The excavation of a site commonly gives us a neat and definite stratification of successive periods. Although the religious history of the Empire is less fortunate, nevertheless it has turning points and we can remark certain features as characteristic of particular periods. It is not that the phenomena in question are confined to these periods, but that they appear in them with special emphasis. The purpose of this paper is to consider a group of inscriptions which throw some light on the religious atmosphere of Rome in the middle of the third century of our era.

It has often been suggested that the principal gnostic myths had their origin in genuine folklore, and the difficulty of discovering traces of this lore outside of gnostic sources has been explained by supposing that the myths were Oriental and were derived either from the oral traditions of localities in which no literature was produced or from literature which is no longer extant. Nothing favorable, however, to this view can be found from a comparison of gnostic myths with the native myths of Greece or with such Oriental mythology as is preserved unmixed with philosophic exegesis. In cases where known Greek, Jewish, or Christian sources are borrowed for the myths, the effort to extract gnostic theology is as painful as in the worst attempts of the Stoic exegetes, but where the myth is distinctively gnostic the philosophic meaning is easily traced in the story's plot. The reason for this is evidently not that Oriental myths are more philosophic than Greek but that gnostic myths are in their origin artificial and symbolic. Reminiscences of Oriental fancy may occasionally appear, but they do not control the main structure of the plots and can usually be detected by the difficulty with which a philosophic meaning is attached to them. An underlying structure of thought invariably conditions the imaginative forms of gnostic myths, so that theological differences between related sects are often apparent only in minor variations in the development of the story. These variations are difficult to interpret in systems of which we have only a fragmentary knowledge, and it is dangerous to patch up one system with pieces derived from another, however admirably they may seem to fit. Unlike the Stoics, who started from popular myths, the natural products of unsophisticated imagination, and explained these as symbols of philosophic truth, the gnostics invented their own myths to suit their philosophy. In course of time the best of these inventions served as the basis for further allegorizing, and some of the later gnostics, like the authors of Pistis Sophia, forgot, or neglected, the philosophy of their masters and elaborated only the mythological elements in their theology. Since they were men of feeble abilities, they only made bad myths into worse ones, and obscured the philosophic meaning which was really symbolized in the earlier forms of the stories, stiff and artificial though they were.

The resemblance of P. Got. 21 to the letter sent by Jesus to Abgar had already occurred to me when I saw Bell's review of Frisk's publication. Bell there expresses the opinion that “the text looks like a version of the ‘Letter to Abgar.’” It is in reality nothing else.

He entered into the synagogue and taught. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes (Mk. 1, 21–22).

The accepted interpretation of Mark 1, 21 f. is well known. In the words of Herford, the passage means that Jesus taught “with the spiritual force of a tremendous personality,” and this was bound to shock his contemporaries who adhered to the idea of Torah. Such a view has the advantage of making the material self-explanatory, while it receives corroboration both from other data in the gospels regarding Jesus' personal traits and from facts derived from the Judaistic sources concerning the Pharisaic method of teaching.

In my Studies in Matthew (1930, pp. 452 ff.) the reader will find a brief statement of my conviction that the long debated Papias-testimony prefixed by a medieval prologue-writer to the Gospel of John was originally meant for the Revelation. Arguments and references there given need not be repeated here because the present note is concerned only with the final clause of the fragment; but since this is obscure it may be advisable to print it in full side by side with the conjectured original.