is
identification with Satan, seem to have been exhausted in these schools.
Accordingly, in the former case, the Old Testament was regarded as the
revelation of a subordinate God, in the latter as the manifestation of
Satan, and therefore the ethic--with occasional use of Pauline
formula--always assumed an antinomian form, compared with the Jewish
law, in some cases antinomian even in the sense of libertinism.
Correspondingly, the anthropology exhibits man as bipartite, or even
tripartite, and the Christology is strictly docetic and anti-Jewish. The
redemption by Christ is always, as a matter of course, related only to
that element in humanity which has an affinity with the Godhead.[338]

It is uncertain whether we should think of the spread of these doctrines
in Syria in the form of a school, or of a cultus; probably it was both.
From the great Gnostic systems as formed by Basilides and Valentinus
they are distinguished by the fact, that they lack the peculiar
philosophic, that is Hellenic element, the speculative conversion of
angels and AEons into real ideas, etc. We have almost no knowledge of
their effect. This Gnosticism has never directly been a historical
factor of striking importance, and the great question is whether it was
so indirectly.[339] That is to say, we do not know whether this Syrian
Gnosticism was, in the strict sense, the preparatory stage of the great
Gnostic schools, so that these schools should be regarded as an actual
reconstruction of it. But there can be no doubt that the appearance of
the great Gnostic schools in the Empire, from Egypt to Gaul, is
contemporaneous with the vigorous projection of Syrian cults westwards,
and therefore the assumption is suggested, that the Syrian Christian
syncretism was also spread in connection with that projection, and
underwent a change corresponding to the new conditions. We know
definitely that the Syrian Gnostic, Cerdo, came to Rome, wrought there,
and exercised an influence on Marcion. But no less probable is the
assumption that the great Hellenic Gnostic schools arose spontaneously,
in the sense of having been independently developed out of the elements
to which undoubtedly the Asiatic cults also belonged, without being
influenced in any way by Syrian syncretistic efforts. The conditions for
the growth of such formations were nearly the same in all parts of the
Empire. The great advance lies in the fact that the religious material
as contained in the Go