Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. “This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible.... We beg our readers to understand,” he adds, “that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago ... as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes.”[138] That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a “mystery”-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a stele, the sign used for it being an opened eye.[139] Bunsen mentions as another explanation of PTR--“to show.” “It appears to me,” he remarks, “that our PTR is literally the old Aramaic and Hebrew ‘Patar’, which occurs in the history of Joseph as the specific word for _interpreting_; whence also _Pitrum_ is the term for interpretation of a text, a dream.”[140] In a manuscript of the first century, a combination of the Demotic and Greek texts,[141] and most probably one of the few which miraculously escaped the Christian vandalism of the second and third centuries, when all such precious manuscripts were burned as magical, we find occurring in several places a phrase, which, perhaps, may throw some light upon this question. One of the principal heroes of the manuscript, who is constantly referred to as “the Judean Illuminator” or Initiate, Τελειωτὴς, is made to communicate but with his _Patar_; the latter being written in Chaldaic characters. Once the latter word is coupled with the name _Shimeon_. Several times, the “Illuminator,” who rarely breaks his contemplative solitude, is shown inhabiting a Κρύπτη (cave), and teaching the multitudes of eager scholars standing outside, not orally, but through this _Patar_. The latter receives the words of wisdom by applying his ear to a circular hole in a partition which conceals the teacher from the listeners, and then conveys them, with explanations and glossaries, to the crowd. This, with a slight change, was the method used by Pythagoras, who, as we know, never allowed his neophytes to see him during the years of probation, but instructed them from behind a curtain in his cave.