770 EPILOGUE
the common era as a turn elsewhere or inward by Jews disappointed that their
foretold messiah had not come. But there were messianic figures who did
come to parts of Israel, were not as radical as Jesus, or at least as Jesus' inter-
preters created and made him, and whose lives were recorded in historical de-
tail, which Jesus, outside the gospels, was not. In the Mishnah and the Talmud
we find numerous examples of religious figures operating beyond the fold of
the main Jewish sects. Rebellious Galilee had produced not only Jesus but Ha-
sidic messianic figures contemporary with Jesus, of whom the two outstand-
ing healers and miracle makers were Honi and Hanina. Probably Jesus himself
was a Hasidic messianic, as Geza Vermes suggests in The Changing Faces of
Jesus, but these charismatics were extrinsic, as apparently was Jesus, to the tra-
ditional religious parties.^8 In this period of change and anxious searching for
messianic figures of spiritual enlightenment, the gnostics added their message
of personal salvation.
Incidentally, it must be remembered that the faces of Judaism, like that of
the rabbi Jesus, were also changing and multiple. They changed again with
each new interpreter, and their scriptures changed according to the eyes of
each interpreter. Among those changing faces, whom Scholem, Grant, and
others describe, were the Jewish gnostics who, as noted, were to give us the
earliest extant gnostic scripture, the Book of Baruch.
THE JEWISH BOOK OF BARUCH
Gnosticism's main Christian speculations were preceded by heterodox Ju-
daism and early Jewish-Christian gnostic systems. Of the latter, Irenaeus de-
clares the oldest to be the three doctrines of Simon Magus, Menander, and
Saturninus. They reject the god of the Bible as the creator of the world, which
they say was the work of angels. The Book of Baruch attributed to Justin, pre-
served only as a paraphrase in Hippolytus's Refutation of All Heresies, repre-
sents one of the earliest stages of gnostic evolution. Grant calls it "an example
of a gnosis almost purely Jewish ... which owes its origin to three principles,
two male and one female."^9 It contains a fascinating mixture of traditions,
in which the first male is hellenic Priapos, father of the cosmos, while Jewish
Elohim is father of this world and a lover of Edem (Eden), the female princi-
ple. Elohim breaths spirit into Adam, while Edem breathes soul into the first
- Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus. When gnosticism embraced Jesus in various guises—
messiah, angel, and god—their docetic Jesus was interpreted as a gnostic figure just as the
Gospels of John and of Thomas became central to the gnostic canon. - Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, 19.