Chapter V: Introduction

The worships, beliefs, and religious practices of the age which saw the birth and infancy of Christianity must always be the most interesting of all subjects to the student of history, nor are there many more deserving the attention of the general reader. The opponent, quite as much as the adherent of Christianity, must admit that the early struggles of the faith which is professed by nearly a third of the human race, which for fifteen centuries wielded unchallenged sway over the whole of Europe, and which has grown with the growth of European colonization until it now has a firm settlement in every quarter of the inhabited world, must ever possess surpassing interest for humanity. Yet the popular ideas on the subject are not only vague but erroneous. A general notion that, shortly before the coming of Christ, the Pagans had tired of their old gods, and, lost to all sense of decency, had given themselves up to an unbridled immorality founded on atheistic ideas, is probably about as far as the man who has given no special study to the subject would venture to go. Such a view, founded perhaps on somewhat misty recollections of the Roman satirists and a little secondhand knowledge of the denunciations of the early Christian writers, is almost the reverse of the truth. There has probably been no time in the history of mankind when all classes were more given up to thoughts of religion, or when they strained more fervently after high ethical ideals, than in the six centuries which have been taken for the subject of this book[1].

The cause of this misconception is, however, clear enough. Half a century ago, the general public was without guide or leader in such matters, nor had they any materials on which to form opinions of their own. The classical education which was all that the majority of men then got, carefully left all such matters as the origins of Christianity on one side. The treatises of the Fathers of the Church, for the most part written in late and inelegant Greek, were held to be too corrupting to the style of scholars reared on the texts of the purest period to be attempted by any but professional theologians, by whom indeed they were often very imperfectly understood. Nor was much to be gathered from the profane historians of the early Christian centuries, who maintained such an obstinate silence with regard to Christianity as to give rise to the theory that they must have conspired to ignore the new religion of the lower classes as something too barbarous for ears polite[2]. Moreover, the ruling maxim of education, especially of English education until the end of the XIXth century, was that it was better to know one thing thoroughly than to acquire a smattering of a great many, and that a scholar was better served by an intimate knowledge of second aorists than by any wide extent of reading; while the comparative method of study was still confined to sciences of analysis like anatomy and philology[3]. Above all, what has been called the catastrophic view of the Christian religion was still in fashion. Although our spiritual pastors and masters were never tired of reminding us that God’s ways were not as our ways, they invariably talked and wrote on the assumption that they were, and thought an Omnipotent Creator with eternity before Him must needs behave like a schoolboy in control of gunpowder for the first time. Hence “the remarkable victory” which, in the words of Gibbon, the Christian faith obtained over “the established religions of the earth” was in the view of the orthodox chiefly due to the miraculous powers placed at the disposal of the primitive Church, and it was considered impious to look further for the cause of the despotic rule which in a comparatively brief space of time it succeeded in establishing over the minds of men.

From this state of things, the foundation of what is known as the science of religions did much to deliver us. When non-Christian faiths, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Mohammedanism, came to be systematically studied without preconceived hostility or desire to jeer at their absurdities, it was seen that the same atmosphere of miracle and legend had gathered round their infancy as round that of the Christian Church. Outside the regular or canonical scriptures—if the phrase may be used—of all of these faiths, there had evidently grown up a vast literature of uncertain date and authorship in which the same stories were repeated and the same episodes introduced as in the Christian Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Lives of the Saints. It began to dawn upon us that, as the human mind under the same conditions generally works in the same way, it was possible that all religions, whether true or false, might have gone through the same or similar stages of development[4].

