The Corpus Hermeticum in relation to Christianity

[MrMacSon]

The Corpus Hermeticum are the core documents of the Hermetic tradition. Dating from early in the Christian era, they were mistakenly dated to a much earlier period by Church officials (and everyone else) up until the 15th century. Because of this, they were allowed to survive and we[re] seen as an early precursor to what was to be Christianity. We know today that they were, in fact, from the early Christian era, and came out of the turbulent religious seas of Hellenic Egypt.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/herm/

Introduction

The Hermetic tradition represents a non-Christian lineage of Hellenistic Gnosticism. The tradition and its writings date to at least the first century B.C.E., and the texts we possess were all written prior to the second century C.E. The surviving writings of the tradition, known as the Corpus Hermeticum (the "Hermetic body of writings") were lost to the Latin West after classical times, but survived in eastern Byzantine libraries. Their rediscovery and translation into Latin during the late-fifteenth century, by the Italian Renaissance court of Cosimo de Medici, provided a seminal force in the development of Renaissance thought and culture. These eighteen tracts of the Corpus Hermeticum, along with the Perfect Sermon (also called the Asclepius), are the foundational documents of the Hermetic tradition.

http://gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm#NHL

The fifteen tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum, along with 'The Perfect Sermon' or 'The Asclepius', are the foundation documents of the Hermetic tradition. Written by unknown authors in Egypt sometime before the end of the third century C.E., they were part of a once substantial literature attributed to the mythic figure of Hermes Trismegistus, a Hellenistic fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.

This literature came out of the same religious and philosophical ferment that produced Neoplatonism, Christianity, and the diverse collection of teachings usually lumped together under the label "Gnosticism": a ferment which had its roots in the impact of Platonic thought on the older traditions of the Hellenized East.

http://hermetic.com/texts/hermetica/h-intro.html

Many Christian writers, including Lactantius, Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, Campanella and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, considered Hermes Trismegistus to be a wise pagan prophet who foresaw the coming of Christianity.[13][14] They believed in a prisca theologia, the doctrine that a single, true theology exists, which threads through all religions. It was given by God to man in antiquity[15][16] and passed through a series of prophets, which included Zoroaster and Plato. In order to demonstrate the verity of the prisca theologia, Christians appropriated the Hermetic teachings for their own purposes. By this account, Hermes Trismegistus was either, according to the fathers of the Christian church, a contemporary of Moses[17] or the third in a line of men named Hermes, i.e. Enoch, Noah, and the Egyptian priest king who is known to us as Hermes Trismegistus,[18] or "thrice great" on account of being the greatest priest, philosopher and king.[18][19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_Trismegistus

Many of the Hermetic writings closely resemble portions of the Gospel of John ... Martin Luther actually believed that the author of the Corpus had merely copied the writings of John the Evangelist. A very old Egyptian text says:

• “In the beginning was Thoth; and Thoth was in Atum; and Thoth was Atum in the unfathomable reaches of primordial space.”

The Prologue of John’s Gospel, beginning with “The Word was with God and The Word was God”, closely resembles the actions of Thoth – and Thoth was the Egyptian name of Hermes, the god of Wisdom. Marsilio Ficino himself did not fail to see the similarities between the Corpus Hermeticum and John’s Gospel and even stressed these in his introduction to his translation.

http://philipcoppens.com/ficino_mag.html

Perhaps the converse of what Martin Luther believed occurred? ie. perhaps the Johaninne author copied the concepts of the Corpus Hermeticum?

Marsilio Ficino realised that Christianity was a variation – an interpretation – of a group of followers of the Corpus Hermeticum, specifically the cult of Serapis.

When Jean-François Champollion translated the hieroglyphic script in the 19th century, he stated that the Corpus contained the ancient Egyptian doctrine. According to two prominent scholars, Bloomfield and Stricker, the Corpus Hermeticum was indeed the “bible” of the Egyptian mystery religion of Serapis. Interestingly, this is exactly what Ficino himself believed. But he also believed that with the Corpus Hermeticum, the Florentine Academy received the “true bible”, i.e. the sacred literature which had been used in the training of John the Baptist and Jesus; it was the bible of original Christianity, the Serapis cult.

---Morton Bloomfield (1952) The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing; Michigan State College Press) pp.22-3.
---BH Stricker (1949) the Corpus Hermeticum Mnemosyne 2: 79-80


The central mythical image of Hermeticism, described in the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, “Poimandres, the Shepherd of Men”, is the ascent of the soul after death, and its passage through the spheres of the seven planets. When entering the Eighth Sphere (the Fixed Stars), it joins the company of the Blessed. An identical journey is described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the soul must traverse the several halls of the Otherworld and be weighed against a feather (an act performed by Thoth), before it can enter the Paradise of Osiris. Furthermore, Thoth and his Hellenised counterpart Hermes were the messengers of the gods, those who travelled between Heaven, the Kingdom of God, and Earth, the Realm of Man. In Christianity, this mediator role was Christ and Christ alone.

