Irenaeus, I. 28, c. 5, p. 237, Harvey, gives a list of the books which they assigned to each planetary power, Jaldabaoth taking the lion’s share with the Hexateuch, Amos and Habbakuk. Footnote 279: Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk V. c. 7, p. 150, Cruice. Proverbs xxiv. 16 seems the text referred to. Footnote 280: Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk V. c. 25, pp. 226, 227, Cruice. Sophia is evidently the serpent in this combination. Footnote 281: The Ebionites, or whatever other Judaeo-Christian sect is responsible for the _Clementines_, make St Peter affirm that Jesus “did not proclaim Himself to be God,” and that “that which is begotten cannot be compared with that which is unbegotten or self-begotten.” See _Clem. Hom._ XVI. cc. 15, 16. CHAPTER IX POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: VALENTINUS It seems fairly plain that the originators of the Ophite teaching were uneducated men[282]. A few quotations from Homer and Pindar, probably familiar to anyone who listened to the Rhapsodists, are indeed to be found in the anonymous author whom Hippolytus quotes under the name of “the Naassene.” But the reading of the learned of that day consisted not of poetry but of philosophy; and there is no trace in his speculations of direct acquaintance with the works of any philosopher whatever. This is the more striking because Heraclitus of Ephesus, Zeno of Cyprus, and Cleanthes of Assos might have been brought into court in support of his cosmogonical ideas; and the Stoic philosophy was especially an Asiatic one, having one of its principal homes in Tarsus, and therefore not very far from Phrygia proper. Its cosmology as taught in Rome at the period now under discussion[283], differed very little from that of the earlier Ophites, and its theory of “seminal reasons” (λόγοι σπερματικοὶ) or particles of fiery matter descending from heaven to earth and there becoming formative principles, together with its belief in metensomatosis or transmigration has many resemblances with the Ophite scheme of redemption[284]. Yet the Naassene author in an age when philosophy was most in fashion never appeals to the authority of the founders of the Stoic school or of those followers of theirs who must have been his contemporaries and countrymen; and Hippolytus, whose own acquaintance with Greek philosophy was superficial and hardly first-hand, in his summary of the Naassene doctrine draws no parallel between the two. On the other hand, the Naassene author perpetually refers to the Old Testament which he seems to have known in the Peshitto or Syrian version, although, as will have been seen, he by no means regards it from the Jewish standpoint as a divinely inspired rule of life, and pushes down Yahweh, its God, into a very inferior position in the scale of being. As the date of the Peshitto has not yet been put further back than the second century A.D.[285], this would lead one to