That this view of the case was in itself a great step in advance, everyone will readily admit who can remember the horror with which any proposal to equate or even compare Christianity with any other religion was once received. It was much helped, however, by another novel hypothesis which about that time had got over its period of obloquy and was rapidly coming to the front, namely, the theory of evolution. When Darwin in his _Origin of Species_ enunciated the truth that as more animals and plants than the earth can support come into existence every year, it is only those varieties which are best fitted to their environment which survive the consequent struggle for existence, he practically gave us a new standpoint from which to contemplate Nature. Herbert Spencer, quickly grasping this principle and carrying its application much further than Darwin had ventured to do, showed that it governed the development not only of animal forms but of the intellectual and moral faculties of man, of political and social institutions, and even of what he called “ecclesiastical institutions,” which included religions themselves. With the general acceptance of this view, it followed that the success in point of popularity of any creed at any period of the world’s history was not due to any sudden or capricious exercise of the Divine will, but to the normal working of a universal and irresistible law.

But, at this point, we must stop a little to define what is meant by the science of religions. Science, in this sense, has so far departed from its strict and etymological signification of knowledge, as to connote exact knowledge based upon ascertained fact, while a science is generally held to mean an organized system in which the largest possible number of related facts are gathered together with reference to one common subject of study. At first sight, it appears that nothing can be more rigidly excluded by this definition than religion, which has been defined as “the effective desire to be in right relation to the power manifesting itself in the universe[5].” This, which in some quarters would be called the religion “of the heart,” can never form the subject of study based upon exact knowledge, because the relations between any human being and the power manifesting itself in the universe can be known only, so far as we can see, to that being and to that power. But in the science under consideration, there is no question of religion generally, but of religions, which is a very different thing. By a religion, we generally mean the assembly of beliefs, traditions, and forms of worship which go to make up a faith or cult, and this, as it must, according to the experience of all history, have come into being through the agency of some man or men, should go through the same evolutionary process as all other human institutions. Hence there is at first sight a considerable probability that all religions whatever will be found on examination to follow the same law of development by the survival of those best fitted to their environment that we have seen operative in the case of animal forms.

Here, however, the Christian—or for that matter, the adherent of any faith which claims to have been founded by a special revelation—finds himself in the presence of a dilemma. His own faith, whether it be Christianity or another, is in his eyes true, as being not the work of man, but of God, and all others are false. How therefore are they to be compared? Is the Jew, who believes the Law to have been delivered to his people “among the thunders of Sinai,” the Parsi who is taught the special inspiration of Zoroaster by the “Omniscient Lord” Ahura Mazda, or the Mohammedan who thinks that Mohammed received the Koran from Allah himself, to be told that his faith has developed according to the same laws as that of the Christian, who is convinced that his has no other source than the teaching of the Divine Founder of Christianity?

To this it may be said that the dilemma is more apparent than real, and is due to a like confusion of thought with that which seized upon many when the evolutionary theory was first promulgated. No argument was then more common than that the Divine creation of the animals, including man, was authoritatively revealed once for all in the first chapter of Genesis, and that the bare formulation of the idea that man’s bodily form had developed by a long process of evolution and selection from those of the lower animals was therefore a blasphemy that could only be uttered by atheistic men of science[6]. There is no occasion to go here into the tissue of sophistries and misconceptions with which Mr Gladstone, when confronted with this argument in controversy with M. Albert Réville, one of the founders of the science of religions, and with M. Réville’s champion Prof. Huxley, tried to prove that the assertion of the doctrine of evolution was to be found in the Book of Genesis. It is sufficient to say that Darwin never affirmed that natural selection or the survival of the fittest was the cause of the variation of animal forms, but simply that it was the mode in which that variation, however caused, operated[7]. In like manner, it may be said that the science of religions by no means attempts to discuss the causes which lead to the institution of any particular religion, but deals merely with the laws underlying its development when once instituted. The Christian religion, like those of Moses, Zoroaster, and Mohammed, however Divine its origin, was, like them, propagated by men who founded the Church, handed on the traditions, and gave form to the ceremonies. Is there, therefore, any reason why the same law of development should not apply to this as well as to its rivals?