The link between the Corpus Hermeticum, John the Baptist and the Serapis Cult is able to answer one of the most nagging questions of the history of the “underground stream”, a question that Picknett and Prince’s book Templar Revelation posed when it showed that the people who worshipped John the Baptist were also Hermeticists ...

As the Corpus Hermeticum and the Serapis cult were the same and, as there is evidence that John the Baptist was a priest of Serapis, it follows that those who held John in high esteem would do this because of his particular doctrine, which was the Hermeticum. This also explains why the rediscovery of the knowledge of the Corpus Hermeticum happened within a group of people, the Florentine Academy, who had been driven to understand the true origins of the Baptist’s message. It may also explain why Leonardo Da Vinci was fascinated with John the Baptist …and why Florence was specifically cherished as being the capital of the Renaissance, for John the Baptist was the city’s patron saint.

http://philipcoppens.com/ficino_mag.html

• The Significance of the Hermetic Writings [in late medieval Europe]
  
  The Corpus Hermeticum landed like a well-aimed bomb amid the philosophical systems of late medieval Europe. Quotations from the Hermetic literature in the Church Fathers (who were never shy of leaning on pagan sources to prove a point) accepted a traditional chronology which dated "Hermes Trismegistus," as a historical figure, to the time of Moses. As a result, the Hermetic tractates' borrowings from Jewish scripture and Platonic philosophy were seen, in the Renaissance, as evidence that the Corpus Hermeticum had anticipated and influenced both. The Hermetic philosophy was seen as a primordial wisdom tradition, identified with the "Wisdom of the Egyptians" mentioned in Exodus and lauded in Platonic dialogues such as the Timaeus. It thus served as a useful club in the hands of intellectual rebels who sought to break the stranglehold of Aristotelian scholasticism on the universities at this time ... [continued in a post below ...]
  
  http://hermetic.com/texts/hermetica/h-intro.html

II. References and Fragments in the Fathers -- http://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v3/index.html

1. Justin Martyr
2. Athenagoras
3. Clement of Alexandria
4. Tertullian
5. Cyprian
6. Arnobius
7. Lactantius
8. Augustine
9. Cyril of Alexandria
10. Suidas
11. Anonymous

Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. 1964.

... There are many other quotations from, and references to Hermes Trismegistus in Lactantius’ Divine Institutes. He evidently thought that Hermes was a valuable ally in his campaign of using pagan wisdom in support of 'the truth' of Christianity ... he has pointed out that Hermes, like the Christians, speaks of God as “Father”; and in fact the word Father is not infrequently used of the supreme being in the Hermetic writings. Still more telling, however, was Hermes’ use of the expression “Son of God” for the demiurge. To demonstrate this remarkable confirmation of the truth of Christianity by this most ancient writer, Lactantius quotes, in Greek, a passage from the Asclepius (one of the quotations which has preserved for us fragments of the lost Greek original):

Hermes, in the book which is entitled The Perfect Word, made use of these words: “The Lord and Creator of all things, whom we have thought right to call God, since He made the second God visible and sensible. . . . Since, therefore, He made Him first, and alone, and one only, He appeared to Him beautiful, and most full of all good things; and He hallowed Him, and altogether loved Him as His own Son.” 16 The Perfect Word, or Sermo Perfectus, is a correct translation of the original Greek title of the Asclepius, 17 and the passage which Lactantius quotes in Greek corresponds roughly to a passage in our Latin translation. Thus the Asclepius, the work which contains the weird description of how the Egyptians fabricated their idols and the Lament for the Egyptian religion, becomes sanctified because it contains a prophecy concerning the Son of God.

It was not only in the Asclepius that the Hermetic writers used the expression “Son of God”. At the beginning of Pimander, which is the
Hermetic account of creation, the act of creation is said to be through a luminous Word, who is the Son of God. 18 When discussing the Son of God as the creative Word, with quotations from the Scriptures, Lactantius brings in Gentile confirmation, pointing out that the Greeks speak of Him as the Logos, and also Trismegistus. He was doubtless thinking of the passage on the creative Word as the Son of God in the Pimander, and he adds that “Trismegistus, who by some means or other searched into almost all truth, often described the excellence and the majesty of the Word.” 19

Indeed, Lactantius regards Hermes Trismegistus as one of the most important of the Gentile seers and prophets who foresaw the coming
of Christianity, because he spoke of the Son of God and of the Word. In three passages of the Institutes he cites Trismegistus with the Sibyls as testifying to the coming of Christ. 20 Lactantius nowhere says anything against Hermes Trismegistus. He is always the most ancient and all-wise writer, the tenor of whose works is agreeable to Christianity and whose mention of God the Son places him with the Sibyls as a Gentile prophet. In general passages Lactantius condemns the worshipping of images, and he also thinks that the demons used by Magi are evil fallen angels. 21 These things are, however, never associated by him with Trismegistus, who always appears as a revered authority on divine truths. It is no wonder that Lactantius became a favourite Father for the Renaissance Magus who wished to remain a Christian.

