Chapter 8: Three Esseno-Christian Christs: Seth, Melchizedek, and Joshua/Jesus

The diverse sects of the movement that was given the general name of Essenism inscribed at the top rank of their preoccupations — which were conferred a dramatic reality by the Zealot movement — the question of the Messiah, the envoy in whom God would confide the care of leading the people towards a promised new earth.

Due to their collaboration with the [Roman] occupiers, the Pharisians disapproved of Messianic speculations, and in particular those that, hoping for the reincarnation of Adam or one of his sons, claimed that the first man was a partner of God and took part in the creation of the world. For them, no Messiah — infatuated with some power — could arrogate any right or function exclusively reserved for Adonai, the Savior, the Creator. Adam chose evil and the Pharisians stigmatized as minim (Gnostic) anyone who affirmed that Adam repented, chose God and was saved, as the Epistula apostolorum claims.

“There existed Jewish traditions about Adam that represented him as the Vise-Regent of God, installed like a king in a sphere beyond the world and imposing his domination on the entirety of creation. Several rabbis perceived the danger of contradiction and attempted to check the most perilous of these positions.”[131] Soon there was a struggle between rabbis and groups that claimed to valorize Adam as the essence of the Messiah, nay, as the Father of the Messiah who was called the Son of Man.

Many Essene factions supported the thesis of an Adam seated on God’s right [hand], redeemer of the human genre and, at the same time, Co-Regent of God, which was a proposition that was inadmissible to Yahwehist monotheism, but that shows through in certain letters [claimed to be] by Saul/Paul.

The Letter to the Colossians (1, 15) makes the Christ a preexisting agent of God in the creation. “The Messiah is called ‘Image of God’ and ‘The Head of the Body,’ which originally signified the entire universe (the ‘Church’ is almost surely an addition to destroy the parallelism between the hymn and the couched [presentee] cosmic vision).”[132] This is an example of one of a number of falsifications of the letters of Saul/Paul by his copyists and translators. These falsifications were intended to make the reader forget that Saul had already belonged to Jewish Gnosticism.

Nevertheless, the name of the Messiah varied according to the sects; therefore the name was precisely what conferred power to the community or Church. A fragment from an apocryphal Book of Daniel discovered at Qumran insists on the expectation of a savior delegated by God and carrying the Name: “He will be called the Son of the Great God and by his Name he will be named. He will be greeted as the Son of God, one will call him the Son of the Most-High.”[133]

The quarrel about the secret name of the Son of God: is Adam reincarnated or the son of Adam, the Son of Man? The Testament of Abraham, a text of Jewish origin from the First Century after the Christian era, describes Adam crowned in the heavens. Such is also the vision of Saul/Paul in the second Letter to the Corinthians (22–23), which evokes the presence of Adam in Paradise or the third heaven.

The Apocalypse of Adam, another text from the First Century of Judaic origin, discovered at Nag-Hammadi (Nag-Hammadi Library, V), contains the revelation of the future destiny of the Adamites, offered by Adam to his son, Seth.

For Fossum, “Adam was the first manifestation of the True Prophet.”[134] Adam possessed the spirit of God, which brought knowledge (gnosis) of all things, past and future (Homelies of Peter, III, 17). The cycle of Adamic legend constituted the axis of Jewish speculations that turned around the nature of the Messiah. It originally explained the theme of the descent and ascension of the savior.[135]

According to the Poimandres, the celestial Adam was made in the form and image of God, a formulation that Saul/Paul took up when he assured [his readers] that Jesus was in the form of God.[136]

The Messiah Seth

The new Adam and Son of Man that the Ebionites and Nazarenes would baptize with the name Joshua, was, for certain Essenes, the third son of Adam, Seth. The important Sethian literature discovered at Nag-Hammadi proves that the vogue for religious syncretism didn’t hesitate to absorb the doctrines of other sects, such as the Naassenes (certain Sethians estimated that the savior had triumphed over the creator by assuming the form of a serpent) and the Cainites, Seth’s brother, and the sectarians attached to Joshua (the Gospel of the Egyptians expresses the equivalence between Seth and Joshua/Jesus). The collection at Nag-Hammadi includes a great number of Sethian works, sometimes indistinct from each other, due to the successive syncretic waves of works by Naassenes, Barbelites and Joshua/Jesus Christians: the Three Pillars of Seth, the Epistle from Eugnoste (which became Sophia Jesus), the Paraphrase of Sem (Seth), in which the mediating Spirit intervenes in the primordial struggle between Light and Darkness.[137]

Seth was born to Adam and the Virgin, Eve. Their descendants are the “spiritual,” “pneumatic” or “perfect” Sons of the Light, who extoll asceticism and the stimulation [l’exacerbation] of the spirit at the expense of the body.