That the answer to this must be in the negative is at last beginning to be generally admitted. Prof. Tiele, writing in 1897, was obliged to confess that “the new science of religions was in many quarters regarded with suspicion[8],” but Dr Jevons, when lecturing at Hartford in 1908, was able to say that “the time has happily gone by when the mere idea of comparing Christianity with any other religion would have been rejected with horror as treasonous and treacherous[9].” Yet it may be doubted whether the clouds have rolled completely away, and it is fairly certain that the many learned and able Catholic priests who have done so much to elucidate the origins and tendencies of ancient religions other than their own have until lately avoided the discussion of their relations with the earliest forms of Christianity. This is the more to be regretted, because they are in many cases peculiarly fitted for the investigation, and their acquaintance with the extra-Canonical Christian writers before Constantine, hitherto much neglected by Protestant theologians, would make their conclusions upon it especially valuable. Yet it is along these lines that future inquiry will probably advance; and if, as most of us believe, the Christian religion has outdistanced and survived all its early competitors because it was better fitted than they to its environment, it is of great importance even from the point of view of the most rigid orthodoxy, that we should have a clear conception of what that environment was. Fortunately the gaps in our knowledge have been in great measure filled by the work of Continental scholars outside the pale of the Catholic Church, who have been indefatigable of late years in discovering documents, editing texts, and publishing monuments which throw great light on the history of the religions which at the outset competed with Christianity for the favour of the Graeco-Roman world. A summary of these labours is one of the objects aimed at in the following pages.

If, now, we attempt to examine what these competitors were, we find at the outset that a good number of those which we once thought formidable may be eliminated from the list. Judaism, for instance, although the matrix in which Christianity was formed, was never at any time in effective rivalry with it. The words of the Gospel as to the Pharisees compassing sea and land to make one proselyte have misled the unwary into supposing that the number of Jewish proselytes was at one time or another large[10]; but it must be remembered that it was the Sadducees and not the Pharisees who were the dominant party in the Jewish State, and that these last formed but a very small part of the total population of Judaea[11]. The Sadducees from their Hellenizing tendencies were much more likely to go over to the faith of the Gentiles than to make any great effort for their conversion, and both they and the Essenes, who formed in Josephus’ day the third party among the Jews, were too much set on procuring, by different means, the temporal supremacy of Israel, to care much about admitting any proselyte to share in it[12]. Although a few undistinguished persons of Gentile blood may have become converts to Judaism between the birth of Christ and the fall of the Temple, their number can never have been at any time important; and after 69 A.D., the furious hostility that arose between Jew and Gentile made any further conversions to the Jewish faith practically impossible. Never, so far as we know, did Judaism aim at becoming, and certainly never had the slightest chance of appearing as, a world-religion.

Not less hopeless, in this respect, was the case of the Graeco-Roman pantheon. The late Mr Long’s picture of “Diana or Christ,” representing a young woman called upon by a sympathetic Roman magistrate to choose between sacrificing to the statue of the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus and condemnation to death as a Christian, attained great popularity in its day, and shows with fair clearness the view of the relations between Paganism and early Christianity supposed at the end of the last century to have been current in the first. Yet hardly anything could give a falser idea of the religious history of the period. The officials of the Roman Empire in time of persecution sought to force the Christians to sacrifice, not to any of the heathen gods, but to the Genius of the Emperor and the Fortune of the City of Rome; and at all times the Christians’ refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as a political offence[13]. For the rest, the worship of the Olympian gods had, when Christianity came to the surface, almost entirely died out, and both Greek and Latin writers bear witness to the contempt with which it was regarded by both races at the beginning of our era. Cicero, while admitting that the world is governed by the providence of the gods, rejects all the myths attached to them as impious, and declares that the “Deity who is diffused in every part of Nature” appears as the earth under the name of Ceres, as the sea under that of Neptune, and so on[14]. Plutarch, too, is plainly a monotheist, who worships “the one eternal, passionless Spirit far removed from the world of chance and change and earthly soilure” of Greek philosophy[15]; and, while lamenting the decay of faith which has led to the cessation of oracles, thinks that all the manifestations of the Divine providence are the work of no great deity, but of a crowd of inferior powers or demons who are hardly in a greater superiority of position to man than the fairies of our childhood[16]. Whatever rivalry the Christian Church had to face in its infancy, it had none to fear from the deities of Olympus.

