Note 35 — Chapter VII · ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS

Already in the spurious Epistles to Timothy we have allusion to the “antitheses of the gnosis”35 or pretended occult knowledge; and to early Gnostic influences may be attributed those passages in the gospel, above cited, which affirm that the Messiah’s teaching is not for the multitude but for the adepts.36 All along, Gnosticism37 stood for the influence of older systems on the new faith; an influence which among Gentiles, untrained to the cult of sacred books, must have seemed absolutely natural. In the third century Ammonios Saccas, of Alexandria, said to have been born of Christian parents, set up a school which sought to blend the Christian and the pagan systems of religion and philosophy into a pantheistic whole, in which the old Gods figured as subordinate dæmons or as allegorical figures, and Christ as a reformer.38 The special leaning of the school to Plato, whose system, already in vogue among the scholars of Alexandria, had more affinity than any of its rivals39 to Christianity, secured for it adherents of many religious shades,40 and enabled it to develop an influence which permanently affected Christian theology; this being the channel through which the doctrine of the Trinity entered. According to Mosheim, almost no other philosophy was taught at Alexandria down to the sixth century.41 Only when the regulative zeal of the Church had begun to draw the lines of creed definitely42 on anti-philosophic lines did the syncretic school, as represented by Plotinus, Porphyry, and Hierocles,43 declare itself against Christianity.