostics.
BASILIDES AND ABRASAX

I ought perhaps to have found more room in this

survey for the curious speculations of Basilides. A
good deal of obscurity hangs over them and over
the subsequent history of his followers. But one
point may be noticed here. Prominent in his
hierarchy was the Archon Abrasax (also called
Abraxas), ruler of one of the Heavens, of which in
the Basilidean system there were 365: it will be
86
 BASILIDES
noticed that the letters of Abrasax, when added
together, come to 365. The point of the 365
heavens was that each was less concrete, less
material, than the one below it, till at last in the
ultimate region we arrive at what is altogether
Nothing! This does not seem to me a very helpful
presentation; I confess to preferring the Valen-
tinian Notion which welled up out of the im-
measurable Deep, or even the ‘little thought’ which
entered into the helpless ‘God of truth’ and stirred
him up to uttering his three monosyllabic but
epoch-making cries! The fact is we do not know
how diversity can come out of unity, or the con-
crete out of the undifferentiated, any more than we
know the real nature of our own consciousness of
ourselves and of other things. The 365 heavens of
Basilides appear to me to be nothing more than an
attempt to acquit the ultimate Heavenly Power of
responsibility for letting this material concrete
world come into existence.
It is time to sum up now the main thoughts
about the ‘Gnostics’ and their speculations which
I have attempted to put before you. It is the old
traditional view, with a difference. I regard the
Gnostic systems, from Valentinus to Pistis Sophia,
as essentially Christian systems, though doubtless
heretical. The foreign element in these systems is
not a non-Christian ‘gnosis’ or philosophy, more
ot less self-consistent, but with a few Christian
« Hippolytus, Haer. vii 20.
87
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
elements (such as the figure of the gnostic ‘ Jesus’)
superadded. On the contrary, the figure of Jesus
is essential, and without Jesus the systems would
drop to pieces. In my view the systems were in-
vented to explain Jesus in terms of the science of
the day by Christians who were dissatisfied with
the Old Testament, or rather with that view of
Gop and the Universe, which the Old Testament
seems to set forth. That the Old Testament and the
Christian Gospels were Books of Mystery, con-
taining hints of the profoundest philosophy and
cosmogony the Gnostics for the most part were
willing and eager to believe. But they could not
accept them as they stood, because as they stood
the statements of the Scriptures were in opposition
to the main conclusions of the science and philo-
sophy current in the Graeco-Roman civilization.
These conclusions were chiefly embodied in the
Ptolemaic Astronomy and the belief in the natural
immortality of the human soul. The former of
these led directly to the doctrine of the celestial
spheres and to astrology with its accompaniment
of planetary Fate, while the latter doctrine had as
its rider the notion that the material body was a
prison to the ethereal soul within it. Gnosticism
appears to me to be an attempt to combine these
ideas with Christianity, and I mean in this con-
nexion by ‘Christianity’ a conviction that ‘Jesus
who appeared in Judaea’ in the days of Pontius
Pilate had been an authoritative mission from the
ultimate, unapproachable Gop, sent of His own
88
 THE STATUS OF JESUS
free will to enlighten those who would follow Him
and to deliver their immortal part after their bodily
death from being cast back into the miseries of
this sinful world.
It may be objected to this view that the gnostic
Jesus does not seem to have an entirely intelligible
status in the gnostic hierarchy. No, indeed: how
should He? It is the same in the religion of Mani.
But that is only another way of saying that Gnosti-
cism is not a really satisfactory religious theory.
The Jewish Prophet, more than a Prophet perhaps,
who had had a brief but tragic career among the
Jews, was very much unlike Hermes Trismegistos,
in whom we really do see embodied the contem-
porary notion of what a Divine Teacher ought to
have been. In the system of Valentinus we do see
indeed some attempt to represent Jesus as one in
whom all the fulness (or p/eroma) of the compli-
cated Divine Nature dwelt, an idea directly taken
from S. Paul;* but when (as in Pistis Sophia and the
Books of Ieu) we hear the Gnostic speaking for
himself we find Jesus occupying an altogether
peculiar position in the heavenly hierarchy. He is
at once more teal and more mysterious than the
other personages and powers. On the one hand
He is the authoritative Mystagogue; He reveals and
performs the highest sacramental, miraculous,
rites. He passes through the heavenly regions and
all do Him obeisance. As in the Gospel, He speaks
of His Father and certainly means by that term the
t Colossians i 19, ti 9.

89
 EGYPTIAN GNOSTIC WORKS
ultimate Gop. But He reveals to the Disciples the
grandiose fabric of the Universe, both material and
ethereal, with its Archons and Regions and Trea-
suries of the Light—what is His place in it? That
is never explained.
My point is that this was inevitable, because the
Gnostics were, in the last resort, Christians and
had no ‘explanation’ for Jesus. He remained more
teal to them as a ‘Saviour’ than the fantastic
demonic organization from which they understood
that He was saving them. But their permanent
merit did not lie in inventing a theory of religion
which should, so to speak, put Jesus Christ into
His proper place. Their merit was in recognizing
that some new theory of religion was called for.
The special constructions of Valentinus and Basi-
lides and their tivals were rejected by the Great
Church, and the speculations of these thoughtful
men were driven into holes and corners of the
Christian world, where they became the founda-
tion of a crude mythology such as we find in the
Coptic works discussed in this chapter. But by
the time the struggle was over what is called
“Chiliasm’ had begun to fade into the background
of the Christian consciousness. In the East the
Apocalypse of John was already dropping out of
favour, and documents such as the Apocalypse of
Peter began to take its place, documents in which
attention was concentrated on the state of good and
bad souls immediately after death, rather than on
a general resurrection at an anticipated return of
go
 GNOSTICISM AND CHILIASM
Christ to earth with attendant rewards and punish-
ments.
It was a difference of emphasis rather than a
repudiation of old beliefs, but the new emphasis
fitted better with the ideas of the Graeco-Roman
world, and removed a stumbling-block in the way
of the conversion of the thoughtful classes. In any
case I venture to think that we ought to see in the
so-called ‘Gnostic’ systems of the second century
mainly an attempt to set forth what a generation
ago used to be called ‘the new theology’: that is to
say, a reformulation of Christianity in terms of
‘modern’ science and philosophy. The science of
that time was crude and the philosophy too greatly
belittled the things of sense, so that the Gnostic
‘new theology’ was unsatisfactory. Perhaps the
safest moral that can be drawn is the danger of
lightly abandoning the Past at the bidding of
present-day ideas. All the same, the dangerous
renunciation has to be attempted from time to
time.

91
 Chapter IV
THE FOURTH GOSPEL: MANDAISM
AND CHRISTIANITY
T is time now to give some account of the
Mandaean Religion. One of the most curious
developments of theological criticism in the
last few years is the attention paid to the Man-
daeans of Iraq: it has even been alleged that the
Fourth Gospel shews signs of having been origin-
ally intended as a sacred book of a sect akin to
these Mandaeans, and that what we have is a
tevision made to turn it into a Christian work. I
shall venture to pass over this paradoxical theory
here, because even if true it would not cease to
be extremely paradoxical. The Mandaean sacred
Books were not gathered together till after the
victories of Islam: it would be indeed surprising if
they demonstrably set forth a religious theory of
which the Gospel according to John, a work pub-
lished in its present form about the end of the first
Christian century, presented a later development!
In fact it seems to me that the theory could only
have been entertained by learned men at all because
the current theory of the meaning of the Fourth
Gospel had been felt to be in some respects un-
satisfactory. I propose therefore to begin by con-
sidering the opening section of this Gospel itself.
But first let me make a distinction between the
92
 WHAT IS LOGOS?
actual teaching of the Fourth Gospel and what is
commonly spoken of as ‘the Logos-doctrine’. We
are often invited to regard the Word or Logos
spoken of in the opening sentences of the Gospel
as identical with the Logos expounded by Philo,
the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher. The Evan-
gelist goes on to assert that this Logos became
flesh, which was a step beyond the conceptions of
Philo; but we ate invited to read into the word
Logos, used by the Evangelist, all or most of the
Philonean notions, which in turn are ultimately
derived from Plato. These notions were very
attractive to many Christians, from the second
century onwards, among others to Justin Martyr,
who has much to say about the Logos, though
indeed he makes curiously little direct use of the
Fourth Gospel, if he derived his Logos-doctrine
from it. At any rate, from the time of Justin
Martyr onwards, the Logos of the Gospel has been
generally regarded as the Philonean, Platonic, /ogos.
Now in the first place one must remark that
fogos, Abyoo, is one of the commonest words in the
Greek language. It means of course a word, a
discourse, an account (both in the sense of ‘narra-
tive’ and of ‘bill’),¢ and also reason and plan. We
should be wary of assigning a special technical
sense to such a term, unless the usage of the writer
is established. And in the Fourth Gospel itself we
have a notable instance, as everybody will re-
member, where ‘the Word of Gon’ is not used of
: E.g. Lk. xvi 2.
93
 THE FOURTH GOSPEL
Jesus at all, but corresponds rather with the inspi-
tation usually ascribed in New Testament language
to the ‘Spirit’. If ‘the Logos’ has been a technical
term to the Fourth Evangelist it is almost impos-
sible to understand how he could have worded, as
he has done, the argument that the Scripture called
Gods those to whom ‘the word of Gop’ came
(Joh. x 34-6).
We must therefore not assume that Adyoo,
‘word’, in the opening sentences of the Fourth
Gospel necessarily means the Philonean Logos. Let
us then turn to the phrases themselves and see
whether they do not explain their own meaning.
“In the Beginning was the Word’, év dpi fv 6
Adyoo—one thing at least is certain about this
sentence. No one could begin a work with év épyij
without at once carrying back his Christian or
Jewish readers to the first words of Genesis. To
begin a work in this way practically means ‘I am
starting where Genesis starts, what I say is what
Genesis says in other words’. Well then, what was
the ‘word’ that was there in the Beginning? I
think we know it very well, it was Tevnérite pao,
“Let there be light’. And that this is correct is
confirmed by the way that the Evangelist imme-
diately goes on to talk about Light, and how it
shined in Darkness.
But this word or sentence or decree—to whom
was it spoken? Not to ‘light’, for light did not
yet exist. Nothing yet existed, nothing yet had
happened, the ‘word’ had been in the beginning,
94
 THE DIVINE WORD OF GOD
before things happened. There was nothing, no
one, to whom it could be spoken but Gop. The
word had been addressed to Gop.! The alternative
translation, that the word was with Gop (apud
Deum) seems to me unsatisfactory, for as used else-
where elvor trpdo tiva conveys the idea of mere
juxtaposition, not of intimate genetic connexion.
“What’, do you say, ‘a word addressed to Gop?
Who by?’ So the Evangelist, anticipating the
objection, adds Kal Osd0 fv & Adyoo, ‘and the
Word was itself Divine’. What the Evangelist
introduces us to is no new theology, but the
familiar, though lofty, conception of Genesis, viz.
that of the One only Gop producing the creation
by consulting with Himself, yet bringing forth
into visible form nothing without announcing His
formulated intention.? What had come to pass in
consequence of this intention was Life. Light as
distinct from darkness was the most general
feature of existence, but in the case of Man this
‘light’ was best called Life.
Further, this Word or Intention ‘was’ (#v),
whereas ‘all things came to pass’ (tyéveto) through
it. The difference between these verbs is not
ontological, the difference is simply that the Word,
so to speak, is on the stage when the curtain goes
_ ¥ apd tdv edv. So also Joh. x 35, mpda otto 6 Adyoo Tot
Got tyéveto, and Jeremiah xiv 1, etc.
* Compare also Amos iii 7. If we are to use Valentinian
hraseology we might say thatthe visible universe was no hap-
ard happening, but was brought forth by Wisdom (cogia)
in accordance with design (8Antéc).
95
 THE FOURTH GOSPEL
up, while the ‘things’ are not. ‘There was (fv) a
man in Babylon’ at the beginning of Susanna,
“There was (4v) a man of Mount Ephraim’ at the
beginning of Samuel, ‘There was (Av) a man in the
region of Ausitis’ at the beginning of Job. Weare
not to infer that Job or the father of Samuel or the
husband of Susanna existed from eternity; all the
wotd implies is that each is on the scene when the
action begins. Similarly, in the first verse of. the
Fourth Gospel the Word of Gop is postulated, it
was there at the beginning, and to inquire whether
fv tote, Ste otxK fv, whether there was anything be-
fore that, is to look outside the frame for the rest
of the picture.
Then, in the sixth verse of the Gospel, a certain
John is introduced to us: a man divinely commis-
sioned to bear witness about the divine Light, not
that John himself was this Light, for the true Light
was there just then, coming into the world, though
unknown and unrecognized.t But to those who
did receive Him, says the Evangelist, He gave
fresh supplies of power, power to become children
of Gop by a new and non-material process. ‘I
mean to say’, he continues, ‘the Word itself be-
came human and we saw Him”: as far as I can see,
the kai of Kal & Adyoo odp€ tyéveto is resumptive,
1 T take épxdpevov (ver. 9) to be a nominative, agreeing
with péc, not as anaccusativeagreeing with navta dvOparrov.
This interpretation has left a trace in Cyprian, Test. i 7
(aeniens in hunc mundum, L* (sic) MO; O; PQV and Cass: all
other Latins have senientem). Human beings when they
‘come into the world’ have very little but animal life.
96
 JOHN THE BAPTIST
and should betranslated by ‘I mean to say’ or ‘Well,
then’, not by ‘And’.t The Evangelist then goes
back to John, whom he had introduced to his
readers already, and gives John’s testimony about
the one who was to come, passing on (after his
usual careless manner of writing) to words of his
own (wv. 16-18), which sum up the Prologue.
These words seem to me to be a summaty in other
terms of what has been already said, not to an-
nounce a fresh development.
It is most important to note how far we have
got, to what point the narrative of the Gospel has
arrived. As I understand the matter, the readers
of the Gospel have been introduced to John; they
have also been told something about a mysterious
personage called Jesus Christ, but they have not
yet been introduced to Him. An introduction is
clearly necessary, for we have been told that the
‘world’ knew Him not and that His own did not
receive Him. So the Evangelist goes on to tell us
in detail what the testimony of John was. It was,
in the first place, an emphatic denial that he, Jobn,
was the Christ or Elijah or ‘the Prophet’, but he
declared that he was the prophetic Voice preparing
the way, come to make known who the mysterious
Coming One was. Then one day, when he sees
Jesus coming up, he says, ‘There is the Lamb of
Gop!’ How does he know? He tells us that he
For this use of kai, see especially Timothy and Aguila,
p- 76, and my Note on that passage in Evangelion da-
Mepharreshe, 1. 265.
BC 97 7
 THE FOURTH GOSPEL
had learned by inspiration that the one on whom
he saw the Spirit of Gop descending like a dove
was He who would baptize with holy Spirit: he
had seen the Spirit descending upon Jesus, and
so he testifies that Jesus is the Chosen of Gop
(6 ékAsxtéo Tot Ge00).t
Now the secret is out, so to speak; in fact,
mote than one secret. First of all, we see the réle
of John according to the Fourth Evangelist.
John is the witness of the Incarnation! It is he
who introduces us to Jesus, to Jesus as the
Messiah.
I cannot resist the impression that the doctrine
of the Fourth Gospel is what is usually called
‘adoptionist’, and that we do wrong to combine
its presentation with the Infancy Narratives of
Matthew and Luke. As I understand the tale told
in the first chapter of John, what is taught in that
chapter is that the creative word of Gop, which had
of old produced light and energy out of nothing,
descended upon the man Jesus and remained upon
him; John actually witnessed this event and had
been inspired to know its meaning. The Fourth
Gospel does not say that John baptized Jesus, but
that he witnessed the descent of the Spirit of Gop:
that descent, as I understand the text, was the
Incarnation. After the descent of the Spirit, wit-
nessed by John, Jesus (hitherto called son of
Joseph, Joh. i 45, vi 42) became the incarnate word
t Joh. i 34 N* ¢ ff syr.sc. There can be little doubt that
this is the true reading here.
98
 JOHANNINE CHRISTOLOGY
of Gop, born from above not by natural process
but by the Divine will.