It has been said, however, and to a certain extent accepted, that the first efforts of Christianity were sorely hindered by the followers of the great Greek philosophers. In this there is a certain amount of truth, for the Neo-Platonic school did indeed enter into an alliance with the few remaining worshippers of the Pagan gods which forced them into an attitude of opposition to Christianity. But this was at a date some time after the compact with Constantine, and consequently later than that within the scope of this book. Nor is it likely that at an earlier date philosophy and Christianity appealed to the same class of minds, and that they thus entered into serious competition with each other. As the late Dr Hatch has said, “the earliest forms of Christianity were not only outside the sphere of Greek philosophy, but they also appealed on the one hand, mainly to the classes which philosophy did not reach, and on the other hand, to a standard which philosophy did not recognize[17].” Faith, not reason, was the quality that the Apostles and their immediate successors sought in their hearers, and Celsus was probably not far wrong when he said that the rule of admission into the infant Church was “Let no educated man enter, no wise man, no prudent man, for such things we deem evil; but whoever is ignorant, whoever is unintelligent, whoever is simple, let him come and be welcome[18].” To this state of mind the password of the early Christian communities, _Maran atha_, is a sufficient key. The confident expectation of the nearness of the Parusia or Second Advent for the primitive Christian overwhelmed all other considerations. “The Lord is at hand and His reward” was the one fact that he wished to keep before him. What need to trouble about the Highest Good or the hundred other questions that vexed the souls of the philosophers?

The religions competing with Christianity which are left after this elimination may be classed in three categories. First come the Oriental religions native to countries lying to the south and east of the Mediterranean and therefore mainly outside the sphere of Hellenic culture until after the conquests of Alexander. These religions, born or nurtured in Asia Minor, Persia, and Egypt, so soon as Alexander had carried out his project of the marriage of Europe and Asia, poured westward in a flood which a Roman satirist compared to the Orontes emptying itself into the Tiber, and gained, according to a well-known law in the history of religions, a far greater influence over the minds of men than they had exercised in their native home. The second category comprises the many strange sects which the first Fathers of the Church grouped together under the generic name of Gnostics. The faith which these professed was not, as it is sought to show later, one founded on religion at all but rather on magic, and had long been present in germ as a sort of heresy or alternative belief underlying the worship of the gods of Olympus. Finally, there arose the ambitious religion of Manes, which aimed at sweeping into one vast synthesis or eclectic church the three religions of Zoroaster, Buddha, and Christ, which at the time of its institution divided between them the allegiance of the civilized world.

Each of these categories shall be dealt with in turn; but before doing so, it may be well to say something upon the state of our knowledge concerning them. Until lately, it was a commonplace of religious history that the Catholic Church had destroyed as far as possible all traces of the religions that she had supplanted, which was picturesquely expressed in the phrase that in her victory she had burned the enemy’s camp. That this was her conscious policy may be gathered from the advice given by a Pope of the VIIth century, to “break the idols and consecrate the temples” of the heathen[19]; but of late many relics of the ancient faiths which had before escaped us have been disinterred by the care of scholars. During the last century, the lost heresiology of Hippolytus and considerable fragments of works by Gnostic authors were brought to light in circumstances to be described in their place[20], while the present decade has not only added to our stock of Gnostic fragments, but has revealed to us on the western frontier of China a hoard of Manichaean documents rich beyond our hopes[21]. These are not only valuable by reason of the information they afford, but give us ground for the belief that, as the interest in such matters becomes more widely spread, many more documents throwing light upon the subject will appear.

