All this is clear enough; but the difficulty begins when one asks in which sense the writer of the Fourth Gospel used the phrase. Did he mean that the Logos was the _anima mundi_? The phrase "the true light which lighteth every one" is susceptible of such a meaning. But it seems more probable that his theology was in the main transcendental, and that the Logos was for him the connecting link between God and the world. But how far is the Prologue really metaphysical and not comparable in its identification of Jesus and the Logos to Cornutus,[16] with his identification of Hermes and the Logos? Further problems arise if an effort is made to reconstruct fully the Ephesian Christianity of which the Fourth Gospel is the product. After the Prologue the Logos does not seem to be mentioned again; Jesus appears as the supernatural Lord (though this word is not characteristic of the Gospel) who reveals the Father to men. He offers them salvation by regeneration in baptism, and by eating his flesh and blood in the Eucharist. They become supernaturally the children of God. This is the teaching of the Hellenised Church, not of the historic Jesus. But running through the Gospel there is also another line of thought which regards salvation as due to knowledge rather than sacraments. What is the relation to each other of {125} these two ways of regarding salvation? The problem has scarcely been formulated by the students of the Fourth Gospel, much less adequately discussed. Obviously the tendency of Ephesian Christianity was to minimise the human characteristics of the historic Jesus, and to merge into Docetism. This can be seen in the Fourth Gospel, and in the allied Johannine Epistles. The writer is fully aware of the danger, and protests against Docetism, but his own writings with very small changes would have been admirably adapted for Docetic purposes.[17] If Ephesian Christianity had never come to Rome, and met its complement in the Adoptionists, it might, in spite of the Fourth Gospel, have degenerated into thorough-going Docetism, or have been represented only by Gnostics. It is hard either to prove or to refute the suggestion that Alexandrian Gnosticism of the Valentinian type came from Ephesus along the Syrian coast, and that the ultimately successful Catholicism of Pantaenus and Clement came from the other stream which passed first northwards and then through Italy to Alexandria. Each of these streams accumulated new ideas on the way: the stream passing through Syria found the Eastern Gnostics of whom Simon Magus is alleged to have been the first. The other stream passed through Rome and found Adoptionism. The combination with this strengthened the belief in the true humanity of Jesus, and in his {126} real divinity, thus providing the groundwork for the Christological development of Irenaeus and his successors in the fourth century.[18]