This is not orthodox Christology, but it does

seem to me to be Johannine Christology. It ex-
plains why the Evangelist is so careful to introduce
his readers to the ‘man sent from Gop whose
name was John’, for this man in his turn will in-
troduce us to the incarnate Jesus Christ, rightly
called from the moment of His incarnation the
Lamb of Gop. The only reason that it has not been
obvious to all readers of the Fourth Gospel is the
tacit assumption that whatever its authorship or
date may turn out to be that Gospel must be
regarded as strictly orthodox in doctrine. 1 ven-
ture to think, on the other hand, that at the end of
the first century a.D. there was not yet any ‘ortho-
dox’ Christology, that Christians were feeling after
a Christology, a doctrine about the personality of
Jesus their Lord, and that a synthesis had not yet
been reached. Whether the belief in the Virgin
Birth of Jesus was accepted by the Fourth Evan-
gelist, whether even he had heard of it, we do not
know. But I think his silence about it leads us to
suppose that he attached very little importance to
the matter. What mattered to him was the real
Descent of the Spirit, and that it had not been
given to Jesus by measure but fully.
From the moment of the Descent Jesus can say
“I and the Father are one’ (& éovev, x 30: cf. 1
Cor. iii 8): what He says is creative and authori-
99 7-2
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
tative, because it is of the same nature as the Divine
Voice of which we read in the opening chapter of
Genesis. In the terminology of Péstis Sophia, Jesus
has become the Master of the ineffable Mystery:
“He is a man in the world, but He towereth above
all angels and will tower still more above them all;
He is a man in the world, but He is King in the
Light’. And, just as in Péstis Sophia, the true
Life consists in knowing Him.
THE MANDAEANS
Those who accept the explanation given above of
the appearance of John the Baptist’s name in the
opening verses of the Fourth Gospel will not, I
think, feel it necessary to regard that work as a
Christianized version of a Gospel about John. But
so much has been written in late years about the
Mandaeans and their connexion with the Baptist,
that some account of them here will not be out of
place. They have at least this interest, that what-
ever their remote origin may have been, they are
certainly the only surviving Gnostic Sect.
The Mandaeans are a religious community still
to be found in Lower Babylonia, on the lower
reaches of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The very
frequent ablutions required by their religion make
residence on or near the bank of a flowing river
necessaty for them. They call themselves Mandae-
ans, which really does mean ‘Gnostics’, but they
are locally known as Sxbbis, i.e. baptizers. Their
t Pistis Sophia 228 ff.
100
 RIGHT AND LEFT GINZA
sacred Book is called the Ginza, i.e. the Treasure.
Another, of miscellaneous contents, is known as
the Book of John (or, of the Kings). There is also
a sort of Hymn-book, called Qo/asta. These are
all written in an Aramaic dialect, akin to Syriac.
The Mandaean script is peculiar: the gutturals &
and y have disappeared and 7 and m have become
simple 4," but the guttural letters are used for
vowels, 8 for a, Y for e¢, besides the usual Aramaic
use of } fot o and #, and of ° for 7. The sacred Book,
the Ginza, is divided into two parts, that concerned
with the Living and that concerned with the Dead:
these are always bound up, so that each begins the
book, but from opposite ends, meeting in the
middle; the one part is upside down to the other,
just like a Note-Book which has been begun at
both ends. The two parts are known respectively
as the Right and the Left Ginza.
How are we to class these people? It is rather
important to take hold of them properly, so to
speak. When Roman Catholic missionaries first
came across them in the seventeenth century they
conjectured that the Mandaeans were descended
from disciples of John the Baptist, such as are
mentioned in Acts xviii 25 ff., and so these mis-
sionaties named them ‘Christians of S. John’. This
erroneous idea is now universally abandoned, but
it survives in an altered form, and there are still
those who regard the Mandaeans as the survivors
of a Palestinian sect or school.
* Occasionally yy is represented by 4s in rk#ha= Ka.04,
Ior
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
We have now, in the Scholion of Theodore bar
Konai (or Kéwini), an account of the Mandaeans
by an ancient Mesopotamian writer,' writing in the
year A.D. 792. He tells us that their founder was a
cettain Ado, 2 mendicant, who came from Adia-
bene, i.e. from the district just north of Mosul. He
further tells us that his teaching was derived from
the Marcionites, from the Manichaeans and from
the ‘Kanteans’. These latter are only known from
Theodore himself: it is very possible that the name
should be vocalized Knathayé, which might mean
something like ‘the Colleagues’.
There is no reason to reject the evidence of
Theodore bar Konai. He was writing about a
century after the Ginza had been compiled, for the
Ginza (G.R. 387) expects the end of the Arab
dominion after 71 years, i.e. a little after a.p. Joo.
But of course the matter does not end here. It is
important to consider how much his evidence
comes to. There 7s a good deal in the Mandaean
literature that recalls Marcionite and Manichaean
teaching, especially as set forth in the polemics of
S. Ephraim against these religions. Who were the
Kndathayé? Out authority, Theodore, gives a clearly
fantastic account of them, asserting that they were
Babylonian descendants of Philistine priests of
Dagon?. I think we may judge from this that they
were not recognizably a Christian or Jewish sect,
t See H. Pognon, Coupes de Khouabir (1898), esp. pp.
224-7.
2 Pognon, p. II.
102
 THE DEAD MANDAEAN
and this corresponds with the fact that there is in
the Mandaean mythology a large element which is
neither Biblical nor Christian, e.g. that connected
with Ptahil and Abatur. We may therefore para-
phrase Theodore’s account of the Mandaeans by
saying that this religion is a mixture of Christian
and non-Christian elements, the Christian elements
being mostly derived from Marcionite and Mani-
chaean sources.
But even so our problem is not solved. Before
we reject the idea, so popular in Germany of late
years, that the Mandaean documents throw valu-
able side-lights on the earliest Christian traditions,
we must get some positive idea of what the Man-
daean religion really is. How shall we interrogate
the vast and miscellaneous Mandaean literature, so
as to make it answer our questions?
I think we should begin with what is called the
Left-hand Ginza, the part concerned with the Dead.
In G.L. 82 f. (= ur 8) we read that when the soul
of the good Mandaean departs there is confusion
in Tzbi/, i.e. the material world, and its Rulers
gather together and say:
Who has taken away the Pearl: that illuminated the falling
house?
In the house that it has left: the walls cracked and fell in.
Its walls cracked and fell in: and its door-posts fell to the
ground.
Its windows were shut: and its lamps quenched and shone
not.
[The Soul speaks :}
Mine eyes see no more: what is done in the present age.
Mine ears hear no more: what is said in the present age.
103
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
My feet tread no more: in the present age, nor do they
return.
The soul that is worthy speaks and goes away: from the
world even unto the abode of light.
Naked was I brought into the world: and empty am I come
out of it.
Empty am I come out of it: like a bird that carries no load.
My teward goes on in front: and my alms follow behind.
The Waterwaves I hold in my hand: and turn my course to
the abode of light.
The ‘Waterwaves’ are the power of the cleans-
ing waters of Mandaean baptisms.
When the Seven, i.e. the hostile Planets, see the
soul they try to arrest its course, but fail, and they
ask:
With whose power hast thou come forth: and whose Name
has been spoken over thee?—
I have come forth with the power of Life: and the Name of
the chief of Brightness has been spoken over me;
The Waterwaves I hold in my hand: and turn my course to
the abode of light.
Here you have in poetic form the essence of
Mandaism. The poetic form consists chiefly of a
skilful use of repetition, very much as in Baby-
lonian style, but something like it is to be seen in
the prose homilies of Narsai the Nestorian Doctor
(fl. A.D. 500). Trbi/ is used for the material world:
this is the Hebrew 5am, but it should be noticed
that this word is transliterated from the Hebrew
in the form usd also in the Syriac Bible. As for
the doctrine, it is clearly ‘Gnostic’, dominated by
the soma-sema view of human life, and by a belief
t Sic.
104
 BARDAISAN AND THE SOUL
in baleful astrological Fate. This world is bad; the
soul of man has its true home elsewhere, but apart
from its possession of the true knowledge it cannot
escape through the Spheres and is liable to be cast
back again into a human body!
This is the doctrine of Péstzs Sophia also, and of
Gnostic systems generally. But, as I pointed out
in the beginning of these Lectures, it is a logical
by-product of a belief in the Ptolemaic astronomy
combined with a belief in the separable Psyche or
soul. If we are to look for ‘origins’ for this part
of the Mandaean beliefs, the nearest is the philo-
sophy of Bardaisan. According to Bardaisan our
Lord only raises souls. The body is heavier than
the soul and not really akin to it; it cannot
cleave to it for ever. Adam’s sin prevented souls
after death from ‘crossing over’, while on the
other hand the Life or Salvation brought by
our Lord was that He enabled souls to cross
without hindrance into ‘the Bridal-chamber of
Light’.
‘But why quote from Bardaisan?’ you will say.
Are not the Mandaeans bitterly opposed to Chris-
tianity, calling Eshu Mshiba a Deceiver and the
Holy Spirit a female Demon? Yes, that is true, and
yet I believe they are, from the point of view of a
scientific classification, properly to be looked upon
as Christians, though heretical Christians. They
are, in fact, Dissenters, and like other dissenters
x See my Essay in C. W. Mitchell, Epbraim’s Prose
Refutations, Ul, p. CKXV.
105
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
from the established forms of religion or philo-
sophy they tend to use a peculiar set of terms, like
those Protestants who would not speak of the
Church but only of the Congregation, and had no
Bishops but only Superintendents.
One preliminary consideration is important. The
Mandaeans may be regarded as heretical Chris-
tians: they are certainly not Jews. On this subject
I would refer to the excellent study by the Danish
scholar Dr S. A. Pallis.t Dr Pallis does not believe
that there is any direct connexion between Man-
daism and Judaism. ‘The Mandaeans’, he says,
‘have made no distinction between Jews and
[Catholic] Christians, or rather when they speak of
Yahutayé they always think of the Christians and
cali them by this name.’ He goes on to suggest
that their ideas were confused by the fact that the
Old Testament was a holy book of the Christians.
And, as I have pointed out elsewhere,” such know-
ledge of the Old Testament as the Mandaeans have
does not come from Jewish sources, but from the
Peshitta, the Syriac version of the Bible current in
the Mesopotamian Churches. It was a pity that
Lidzbarski, the learned editor of the Mandaean
sacred books, seems to have been less familiar with
the Syriac Bible than with other branches of
Aramaic literature. All the Hebrew terms, such as
tibil (mentioned above), or Lewiathan, or yama
1 §. A. Pallis, Mandaean Studies, pp. 115-50 (London,
1926).
2 Journ. Theol. Stud. Xx1X, p. 228 f.
106
 INFLUENCE OF THE SYRIAC BIBLE

