reconstruction of a pre-Christian pagan doctrine of the soul as the garment of the spirit is a matter of pure conjecture. [177] _Corp. Herm._ x. 13. [178] Reitzenstein, _Hellenistische Mysterienreligionen_, 2te Aufl., 1920, p. 183. [179] J. Kroll, _op. cit._, pp. 286-289, especially p. 288, Anm. 1. Similar difficulties appear everywhere. It is certainly very hazardous to use Gnosticism, a post-Pauline phenomenon appealing to Paul as one of its chief sources, as a witness to pre-Pauline paganism. Certainly such use of Gnosticism should be carefully limited to those matters where there is some confirmatory pagan testimony. But such confirmatory testimony, in the decisive cases, is significantly absent. The use of Gnosticism as a source of information about pre-Christian paganism might be less precarious if the separation of the pagan and Christian elements could be carried out by means of literary criticism. Such a method is employed by Reitzenstein in connection with an interesting passage in Hippolytus. In attacking the Gnostic sect of the Naassenes, Hippolytus says that the sect has been dependent upon the pagan mysteries, and in proof he quotes a Naassene writing. This quotation, as it now exists in the work of Hippolytus, is, according to Reitzenstein, "a pagan text with Gnostic-Christian scholia (or in a Gnostic-Christian revision), which has been taken over by an opponent who did not understand this state of the case, and so, in this form, has been used by Hippolytus."[180] Reitzenstein seeks to reproduce the pagan document.[181] [180] Reitzenstein, _Poimandres_, p. 82. [181] _Op. cit._, pp. 83-98. Unquestionably the passage is interesting, and unquestionably it contains important information about the pagan mysteries. But it does not help to establish influence of the mysteries upon Paul. It must be observed that what is now being maintained against Reitzenstein is not that the Gnostics who appear in the polemic of the anti-heretical, ecclesiastical writers of the close of the second century and the beginning of the third were not influenced by pre-Christian paganism, or even that they did not derive the fundamentals of their type of religion from pre-Christian paganism. All that is being maintained is that it is very precarious to use the Gnostic systems in reconstructing pre-Christian paganism in detail--especially where the Gnostic systems differ from admittedly pagan sources and agree with Paul. In reconstructing the origin of Paulinism it is precarious to employ the testimony of those who lived after Paul and actually quoted Paul.