The following pages are a modest attempt to bring before the public certain documents of great importance for the understanding of the growth and development of the Christian religion. They are not new, almost all of them having been translated at one time or another into English, French, German, or Italian: but they are all practically unknown save to scholars, are all fragmentary, and with hardly an exception, are difficult to understand without a running commentary. In these circumstances, I have ventured to follow, not for the first time, the advice given by Sir Gaston Maspero to his pupils in one of his luminous lectures at the Collège de France. “If” said in effect that great master of archaeology, “you find yourselves in the presence of scattered and diverse examples of any monument you cannot understand—funerary cones, amulets of unusual form, hypocephali, or anything else—make a collection of them. Search museums, journals of Egyptology, proceedings of learned societies, until you think they have no more novelties of the kind to offer you. Then put those you have collected side by side and study them. The features they have in common will then readily appear and in a little time you will find that you will perceive not only the use of the objects in question, but also the history of their development, their connexion with each other, and their relative dates.” This has been the end aimed at in this book; and although, like most aims in this world, it has not been perfectly achieved, it may, I think, be said with confidence that these documents explain and supplement one another in a remarkable degree, and that in the majority of cases sense can now be read into what at first sight seemed to be nonsense. As more fragments of the same kind come to light, also, one has fair reason to hope that those points which are still obscure may be made clear.