a’suf,. which might be taken to suggest a direct

acquaintance with the Hebrew Bible or Jewish
tradition, are found similarly transliterated in the
Peshitta.? This is not what we should find if the
Mandaeans really were descendants of a Jewish
sect, whether heretical or orthodox.
As for the relation of the Mandaeans to Chris-
tianity, we ought not to be too much influenced by
the fact that to them Esha Mshiha (Jesus Christ)
is a false prophet, who is also Nba, i.e. Nebo-
Hermes, the planet Mercury, or that his mother is
Raha d’ Kudsha (the Holy Spirit), an evil demon who
is also Dibat, the planet Venus. We are all in this
age of books and diffused education too much in-
fluenced by our own personal knowledge of the
beginnings of Christianity, derived from our own
reading of the New Testament itself, and we tend
to think that for those who do not accept orthodox
Church theology there is always the alternative of
a sort of modernist, more or less naturalistic, view
of Jesus Christ who went about doing good. But
for those who are not familiar with the Gospels,
who hear of ‘ Jesus Christ’ or ‘Holy Spirit’ only as
the sacred deities of a hostile and petsecuting
Church, this alternative is not open. And a very
little investigation makes it quite clear that the
* The (mythical) Red Sea, in which the wicked perish: it
is AD D’ in Hebrew, but is transliterated sown
the Peshitta, exactly as in Mandaean (see G.L. 55).
2 Even the *uphané (the ‘Wheels ’) occur in the Peshitta
text of Ezek. x 13,
107
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Mandaean hostility to Eshu Mshiha is hostility to
the fully developed post-Nicene Church. In several
places ‘Christ’ is actually called ‘the Byzantine’
(Ramaya), and further we are told that the disciples
of this Christ become ‘Christians’ (Kristiani), and
turn into monks and nuns who have no children
and who keep fasts and never wear white clothes
like the Mandaeans (G.R. 1 55). Ina word, it is
not the Christ of the Gospels, but the Christ of
fully developed ecclesiastical organization and
policy to which Mandaism is so hostile.
When were Mandaeans persecuted by Christians?
It can only have been during the Sasanian Empire,
when Christianity was a more or less tolerated
religion, whose head—alone recognized as such by
the King of Kings—was the Nestorian Catholicus
of Seleucia. The Nestorians were reckoned here-
tical by the Byzantines, but of course their diver-
gences from the Catholic norm were slight in
comparison with the Mandaeans, both in organiza-
tion and doctrine. The Mandaean Religion, as such,
was not recognized by the Persian Government:
they must have been reckoned as a variety of
‘Christians’, as in fact they are. ‘Amuneil (i.e.
Emmanuel) is his name, Esha Mahiana (i.e. Jesus
the Saviour) he calls himself,. . when he oppresses
you, tell him “We belong to thee”. But in your
hearts confess him not, and fall not away from the
word of your Lord, the high King of Light’ (G.R.
« For this and the following paragraphs, see my above-
mentioned study in Journ. Theol. Stwd. xxrx, pp. 225-37.
108
 KNOWLEDGE OF SALVATION
1 28). Surely these words from the Ginza reflect
a time when Mandaeans were willing to let them-
selves be formally inscribed as Churchmen, though
they were not really such.
Words like Esha and Amuneil shew that Man-
daean transcriptions of Biblical names are often
inaccurate. This is no doubt due to ignorance or in
some cases (as in Shum for Shem, i.e. ‘name’) to
the phonetic Jaws of the Mandaean language. But
occasionally their peculiar religious use of names
makes the ordinary use of familiar terms impos-
sible, and other words have to be substituted.
Ruha, as we have seen, is used by the Mandaeans
exclusively for the evil spirit, so they no longer use
it, as all other Aramaic dialects do, for ‘wind’: they
use yika instead, a word which in Syriac means
‘storm’. A/aha (i.e. God) has to them the meaning
‘false god’, so for the true Divine Being they use
various substitutes such as ‘the Great Mana’ or
Manda d’Hayyé. This last term is that from which
“Mandaean’ is derived. It means ‘the Gnosis of
Life’ or rather (to use a more familiar term)
‘Knowledge of Salvation’. Iam not paraphrasing.
In Syriac ‘life? and ‘salvation’ with all their
derivatives are synonymous in ecclesiastical termi-
nology, and the yv&c1o owtnpiac spoken of in the
Benedictus (Lk. i 77) is rendered in the Syriac Bible
by madd‘a dbayyé, which is exactly the same, syllable
for syllable, as the Mandaean term.! The ‘Great
Mana’ means ‘the Great Vessel’ or ‘Garment’: I
t See Note at end of this chapter.
109
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
venture to think it more or less corresponds to the
idea of the Valentinian Pleroma, something which
contained the whole Divinity, in which the
Divinity is wrapped, even as the Mandaean is
wrapped in his wana when he receives the life-
giving Baptism.
Well, then, ‘Jesus Christ’ was to the Mandaean
only the Pseudo-Messiah worshipped by the of-
ficial Christians. Had they a name for the true
Jesus? The answer is, Yes; they called Him Anush
ot Exush, usually in the form Asush-uthra. The
wotd Uthra (<aho=), lit. ‘wealth’, ‘treasure’, is
the Mandaean title for a good spirit, so that Anush-
uthra might almost be rendered ‘Saint Homo’.
Anush is the same name as the Biblical Patriarch
’ Enosh (i.e. “man’), but it is likely that the Mandaean
conception of Axush as the messenger of the truth
is connected with the way in which Jesus in the
Gospel calls himself Son of Man (in Syr. breb
a nasha).
What, then, is the career of Anush-uthra accord-
ing to the Mandaeans? In G.R. 1 53 and G.R. 1 29
we read that Anush-uthra comes into the world in
the days of Pilatus (or Paltus, i.e. Pilate) the king of
the world; he heals the sick, makes the blind to see,
cleanses the lepers, raises the cripples so that they
can walk, and makes the deaf and dumb to speak.
With the power of the high King of Light he
raises the dead. Those who believe in him among
the Jews he teaches that there is Life and Death,
Light and Darkness and burning Fire, Truth and
110
 ANUSH-UTHRA THE STRANGER
Error. Three hundred and sixty Prophets go out
of Jerusalem and preach in the name of the Lord of
Glory: then Anush-uthra ascends to the Mandaean
Paradise and will not be seen again by mankind till
the End comes. Before he ascended, however, we
read in another place that Anush-uthra will un-
mask the Deceiver, the Byzantine Christ, who will
confess that he is only one of the deceiving Seven
Planets: he will be seized by the Jews and crucified
(G.R. 11 58).
That this tale of the preaching and of the miracles
of Anush-uthra in Jerusalem is no isolated patch
in the Mandaean construction appears from G.R.
xIV 288 f., where true religion is represented as
being the doctrine taught by Anush-uthra, and
still more from G.R. xv, where Anush-uthra him-
self sings of his coming into the world. He calls
himself the Stranger (sakraya, G.R. 328, last line)
and says: ‘I took a bodily form and appeared
in Jerusalem. I spoke with my voice and preached,
and became a Healer for Miriai: a Healer for
Miriai I became, and healed her from head to foot.
I was called Healer of the Truth (Aashza), who heals
and takes no fee’ (G.R. 331 f.).1 This is followed
among other things by the mission of 365 disciples.
Clearly we have here a parallel to what we read in
G.R.1 and 1; it is the same doctrine that is set forth.
t The emphasis on the healing of Miriai, the faithful
convert and disciple (see Lk. viii 2), is enough to shew that
this Mandaean figure has been developed out of Mary
Magdalene, not out of Mary the mother of Jesus as Lidz-
barski (Jobannesbuch, p. 125) imagines.
Tit
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
The Mandaeans, then, rejected the Christ of the
Catholic Church, born of a woman and crucified,
but they accepted the Stranger who appeared in
Jerusalem in the days of Pilate, who healed the sick
and taught the true and life-giving doctrine, and
who ascended in due course when his work was
done to his own place in the world of Light. This
Personage is called the Stranger, but he is no
stranger to the modern student of Christian anti-
quity: it is clearly the Manichaean Jesus, a petson-
age adopted by Mani from Jesus of Marcion.? In
other words it is no new controversial figment of
the Mandaeans.
The Marcionites in the fifth and sixth centuries
were an unlicensed and vanishing society. But they
had once been a great factor in the Christianity of
the Euphrates Valley, as is clear from the polemics
of Ephraim and still more from the influence which
they had on the new theology of Mani. Iam not
suggesting that the Mandaeans are Marcionites in
disguise: what I do suggest is that Theodore bar
Konai was right when he tells us that Mandaean
doctrine is partly derived from the Marcionites,
and J think we can say with confidence that that
part is their ‘Christology’, that Anush-uthra is
the Marcionite Jesus.
From Manichaeism the Mandaeans derived their
1 Several passages in Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of
Marcion seem to indicate a Marcionite doctrine of two
Messiahs, the false and the true: see Mitchell, 11, p, xxxviil,
L. 14; p. xlvili, 1. 18; p. xlix, 1. 24.
1i2
 MARRIAGE
conception of the High King of Light and His
glorious and peaceful realm far beyond the heaven
and earth of this evil world. His Five good attri-
butes, His seat in the North, and other details,
seem to have come direct from Mani’s presentation
of the ‘King of the Paradises of Light’. Further,
the Mandaean formula of Confession in G.R. 11
61 ff. (especially 63, end)" recalls the Manichaean
Khuastuanift. But the connexion of Mandaism
with Manichaeism does not seem to me so intimate
as its connexion with the religion of Marcion.
In one point, of course, Mandaism differs from
the organization of the Marcionites and the Mani-
chees, in that marriage is not only permitted but
commanded. Mandaism further differs from most
forms of Christian practice, in that Baptism is not
administered once and for all, but is often re-
peated, as often as required. According to Epi-
phanius the Marcionites permitted a second and
third baptism. The Mandaean repeated baptisms
might be reconciled to Marcionite theory as an
extension of their custom. It is noteworthy that
particular lustrations are commanded to Man-
daeans in connexion both with marriage and co-
habitation (G.R. 1 14, and elsewhete).?
Of course it would be hopelessly perverse to
attempt to derive all Mandaean mythology and
ptaxis from Mesopotamian Marcionite Chris-
tianity alone. I am not here primarily concerned
1 Lidzbarski, p. 57: cf. my Religion of the Manichees, p. 57 £.
* Lidgbarski, pp. 16, 35.
BC 113 8
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
with Mandaism in itself, but with the use that has
been made during the last fifteen years of Mandaean
parallels to New Testament ideas and phrases, the
use, I mean, whereby these phrases have been
treated as independent parallels, not as borrowings,
often unintelligent borrowings or adaptations,
from the Syriac Bible. So far as I know, the
only protests that have been raised have been
those of Dr Pallis in Copenhagen, Prof. Peterson in
Bonn, Pére Lagrange in the Revue Biblique, besides
my article in the Journal of Theological Studies.
Lately, however, our protests have been rein-
forced by a study of the Mandaean Baptismal
Liturgy by Prof. H. Lietzmann of Berlin in the
Sitgungsberichte of the Prussian Academy for
1930 (Phil.-Hist. Ki. xxvu, pp. 596-608). Prof.
Lietzmann goes through the notices of John the
Baptist in the Mandaean writings, and shews that
they belong to the later stages of their tradition,
that they have no other basis than the Canonical
Gospels, and that there is nothing to connect the
Mandaeans with conjectural followers of John.
Further, he compares the Mandaean Baptismal rite
with the Nestorian Order of Baptism, and comes
to the conclusion that the Mandaean rite is actually
detived from the Nestorian, even to the use of the
word ‘Jordan’ in the sense of baptismal water!
Anyone who has read a good modern description
of the Mandaeans and their way of life—I can
recommend Mrs Drower’s, to be found in the
t Lietemann, p. 602.
114
 VARIED SOURCES OF MANDAISM
Quest, XV1(1924-5), pp. 80-92, 217-25 —will under-
stand that Mandaean Baptisms are the centre of
the Mandaean Religion, far more than the fairy-
tales that they have inherited or invented about
Angels and Demons.
“But after all’, some one may say, ‘you began
with the Left-hand Ginza, with the Massektas that
speed the soul to the heavenly regions after it has
left the body for ever. You said that the belief
about the fate of the soul was the true essence of
Mandaism. Surely that is Gnostic?’ Yes, central
also to Mandaean Religion is the doctrine of the
ascent of the enlightened soul after its separation
from the body through the ‘custodies’ (wattartas),
i.e. guarded frontiers, through which only those
provided with the seal acquired in Mandaean bap-
tisra can pass. And further there is the peculiar
Mandaean mythology—Abatur, Ptahil, Ur, a
seties of Demiurgic beings unlike in name and
function from anything known elsewhere. These
may be of Mesopotamian origin: no one has yet
suggested a really satisfactory derivation for
‘Abatur’ or ‘Ptahil’, who occupy somewhat the
same place in the Mandaean system (or rather
systems) as Jaldabaoth does in some Western
Gnostic systems. It may be noted that ‘Crun, the
gteat mountain of flesh’, that tries to swallow
Hibil-Ziwa (G.R. 143), seems to be a far-off re-
miniscence of Kpdévoo, of Saturn, not the planet
but the banished father who used to swallow his
children and now sits in Tartarus. If this be so,
lg 8-2
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
thete is also a Greek, icc. Western, element in
Mandaean mythology.
I should like here to put forward the conjecture
that Ur, the Lord of Darkness, the worst of de-
mons, who swallows souls, is a deformation of 0An.
Hyle, <\om, is the evil element in Marcion’s sys-
tem:! this explanation of the name fits excellently
with the part that Ur, yy, plays in Mandaean
mythology. As for the form, Mandaean ty corre-
sponds to Syriac da in the word Nyy, ‘leaf?:?
Mandaean 4 corresponds to Syriac / in the word
NTOINN, ‘disciple’ (Syriac talmida); and an un-
accented final vowel can easily fall out, as in WNOY
etak, which comes from the Greek téya.3 Thus
evety apparent irregularity has its appropriate
etymological parallel.4
But as for what may be called more particularly
the ‘Gnostic’ part of the Mandaean theology, the
doctrine that the human soul is imprisoned in an
alien, non-redeemable body, from which it escapes
at death but even then cannot win its way to its
true home outside the spheres which encompass
this world, save only if it have assimilated the true
t See Mitchell’s Ephraim, 1 Jo £., 140 ff.
2 Néldeke, Manddische Grammatik, p. 61.
3 Ibid. p. 202.
41 should like also here to suggest that Kolasta
(xnpxdyp), the name of the Mandaean Hymn-book, is not
derived from the Arabic doe (i.e. ‘quintessence’), but is
simply the feminine of the Syriac word fu/lasd (aan),
meaning ‘praise’ or ‘laud’. This word is ultimately derived
from KoAdéo, and is quite common in Syriac literature.
116
 BARDESANIAN GNOSIS
knowledge during this life, this also can be traced
in the Euphrates Valley in ancient Christian circles,
for it is the doctrine of Bardaisan. Bardaisan was
a philosopher, a man of culture and science, as
such things were understood in his days, with some
astronomical knowledge of his own. So far as his
ideas have been transmitted to us, he does not
speak of monstrous genii with fantastic forms and
names, but of Fate and Free-will, of the Planets, of
the Heavenly Powers on the right or the left:
what may be called the fairy-tale element is absent.
But his mythology does speak of souls hindered at
the crossing,’ and kept in seven Limbos (ma‘éné),?
which correspond in function at least to the
Mandaean celestial Prisons (wattartas). Moreover
madd‘a, the Syriac word from which manda is actu-
ally derived, was the name Bardaisan used for the
Divine Reason or Gnosis that dwells in man.3
As I said at the beginning, I venture to think
that modern writers about ‘the Gnosis’ have not
always considered that some of the resemblances
between some of the very different ‘Gnostic’
systems may come from a common understanding
of the actual facts which ultimately gave rise to the
pseudo-science of Astrology, facts that had to be
taken account of when once they had been appre-
hended. The Ptolemaic system, though now anti-
quated, was in its day up-to-date science, based on
t Mitchell, 11, p. lxxvii: see also p. cxxx.
2 Ibid. pp. \xxvii and xcvii.
3 [bid. p. lxxili.
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 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
actual observation of facts. When Milton’s ‘meek-
eyed Peace...came softly sliding Down through
the turning sphere’ from Heaven, it was really
through a series of spheres that she had to pass.
The discovery of the regular but independent
motion of the Planets was accounted for by the
doctrine that they were fixed each in its own
sphere, which apparently no other star could pene-
trate. Heaven therefore was not open as it seemed:
it was surrounded by crystal spheres, transparent
indeed but impenetrable. Granted that the Soul
when released from the Body flew up towards
Heaven, how could it get through the spheres on
its way home?
My point is that this difficulty presents itself
naturally, is a natural question to be asked. It is
not wonderful that several systems have a doctrine
of ‘wards’ to be passed, in number corresponding
generally with the number of the Planets. Some-
times the stress was laid on past good conduct,
sometimes on the possession of secret knowledge:
what seemed evident was that some passport was
necessary before the soul could read its title clear
to mansions in the skies—or rather, beyond the
skies. Wherever therefore the doctrine of the
‘spheres’ was accepted we find doctrines of how to
get past them, corresponding in part to old tales of
how to pass the fabled rivers of Hades.
In any case, what we know of Bardaisan’s cos-
mogony is enough to shew analogies with the
substructure underlying the fantastic and com-
118
 A MESOPOTAMIAN SECT
plicated Mandaean fairy-tales. The important thing
is, that Bardaisan belongs to the region of the
Euphrates Valley. We need not go to the sects
described by Irenaeus and Hippolytus and Epipha-
nius for analogies to Mandaism. The Mandaeans
live in Babylonia. Their sacred writings were
compiled some seventy years after the coming of
Islam, i.e. not before a.p. yoo. Their founder, that
is to say the founder of Mandaism in its present
form, according to the only tradition we have, was
a wandering ascetic from Adiabene, whose doc-
trines were partly borrowed from those of the
Marcionites and the Manichees, both known to
have been influential in Mesopotamia generally. It
requires very strong detailed evidence to make it
probable that any parts of the system which do not
seem to come from Matcionites or Manichees were
derived directly from a Mediterranean source. The
Biblical knowledge of the Mandaeans can all be
traced to a study of the Peshitta, the Bible of the
official] Christians of Babylonia, including their
unsympathetic portrait of Jesus Christ. The Man-
daean Anush-uthra, on the other hand, is not a
mere pale reflexion of the Church’s Jesus Christ,
but the Marcionite (and Manichaean) Jesus: all
that is said of Anush-uthra, including the figure of
Miriai, a queer reminiscence of Mary Magdalene,
is ultimately derived from the Lucan Gospel as
curtailed and arranged by Marcion.
In Bardaisan we have an educated Gnostic’s
doctrine of a modified astrological Fate, including
11g
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
the soul’s fate after death. In Mandaism we have
a somewhat similar doctrine, as seen through the
medium of oral lore and a tradition preserved by
wandering mendicants. Even though a feature
here and there may be recognized as the lineal
descendant of ancient speculations of the age of
Valentinus, we cannot expect it to be more faith-
fully preserved than the features of the Marcionite
Jesus are preserved in the Mandaean Anush-uthra.
In other words, Mandaism may be interesting in
itself, but it is useless to go to it as a key to unlock
the mysteries of early Christian development.