One word may be said in conclusion as to the relations of these rival religions between themselves. Whoever studies the documents here described cannot fail to be struck by the fact that certain ideas, phrases, and even words, seem common to them all. At the time that these documents were written this similarity excited no remark from the orthodox, as it was at once disposed of by the theory that these religions were one and all the invention of the Devil, and therefore naturally bore traces of their common origin. This explanation, however convenient, does not satisfy the demands of modern criticism, and it is therefore necessary to look further. One way of accounting for the phenomenon is to suppose that many if not all of the analogies noticed are due to the mistakes of scribes and translators, who, when dealing with expressions unfamiliar to them, were naturally inclined to repeat the same phrases over and over again. This, as all know who have had to do with ancient manuscripts, is accountable for much, and it is extremely likely that a monk of the Vth or VIth century transcribing an account of the opinions of, for instance, the Ophites who flourished in Phrygia before the birth of Christ at the same time with those of the Manichaeans found in Rome three centuries later, would not hesitate to express views essentially different by the same phrases and even the same words. Add to this the jumble that persons untrained in philology naturally make between names in a foreign language and those of similar sound in their own tongue, coupled with the fixed idea of finding in the traditions of the heathen a confirmation of the historical truth of the Hebrew Scriptures, and you have some explanation of the cause which makes many proper names recur unexpectedly in otherwise unrelated documents. Thus the Armenian bishop, Moses of Chorene, in narrating the story which he says he obtained from Berossus, the Chaldaean historian who wrote at the beginning of our era, says that “Before the building of the Tower of Babel and the multiplication of tongues among the human race, after the navigation of Xisuthros [_i.e._ Hasis-adra, the Babylonian Noah] in Armenia, Zervan, Titan, and Japhet were princes of the land. These persons,” he adds, “seem to be Shem, Ham, and Japhet[22].” Zervan is the name given by a late sect of Zoroastrians to the “Boundless Time” whom they placed at the origin of all things, while Titan belongs to the Hellenic mythology, and Japhet may either be Saturn’s brother Iapetus, or the patriarch of the Book of Genesis. It is to be conjectured that Berossus did not use these three names in the apposition quoted or probably at all, and we can only guess vainly at the real names which are concealed under those which Moses of Chorene here gives.

But when all allowance is made for mistakes like these, there remains a fund of ideas common to all or many of the religions hereafter treated of, which cannot be explained away by any theory of verbal inaccuracy[23]. As an instance of this, let us take the notion of an archetypal or heavenly man created ages before the appearance upon earth of terrestrial man, who was nevertheless made in the image and after the likeness of his predecessor. This idea, as will be shown later, is met with among the Phrygian Ophites, where “a Man and a Son of Man” were said to be the origin of all subsequent things, as in the Avestic literature of Persia where Gayômort, the son, according to one story, of the Supreme God Ahura Mazda by his daughter Spenta-armaiti, is made at once the pattern and the source of the whole human race. The borrowings of Zoroastrianism from Babylonia were not few, and we might conceive this to be the survival of some old Babylonian tradition, such as that which modern critics believe to have been the origin of the Creation and Flood stories of Genesis; and this theory is strengthened by the predominant part which this “First Man” plays in Manichaeism, itself a Babylonian faith, where the Turkestan MSS. show him as a sort of intermediary between the gods of light and this earth. But how shall we account for the fact that in one of the earliest documents of the _Pistis Sophia_, the collection of Gnostic writings hereafter described[24], a great angel named Jeû, who is spoken of many times as the “overseer of the light” and the arranger of the Cosmos, is also alluded to as the “First Man,” in a way which shows that the writer did not doubt that the allusion would be comprehended by his readers without further explanation[25]? The _Pistis Sophia_, although doubtless written in Greek in the first instance, comes to us in a Coptic dress, and the documents therein contained show more affinities with the Egyptian than with the Persian religion. How therefore can we account for the same idea appearing at almost the same time in countries between the peoples of which there was always bitter hostility, and which were separated moreover by the Arabian Desert and the whole breadth of Asia Minor?