According to Sethian mythology — such that it is able to disentangle itself from the writings at Nag-Hammadi — Ialdabaoth (the God of Genesis) created a bad world. Nevertheless, in the man that he produced was perpetuated a celestial gleam that, aspiring to return to the superior place from which it issued, shows the road to salvation. Like Sophia, Barbelo and Naas, Seth is the Messiah of the Good God, superior to Ialdabaoth.

The Sethians divided history into four periods: the age of Adam, the age of Seth, the age of the first Sethians, and the present, in which the Sethians prepared the return of their Messiah. After the end of time, the Faithful, the Sons of the Light, would enter a plerome superior to the places created by the Demiurge. Because “their kingdom isn’t of this world.” Come from elsewhere, “allogenes,” as they would say, they would return to the side of the Father, in a universe illuminated by four entities: Hermozel, Oroiael, Daveithe and Eleleth (in the same way that the Judeo-Christians selected four angels: Michael, Raphael, Bagriel and Ouriel, the Catholics would place four canonical gospels under four symbols that doubled the names Mark, Matthew, Luke and John: the eagle, the lion, the bull and the man).

The Messiah Seth announces the return to the “other world.” The race of Seth, Puech says of Seth’s sons and their descendants, are “another” race, a foreign or strange race in the strong senses of the terms.[138] (Strounsa thinks that the famous Elisha ben Abuya — who was condemned by Jewish orthodoxy at the beginning of the Second Century because he rejected the Talmud and therefore became aher, “other,” “stranger/foreigner,” “allogene” — was a member of the Sethians.[139] Sperma eteron translates zera aher.) This idea was shared by other Christian sects, including those devoted to Joshua/Jesus, whose adepts, to the great scandal of the Greeks and Romans — for whom all of the religions assumed their meaning in the citizen cult of the State — displayed the greatest scorn for death and for the punishments because they were assured of re-joining the true kingdom of light (and such was still the profession of faith of Justin the Apologist, condemned to death around 165).

The Elenchos quotes from extracts from a Sethian cosmogony, in which (as among the Naassenes) one perceives a religious recuperation of the attempt of Simon of Samaria to bring back to the [human] body the mythological inspiration of the Pentateuch. The cosmos is in the image of the belly of a pregnant woman:

