Note (return) — Chapter IV

The traditional question as to the origin and development of Gnosticism, as well as that about the classification of the Gnostic systems, will have to be modified in accordance with the foregoing discussion. As the different Gnostic systems might be contemporary, and in part were undoubtedly contemporary, and as a graduated relation holds good only between some few groups, we must, in the classification, limit ourselves essentially to the features which have been specified in the foregoing paragraph, and which coincide with the position of the different groups to the early Christian tradition in its connection with the Old Testament religion, both as a rule of practical life, and of the common cultus.327