But when all allowance is made for mistakes like these, there remains a fund of ideas common to all or many of the religions hereafter treated of, which cannot be explained away by any theory of verbal inaccuracy[23]. As an instance of this, let us take the notion of an archetypal or heavenly man created ages before the appearance upon earth of terrestrial man, who was nevertheless made in the image and after the likeness of his predecessor. This idea, as will be shown later, is met with among the Phrygian Ophites, where “a Man and a Son of Man” were said to be the origin of all subsequent things, as in the Avestic literature of Persia where Gayômort, the son, according to one story, of the Supreme God Ahura Mazda by his daughter Spenta-armaiti, is made at once the pattern and the source of the whole human race. The borrowings of Zoroastrianism from Babylonia were not few, and we might conceive this to be the survival of some old Babylonian tradition, such as that which modern critics believe to have been the origin of the Creation and Flood stories of Genesis; and this theory is strengthened by the predominant part which this “First Man” plays in Manichaeism, itself a Babylonian faith, where the Turkestan MSS. show him as a sort of intermediary between the gods of light and this earth. But how shall we account for the fact that in one of the earliest documents of the _Pistis Sophia_, the collection of Gnostic writings hereafter described[24], a great angel named Jeû, who is spoken of many times as the “overseer of the light” and the arranger of the Cosmos, is also alluded to as the “First Man,” in a way which shows that the writer did not doubt that the allusion would be comprehended by his readers without further explanation[25]? The _Pistis Sophia_, although doubtless written in Greek in the first instance, comes to us in a Coptic dress, and the documents therein contained show more affinities with the Egyptian than with the Persian religion. How therefore can we account for the same idea appearing at almost the same time in countries between the peoples of which there was always bitter hostility, and which were separated moreover by the Arabian Desert and the whole breadth of Asia Minor?