In the matrix, the innummerable imprints gave birth to the infinite multitudes of living beings. This infinite variety that bloomed in the form of different beings born under the heavens was inseminated with the odorous effluvium of the Pneuma that came from on high with its light and it was mixed with it. From the water surged a first-born principle, a powerful wind, impetuous, the first cause of all existence; because the wind makes the waters boil and raises them up in waves. Therefore the formation of the waves resembled the effort of the matrix to deliver itself from man or the spirit as soon as it was excited and heated by the shock of the Pneuma. (*) When this wave raised by the wind was elevated above the waters, it conceived and, conforming to its nature, received the fruit of the woman, it retained the light disseminated from on high with the odorous effluvium of the Pneuma, that is to say, the Spirit assumed various forms that are the Perfect God, descended from on high, from the Light and the unengendered Pneuma in human nature as in a temple, born from water by the impulse of nature and the movement of the wind, combined and mixed with the body, as salt impregnates things and the light impregnates darkness, aspiring to be free from the body that is powerless to find salvation or issue. Because what had been mixed was only a completely small glimmer, a kind of fragment separated from the luminous radiance that was introduced into the corporeal world in multiple forms and that ‘retained from the depths of the great waters’ (Psalm 29, 3), as the Psalm says. The light from on high thus had only a thought and a care: how the Spirit was to be delivered from a shameful death and the dark body, delivered from his father below, the wind that raised the whirlpooling unleashed waves, and engendered the Spirit, his perfect son but of a difference essence. Because it was a ray of this perfect light descended from on high, imprisoned in the dark waters, frightening, bitter and impure, it was the luminous Pneuma that was carried beyond the waters (Genesis, 1, 2). Thus, when the raised waves of water conceived the fruit of the woman, they retained under all sorts of forms — such as the belly of a pregnant woman — the disseminating light, as one establishes it among all living beings. The impetuous and terrible wind, [with] its whirlpools like serpents, like winged serpents, steered it off course. (**) It is through this wind, that is to say, through the serpent, that creation began, all things having begun their generation at the same time. Thus, when the Light and the Pneuma were received in the chaotic matrix, which was impure and the source of corruption, the serpent, the wind of darkness, the First-Born of the waters, penetrated it and engendered man, and the impure matrix neither loved nor knew another form. The Logos from on high issued from the Light, being similar to the serpent, deceived it by this resemblance and penetrated into the impure matrix so as to break the bonds that enclosed the Perfect Spirit that had been engendered by the First-Born of the water, the serpent, the wind, the beast of the impure matrix. Such was the form of the slave; such was the necessity that obliged the Logos of God to descend into the womb of a virgin. But it did not suffice that the Perfect Man, the Logos, penetrated into the womb of a virgin and appeased in the darkness the sorrows of childbirth. After he entered into the shameful mysteries of the womb, he washed and drank from the gushing living water that must exhaust anyone who wants to divest himself of the form of the slave and assume the celestial garment (Elenchos, V, 19–22). (***)

(*) By an action inverse to that of Simon and his Cosmo-Somatism, the sperma (sperm) becomes pneuma (spirit); the coupling of man and woman that creates the world gives place to religious allegory, to spiritualization. The Sethians called themselves Pneumatics, in opposition to the Hylics, sons of Cain, and the Psychics, sons of Abel.

(**) The winged serpents are the seraphim (seraphins). As among certain Naassenes of the ascetic tendency, the Redeeming Serpent is opposed to the Serpent of Lust. Here the matrix is impure, which is the inverse of the Simonian conception.

(***) It would suffice for the sects devoted to Joshua/Jesus to translate the myth into a legend of virginal birth, embellished as a familial saga. Likewise, the triad Light, Pneuma and Darkness, alias the Father, the Mother (or the feminine Spirit, the Sophia/Wisdom) and the Son, would engender the future Arian and Catholic speculations on the Trinity.

The library of Nah-Hammadi surrendered a Sethian text, entitled the Epistle of Eugnoste, in which are clearly expressed the ideas that the Joshua/Jesus sects of the Second and Third Centuries would not have any scruples about exploiting and recuperating in the name of their mythic heroes.

In the Infinite appeared the Father, produced by himself; he produced an androgynous man, the masculine name of whom is lost to us, but whose feminine name is Sophia-Pansophos. The immortal man himself created a great Eon with the gods and archangels: he is called: God of Gods and King of Kings; he is the Faith of the beings who produce themselves; he possesses an intelligence, an intention (ennoia), a thought ... like the primordial being. The first celestial man, uniting with his Sophia, produced an androgynous son; the son is the first engendering Father, the Son of Man, whom one also calls: Adam of the Light. He created in his turn an Eon peopled by a multitude of angels that one names: the Ecclesia of the Luminous Saints. He united with his Sophia and produced a great androgynous light that is, in his masculine name, the Savior, the Creator of all things, and, in his feminine name, Sophia, generator of all, whom one also calls Pistis.[140]

To affirm that the Messianic sects had deformed the dogmatic message of Jesus and his apostles is to suppose that this orthodoxy had existed in the First Century and was still babbling on [balbutiante] in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries. With a strange complacency with respect to ecclesiastical falsification, many historians have preferred to ignore the stratification of successive syncretims that — drawing upon the doctrines of the Sethians, Naassenes, Barbelites, Elchasaites, Nazarenes and others — ended up, under the name of Joshua, offering to the federated power of the bishops a shield and a universality that was required by their political project of conquest and empire.

The Epistle of Eugnoste was thus cut out and recomposed on the model of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples, so as to adopt the title Sophia of Jesus.[141] The prologue to the Canonical Gospel attributed to John was also inspired by Sethian texts.