NOTE
ON THE PHRASE MANDA D’HAYYE
As I said on p. 109 the Mandaean term Manda d’Hayye
actually occurs in the Syriac text of the Benedictus (Lk. i 77).
This is duly acknowledged by Lidzbarski (Jobannesbuch,
p. xvii, note 2), but Lagarde’s remark there quoted is mis-
leading. Lagarde says ‘ Lucas 177 yvo10 cwmplag sam
wSaiin tibersetzt, wahrend sonst cwtnpia ~ata& ist’, This
remark was made in 1890, before the discovery of the
Sinai Palimpsest had enlarged our knowledge of early
Syriac ecclesiastical diction.
First, as to owtnpta and cmzev. The ‘Old Syriac’ Version
regularly represented these words by ‘life’ (+s%) and
“cause to live’ (,a«<), even in such passages as Matt. viii
25, where the cry of the disciples in the boat—Kvpie, o&cov
~—is rendered in S (Aiat C) ‘Our Lord, make us live!’ In the
Peshitta, a revision of the ‘O'd Syriac’ made about a.p. 412,
this curious rendering is generally retained, but a more
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 MANDA D’HAYYE
literal one is now and then substituted. For instance, in
Matt. viii 25 the Peshitta has ‘Our Lord, deliver us’(___ ¢&).
As for the noun ow7npla, the rendering ‘life’ is allowed to
remain in Lk. i 77, xix 9, and Joh. iv 22, but aim4tas,
‘deliverance’, is substituted in Lk. i 69 (a word reserved by
the‘ Old Syriac’ for Autpworc); and the resumptive owtnpiav
of Lk. i 71, for which S has ‘and He hath snatched
us away to life’, becomes ‘that He might deliver us’ in the
Peshitta. Notwithstanding these corrections, ‘life’—though
in Syriac, as in Hebrew and also Mandaean, it is a masculine
plural—continued to be the conventional equivalent for
‘salvation’, as may be seen from Jude 3, where in the post-
Feshigta version ‘our common we is rendered ‘the
ife of us in common’ (woXa 63 3). '
The word Watch Aes madd'a, with hard d, like <\h=n)
is a perfectly regular formation from =, ‘to know’. It
occurs also in Jewish Aramaic, in some dialects of which the
-dd- in the middle is turned into -nd-, just as in Mandaean.
In Syriac the word is used not so much for ‘knowledge’ as
for ‘intelligence’ or ‘reason’. Bardaisan calls madd‘a the
strange and divine leaven in the soul, the soul being in
itself without knowledge (#da‘thé): in other words, it is
Reason regarded as a superadded faculty in the human make-
up. It is therefore exactly that supetnatural understanding
of divine things which is meant by gnosis as a technical term.
The Manda d’Hayyé is exactly the personified Gnosis.
‘Far be it for me’, says Miriai the true Mandaean, ‘to love
him whom I have hated; far be it for me to hate whom I
have Icved;
Nay, far be it for me my Lord Manda d’Hayyé to hate, who
is for me a support in the world,
A support is He to me in the world, and a Helper in the
place of Light.’
As this extract shews,' Manda d’ Hayyé is fully personified, a
Being capable of inspiring romantic affection. Miriai is the
Mandaean name for Mary, i.e. Mary. Magdalene (Lk. viii 2),
the disciple of Jesus. No doubt the ultimate historical fact,
according to our Western ideas ofconctrete fact, upon which
1 Johannesbuch 131, p. 129; Kolasta xu1v, p. 211 f.
I2t
 MANDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
the poetical lines I have just quoted is based, is the affection
and gratitude which Jesus inspired in Mary Magdalene.
But the Mandaean Religion is altogether alien to concrete
history. As with the Manichees, they confuse the Prophet,
his symbol, his doctrine: in fact they distrust the concrete
human personality, as does the ‘Gnostic’ author of the Acts
of Jokn.t ‘Miriai’ has no doubt come into the Mandaean
mythology through the Marcionite Gospel with its de-
humanized Jesus: Asash-nthra—‘ Saint Homo’, as we might
call Him—is not really more human than Manda d’Hayyé,
the doctrine proclaimed by Saint Homo, but is also not less
human. So in the end the words of Miriai do re-echo some
of the loyalty and devotion of the orthodox Christian for his
Lord and Saviour.
In any case, to translate Manda d’Hayyé by yuSoi 2wijo,
and not yvécig cwrnptlas, is to beg the question of the origin
of the term.
t See M. R. James, Apocryphal N.T., p. 256.

