such did not wait for
Christianity to force its way into the religion of Gnosis, but was
already present there under various forms.'[162:1] He occurs notably in
two pre-Christian documents, discovered by the keen analysis and
profound learning of Dr. Reitzenstein: the Poimandres revelation printed
in the _Corpus Hermeticum_, and the sermon of the Naassenes in
Hippolytus, _Refutatio Omnium Haeresium_, which is combined with
Attis-worship.[162:2] The violent anti-Jewish bias of most of the
sects--they speak of 'the accursed God of the Jews' and identify him
with Saturn and the Devil--points on the whole to pre-Christian
conditions: and a completely non-Christian standpoint is still visible
in the Mandaean and Manichean systems.

Their Redeemer is descended by a fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos
Soter' of early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis
and Adonis from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish
conception of the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names,
which the name of Jesus or 'Christos', 'the Anointed', tends gradually
to supersede. Above all he is, in some sense, Man, or 'the Second Man'
or 'the Son of Man'. The origin of this phrase needs a word of
explanation. Since the ultimate unseen God, spirit though He is, made
man in His image, since holy men (and divine kings) are images of God,
it follows that He is Himself Man. He is the real, the ultimate, the
perfect and eternal Man, of whom all bodily men are feeble copies. He is
also the Father; the Saviour is his Son, 'the Image of the Father', 'the
Second Man', 'the Son of Man'. The method in which he performs his
mystery of Redemption varies. It is haunted by the memory of the old
Suffering and Dying God, of whom we spoke in the first of these studies.
It is vividly affected by the ideal 'Righteous Man' of Plato, who 'shall
be scourged, tortured, bound, his eyes burnt out, and at last, after
suffering every evil, shall be impaled or crucified'.[163:1] But in the
main he descends, of his free will or by the eternal purpose of the
Father, from Heaven through the spheres of all the Archontes or
Kosmokratores, the planets, to save mankind, or sometimes to save the
fallen Virgin, the Soul, Wisdom, or 'the Pearl'.[164:1] The Archontes
let him pass because he is disguised; they do not know him (cf. 1 Cor.
ii. 7 ff.). When his work is done he ascends to Heaven to sit by the
side of the Father in glory; he conquers the A