The Messiah Melchizedek

The Epistle to the Hebrews, attributed to Saul/Paul by the Catholics, to Barnabas by Tertuillien and to Apollos by Luther, linked the priesthood of the Messiah Joshua-Jesus to the priesthood of Melchizedek. According to Fitzmeyer, it was addressed to the Essenes.[142]

Who was Melchizedek? For biblical mythology and orthodox Jews, he was a person of little importance, a Priest-King of Salem (Jerusalem). But the Essene texts treat him with veneration and credit him — as well as Adam and Seth (with whom he was sometimes confused) — with the vocation of Messiah.

Cave 11 at Qumran revealed a midrash in which Melchizedek is held as the announcer of the Good News (otherwise called the Gospels) and is none other than the Messiah for whom salvation will come.[143] Hero of the battle of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, he would vanquish Belial, the master of evil (“He who announces the Good News is the Messiah”).

Moreover, Melchizedek finds himself associated with Michael, head of the angels. Other characteristics that complete the sketch of the figure of the Archangel Michael will be of great consequence for christo-angelology. One gave to Melchizedek the name Michael and it is to him that one connects Psalm 11/1 and 4. He is invested with a cosmogonical function: he is the maintainer of the universe. According to Henoch, 69/14 sq: “God desposited into the hands of Michael the Secret Name by which the heavens were suspended before the world was created and for eternity; the Name by which the earth was created upon the waters and by which the profound secrets of the mountain became the beautiful waters.”[144]

Furthermore, the Zohar makes this precise: “Everywhere you find mentioned Michael, who is the first of the angels, the Shekhina is understood.”[145] Therefore, the Shekhina (or Achamoth) is none other than the Spirit, feminine in Hebrew, figured under the traits of Sophia, Mariaumne, Myriam and Mary.

The Books of Henoch, dear to the Essenes, call Melchizedek the Son of Man, according to the Book of Daniel, which would adopt the sects devoted to Joshua/Jesus so as to qualify their Messiah.[146]

Stacked up from the Second Century before the Christian era to the First Century that inaugurated it, the texts of Henoch (in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries) existed in three manuscript versions, Greek, Ethiopian and Slavic. One can distinguish an orthodox Jewish redaction, in which YHWH punishes the two hundred watchers or egregores, and an Esseno-Christian redaction, in which God, judging their fault to be pardonable, reconciles himself with them, which is a softening that — like the salvation accorded to Adam and the Serpent by the Sethians and Naassenes — suggests the appearance of a God of kindness who opposes his mercy to the intransigence of the God of Israel.

The miraculous birth of Melchizedek in Henoch announces that of Joshua-Jesus: he is engendered by a woman, without the intervention of a carnal father (the woman is the Spirit, the Shekhina/Achamoth/Sophia, Mariaumne/Myriam and, much later, the Virgin Mary). Following the Epistle to the Hebrews (7, 16), the Messiah endowed with the name Jesus “was not made according to the law of carnal order.”

Finally, Melchizedek, whose name [as we have seen] contains an allusion to justice (tsedeq), participated in the Essene thematic of the Master of Justice. The Testiment of Levy says: “And then the Savior will raise up a New Priest to whom all the words of the Savior will be revealed, and he will exercise a judgment of truth on the earth during a multitude of days.”

A manuscript from Nag-Hammadi pushes the identification much further; it evokes celestial messengers who assign to Melchizedek his future role as Great-Priest and predicts for him a destiny of Messiah condemned to undergo torments so as to triumph over death.

At the end of the Second Century, the devotes of Melchizedek would disapprove of Theodote Trapezetes, with whom they nevertheless shared the belief in an angel-messiah, an angelos-christos. They estimated that it was Melchizedek and not Joshua-Jesus who was the superior angel. The quarrel would reappear in the Fourth Century with Arius, who, far from being an innovator, remained loyal to the old angelo-christology, which was permitted by the ensemble of the Christian sects until the second half of the Second Century.

