Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. II (the Corpus Hermeticum) — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

The sentence (in § 2), " All things being undefined and yet unwrought (aKaraarKevaa-rwv)" is also to be noticed, and, together with the opening sentence of the cosmogony, compared with the LXX. version of Gen. i. 2 :

Are we, then, to suppose that our Trismegistic writer based himself directly upon this famous "oracle" of Jewish Scripture ?

The Jewish Gnostics would doubtless do so in their commentaries ; but the phenomena of the Christianized Jewish Gnostic systems persuade us rather that these Gnostic Jews did not derive their ideas directly from the text of their national Scripture, but from what we may call parallel traditions of an esoteric nature. We shall see later on, when treating of Zosimus, that there were translations of the Chaldsean sacred books in the Alexandrian Library, and we cannot but believe that the general ideas of Chaldaean cosmogony were familiar to all the learned of the time. For Chaldsea and Egypt were regarded as the two most wisdom-loving nations of antiquity, the two most sacred lands. What wonder, then, that Chaldaean and Egyptian ideas should be blended together, and turned out into a "scientific" whole, by the spirit of Greek " philosophizing," in our treatises ?

I would therefore conclude that both here, and in 2the repetition of the formula, "increase in increasing and multiply in multitude" (§ 3), from the " Poemandres " treatise (§ 18), the similarities are not due to direct plagiarism, but to the fact that such logoi were " in the air." I would also suggest that the somewhat peculiar term a/caracr/ceJacrTo? was not original with the Greek Targum of Genesis, first made at Alexandria some 250 years B.C., but that it was rather taken from the theological and philosophical language of the day and used by the Hebrew translators ; that, in brief, in the LXX. translation already we have to take into account the strong influence of the technology of Hellenistic theology.

With regard to the whole of our treatise, I would suggest that we have the heads of topics which were to be subsequently explained and commented upon, rather than a didactic treatise setting forth a clear teaching. Like the proem, the cosmogenesis itself is straitly condensed, so condensed that the indications are too vague for us to form any clear mental picture of the process that is suggested. We have nothing but a series of headings that may have meant something very definite to the writer — may, in fact, have summed up for him a whole body of doctrine — but which for us, in our ignorance of detail, can have but little precise meaning.