Ilda-Baoth, discovering that Christos was bringing to an end his own kingdom of matter, stirred up the Jews against him, and Jesus was put to death.[318] When on the Cross, Christos and Sophia left his body and returned to their own sphere. The material body of the man Jesus was abandoned to the earth, but he himself was given a body made up of _æther_ (astral soul). “Thenceforward he consisted of merely _soul_ and _spirit_,” which was the reason why the disciples did not recognize him after the resurrection. In this spiritual state of a _simulacrum_, Jesus remained on earth for eighteen months after he had risen. During this last sojourn, “he received from Sophia that perfect knowledge, that true Gnosis, _which he communicated to the very few among the apostles_ who were capable of receiving the same.” “Thence, ascending up into the middle space, he sits on the right hand of Ilda-Baoth, but unperceived by him, and there collects all the souls which shall have been purified by the knowledge of Christ. When he has collected all the spiritual light that exists in matter, out of Ilda-Baoth’s empire, the redemption will be accomplished and the world will be destroyed. Such is the meaning of the re-absorption of all the spiritual light into the pleroma or fulness, whence it originally descended.” The foregoing is from the description given by Theodoret and adopted by King in his _Gnostics_, with additions from Epiphanius and Irenæus. But the former gives a very imperfect version, concocted partly from the descriptions of Irenæus, and partly from his own knowledge of the later Ophites, who, toward the end of the third century, had blended already with several other sects. Irenæus also confounds them very frequently, and the real theogony of the Ophites is given by none of them correctly. With the exception of a change in names, the above-given theogony is that of all the Gnostics, and also of the Nazarenes. Ophis is but the successor of the Egyptian _Chnuphis_, the Good Serpent with a lion’s radiating head, and was held from days of the highest antiquity as an emblem of wisdom, or Thauth, the instructor and Saviour of humanity, the “Son of God.” “Oh men, live soberly ... win your immortality!” exclaims Hermes, the thrice-great Trismegistus. “Instructor and guide of humanity, I will lead you on to salvation.” Thus the oldest sectarians regarded Ophis, the Agathodæmon, as identical with Christos; the serpent being the emblem of celestial wisdom and eternity, and, in the present case, the antitype of the Egyptian Chnuphis-serpent. These Gnostics, the earliest of our Christian era, held: “That the supreme Æon, having emitted other Æons out of himself, one of them, a female, _Prunnikos_ (concupiscence), descended into the chaos, whence, unable to escape, she remained suspended in the mid-space, being too clogged by matter to return above, and not falling lower where there was nothing in affinity with her nature. She then produced her son Ilda-Baoth,