Werner shows that Arius interpreted the Epistle to the Hebrews as proof of angelo-christology (Jesus as angel of the Savior), and was inspired by the argumentation of the followers of Melchizedek who, drawing from the same Epistle, reached the conclusion that the Christ, as far as his essence and rank, was not above but below the celestial angel Melchizedek.[147]

Joshua/Jesus, Unknown Prophet and Syncretic Messiah

The creature whose crucified body and spirit of sacrifice have dominated two thousand years of an inhuman civilization pushed abstinence and abnegation so completely that he left no traces of his passage through history.

Historians, philosophers, authors, polygraphs — no one in the First Century heard the heroes of the evangelical novels speak. Pliny the Elder (instructed in the existence of the Nazarenes, nevertheless), Justin of Tiberiade, Juvenal, Martial, Dion Chrysostome, Philon of Alexandria, Petrone — all knew nothing of this man.

Flavius Joseph, attentive observer of a war of the Jews in which he collaborated with the Romans, cites Theudas, Jacob and Simon, sons of Juda of Gamala. But the least echo of the exemplary gesture of a New Joshua, named Jesus by the Greeks, never reached him; perhaps there was a copyist who, in the Slavic version of the Twelfth Century, interpolated information about Jesus, the absence of which struck him as inadmissible to a contemporary historian. The patriarch of Constantinople, Photios, made a show of honesty, if not naivete, in this regard. Commenting on the Chronicles of the Kings of the Jews, credited to Justin of Tiberiade (he had a copy of the manuscript, which no longer exists), Photios — in his Myriobyblion (108), a collection of analyzes of 279 different texts read by him — is indignant about the silence concerning Jesus, though the author [of the Chronicles of the Kings of the Jews] lived several kilometers from Caphernaum, a celebrated city in the sacred geography of the Church.[148]

The Qumran manuscripts know Seth, Melchizedek, and the Master of Justice. They know nothing of Jesus, unless “Jesus” is an identikit [portrait-robot] Messiah and a script [texte] plagiarized by The Sermon on the Mount.

As for the Letter attributed to Barnabas, a Judeo-Christian text [written at the] end of the First or the beginning of the Second Century that extols the abandonment of Mosaic law, not in the spirit, but in the letter (circumcision of the heart must replace circumcision of the sex[ual organ]), Jesus is none other than Joshua, son of Noun. Around 230–250, Origen, in a sermon on Joshua/Jesus, celebrated the intemporal and exemplary glory of the biblical Joshua whom he calls Jesus.

In 135 (and not between 80 and 90), the Pharisian convention condemned the heresy of the noisrim or Nazarenes, but knew nothing of a community-head named Jesus.

One must wait until the beginning of the Second Century to find an allusion to the chrestianoi, otherwise known as the Messianists (Chrestos or Christos translates the Hebrew word Messiah). Around 111, a letter from Pliny to Trajan asks the emperor about the fate to reserve for the chrestianoi — according to all probability, the Elchasites — who “assemble before the dawn to sing hymns to the Messiah as to a God” (Christo quasi Deo).

In the same epoch, Tactitus, in his Annals and, a little later, Suetone, speak not of a Jesus but of a Chrestos, the cause of agitation under Nero. Therefore, there existed at the same time a quite historical Chrestos, who preoccupied Emperor Hadrian and aroused the disapproval of Greco-Roman [public] opinion: the nationalist Messiah, Bar Kochba, hero of the last insurrection of the Jewish people.

Tactitus and Suetone were not unaware that the Rome of Claudius and Nero had repressed many agitations of Jewish Messianism then led by the Zealot movement. The Elchasite behavior described by Pliny in his letter to Trajan, who was lenient, did not justify the repulsion felt by Tacitus and Suetone: their injurious commentaries inspired even more insults addressed to the Jewish religion as well as the contemporary rise of anti-Semitism.

