Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

As to "The Sermon on the Mountain," "it can be placed, in order of ideas and date, between 'The Shepherd ' and the first Gnostic schools ; it should be a little earlier than the founders of Gnosticism, Basilides, and Valentinus " (p. Ixv.).

If Gnosticism be taken with Me"nard to mean the Christianised theosophy of Basilides and Valentinus from the first quarter of the second century onwards, the oldest Trismegistic treatises are demonstrably earlier, for their Gnosticism is plainly a far simpler form ; in fact, so much more simple that, if we could proceed on so crude an hypothesis as that of a straight-lined evolution, we should be forced to find room for intermediate forms of Gnosticism between them and the Basilidian and the Valentinian Gnosis. And of this Me"nard seems to be partly conscious when writing: " We can follow in the Hermetic books the destiny of this Judseo-Egyptian Gnosis, which, during the first century, existed side by side with Christianity without allowing itself to be absorbed by it, passing insensibly from the Jewish school of Philo to the Greek school of Plotinus" (p. Ixvii.).

Me'nard here used the term Christianity for that tendency which afterwards was called Catholic or General Christianity, the body to which these very same Gnostics gave the principal dogmas of its subsequent theology.

But if the Gnostics were Therapeuts, and the Trismegistic writers Therapeuts, why should Me'uard call them Jews, as he appears to do in his interesting question, "Where are the Jewish Therapeuts at the end of the second century ? " Certainly Philo laboured to give his readers the impression that the Therapeuts were principally Jews, perhaps to win respect for his compatriots in his apology for his nation ; but the Therapeuts were, evidently, on his own showing, drawn from all the nations and scattered abroad in very numerous communities, though many Jews were doubtless in their ranks — indeed, Philo probably knew little about their communities other than the Mareotic. If, then, the term "Therapeut" will explain some of the phenomena presented by these writings, the combination "Jewish Therapeuts" will certainly not do so. The very answer of Me'nard himself to his question shows that even these Mareotic Therapeuts could not have been orthodox Jews, for the French scholar proceeds to surmise not only that, " some, converted to Christianity, became monks or Gnostics of the Basilidian or Valentinian school," but that " others more and more assimilated themselves to Paganism."

And by "Paganism" our author says he does not mean "polytheism," for "at this period all admitted into the divine order of things a well-defined hierarchy with a supreme God at the head ; only for some this supreme Deity was in the world, for others outside it " (p. Ixxiv.).

Menard's introduction meets with the general approval of Reitzenstein (p. 1), who characterises it as feinsinnige, and agrees that he has rightly appreciated many of the factors, especially from the theological side; he, however (p. 116, n. 2), dissents, and rightly dissents, from Me'nard as to any direct Jewish influence on the Trismegistic literature, and refuses to admit that the " Poamandres " can in any way be characterised as a Jewish-Gnostic writing.

But the sensible views of Me'nard were impotent to check the crystallisation of the German theory, which was practically repeated by Zeller,1 and once more by

1 Qesch. d. griech. Philos., III., ii., 225 S. Zeller, while recognising the Gnostic nature of C. H. i. and C. H. xiii. (xiv.), treats the rest of our Corpus as an expression of declining Paganism. So also Erdmann (Hist. Philos., i. 113, 2, Tr.), who deals with our Corpus only, and assigns its sermons to different authors and times.