This method, which fictitiously refers back every saying to an immediate inspired delivery, was brought to its keenest edge in the Talmudic and the Islamic theologies. A new Halakha or a Hadith is only valid when it can be referred through an unbroken chain of guarantors back to Moses or Mohammed.[435] The solemn formula for this in Jerusalem was “Let it come over me! So have I heard it from my teacher.”[436] In the Zend the citation of the chain of warranty is the rule, and Irenæus justifies his theology by the fact that a chain goes back from him through Polycarp to the primitive Community. Into the Early Christian literature this Halakha-form entered so self-evidently that no one remarked it for what it was. Apart altogether from the constant references to the Law and the Prophets, it appears in the superscription of the four Gospels (“_according to_” Mark), each of which had thus to present its warrant if authority was to be claimed for the words of the Lord that it presented.[437] This established the chain back to the Truth that was incarnate in Jesus, and it is impossible to exaggerate the intense reality of this in the world-idea of an Augustine or a Jerome. This is the basis of the practice, which spread even more widely from the time of Alexander onwards, of providing religious and philosophical writings with names,[438] like Enoch, Solomon, Ezra, Hermes, Pythagoras--guarantors and vessels of divine wisdom, in whom, therefore, the Word had been made Flesh of old. We still possess a number of Apocalypses bearing the name of Baruch, who was then compared with Zarathustra, and we can scarcely form an idea of what in the way of literature circulated under the names of Aristotle and Pythagoras. The “Theology of Aristotle” was one of the most influential works of Neoplatonism. And, lastly, this the metaphysical presupposition for the style and the deeper meaning of _citation_, which was employed by Fathers, Rabbis, “Greek” philosophers, and “Roman” jurists, and eventuated on the one hand in the Law of Valentinian III,[439] and on the other in the elimination from the Jewish and Christian canons of apocryphal writings--a fundamental notion, which differentiated the literary stock according to difference of _substance_. V