Around 160, the Christ or Messiah of a Christian such as Justin the Apologist was not a historical individual. He was a God incarnated in the form of a man, martyred on earth and returned to the divine essence of which he was the emanation (this is the doctrine of the angelos-christos that Catholicism would condemn much later under the name Docetism). The irony is that this conjecture about a prophet born from a man and a woman [originally] emanated from a Jew. Justin reports in his Dialogue with the Jew Tryphon:

Those who affirm that the Christ was a man, and that he was anointed and became the Christ by election, seem to me much closer to the truth than your doctrine. Because we [are] the Jews, we expect the Christ in so far as he is a man born from man and Elie will come to anoint him when he has come. But if the one of whom you speak avers to be the Christ, one must conclude that he is a man born from man. Nevertheless, since Elie did not come to anoint him, I do not believe that he is the Christ.[149]

Martha of Chambrun-Ruspoli, who cites Justin, adds: “It is perhaps so as to respond to this argument that we read in the Gospels that Elie will return in the person of John the Baptist.”[150]

And Tryphon still objected: “You Christians follow vain rumors, you have invented a Christ in the way you inconsiderately sacrifice your lives.”[151]

How can the historians, who are so little attached to the testimony of attested facts, accredit the Catholic and Roman fable of a historical Jesus, whereas he is still for Justin (a Saint and martyr, according to the Church) an angelos-christos, and who possesses neither family nor history in the letters of this Saul/Paul whom Marcion mentions for the first time.

In a challenge to the forgeries of Eusebius of Cesaree and “the Father of the Church,” the Emperor Julian, writing his Against the Galileans around 350 (it was later destroyed, except for several quotations, as a precaution), finds himself grounded in affirming: “If you can show me that one of these men is mentioned by the noted writers of the epoch — these events [supposedly] taking place under Tiberias and Claudios — then you would be right to consider me to be a perfect liar.”[152] Obviously, Julian did not belong to the long line of liars.

On the other hand, in the Fourth Century, Jerome — a saint according to the Church — exposed the truth by propagating the letters that Seneca exchanged with Paul, proving (as with the adventures imagined by the Acts of the Apostles) that the author of the epistles disposed of an historical and dogmatic existence well before Marcion’s discovery. (The question of the Gosepls that, canonical or apocryphal, are only, following Soden, kultlegende [“cult legends”] will be examined further on.)[153]

Everything happens today as if the historians, finally perceiving the enormity of the official lie, now devote themselves to evoking plausible historical Jesuses, despite the first two centuries, in which he played [the role of] angel-Messiah: a glimmer imprisoned in a body frees itself from death and returns to God. Not ignoring the character of the “pious fables” (according to Loisy, Bultmann, Guillermin and Schweitzer), or the anecdotes that exoterically translated the elements of the myth, the historians draw from New Testament, the texts of which were revised as late as the Fourth Century, information that is coupled with events from the very first decade. Brandon thus advances the idea of Jesus as a Zealot, crucified between two lestoi or brigands, from the term with which Joseph [Flavius] qualifies the anti-Roman guerrillas.[154] So as to win the good graces of Rome, the Pauline school made a pacifist into a martyr, crucified not by the Romans but by the Jews. As for Robert Amberlain, who bases himself on the crucifications of Jacob and Simon (the sons of Juda of Gamala), he infers that Jesus was their father, also a Zealot.[155]

Elements of a Forgery

The 70-odd canonical and apocryphal scriptures elaborated for the greatest glory of the Messiah Jesus illustrates in an exemplary manner a remark by Robert Graves: “The tales (are) especially explications of rituals or religious theories presented under the form of histories: a veritable compendium of instructions in the manner of the Hebraic books and possessing many points in common with them.”[156]

Such a large number of elements entered into the fabrication of a historical Jesus that accounting for them all would require several volumes and a quantity of energy that, for my part, I would prefer to invest in more passionate matters. Thus I will content myself with recalling the most obvious.

The only Jesus known in the First Century was the biblical Joshua, son of Noun, and Jesus ben Shira, whose name appears in a book of Wisdom.

The myth of Joshua carried a double eschatology: a natural salvation recalled by the River Jordan, beyond which the successor of Moses led his people, and a universal salvation because the crossing of the celestial river, or the baptismal immersion in the waves, was accomplished without striking any blows against the kingdom of the Father. The syncretism born from the Zealot opposition to the Roman occupiers did not fail to found the preoccupations of the Zealots, Essenes, and Nazarenes in a universal eschatology. The reincarnation of the Tsedeq, the Just, martryed around 63 [B.C.E.], was revived by the crucification of Jacob and Simon of Gamala, brothers or witnesses of God, according to a midrashic expression reprized by the Apocalypse attributed to John.