122
 Chapter V
THE CHURCH AND THE
OLD TESTAMENT
E have glanced at Gnostic theology in its
\ \ / philosophic bloom and its mythological
decay. What had the Church to offer as
an alternative? Harnack says somewhere that in
the great struggle of the Diocletian persecution,
at the beginning of the fourth century, the two
sides, Christianity and Paganism, had only one
theology but two rival mythologies. Whether the
epigram be Harnack’s or another’s, and whether
it expresses the state of things accurately, does not
matter: it is near enough to historical truth to be
a good starting-point.
What is meant by the one theology is the victory
of Monotheism, tempered by subordinate hero-
cults. On the Pagan side many of the old cults of
Gods and Goddesses, Hetoes and Saviours, were
alive and flourishing, but the unity of the supreme
Divine Power was generally recognized in theory.
From the time of Elagabalus, culminating in
Aurelian, the supremacy of the Unconquerable
Sun, unique and all-vivifying, had come into
prominence. The Zeus of official worship was in
practice a name of the Unconquerable Sun, as well
as of the Open Sky, always present and always the
same everywhere. Similarly the Christians were
123
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
consciously monotheistic; but they refused to
identify their Gop with ‘Zeus’. On the other hand,
for those who wanted a less august worship side
by side with that of the Supreme Deity, there had
gtown up among Christians the cult of the Mar-
tyrs, beginning with the local Martyrs of whom the
several Churches were proud; and these local cults
were becoming more and mote universal in the
case of the greater and more notable Saints.
I am not wishing to press the analogy or to
maintain a paradox. No doubt, when examined
carefully, the Christians and their opponents had
different theologies, but there were also great
resemblances. There was superstition among the
Christians on the one hand; and, on the other, the
theology of the higher Paganism had become so
enlightened that it is an open question whether the
theological ideas of the Hermetic writings are, or
are not, independent of Christian ideas. This litera-
ture, we may remember, is quoted by Lactantius,
wiiting just after the Diocletian persecution came to
an end, so that, whatever the origin of the Hermetic
writings may have been, they must then have
tepresented a living movement of non-Christian
contemporary thought.
There was also assimilation in Christian thought
about the state of the dead. The baptismal pro-
fession of Christian faith still expressed belief in
the resurrection of the flesh, as indeed it does to
this day, but the emotional value of this inherited
dogma was already overshadowed by a vivid belief
124
 THE STATE OF THE DEAD
in the intermediate state, the state of the dead, good
and bad, immediately after death. The Martyrs at
least, so all Christians believed, had gone to reign
with Christ—or rather their souls and spirits had
gone there, for their venerated bones were the
special treasure of the Christians still on earth. At
any rate they were already in conscious bliss.
The old Christian belief that Gop had appointed
a day in which He would judge the world by the
man whom He had ordained, in which all men of
all ages would rise again in their bodies and receive
their due punishment or reward, still survived, but
what had that stupendous Assize come to mean?
The dead were already judged, were already re-
ceiving their reward. In terms of literature, the
doctrine of the Apocalypse of Peter, however
uncanonical, had superseded that of the Apoca-
lypse of John. The assurance of ‘immortality’ was
no doubt stronger among the Christians than the
Pagans, and the means of obtaining a happy lot
after death were different, but the state was much
the same. The blessed souls domiciled in the Milky
Way of whom we read in the Sovnium Scipionis, the
initiated Gnostic after death who flies unimpeded
through the spheres, the glorified Martyrs of the
Catholic Church, these are all in much the same
state of existence: they are in heaven, but they have
not been resurrected. Here again there has been
assimilation of ideas, away from the early Jewish
and Christian presentation towards the ideas of
Greek speculation.
125
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
Yet one thing is certain. We modern historians
of thought may see the resemblances between
Pagan and Christian Religion at the time of their
last great open struggle for ascendancy: at the
time, what the Pagans and Christians were acutely
conscious of was their incompatible difference. In
what did this consist? The epigram I quoted at the
beginning placed the difference in their mythology.
What is implied by this?
If we reply that the Christians believed in the
Bible, while the Pagans had nothing but their false
and fantastic legends of the Gods, we are giving
the old-fashioned answer. This answer I believe to
be essentially true, but at the present day it requires
a good deal of reformulation. I propose to con-
sider at some length what belief in the Bible really
implies, and in what way it is essentially different
from the Pagan account of the origin of Gods and
men.
We cannot now, without definition, contrast
“Bible truth’ with ‘heathen fables’. And it is
exactly in those parts, upon the historical accuracy
of which old-time believers laid most stress, that
the literal truth of the Bible is now most called in
question. The creation of the world in six days,
Adam and Eve, Noah’s Flood (in the sense of a
world-wide Deluge),—these things have dropped
out of our geological manuals and our primers of
Ancient History. Iam not one of those who think
this is a matter of no consequence for the present
and the future of the Christian Faith. The need for
126
 ANNALISTIC OR SYSTEMATIC
a reconstruction and revision of our theological
theories about the origin of things, including Man,
is coming more and more to be felt among
thoughtful Christians, though useful reconstruc-
tion does not make much progress.
Nevertheless the Old Testament is in the main
a book of history, of history rather than of system-
atic theology. Even the legislation, though re-
garded as Divine, is couched in historical form.
The contrast, then, between the religion of the
Christians and that of the Pagans in Diocletian’s
day, if we neglect the mere legends of the Gods and
bear in mind such expositions of Paganism as that
of Sallustius, is the contrast between an historical
account and a philosophical account. Or rather,
since ‘historical’ is often used in modern times in
the sense of ‘truly historical’, let us say between an
annalistic and a systematic account.
Annalistic or systematic—let us consider a few
leading Christian documents which are systematic,
that we may better appreciate how the Bible differs
from them. I am thinking of such documents as
the Creeds, the Church Catechism, the Sawma of
Thomas Aquinas. These are all very valuable
documents, excellent in their way and in their
place. But the Bible—and here I am thinking
particularly of the Old Testament—is different. It
is a set of writings which, taken together, give an
account of how the Religion of the Jews came to
be what it was about the Christian era. A cursory
study of this literature brings out the fact that the
127
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
outstanding achievement of the Israelite race con-
sists in new ideas about the relation of moral con-
duct to true religion. These ideas are to be found
in the utterances of the Prophets, a great chain
of seers of whom the greatest names are Amos,
Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Second Isaiah, and
Ezekiel.
It is most important to include Ezekiel, if we
wish to understand the essential difference between
Jewish and Greek Religion and justify to ourselves
the ‘narrowness’ and ‘exclusiveness’ of Judaism
and of its daughter, Christianity. Even the causes
of this narrowness are historical rather than system-
atic, they are the result of a special development,
the history of which is to be found woven into the
structure of the Bible. We can now give a more or
less reasoned account of this development, helped
thereto not only by methodical study of the Bible
and by setting the various parts of it in their true
chronology and environment, but also by the pos-
session of an evolutionary philosophy, a philo-
sophy which sees living truth in growth and change
and ‘epigenesis’, rather than in a static perfection.
But this evolutionary philosophy is essentially a
ptoduct of our own times. The times were not ripe
for it in the age of Diocletian, or indeed in any age
until the present day. Therefore the only form in
which such a philosophy could be held in ancient
times was an annalistic form, something which had
as its Palladium an account of a development rather
than an infallible exposition of the final stage.
128
 AN ANNALISTIC PHILOSOPHY
Let us think for a moment what we have come
to believe that the Old Testament really is, and then
at the reasons which led the Church, in its forma-
tive stage, to cling to it in preference to any system
of Gnostic construction. This, I may remark in
passing, was the real alternative. The Creeds of the
fourth and fifth centuries were attempts at short
and yet authoritative statements of Christian
Doctrine, but by that time the main lines of
Christian Doctrine had already crystallized and,
moreover, the Creeds all profess to be founded
on the statements of Holy Scripture. With what
difficulty was the term somoousion inserted in
the Creed, just because it is not actually found
in the Bible! The teal battle in the second cen-
tury centred round the position of the Old
Testament.
What, then, is the Old Testament? It is the
collection of the sacred Books of the Jews, and
were it not so familiar to us from childhood we
should recognize more easily that it is a very extra-
ordinary collection. What can we learn from it?
We learn from it the process by which the Jewish
Religion came to be what it was, an unique pheno-
menon in the then new post-Alexandrian civiliza-
tion, indeed an unique phenomenon in the ancient
world generally. The Old Testament may be de-
sctibed as the record of two controversies, both
of great importance and interest in themselves, and
still more so by reason of the solution they received
in fully developed Judaism. They may be called,
BC 129 9
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
for short, ‘Nature-Religion or Social Religion’ and
‘Priest or Prophet’.
Let me indicate, in the fewest possible words,
what I mean. Man’s life depends upon the food-
supply, and this, both for man and beast, depends
upon the weather. How can we secure good har-
vests? One ancient answet, as we all know, is that
if we cut the crops with the right ceremonies, and
give the local Unseen Powers the right kind of
tribute, they may be favourable to us and give us a
good harvest next season. This is what is called in
the Old Testament ‘Baal-worship’. It is a sort of
magic, a sort of unscientific science, what I called
just now Nature-Religion. Beside this, and for the
most part in opposition to it, there is in the Old
Testament another Religion. Man by himself is
weak, but he has a power of combination with his
fellows that makes him master of all living things,
and if he be oppressed by other men it is by
combination with friends that he can free himself.
But combination involves give and take, ina word,
morality, discipline, forbearance. Nowhere, let me
point out, is this clearerthan in War. If the members
of a clan be fighting together side by side for a
common object they must be ready to give up
individual advantages for the common good, they
must obey their leader, they must work and
fight and if necessary die for the common cause.
And in primitive society all this is under the
sanction of Religion. The God of the clan fights
for His own clansmen and gives them, if He be
130
 TWO CONCEPTIONS OF RELIGION
stronger than the God of their enemies, victory in
battle.
It was in war that religious patriotism was most
clearly displayed, but it shewed itself also in peace.
The tradition says that Moses brought out the
Israelites from Egypt, but it also makes him the
legislator who formulated the rules that ought to
obtain between one Israelite and another. And
both parts of Moses’ work were accomplished
with the help and the sanction of the Gop whom
he taught his countrymen to call by a new Name.
To Hebrew thought the Name implied the charac-
ter, and the new Name, however pronounced,
whether Yahweh or Yahoh, implied patriotism
and civil justice.
Hete then we have two distinct conceptions of
Religion: in the one it means the practices and the
customs that were believed to ensure the due
abundance of the kindly fruits of the earth, in the
other it means patriotism and civil justice. In the
Old Testament the former conception is associated
with the Baalim, the local Genius of each district
and with the immemorial rites locally practised;
the Lord Gop whom Moses made known to
Israel is associated with the other conception,
with everything that makes for true patriotism or
true civil justice. I stress the adjective, for we see
in the words of the Prophets an expansion and a
deepening of what true patriotism might mean.
The other great controversy with which the Old
Testament is concerned is that between ‘Priest’ and
131 9-2
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
‘Prophet’. I need not go into details, for most of
it is familiar ground. The Priest is the religious
professional: the essential thing is that religion is
his profession, his trade. The main method of
communicating with the Gods in ancient times was
by sacrifices, so that conducting sacrifices was one
of the main duties of priests; but besides this it was
the regular duty of the priest to declare the will of
the Gop, whether by Oracles, or casting the sacred
Lot, or by his knowledge of the ancient customs.
He was usually attached to a particular shrine, and
the central government, if at all powerful, can
generally exercise a good deal of control over a
local sanctuary. All these considerations tend to
make the Priest a bulwark of conservatism, not the
conservatism that looks back to ‘the good old
times’ as compared with present abuses, but the
consetvatism of the existing system.
The Prophet was quite different, and the greater
Prophets of Israel represent a quite peculiar de-
velopment. The essence of the Prophet is that it is
understood that Gop Himself was speaking by him,
To get a just idea of this claim we must begin ona
much lower level than what would be implied
nowadays by these words. We need not go outside
the Bible. We see from the old tales in 1 Samuel
that when Saul was ‘among the Prophets’ it meant
that he had been seized with a fit of wild religious
frenzy, such as we are told comes over a Negro at
an emotional Camp-meeting.t We say in such cases
1 1 Sam. xix 24.
132
 PRIEST AND PROPHET
that the man has lost his self-control; the Orientals
say he is ‘possessed’: that is, an unseen but real
spirit, good or evil, has come and taken possession
of his intelligence, so that the words he may utter
are not the man’s own but those of the alien spirit.
Such was the Prophet in Israel when we first
come across him. But there followed a strange
transformation, the most remarkable and impor-
tant fact in Israelite history. The essence of the
Prophet is his enthusiasm. He speaks with autho-
rity, because he believes, and those who hear him
believe, that what he says is not his own but the
Oracle of the Gop. Nothing less than this can
nerve a man, and particularly an Oriental, to run
counter to the King, the Government, to those who
have official position in the State and in Religion,
above all to the all-pervading authority of Custom.
A consciousness of direct inspiration from GoD
makes a man free of all other authority: to be under
compulsion from Gop is to be free of every other
sort of dominion.
So the Prophet, like the Mohammedan Dervish,
was free to doand say what his inner impulse moved
him to do or say. ‘A consciousness of direct inspira-
tion’—the prophet-dervishes whom Saul joined
were not properly conscious at all, they were
drunk with their enthusiasm. The strange trans-
formation of which I spoke was the rise of a chain
of Seers who had the prophetic enthusiasm but
remained sober and conscious of their mission.
Elijah, Amos, Jeremiah, Ezekiel,—these four are
133
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
the most important links: they represent the trans-
formation of the religion of the Israelites out of
something almost indistinguishable from ordinary
Semitic heathenism into the peculiar Jewish sys-
tem, which is presupposed in the writings of the
New Testament and which still survives in its two
children, Christianity and the Rabbinical Religion.
Each of the four—Elijah, Amos, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel—had a peculiar relation of antagonism or
alliance with the Priests of their day, and equally
a peculiar relation with regard to that other con-
troversy, which I have called ‘Nature-Religion or
Social Religion’. It would take too long to sum-
marize the familiar tale of the message of Amos and
Jeremiah, though they do represent a revolution
in teligious thought. They were in antagonism to
the Priests of their day, and to the time-hallowed
Nature-Religion with which the Priests were
identified. The moral denunciations of Amos
sound to-day like religious commonplace; in
Amos’s day they were revolutionary paradox.
Jeremiah may almost be said to have found out
personal religion, independent of national worship.
Though he lived to see all the externals of worship
swept away, he still had communion with his cop.
Before him Religion had been always more or less
national, civic, communal.
But the lofty peak reached by Jeremiah was by
no means the last stage in the development of Old
Testament Religion. In the end the great con-
troversies of which I have spoken had a most un-
134
 EZEKIEL
foreseen issue, unforeseen that is by Amos and
Jeremiah, though it embodied the essential victory
of their ideas. They had been in opposition to the
established worship and to the priests, not because
the worship was ritualistic or the priests a profes-
sional class, but because the ritualistic worship had
no concern with social abuses and was in some
ways itself immoral, and becausethe priests werethe
champions of this worship and were not the cham-
pions of social morality.
Herein lies the importance of Ezekiel. In him
we see the coalescence of the prophetic and priestly
ideals. He was a Priest, one of the first batch of
exiles, and his prophetic Visions came to him in
Babylonia, far from the Holy Land of Palestine.
He was as keen about moral conduct as Amos him-
self, and he received the news of the fall of Jeru-
salem as calmly ‘as Amos contemplated the fall of
Samaria. But he believed that in Gop’s good time
