[Footnote 280: Nothing is known of this Justinus, whose name is not mentioned by any other patristic writer, and there is no sure means of fixing his date. Macmahon, relying apparently on the last sentence of the chapter, would make him a predecessor of Simon Magus, and therefore contemporary with the Apostles’ first preaching. This is extremely unlikely, and Salmon on the other hand (_D.C.B._, s.v., “Justinus the Gnostic”) considers his heresy should be referred to “the latest stage of Gnosticism” which, if taken literally, would make it long posterior to Hippolytus. The source of his doctrine is equally obscure; for although Hippolytus classes him with the Ophites, the serpent in his system is certainly not good and plays as hostile a part towards man as the serpent of Genesis, while his supreme Triad of the Good Being, an intermediate power ignorant of the existence of his superior, and the Earth, differs in all essential respects from the Ophite Trinity of the First and Second Man and First Woman. Yet the names of the world-creating angels and devils here given, bear a singular likeness to those which Theodore bar Khôni in his _Book of Scholia_ attributes to the Ophites and also to those mentioned by Origen as appearing on the Ophite Diagram. On the other hand, there are many likenesses not only of ideas but of language between the system of Justinus and that of Marcion, who also taught the existence of a Supreme and Benevolent God and of a lower one, harsh, but just, who was the unwitting author of the evil which is in the world. This, indeed, leaves out of the account the third or female power; but an Armenian account of Marcion’s doctrines attributes to him belief in a female power also, called Hyle or Matter and the spouse of the Just God of the Law, with whom her relations are pretty much as described in the text. Justinus, however, was not like Marcion a believing Christian; for he makes his Saviour the son of Joseph and Mary and the mere mouthpiece of the subaltern angel Baruch, while his account of the Crucifixion differs materially from that of Marcion. The obscene stories he tells about the protoplasts also appear in much later Manichæan documents and seem to be drawn from the Babylonian tradition of which the loves of the angels in the Book of Enoch are probably also a survival. It is therefore not improbable that Justinus, the Book of Enoch, the Ophites, and perhaps Marcion, alike derived their tenets on these points from heathen myths of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, which may possibly be traced back to early Babylonian theories of cosmogony. Cf. _Forerunners_, II, cc. 8 and 11, _passim_.] [Footnote 281: Hippolytus, like the Gnostic writers, seems to know of an oral as well as a written tradition from the Evangelists.] [Footnote 282: Matt. x. 5. In the A.V. as here, τὰ ἔθνη, “the nations.”] [Footnote 283: πρότερον διδάξας or “at first teaches.”]