suppose that it had only recently come to the notice of the Naassene writer, who probably welcomed it as a valuable source from which to draw materials for spells and exorcisms. This excessive reverence for the letter as apart from the spirit of a document is characteristic of the magician of the early Christian centuries, and is further exemplified in a magic papyrus of the IIIrd century A.D., now in the British Museum, where “a number of single lines taken without any regard to sense or on any discernible principle from the Iliad and Odyssey” are arranged in a certain order for use as a fortune-telling book, and appear in company with magical recipes for obtaining dreams, compounding love philtres, and all the usual paraphernalia of a wizard of the period[286]. Such a use of writings venerable for their antiquity would never enter into the head of anyone endowed with any literary sense, but seems natural enough to persons of limited reading, to whom they form their sole material for study. In reading into the lives of the Jewish patriarchs hidden allusions to the theories of the origin of the universe and the destiny of man then current over the whole Hellenistic world, the Naassenes did not behave differently from our own Puritans of Cromwell’s time, who discovered in texts like “Take the prophets of Baal, Let not one of them escape[287]!” a justification for “knocking on the head out of hand,” the clergy of the opposing party[288]. We may, if we please, picture to ourselves the earlier Ophites as a handful of merchants, artizans, freedmen, and slaves inclined by inherited custom to magical practices and to ecstatic or hysterical forms of religion, and, as it were, intoxicated by the new field of speculation which the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into their own tongue had opened to them. At the same time, their anti-Semitic feeling, dating perhaps from the time of the Maccabaean resistance which had materially contributed to the downfall of the Syrian Empire, and considerably exacerbated by the atrocities committed by the Jewish rebels at the close of the Ist century A.D., must have forced them into an attitude in every way opposed to Jewish national pretensions; while it is easy to understand that such persons must have caught eagerly at any _via media_ which enabled them to reconcile the Jewish traditions, long familiar to them through spells and charms, with the legends of the Greek Mysteries, and at the same time protected them against the social and moral obloquy attaching to open adherence to the Jewish rites. Such considerations, perhaps, explain alike the immediate success of St Paul’s preaching in Asia Minor, and the outburst of activity among the Gnostics which followed close upon it[289].