red the interpretation which Paul gave to
Christianity. It was, as we saw, dominated by the apocalyptic notion
of a heavenly, or spiritual, man while it gave ample recognition to the
desire for salvation from sin and participation in the divine life.
Thus Christianity was brought into touch with the mystery-cults and
responded to the yearning for some guarantee of immortality so
wide-spread at this time. "But if the Spirit of him that raised up
Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus
from the dead shall quicken also your mortal {87} bodies through his
Spirit which dwelleth in you." We should compare this passage from
Romans with the corresponding discussion in Corinthians (1, 15), "And
if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, our faith
also is vain." The message which he brought to the Hellenistic world
was in its essentials a definite one. Jesus, a man who recently lived
in Palestine and did wonders, was raised by God and has become a
heavenly man, the guarantee of immortality to those who have faith in
him. The last trumpet of the day of judgment will sound and the dead
will be raised with spiritual or incorruptible bodies, and those who
are still alive will be changed and given these spiritual bodies since
flesh and blood cannot enter the coming kingdom of God. This message
is the natural interpretation of Christianity by a learned Hellenistic
Jew.

But this was merely the beginning of the evolution of Christianity.
The next phase involves its interpretation by the Gnostic movement.
Let us see first what this Gnostic movement was before we try to
determine its direct and indirect influence upon Christianity.

So far as can be made out, Gnosticism was a religious philosophy which
grew up in the eastern part of the Roman empire. Toward the making of
this theosophy went many strands of refined mythology coming from
India, Persia, Alexandria and Palestine. It was an esoteric doctrine
representing that free mingling of traditions from all sources so
characteristic of the age. Those traditions were worked up by
reflection into a fairly systematic outlook upon the world, entirely
continuous with mythology yet far more highly developed. Gnosticism
cannot be called a philosophy in the technical sense of that term since
its constructions did not {88} have a critical foundation. So far as
it used Greek philosophy, it drew from the more pictorial myths of
Plato and the