the nation would be restored, and then the very
centre of the restored community was to be a
reformed Temple served by worthy priests.
Fifty years after Ezekiel had published his
sketch of a restored Israel his dream materialized,
for in 521 B.C., exactly a century after Josiah’s
Reform, and two centuries after the fall of Samaria,
the faithful Jews restarted the worship of the LorD
on the site of the old Temple in Jerusalem. It was
a day of small things, for the community was poor,
but it was the triumph of that peculiar blend of
prophetic and priestly ideals of which Ezekiel is the
135
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
mouthpiece. This henceforth was the Jewish Reli-
gion, the religion which is the background of the
New Testament.
Which had won, Prophet or Priest, Nature-
Religion or Social Religion? The Priests were in
possession: the race of Jewish Prophets, true and
false, died out, but mainly because their cause had
triumphed. In post-exilic Judaism there was, so to
speak, a Constitution. The ancient customs of Israel
had been during the Exile finally codified and
woven together with two or three ancient collec-
tions of the national traditions of the heroic period.
These customs included both the rudiments of a
civil code and the regulations of sacrificial worship.
The result is what we call the Pentateuch. As a
literary work it is perhaps cumbrous and ill-
ptoportioned, but so are many binding legal
documents. The important thing is that it was
binding on all the Jews, both priests and people.
The Priest became a constitutional priest, and the
layman could and did know as much about a priest’s
duties and privileges as the priest himself. Duty,
both ritual and moral, was henceforth a matter
of public knowledge, and it was all a part of
Religion.
Moreover that Religion was in the main Social
Religion, while Nature-Religion received a suffi-
cient measure of recognition. In the main, fully-
developed post-exilic Judaism is a Rule of life and
of conduct. Even the weekly Sabbath-taboo is
grounded in one form of its prescription on a
136
 THE JEWISH RELIGION
humanitarian basis. And the immorality formerly
connected with the Nature-Feasts, against which
the Prophets so often protest, quite disappeared,
though the connexion of Passover with first-fruits
and of Pentecost with wheat-harvest is still per-
ceptible. The connexion of Tabernacles with the
joyous time of vintage is too obvious ever to have
been in doubt, but even there an effort was made to
connect it in thought with the legendary conditions
of the days of Moses.
This is the Jewish Religion, the Religion set forth
in its growth and its completion in the Old Testa-
ment. In some ways it does not strike us as so
peculiar as it ought to strike us, but in very truth
it was a new thing, unique in the Graeco-Roman
world. The Greeks, and after them the Romans,
were very much concerned with Duty, but to them
Duty had little to do with Religion; it was a branch
of Philosophy. It was the special characteristic of
the Jewish Religion that Duty and Ritual, social
conduct and public worship, were all parts of it,
and it was the duty of the layman as much as that
of the priest to know and meditate upon all parts of
italike. As a result the Jew was ready to die for his
Religion, while the immemorial religious customs
of Greek and Roman sank to the level of public
spectacles. Religion to the Jew was a living force,
because it was his concern, not merely the concern
of a professional class.
The above is not exactly the account of the Old
Testament given by Irenaeus in the Epideixis!
137
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
Irenaeus uses the Old Testament after the manner
of his day: his own view of the world and of the
place of man in it was in many respects much
nearer to that of the Gnostics whose speculations
we have been considering than it is to ours. The
parts of Bible history upon which Irenaeus chiefly
Jaid stress, as did also our grandfathers, are those
tales in Genesis which we have learnt to look upon
as folklore. But it is not the system of Irenaeus
which directly concerns us now. The important
thing is that his theology, in opposition to the
Gnostics and also to Marcion, accepts the Old
Testament en bloc, not merely those parts of it
which can easily be used as a proof or illustration
of a second-centuty theological system, whether
that of Irenaeus or of some other. That was the
only way in which the Old Testament could be
preserved through the Dark Ages, as may be seen
by the fate of the rejected Book of Enoch.
We come back to the point from which we
started. The Church accepted the Old Testament
as its authoritative mythology, and that prevented
it from ever becoming quite identical with the
pagan Religion which it supplanted, monotheistic
and sacramental as that Religion tended to be. And,
as I said above, this Christian mythology was
annalistic. Like the pagan Religion there was an
account of the beginnings of things, and in the
beginning things were alleged to have happened
which had a decisive influence over all human life
and destiny. So it was with Osiris, with Attis, with
138
 THE NEW TESTAMENT ANNALISTIC
the Titans, with Hermes Trismegistos. But then
there was a gap. How different is the Christian
Sacred Drama, enacted not at the beginning but
at the end of the ages, and yet linked up with the
beginning by the whole religious history of achosen
Nation! A long history—that was the only form in
which anything approximately equivalent to an or-
ganic evolutionary process could be apprehended
in ancient times.
It is a remarkable fact that the New Testament
is as annalistic, occasional, unsystematic, as the
Old. How different it is in form and general con-
struction from the Kor’an or the Mandaean Ginza,
ot (so far as we can reconstruct them) the Mani-
chaean Scriptures! The Letters of Paul are occa-
sional writings: even if we regard Romans i-xiv
and Ephesians as theological treatises in the form
of letters, yet even Romans was used by its author
as a letter, as we see from Romans xv, which he
must have added as a sort of covering letter or
postscript. The Four Gospels are a miscellaneous
group, two of which are directly based on a third.
The greater part of Acts, though of very great
historical interest, is very unlike a Sacred Book.
What should we think of, say, one of the ‘Sacred
Books of the East’, six per cent. of which proved on
examination to consist of the detailed story of a
shipwreck? The remarkable thing is not that Luke
should have recorded the shipwreck, where indeed
he and his friend S. Paul were actually present,
139
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
though playing a very passive rdle, but that his
record should have become Holy Scripture without
drastic curtailment. Can we imagine Acts xxvii
becoming part of the Corpus Valentinianum? Of
course, if such a piece of literature was already part
of the sacred writings cherished by a religious body,
from which he was a Dissenter, he might have
retained it and allegorized it, but he would hardly
have adopted it on his own initiative.
And there is yet another thing about which the
tale of S. Paul’s sea-voyage and shipwreck may put
us on our guard. The writer was one of the Four
Evangelists, one of those who drew up, from
whatever authorities or traditions, the only ac-
counts of Jesus Christ we possess. I am quite
willing to acknowledge that the account of the
shipwreck has beena little ‘written up’. The speech
of S. Paul in Acts xxvii 21-6 is rather different
from the words which a phonograph might have
caught coming through the howling of the wind.
But it is the work of one who is really interested in
incidents and historical situations, not dominated
by dogmatic considerations and Scriptural remini-
scences. Both Mark and Luke appear to me to be
historical in intention: they wish to tell their
readers a tale which they believe to be true.
The interests of the Evangelists whom we call
Matthew and John seem to me to be less historical
and more directly didactic; no doubt when they
made changes they were all in the direction of the
theological ideas which they had at heart, in
140
 METHOD OF THE EVANGELISTS
Matthew the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy,
in John the peculiar Logos-theology. But Mat-
thew’s dependence on his main authority, viz. the
Gospel of Mark itself, is so marked that ‘Matthew’
remains an historical document: if Mark were not
extant, we should be able to extract most of his
historical information from the latter half of the
Gospel of Matthew. ‘John’ is far less annalistic,
far less naive, but even in the case of the Fourth
Gospel the epoch-making fact of Mark’s narrative,
working onthe Church partly by its direct influence,
but still more being incorporated into and forming
the background of Matthew and Luke, caused the
new Ephesian estimate of the essential teaching of
the Incarnate Son of God to be set in a narrative
framework. The four accounts of Jesus, which the
Church came to cherish as authoritative, are all
annalistic: all four, in their several ways, do set
forth a ‘Christ after the flesh’. How sparing are
the Gospels (and Acts) in giving us teaching from
the risen Jesus, how full on the contrary are the
accounts given of it in Gnostic documents! The
Gnostics did not liketheannalistic; they wanted the
systematic, something not conditioned by time and
environment.
I spoke just now of the ‘epoch-making fact of
Mark’s narrative’. I know quite well that this is a
contentious phrase, so that a few words justifying
it may not be out of place here. I do not need to go
over the familiar ground of Synoptic criticism:
what I wish to explain is the view I take of the place
141
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
of the Gospel tales in Christendom before Mark’s
Gospel was published, i.e. about 65 or 66 A.D.
Frankly, I think very few Christians had been
instructed in them, or even had heard them told.
What the Germans call Gemeinde-Theologie, the
popular consensus, produced the Creed (or some-
thing like it) and did not produce the narrative of
Mark. Luke’s patron, ‘the Rt. Hon. Theophilus’,
had been instructed in the Christian Religion, but
there is nothing to suggest that this included any
more of the Gospel history than is included in
something like the Apostles’? Creed. What Theo-
philus had been taught was not (as I venture to
think) tales about Jesus; it was more likely to have
been those first principles of which the author of
the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks—repentance,
faith, baptism, consecration, resurrection and the
judgement to come (Hebr. vi 1, 2). Like the
Thessalonians, of whom I spoke at the beginning,
he had learnt to ‘serve the Living Gop, and to
wait for His Son from heaven, even Jesus’. He
may have been taught to search the Scriptures,
i.e. the sacred writings of the Jews, whether these
things were so. But there is no evidence that
he, or any of his contemporaries, had heard of
Capernaum or Bethsaida or of what had happened
there.
Of course there were still living, when Mark
wrote, a few survivors of those who had been with
Jesus. There was Peter himself, only recently
magstyred, and (as I believe) Mark had also his own
142
 MARK A PIONEER
personal reminiscences of the fateful visit of Jesus
to Jerusalem. But there were now not many
surviving in Palestine, and very few indeed in the
West. They must from time to time have talked of
what they remembered, but that is a very different
thing from recording their memories in any per-
manent form. There has been much written in the
last few years on what is called Formgeschichte, much
criticism of the artificial and unsystematic way in
which Mark has strung his tales together. But this
criticism seems to me to assume that the tales
themselves had a good deal of circulation before
they were collected and turned into a narrative. Is
there any foundation for this belief? I doubt it.
The Gospel tales have left singularly few traces of
their existence apart from their incorporation into
Mark.
The view against which I am arguing is that in
the early days of Christianity, in the first century
A.D., Christianity was spread or taught by means
of tales about the career of Jesus in Galilee and
Judaea. What Mark did, as I understand the mat-
ter, was to turn the Evangel i into a Biography. He
has the merits and the faults of a pioneer. It was a
discovery to find that by merely telling the tale of
the career of Jesus those who hear it said with the
Centurion ‘Truly this man was a son of Gop!’
Mark compiled his tale from reminiscences of
Peter and (for the last week) from reminiscences of
his own. Others of Mark’s acquaintance had no
doubt contributed their share. Some things in the
143
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
result are surely not quite historical. But so much
is real reminiscence that the general outline is not
far from real history.
Later writers saw that Mark could be improved.
They re-edited Mark, and produced something at
once mote edifying and less historical. The wonder
is that Mark was not simply dropped out of sight,
and J think we owe the final result, viz. a co-ordi-
nated Four, to the conservatism of the Roman
Church, which was willing to accept the newer
editions, but not to abandon the old original,
which doubtless had first been published in Rome
itself.
Let me remark in passing how few biographies
exist earlier than the Gospels themselves! What
book did Mark take as his model? Was he ac-
quainted with the Memorabilia (émopvnyovespata)
of Xenophon? Neither the language nor the style
of Mark would make one think so, but it is the
nearest parallel.:
Naturally some attempts, independent of Mark,
were made to write down some of the Sayings of
Jesus, for His utterances were an actual guide to
the community. Even Paul records that the Lord
had said that they who preach the Gospel might
live by the Gospel, in other words that ‘the
labourer is worthy of his hire’ (= Lk. x 7, Matt.
x 10). Such collections may have been made in
Aramaic: the famous collection now called Q
appearsto bea Greek translation of an Aramaic col-
t See Justin Martyr, 1 Apo/. 67, Dial. 106.
144
 NON-MARCAN SOURCES
lection of Sayings of Jesus. It is remarkable for shew-
ing a distinctly biographical, or rather personal,
interest in Jesus, for we can hardly suppose that the
famous comparison of Jesus with John the Baptist,
which tells us in passing that some of the con-
temporaries of Jesus thought Him too convivial to
bea messenger from GoD," can have been compiled
as a catechetical manual for uninstructed converts!
No, the compiler of Q must have taken an interest
in the Sayings of Jesus for their own sake.
Further, there must have been during the first
thirty years or so after the Crucifixion some who
remembered single striking utterances of Jesus,
though they may have been quite unable to have
produced a sketch of His career. To such remini-
scences I think we owe the striking but dateless
parables and tales preserved to us only in the
Gospel of Luke. We may guess that some of these
were collected at Caesarea, perhaps from the mouth
of one of the daughters of Philip, ‘Apostle’ or
‘Evangelist’, but we can know no more than that
Luke has recorded them.
It is time to return from this digression to our
proper subject, which is the collection of Sacred
Books which the Church chose as authoritative, by
which they judged the teachings and speculations
of too eager Christian thinkers. The moral is
everywhere the same: the acceptance of the anna-
listic as contrasted with the systematic. The Church
* Matt. ix 16-19, Lk. vii 31-4 (‘a man gluttonous and a
winebibber’),
BC 145 10
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
had started with a belief which was indeed definite
and systematic. It was that Gop had sent His Son
to earth at this, the end of the ages, that He had
died and risen again, and—that soon, very soon,
in that very generation, He would return from
heaven in glory to judge the world. ‘They thought
that the Kingdom of Gop should immediately
appear.’ That hope, at any rate in the form in
which it was held, was not fulfilled. The wonderful
thing is that Christianity itself survived. As I
understand it, what is commonly known as ‘Gnos-
ticism’ was a gallant effort to reformulate Chris-
tianity in terms of the current astronomy and
philosophy of the day, with the Last Judgement
and the Messianic Kingdom on earth left out. It
failed. The Church decided still to wait, to let the
old beliefs fade or survive, and meanwhile to
organize itself for an extended career on this earth,
and to put its trust less on constructive theories
than on tradition, on the annals of what Gop had
done in the past.
To us this sounds a timid and unfruitful deci-
sion, but that is because we have a vigorous faith
in our modern science, our modern political
theories, our modern sociology, our modern philo-
sophy. Perhaps we are right: I do not propose to
discuss such questions here. My point is that the
science and the sociology of the ancient world in
the Roman Empire of the second century of our
era was not sound, and that a too close alliance of
Christianity with that science would have proved
146
 COLLAPSE OF THE OLD WORLD
a burden and not a bulwark. I do not think that
Christianity caused the collapse of the old civiliza-
tion: that collapse was, I think, inevitable. In a
sense, I think the Jewish and Christian impression
that the end of the ages had arrived was justified,
though the old fabric took longer to collapse than
they expected. Christianity survived, very well
organized for a long period of decadence and
twilight, for in such periods tradition, the
conservation of ancient wisdom, is the safest
guide.
Now we are in a new day. I do not mean ‘post-
War’, or even since 1776: if we must name names
I would rather name Copernicus and Newton. We
are certainly in a new world, a world not the centre
of the Universe; and of our Earth we know the
ancient history in a way that none of the ancients,
whether Jew or Gentile, knew it. In such circum-
stances, no doubt, we must not cling too blindly to
tradition, we must reconstruct the house of our
soul to fit the new conditions in which it must live.
But all this is very far from the subject of these
Lectures. What we have been considering is the
second century of our era, and the reasons that led
the Church of that day not to accept anew theology
that professed to be in accordance with the spirit
of that age. The Wise Man of old said there was a
time for all things. That is true: the trouble is that
people do not always have wisdom to know which
in their time is the appropriate course. What I have
been trying to shew is that when the Church of the
147 10-2
 THE CHURCH AND OLD TESTAMENT
second century rejected what seemed to be a
scientific account of Religion and clung to an
annalistic account it was taking a course that was
appropriate to the time and therefore truly
scientific.