In Revolution in Judea [English in original], Maccoby supposes that Barrabas and Jesus were actually one person: the first, put to death as a “bandit,” politically symbolized the second. For myself, I am inclined to approach the meanings of the two names: Bar Abbas, Son of the Father, and Joshua/Jesus, “God saved, saves, will save.” This is very much like the trinity of Naassene sects that clearly evoked Kalakau or Adam, the man from on high; Saulassau, the man from below; and Zeesai, the Jordan that flows towards the high and that Adam deposed [dechu] through terrestrial suffering overcome so as to return to the Father.

It is still Joshua, the Jordan and the soul imprisoned in matter that is described by a Naassene hymn transcribed in the Elenchos:

Jesus said, regard the Father
Pursued by evil on the earth
Far from your breath, she [the Earth] truly wanders
It looks to flee from bitter chaos
and it does not know how to cross it.

In the manner of Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage who died in 258, the Catholics called Ecclesiasticus liber or Ecclesiastic the Sophia Iesou uiou Sirach (the Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach), the last sapiential book to figure in the Bible of the Seventy. Written on the eve of the Maccabees’ uprising, the work enjoyed a great reputation among the Zealots.

“Whoever seizes the Law receives Wisdom.” And this “comes before him like a mother, like a virgin wife, she welcomes it; she nourishes it with the bread of prudence, she gives it the water of wisdom to drink.” As in all the Gnostic and Christian developments, this Sophia, mother, wife and virgin (all at the same time) rules at the side of God and communicates her knowledge (her gnosis) to the Sons of Israel so that they can be saved. But her remarks encompass more than just the Hebrew people. She meant to found an alliance in which God encountered Israel so as to promote the order that will permit all of humanity to accede to salvation.

Thus the Essene sects referred to a New Alliance (Novum Testamentum, in Latin), the universal message of which the Master of Justice would express through his return.

In his study of Lilith, Jacques Brill says, with pertinence, with respect to the Sophia Iesou uiou Sirach: “The author of it is represented as a child whose marvelous deeds and gestures illustrate wisdom, in the manner in which the deeds and gestures of Jesus are treated in the Gospels of Childhood.”[157]

The virgin wife and mother, the child nourished by divine wisdom — do not they offer to prophetic imaginations and commentators on community rules enough elements for an anecdotal staging that could facilitate access to simple souls? The clumsy and confused didactic of the Hebrew and Aramaic midrashim easily found among Greek authors a novelistic form that pleased the people. The Homelies of Peter, the Pastor of Hermas, the Acts, the apocryphal and canonical gospels were [all] literary fictions with apologetic pretensions.

Before the staging and imagery illustrated [certain] allegories and symbols, there might have existed other sapientaux compilations continuing [the saga of] Jesus ben Sirach. This is the case with a work discovered at Nag-Hammadi: The Hidden Words that Jesus the Living Said and Were Transcribed by Didyme Jude Thomas, which the Catholics would call the Gospel of Thomas.[158]

The idea of a Jesus who restored a Sapientale tradition opportunely doubled as the angel-messiah with a human nature. Here is expressed the figure of [Jesus as] an insurgent, an audacious thinker, a philosopher proferring the truths of biblical morality, of which Jewish orthodoxy (cramped by its sacerdotal rituals) made so little. The Sophia that is dispensed under his name serves as a guide for the leaders of the Nazarene and Ebionite communities; it also brings to them the authority of the master who reflects on his disciples, witnesses, and brothers in spirit.

Other compilations of Sapienatux remarks made by Jesus ben Sirach were propagated ever since Basilides, in the Second Century, affirmed receiving from Matthew the secret doctrines of the Savior — the name Jesus being confused with the saving role of the Sophia-Spirit. There would exist under the name Matthew, alias Levy, an apocryhphal gospel and a gospel revised according to the Catholic canon.

The hypothetical conjunction of a sage born from the book of Jesus ben Sirach and the angelos-christos named Jesus is confirmed when one finds out that, around 100–110, the Christian Gnostic Satornil of Antiochus, who was the first to found his doctrine on the name of Jesus, established a distinction between a just and wise man named Iesou, on the one hand, and, on the other other, the Messiah or Christos, the intelligence of the transcendent God who united with him at the adult age.