Origen twice quotes this passage, once in a fuller form. “(She) _bore me by one of my hairs to the great mountain called Thabor_.” The passage is also quoted by St. Jerome.(175) Origen and Jerome take pains to give this passage an orthodox and unexceptionable meaning. Instead of rejecting the passage as apocryphal, they labour to explain it away—a proof of the high estimation in which the Gospel of the Twelve was held. The words, “my mother,” are, it can scarcely be doubted, a Gnostic interpolation, as probably are also the words, “by one of my hairs;” for on one of the occasions on which Origen quotes the passage, these words are omitted. Probably they did not exist in all the copies of the Gospel. Our Lord was “led by the Spirit into the wilderness” after his baptism.(176) Philip was caught away by the Spirit of the Lord from the road between Jerusalem and Gaza, and was found at Azotus.(177) The notion of transportation by the Spirit was therefore not foreign to the authors of the Gospels. The Holy Spirit was represented by the Elkesaites as a female principle.(178) The Elkesaites were certainly one with the Ebionites in their hostility to St. Paul, whose Epistles, as Origen tells us, they rejected.(179) And that they were a Jewish sect which had relations with Ebionitism appears from a story told by St. Epiphanius, that their supposed founder, Elxai, went over to the Ebionites in the time of Trajan.(180) They issued from the same fruitful field of converts, the Essenes. The term by which the Holy Spirit is designated in Hebrew is feminine, and lent itself to a theory of the Holy Spirit being a female principle, and this rapidly slid into identification of the Spirit with Mary. The Clementines insist on the universe being compounded of the male and the female elements. There are two sorts of prophecy, the male which speaks of the world to come, the female which deals with the world that is; the female principle rules this world, the body, all that is visible and material. Beside this female principle stands Christ, the male principle, ruling the spirits of men, and all that is invisible and immaterial.(181) The Holy Spirit, brooding over the deep and calling the world into being, became therefore the female principle in the Elkesaite Trinity. In Gnosticism, this deification of the female principle, which was represented as Prounikos or Sophia among the Valentinians, led to the incarnation of the principle in women who accompanied the heresiarchs Simon and Apelles. Thus the Eternal Wisdom was incarnate in Helena, who accompanied Dositheus and afterwards Simon Magus,(182) and in the fair Philoumena who associated with Apelles. The same influence seems imperceptibly to have been at work in the Church of the Middle Ages, and in the pictures and sculptures of the coronation of the Virgin. Mary seems in Catholic art to have assumed a position as one of the Trinity.