148
 Index
(Names of Books, e.g. Timothy and Aquila,
ate ptinted in italics)
Abatur, 103, 115 Baruch, Apocalypse of, 21
Aberamenth6u, 39, 82 f. Basilides, 86 f.
Ablanathanalba, 39, 61 Bdella, 60
Abrasax, Abraxas, 36, 86 Bousset, W., 9
Achamoth, 47 Bruce, James, 62
Acts of John, 46, 122 Bythos, the original fore-
Ado of Adiabene, 102, 119 father, 42 f., 48
Aeons, lower, 67, 72 his Thought, 42, 48, 87;
upper, 44, 47 (= Barbelo), 54, 60
Agrammachamareg, 61
Ahyahasharahyah, 38 Catechisms, 8, 23, 127
Amuneil, 108 Chiliasm, 90
‘Anonymous’ Gnostic Work, Clement of Rome, 20
the, 63, 74, 81 ff. Cosmas Indicopleustes, 31
Anush-uthra, 110 ff., 119, Creeds, 52, 75, 127, 129, 142
122 Cross, Gnostic (= Horos),
Aphraates, 42 46, 52
Apocryphon of Jobn, $3 ff., 59 Crum, W. E., 50
Asceticism, 76 Crun, 115
Askew, Dr, 62 Cyprian (Test. i 7), 96
Astrology, 30 ff.; 88, 117
Augustine, 50 Didascalia, 26
Diocletian, age of, 123, 128
Baal-worship, 130 f. Dlibat (= Venus), 107
Baptism, Mandaean, 113 f. Drower, Mrs, 114
Barbarous Names, 35 f£., Go,
82 Bisler, Dr R., 30 f.
Barbelo, 53 f., 58 ff. Enoch, Book of, 50, 138
a seed, 54 f., 60 Enthymesis, 46 f., 51, 65
Bardaisan, 105, 117f., 121 Epiphanius, 37, 58 ff., 70
Barnabas, Ep. of, 24, 47 Eresh-ki-gal, 38 f., 83
149
 INDEX
Eschatology, 10, 18, 21, §7 Incarnation, Adoptionist, 72,
Eshu Mshiha, 105, 107 f., 98 ff.
rit Irenaeus, Epideixis, 22f.,
‘Ethereal’, 34, 49, 78, 88 137
Ezekiel, 128, 135 adv, Haereses, 42, 47, 59-3,
Ezra (= ‘Second Esdras’), 58, 80
21 Isaiah, Ascension of, 21