It seems to the present writer that no solution of this and of the numerous other difficulties of which this is but one example can be profitably suggested, until we know more than we do at present about the origin and dates of Zoroastrianism. Although this religion is still with us in the beliefs of the modern Parsis, there is none about the origin of which we know less, or concerning the antiquity of which there is greater discrepancy between ancient and modern writers. Thus, while Plutarch, quoting as is generally supposed Theopompos of Chios who flourished in the IVth century B.C., declares that Zoroaster himself wrote 5000 years before the Trojan War[26], modern writers of authority, like Prof. Williams-Jackson and Mdlle Menant, are inclined to bring down the date of the eponymous prophet or reformer of the Persian religion to 700 B.C.[27] The discrepancy is too great to be bridged over by any compromise, and the question has been further complicated by the discovery a few years ago of inscriptions which show that Mithras, the Persian god whose worship formed the most dangerous rival to that of the Christian Church immediately before its alliance with Constantine, was one of the most exalted deities of the presumably Aryan Hittites or Mitannians at a date not later than 1272 B.C.[28] Signs are not wanting that discovery in the near future may take this line of advance, and if it should turn out that the religion which Zoroaster reformed was established in Northern Mesopotamia before the Homeric age, we may have to reconstruct all our ideas of the origin of the Greek religion. There seems no use therefore in dilating upon hypotheses which the course of research may in a very few years prove to be entirely erroneous[29].

In the meantime, the thing of immediate importance seems to be to get the documentary evidence already at our disposal as far as possible before the public, and this is attempted in the pages which follow. The different religions are there arranged in the chronological order of their greatest activity in the West with the belief that this course will prove most convenient to the reader.

Footnote 1:

For the pre-Christian centuries, the rise of ethical religions like
that of the Greek Isis (see Chap. II _infra_) and of Mithras (see
Chap. XII) is perhaps sufficient proof of this. For the
post-Christian, see Tertullian’s remarks as to the interest excited
among the heathens by problems like the origin of evil (_de
Praescript._ c. VII.). As to their striving after morality, see Eugène
de Faye, “Formation d’une Doctrine de Dieu au IIme Siècle,” _Rev.
Hist. Rel._ t. LXIII. (Jan.-Fev. 1911) pp. 1, 2, for authorities. See,
too, Hatch, _Hibbert Lectures_, 1890, pp. 291, 292 and Harnack as
there quoted.

Footnote 2:

W. M. Ramsay, _The Church in the Roman Empire_, 1893, pp. 263, 264.

Footnote 3:

Tiele, in his Gifford Lectures delivered in 1895, remarks on the
ridicule with which the learned Hellenists of his youth received the
efforts of those whom they called the _comparativi_. See _Elements of
the Science of Religion_, 1897, vol. I. p. 7.

Footnote 4:

No better proof can be given of the change in public opinion in such
matters than the comparison of Gibbon’s words with regard to “the
miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive Church” (_Decline and
Fall_, Bury’s edition, vol. II. p. 2) and the way the subject is
treated in the article “Wonders” in Cheyne’s _Encyclopedia Biblica_,
1903.

Footnote 5:

The definition is that of Ira W. Howerth, _International Journal of
Ethics_, 1903, p. 205.

Footnote 6:

See Tiele, _op. cit._ vol. I. pp. 5 _sqq._ The controversies raging
round Darwin’s theory when first put forward are well summarized by F.
W. Hutton in his _Darwinism and Lamarckism_, 1899, _passim_. Cf.
Delage and Goldsmith, _Les Thèoriesé de l’Évolution_, Paris, 1909, pp.
28, 29.

Footnote 7:

See Hutton, _op. cit._ p. 111.

Footnote 8:

Tiele, _op. cit._ vol. I. p. 11.

Footnote 9:

F. B. Jevons, _Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion_,
1908, p. 18.

Footnote 10:

Like the late Dean Stanley, who in his Lectures on the _History of the
Jewish Church_, talked about the synagogue of the Jewish settlement in
Rome under the first Emperors “fascinating the proud Roman nobles by
the glimpse it gave of a better world” (vol. III. p. 410).

