Note 1 — Chapter I · DEVELOPMENTS IN THE UNESTABLISHED CHURCH

If the early Gnostic systems be compared with that of Paul, they will be found to have rather more in common with it than with the Judaic Jesuism from which he ostensibly broke away. It is thus not unlikely that their Christism, like his, is older than that of the gospels, which is primarily of Jewish manufacture. The “Simonians” of Samaria have every appearance of being non-Jewish Christists “before Christ”; and the later Gnostics have several Samaritan affinities. Like “Paul,” they have no Jesuine biography; but whereas he ostensibly holds by an actual man Jesus, however nondescript, they usually declare outright for a mere divine phantom,1 bearing a human semblance, but uncontaminated by mixture with matter, which was the Gnostic symbol for all evil. They did but attach the name of the Christos, and the hope of salvation, to a general theosophy, as Paul attached it to Judaism; and their great preoccupation was to account formally for the existence of evil, which they commonly figured as either an evil power or an essential quality of matter, forever opposed to the principle of good. Hence the allusion to the “oppositions of science falsely so-called”—that is, “the antithesis of the Gnosis”—in the Pauline epistle. But they varied somewhat in details according to their environment, being roughly divisible into two groups—Asiatic and Egyptian.