Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage, closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel “according to John.” The intention of this writer was neither to amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did--and, unlike Mark, consciously did--was to create something quite new, _the first sacred book_ of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion.[381] The book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind “John” and Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World-Cavern. There is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening. The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not “born,” he is “there,” and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a Trinity--God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian problem of “Substance,” which dominated the following centuries to the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion’s splitting up into three churches. And--what is significant in more respects than one--the solution of that problem to which “John” stands closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though the word happens to be) the “easternmost” of the Gospels, and presents Jesus, emphatically not as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the second envoy, who is to be _followed by a third_ (the Comforter, Paraclete, of John xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus himself proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here is unveiled, quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos does not go, the Paraclete[382] cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between them lies the last Æon, the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by Pauline intellect, fought long against the John Gospel and gave it recognition only when the offensive, darkly hinted doctrine had been covered over by a Pauline interpretation. The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist movement (Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and proclaimed in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 207. About 245 Mani,[383] who was intimately in touch with the currents of Eastern Christianity,[384] cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon