(13) And it is not merely on the Jewish side that we have evidence of elements in the early Jesuist movement which derive from sources alien to the gospel record. M. Loisy [240] admits that the hymn of the Naassenes, given by Hippolytus, [241] in which Jesus appeals to the Father to let him descend to earth and reveal the mysteries to men, "has an extraordinary resemblance to the dialogue between the God Ea and his son Marduk in certain Babylonian incantations." [242] He disposes of the problem by claiming that before it can weigh with us "it must be proved that the hymn of the Ophites is anterior to all connection of their sect with Christianity." The implication is that Gnostic syncretism could add Babylonian traits to the Jewish Jesus. But when we find signal marks of a Babylonian connection for the name Jesus in the Apocalypse we cannot thus discount, without further evidence, the Babylonian connection set up by the Naassene hymn. Nor can the defenders of a record which they themselves admit to contain a mass of unhistorical matter claim to have a ground upon which they can dismiss as a copyist's blunder the formula in which in an old magic papyrus Jesus, as Healer, is adjured as "The God of the Hebrews." [243] The very gospel records present the name of Jesus as one of magical power in places where he has not appeared. A strict criticism is bound to admit that the whole question of the pre-Christian vogue of the name Jesus presents an unsolved problem. There are further two quasi-historical Jesuses, one (14) given in the Old Testament, the other (15) in the Talmud, concerning which we can neither affirm nor deny that they were connected with a Jesuine movement before the Christian era. One is the Jesus of Zechariah (iii, 1-8; vi, 11-15); the other is the Jesus Ben Pandira, otherwise Jesus Ben Satda or Stada, of the Talmud. The former, Jesus the High Priest, plays a quasi-Messianic part, being described as "The Branch" and doubly crowned as priest and king. The word for "branch" in Zechariah is tsemach, but this was by the pre-Christian Jews identified with the netzer of Isaiah xi, 1; which for some the early Jesuists would seem to have constituted the explanation of Jesus' cognomen of "Nazarite" or "Nazaræan." [244] The historic significance of the allusions in Zechariah appears to have been wholly lost; and that very circumstance suggests some pre-Christian connection between the name Jesus and a Messianic movement, which the Jewish teachers would be disposed to let slip from history, and the Christists who might know of it would not wish to recall. But the matter remains an enigma.