The systems of many ancient peoples centuries before Christianity contain doctrines and dramatic stories closely analogous to the gospel story of Jesus. The Neo-Platonists held that these occult rites were merely a form of representing philosophic thought as if in scenes of daily life. While Paul refers to certain matters as apparently historical, he never overlooks their symbolic import. The interpolators of his writings misrepresented his real views, as is evinced by internal evidence in the writings themselves. The fourth Gospel, falsely credited to John, was written for the evident purpose of opposing the Gnostic doctrine of Jesus not made flesh by presenting the Neo-Platonic dogma of “the Word made flesh.” In many places throughout the New Testament there is an implication that there were those who denied that Jesus came in the flesh: “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God” (1 John 1: 3). In 2 John, 7th verse, it is said: “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.” How does this comport with the assumption that the existence of the human Jesus was never doubted in the apostolic age? The ignorant and disingenuous ecclesiastics who wrote on Gnosticism in early ages always observed one rule, and that was to represent it as a mere offshoot and corruption of Christianity, invented because of disappointed ambition by apostates from the religion established by the apostles. The Rev. Mr. King, in his _Gnostics, and their Remains_, affirms that such representations “are entirely false.” The truth is, that Gnosticism did not purport to be a Christian system, except by a kind of syncretism to reconcile different faiths. The Neo-Platonists attempted this, and Gnostics did the same on an analogous plan. The historical existence of Jesus was little else than a concession made to the unreasoning multitude, while the esoteric doctrine was so much older as to make such an existence of no possible account except as a piece of folk-lore to hang illustrations of doctrines upon. This is the central idea of every branch of Gnosticism. The forms set forth by different expositors are secondary and incidental, liable to mislead those who attempt to place them in the front and draw deductions from them; and hence Saturninus taught that all that was considered physical in Jesus was only a phantasy, and that what was from God was spiritual only, and not at all corporeal. As for the writings of Tatian, they are “lost”—that is, destroyed—and we are under no obligations to accept what his enemies have said of them. The period was one in which calumny, slander, and forgery were the rule, as well as the main dependence for refuting an adversary. We know nothing of Cerinthus except through Epiphanius, whose reputation for truth and veracity is so bad that he would make falsehood appear like truth by his