so that the
founders were men who lived long before Philo's time; that they were
thoroughly organised, proving thereby that their sect was not a new one
in his day; that the "discipline," organised association, ranks of
priests, etc., implied a long existence of the sect before Philo studied
it, and that such existence was clearly not consistent with any
persecution being then directed against it. Philo writes of flourishing
and orderly communities, founded by men who had long since passed away,
and had bequeathed their writings to their followers for their
instruction and guidance. And what was the date of Philo? He himself
gives us a clear note of time; in A.D. 40 he was sent on an embassy to
the Emperor Caligula at Rome, to complain of a persecution to which the
Jews were being subjected by Flaccus; he describes himself as being, in
A.D. 40, "a grey-headed old man." The Rev. J.W. Lake puts him at
sixty-five or seventy years of age at that period, and consequently
would place his birth twenty-five or thirty years before the birth of
Jesus ("Plato, Philo, and Paul," by Rev. J.W. Lake, pp. 33, 34).
Gibbon, in a note to chap. 15, vol. ii. (p. 180), says that "by proving
it (the treatise on the Therapeuts) was composed as early as the time of
Augustus, Basnage has demonstrated, in spite of Eusebius, and a crowd of
modern Catholics, that the Therapeuts were neither Christians nor
monks." Or rather, he has proved that Christians existed before the time
of Christ, since Augustus died A.D. 14, and before that date Philo found
a long-established sect holding Christian doctrines and practising
"apostolic" customs. A man, who in A.D. 40 was grey-headed, spoke of the
Christian Gospels as writings of ancient men, founders of a
well-organised sect. Now we see why Christianity has so much in common
with the Egyptian mythology. Because it grew out of Egypt; its Gospels
came from thence; its ceremonies were learned there; its virgin is Isis;
its Christ Osiris and Horus; the mask of the revelation of God drops
from off it, and we see the true face, the ancient Egyptian religion,
with a feature here and there moulded by the cognate ideas of other
Eastern creeds, all of which flowed into Alexandria, and mingled in its
seething cauldron of thought.

There is also a Jewish sect which we must not overlook, in dealing with
the sources of Christianity, that, namely, known as the Essenes. Gibbon
regards the Therapeuts and the Essenes as inter