Fall, the, 49 ff. Jacopone da Todi, quoted,

Fate, 33, 66, 88, 105 18
Flora, 26 James, M. R., 46, 122
*Formgeschichte’, 143 Jeremiah, 134
Jesus, Gnostic ideas about,
Gems, ‘Gnostic’, 36, 83 39> 41, 47, $4, 66, 82
Ginza, 101, 102, 108f., 110f., central réle of, 56 f., 75 ff.,
113, 115 88 ff.
left G., 103 £., 115 Jewish Religion, character-
Glass and wax, 76 istics of, 136 f.
Gnosis, 4 ff., 9, 40, 47. 575 John the Baptist, 2, 96 ff.
87, 109 Mandaean Book of John,
‘Gnostics’” “sect, so-called), FOI, III, 121
58 f. John, Revelation of, 21, 90,
Gollancz, H., 38 123
see aso Apocryphon of
Harnack, 123 Jobn
Hecate, 81 Jordan, 72, 114
Hegel, 42, 52 Journal of Theol. Studies:
Hermes Trismegistos, 89, IV, §ON.; XXUI, 41n.;
124, 139 XXV, 42.3; XXIX, 1o6n.,
Hippolytus, 72, 87 1o8n., 114
Horos, 45 f., 52 Justin Martyr, 93, 144

Taldabaoth (Jald-), 38, 54 f., Khnoub, Khnum, 39

115 Kbuastuanift, Manichaean,
Tao, 86 113
Te ie ie, 84-7 King, C W., 38, 83
Teu (Jen), Books of, 39, Go, 63, Knathayé, 102
74, 83 ff. ‘Knowledge of Salvation’,
Immortality, 33 f., 88, 125 45 109
150
 INDEX
Lactantius, 70, 124 Mythology and philosophy,
Lagarde, 120 40, 55» 65
Lagrange, Pére, 114
Leiden Papyrus, 38 f., 82 f. Narsai (Nestorian), 104
Lidzbarski, M., 106, 111, Nbu (= Mercury), 107
120 Nero, 21
Lietzmann, H., 114 New Testament, 15, 139 ff.
Life and Salvation, 109 Nicolaitans, 59
Line upon Line, 23 Noldeke, 116
Logos-doctrine, 93 Nous and Truth, 43 f., 49
Lucifer, 50
Odes of Solomon, yo
Magic, 35 ff., 40, 82 Old Testament, 21, 22-8,
Mammon, 79 f. $7 64, 106, 126-37
Mana (Mandaean), 109 f. One, and Two, 48, 84, 87
Manda d’Hayyé, 109, 117,
120 f, Pallis, S. A., 106, 114
Mandaeans, 1, 92, 100-22 Parusia, 10, 19, 27, 146
language, 101, 109, 116, Passports for the Soul, 76,
120 f. 115, 118
relation to (Nestorian) Paul, 13-19, 139
Christians, 108,112,114 at Athens, 27
Mani, 6, 49, 57, 79, 89, Peshitta, 37f., 104, 106f., 120
112 f. Peterson, E., 114
Marcion, 25, 42, §7, 112f., Philip, Evangelist, 145
138 Philo, 93
Marcionite Baptisms, 113 Philosophy, see Sophia
Mark, a Pioneer, 141 ff. Philotesia, 53, 55
Marriage, 113 Pirke Aboth, 72
Mary, (1) Magdalene, 67, 71, Pistis Sophia, the name, 69,
74. 77> 79> TIT, 121 82
(2) Mother of Jesus, 71 the Book, 63; see p. 154
Milky Way, 125 authoress (?) of, 77
Mitiai, 111, 119, 121 £. see also Sophia
Mitchell, C. W., 105, 112, Planets, 32, 81, 104, 107, 118
116 f. Pleroma, 45, 89, 110
Monotheism, 123 see alse Acons, upper
Myers, F. W. H., 43 Pognon, H., roz
Mystery, First, 6, 74 f., 100 Posidonius, 35
Ist
 INDEX
Prophets, 132 f. Spheres, the, 32, 35, 73, 81,
Prunicus, 55, 58 105, 118
Psyche, 34, 105 Subbi, 100
Ptahil, 103, 115 Subliminal Self, 43
Ptolemaeus the Valentinian, Systematic, 8, 127, 139
26, 51s $3, 55, 05, 67
Ptolemaic Astronomy, 31 ff., Taylor, C., 72
35s 73s 88, 117 Tertullian, 48, 56
Tetragrammaton, the, 61,
Q, 144 f. 86, 131
Qolasta, 101, 121 Theodore bar Konai, 102 f.,
derivation, 116 112
Quest Magazine, 115 Theodoret, 53
Thomas, Gospel of, 72 £.
Red Sea (Mandaean), 107 Tibil, 103 f.
Reitzenstein, R., 9 Timothy and Aquila, 97
Resurrection, 34, 90 “True God’ (in Tew), 39, 84 £.
Rhadamanthus, 83 Typhon-Séth, 82
Ruha (Mandaean), 105, 107,
109 Ur (Mandaean Demon), 115
derivation, 116
Sabaoth, 36 f., 54
Sallustius, 127 Valentinus, 7, 40, 42-52, 87
Sanday, W., 43 f.
Schleiermacher, 33 War, ancient, 130
Schmidt, Carl, 29, 41, 53, Go, Waterwaves, 104
62 £., 74, 81, 83 Wax and glass, 76
Schweitzer, A., 10 Weiss, Johannes, 10
Setheus, 63 Wellhausen, 11
Silvanus-Silas, 14, 18 Wheels Cophné), 107
*Skylli emmoi’, 41, 78 Wordsworth, Bp. Christo-
Socrates, 7, 48 pher, 6
‘Soma-sema’, 33 f., 49, 51, World, its shape, 31
73, 78, 104
Sophia (Philosophy), her Xenophon, 144
all, 41, 44f., 49, 52,
55, 67£., 95 Zorokothora-Meljisedek, 69

152
 OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS
GENESIS Marx
iff. 94 115 10
3
iii
49
49
vi 12
xill §5~37
II
12
Exopus xiv 8 12
iii 12 37 XV 39 143
xxi 24 26 LUKE
1 SAMUEL i 69, 71 121
il 96 77 4, 109, 120
xix 24 132 vii 6 4t
OB _, 31-4 145
viii 2 IIT, 121
it J 96
x7 144
PSALMS 9, 11 11
xxx (6) 68, 86 Xvi 2 93
Ixxxv 71
. 9 79
IsArAH xix 9 120
i9 36 II I, 13, 146
XIX 3 67 JouN
JEREMIAH 11-5 94 ff.
xiv I 95 4 49
EZEKIEL
6,9 96
X13 107 14 96
Amos 34 98
_45 98
til 7 95 iv 22 120
iii 13, vi 14 36 vi 42 98
XK 30 99
MALaAcHI
ili 12 44
34-6 94, 95
xvii 3 100
SUSANNA Acts
I 96 iv 27 ff. 15
KV 22 14
MATTHEW xvii 30 f. 27
vi 34 15 xviii 25 f. Tor
Vili 25 120 xXVii 21-6 140
X7 II RoMANS
10 144 xiv 17 16
xi 16-19 145 xv 139
133
NEW TESTAMENT AND PISTIS SOPHIA
1 CORINTHIANS HEBREWS
im 20 vit, 2 142
18 16 1 JoHn
iii 8 99 ii 18 13
vii 26 15 Jupe
ix 14 144 3 121
xiii 16
xv 5of. 14, 19
2 CORINTHIANS Pistis SoPHIA
iv4 80 Pp. of Pp. of
ix 15 17 1851 ed. this book
GALATIANS 4, 15, 169 f. 66
v.24 46 42-181 67 f.
EpHEsIANS 118-20 71 £.
ii2zof.,iv13, 17-19, 20 121 6o
Vv 32 198 ff. 74
205, 218 74
COoLossIANs 206-16 75
i718, 24 17 226, 231, 235 75
i 19, ii 9 89 228, 230 77, Too
245, 354 84
1 THESSALONIANS 248 f. 78
i9, 10 10, 13, 142 255 76
iv 17 14 334 79
1 TrMorHy 357-90 81, 105
vi 20 4, 14 358, 365, 373 82
2 TIMOTHY 359 60
fii 15 4,6 368 81
Tirus 369 89
iii 5 14 387 76