mouth or by arcane writings. Gnosticism is a ‘knowledge’ religion - that is what the word means - which Claims to have an inner explanation of life. Thus it was, and indeed still is, a Spiritual parasite which used other religions as a ‘carrier’. Christianity fitted into this role very well. It had a mysterious founder, Jesus, who had conveniently disappeared, leaving behind a collection of sayings and followers to transmit them: and of course in addition to the public sayings there were 'secret' ones, handed on from generation to generation by members of the sect. Thus Gnostic groups seized on bits of Christianity, but tended to cut it off from its historical origins. They were Hellenizing it, as they Hellenized other oriental cults (often amalgamating the results). Their ethics varied to taste: sometimes they were ultra-puritan, sometimes orgiastic. Thus some groups seized on Paul's denunciation of the law to preach complete license. Paul fought hard against Gnosticism, recognizing that it might cannibalize Christianity and destroy it. At Corinth he came across well-educated Christians who had reduced Jesus to myth. Among the Colossians he found Christians who worshipped intermediate spirits and angels. Gnosticism was hard to combat because it was hydra-headed and always changing. Of course all the sects had their own codes, and most hated each other. Some conflated the cosmogony of Plato with the story of Adam and Eve, and interpreted it in various ways: thus the Ophites worshipped serpents, arguing that the serpent had triumphed over God; so they cursed Jesus in their liturgy. Some accepted Christian redemption but ruled out Jesus as the redeemer: the Samaritans preferred Simon Magus, others Hercules. The most dangerous Gnostics were those who had, intellectually, thought their way quite inside Christianity, and then produced a variation which wrecked the system. The Basilides group in Egypt, and the Valentinians in Rome, though they differed on other things, both rejected the incarnation and denied Jesus had ever been man: his body was semblance or dokesis. The Docetists had wide appeal among the Greek cultures because they effectively cut off Christianity from its Judaic origins, something which responded to a popular demand, especially among the well-to-do. Indeed, those of Greek culture found it hard to understand why Christianity should wish or need to maintain the Jewish connection. They found the Septuagint a monstrous document: barbarous and obscure or, when comprehensible, repugnant. Why should Christians lumber themselves with it? This line was all the more insidious in that it merely carried Paul's logic a little further. There must have been times when Paul, for all his Jewishness, was tempted to drop the Septuagint himself. How much of it was authentic? Valentinus argued that a great deal had simply been inserted by Jewish elders and possessed no authority; and many other portions represented compromises with contemporary opinion, Moses being a prime culprit. As forms of Christianity spread and enveloped, or indeed produced, highly-educated men, the glaring blemishes of the scriptures were closely examined. By the early decades of the second century there were masses of Christian texts, too, which had no precise status and spoke with many tongues. Which were valid and which were not? The problem attracted the attention of a brilliant and wealthy Greek convert from Pontus, Marcion, who had come to Rome in the 120s or 130s to take an active part in propagating the faith. He was from the school of Paul, indeed his greatest theological follower. He represents two important and permanent strains in Christianity: the cool, rationalist approach to the examination of the Church's documentary proofs, and a plain, unspectacular philosophy of love. He was, as it were, a preincarnation of a certain type of Renaissance scholar, an adumbration of Erasmus. Marcion had no doubt that Paul's essential teachings were sound and he knew they were closest to Jesus in date. His difficulty was how to square them either with the teachings of the Old Testament, or with post-Pauline Christian writings. Using historical and critical methods basically similar to those of modern scriptural scholars, he identified only seven Pauline epistles as authentic, rejecting all the later documents which were circulating in the apostle's name. Of the so-called evangelists he accepted only portions of Luke (in his gospel and Acts) as inspired, rejecting all the rest as later fabrications, rationalizations and muddle. This stripped the New Testament down to its bare Pauline bones: indeed, to Marcion, the teaching of Paul was, essentially, the gospel of Jesus. 26