“Adan Inferior is distributed into its own paths, into thirty-two sides of paths, yet it is not known to any one but _Seir_. But no one knows the SUPERIOR ADAN nor His paths, except that Long Face”--the Supreme God.[508] Seir is the Nazarene “genius,” who is called Æbel Zivo; and Gabriel Legatus--also “Apostle Gabriel.”[509] The Nazarenes held with the kabalists that even the Messiah who was to come did not know the “_Superior_ Adan,” the concealed Deity; no one except the _Supreme_ God; thus showing that above the Supreme Intelligible Deity, there is one still more secret and unrevealed. Seir-Anpin is the third God, while “Logos,” according to Philo Judæus, is the second one.[510] This is distinctly shown in the _Codex_. The false Messiah shall say: “I am Deus, son of Deus; my Father sent me here.... I am the first _Legate_, I am Æbel Zivo, I am come from on high! But distrust him; for he will not be Æbel Zivo. Æbel Zivo will not permit himself to be seen in this age.”[511] Hence the belief of some Gnostics that it was not Æbel Zivo (Archangel Gabriel) who “_overshadowed_” Mary, but Ilda-Baoth, who formed the _material body_ of Jesus; _Christos_ uniting himself with him only at the moment of baptism in the Jordan. Can we doubt Nork’s assertion that “the Bereshith Rabba, the oldest part of the Midrash Rabboth, _was known to the Church Fathers in a Greek translation_?”[512] But if, on the one hand, they were sufficiently acquainted with the different religious systems of their neighbors to have enabled them to build a new religion alleged to be distinct from all others, their ignorance of the _Old Testament_ itself, let alone the more complicated questions of Grecian metaphysics, is now found to have been deplorable. “So, for instance, in _Matthew_ xxvii. 9 f., the passage from _Zechariah_ xi. 12, 13, is attributed to Jeremiah,” says the author of _Supernatural Religion_. “In _Mark_ i. 2, a quotation from _Malachi_ iii. 1, is ascribed to Isaiah. In _1 Corinthians_, ii. 9, a passage is quoted as _Holy Scripture_, which is not found in the _Old Testament_ at all, but which is taken, as Origen and Jerome state, from an apocryphal work, _The Revelation of Elias_ (Origen: _Tract._ xxxv.), and the passage is similarly quoted by the so-called _Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians_ (xxxiv.)”. How reliable are the pious Fathers in their explanations of divers heresies may be illustrated in the case of Epiphanius, who mistook the Pythagorean sacred Tetrad, called in the Valentinian _Gnosis_, Kol-Arbas, for a _heretic leader_.[513] What with the involuntary blunders, and deliberate falsifications of the teachings of those who differed in views with them; the canonization of the mythological Aura Placida (gentle breeze), into a pair of Christian martyrs--St. Aura and St. Placida;[514] the deification of a _spear_ and a _cloak_, under the names of SS. Longimus and Amphibolus;[515] and the Patristic