Footnote 11:

According to Josephus (_Antiq._ XVIII. i. 3, 4) they did not amount to
more than 6000 men distributed throughout the whole of Palestine.
Morrison thinks that “the Pharisaic party had no attraction for the
great bulk of the population,” _The Jews under Roman Rule_ 1890, p.
307.

Footnote 12:

See Chap. V _infra_.

Footnote 13:

See Neander, _General Hist. of the Christian Religion and Church_,
Eng. ed. 1853, vol. I. p. 126.

Footnote 14:

_De Natura Deorum_, c. XXVIII. The statement is put into the mouth of
Balbus whose arguments Cicero declares to have in his opinion “the
greater probability.” See also Athenagoras, _Legatio_, c. XXII. and
Minucius Felix, c. XIX. With such interpretations or mythoplasms,
Philo of Alexandria was familiar. Cf. F. C. Conybeare, _Apology of
Apollonius_, 1894, p. 9.

Footnote 15:

Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, 1904, p. 419.

Footnote 16:

_De Iside et Osiride_, c. XXV.

Footnote 17:

Hatch, _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 124.

Footnote 18:

Origen, _contra Celsus_, t. III. c. 44. Cf. Hatch, where last quoted.

Footnote 19:

Cf. Dill, _Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire_,
1899, p. 38, n. 4. See also the edict of Constantine quoted in the
concluding chapter, _infra_. The steps which led up to the policy are
well summarized by Walter Johnson, _Byways of British Archaeology_,
1912, p. 25.

Footnote 20:

See Chap. VII _infra_.

Footnote 21:

See Chap. XIII _infra_.

Footnote 22:

Langlois, _Collection des Historiens de l’Arménie_, Paris, 1868, t. I.
p. 388.

Footnote 23:

The late Dr Salmon’s theory that writers like Hippolytus may have been
taken in by a forger who made one document do duty for many different
sects is given in Chap. VII _infra_, but the arguments in its favour
are not conclusive.

Footnote 24:

See Chap. X _infra_.

Footnote 25:

Sir Gaston Maspero, “Sur l’Ennéade,” _R.H.R._ Jan.-Fev. 1892, p. 8,
says that the Egyptians regarded Osiris as the First Man, and Jéquier
repeats the statement in his _Livre de ce qu’il y a dans l’Hadès_,
Paris, 1894, pp. 9-10. Yet there seems no evidence that the Egyptians
ever knew him under that name.

Footnote 26:

_De Is. et Os._ c. XLVI.

Footnote 27:

See (Mdlle) D. Menant, “Parsis et Parsisme,” _Conférences au Musée
Guimet_, 1904, and Prof. Williams-Jackson as there quoted. The same
date is accepted with some hesitation by Prof. Hope Moulton in his
_Early Zoroastrianism_ (Hibbert Lectures), 1913, pp. 17 _sqq._

Footnote 28:

See H. G. Jacobi, “The Antiquity of Vedic Culture,” _Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society_, 1909, pp. 720 _sqq._, where the texts relied
upon are given and discussed. The correspondence which followed upon
this paper (see _J.R.A.S._ 1909, 1910) is full of interest. Fossey,
“Les Fouilles Allemandes à Boghaz-Keui,” _Journal des Savans_, July,
1909, p. 316, would make the date of the inscription about 1900 B.C.

Footnote 29:

After this was in print, there came to hand Mr Stephen Langdon’s
translation of the Sumerian tablet from Nippur found by him at
Philadelphia, which narrates in a new and modified form the earliest
Babylonian legend of the Creation. From this it appears that the
goddess Nin-harsag, either on her own account or as the agent of the
god En-ki or Ea, “created two creatures with heads, feet, and face as
a model for mankind.” See Mr Langdon’s Preliminary Note in the
_Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, 1914, p. 196, n.
23. A full transliteration and translation is promised later in the
_P.S.B.A._ If Mr Langdon’s reading of the tablet is accepted, this may
well prove to be the origin of all the “First Man” legends mentioned
on p. lxi, _supra_.