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/C ... es%201.htm

"As early as Origen's Contra Celsus (I, 28), we encounter the claim that it was in Egypt, and specifically as an adult laborer, that Jesus had learned all the magical arts with which he worked miracles and on which he based his divinity. The tradition also occurred in early rabbinic literature, but it was of course suppressed in official Christianity." - Hornung, 2001, pp.76-77.


The Hermetic Divine triad

In Ancient Egyptian theology, divine triads were used to express the divine family-unit: usually composed out of Pharaoh (the son) and a divine couple (father & mother), legitimizing his rule as divine king. Pharaoh Akhenaten had introduced a monotheistic triad (exclusive and against all other deities): Aten, Akhenaten and Nefertiti. In Heliopolis, the original triad was Atum, Shu and Tefnut; in Memphis, Ptah, Sekhmet and Nefertem emerged; whereas Thebes worshipped Amun, Mut and Khonsu. The trinity naturally developed into three or one Ennead.

In Hermetic[s] triad reads as :

1. God, the Unbegotten One, the essence of being, the Father of All - the "Decad" ;
2. Nous, the First Intellect, the Self-Begotten One, the Mind or Light of God - the "Ennead" ;
3. Logos, the "son" from "Nous", the Begotten One above the Seven Archons - the "Ogdoad".

The One Entity or God (the "Tenth") is known to Its creation as the One Mind or Hermes which contains the "noetic" root of every individual existing thing (cf. Plato, Spinoza). This Divine Mind (the attributes or names of the nameless God) allows all things to be sympathetic transformations (adaptations, modi) of God.

LOGOS
The "logos" is a "holy word", coming forth from the Light of the Divine Nous, the Ninth Sphere of Being, situated between the Decad of God Himself and the Ogdoad of the blessed souls, fixed stars and the Deities.

• (1) Decad : God Himself ;
  (2) Ennead : Divine Nous, Light, Godman Hermes Autogenes ;
  (3) Ogdoad : Logos or "son of God" ;
  (4) Hebdomad : the Seven Governors of the world.

Hermetism is initiatory because it wants to elevate the soul to the level of its true Divine nature. Palingenesia is an ascension while alive. Rebirth implies more than just a confrontation with the Gods (as in Ancient Egypt), but a true interaction between Perfect Man and -thanks to the Presence of Mind- God. This interaction leads to a total emergence of the Divine spark in man and hence to his Deification (finally being completely his own Divine Self and thus himself "a God", a being permanently realizing the Enneadic nature (XIII.3,10 & 14). This highest state may be attained in the afterlife, although the Ogdoadic nature may be realized while alive on Earth.

http://maat.sofiatopia.org/ten_keys.htm

[MrMacSon]

.

Thrice-Greatest Hermes

Volume 2

by G. R. S. Mead

[1906]

-

• 2. Corpus Hermeticum
  3. The Perfect Sermon; or the Asclepius

[MrMacSon]

The Significance of the Hermetic Writings [in late medieval Europe]

The Corpus Hermeticum landed like a well-aimed bomb amid the philosophical systems of late medieval Europe. Quotations from the Hermetic literature in the Church Fathers (who were never shy of leaning on pagan sources to prove a point) accepted a traditional chronology which dated "Hermes Trismegistus," as a historical figure, to the time of Moses. As a result, the Hermetic tractates' borrowings from Jewish scripture and Platonic philosophy were seen, in the Renaissance, as evidence that the Corpus Hermeticum had anticipated and influenced both. The Hermetic philosophy was seen as a primordial wisdom tradition, identified with the "Wisdom of the Egyptians" mentioned in Exodus and lauded in Platonic dialogues such as the Timaeus. It thus served as a useful club in the hands of intellectual rebels who sought to break the stranglehold of Aristotelian scholasticism on the universities at this time.

It also provided one of the most important weapons to another major rebellion of the age - the attempt to re-establish magic as a socially acceptable spiritual path in the Christian West. Another body of literature attributed to Hermes Trismegistus was made up of astrological, alchemical and magical texts. If, as the scholars of the Renaissance believed, Hermes was a historical person who had written all these things, and if Church Fathers had quoted his philosophical works with approval, and if those same works could be shown to be wholly in keeping with some definitions of Christianity, then the whole structure of magical Hermeticism could be given a second-hand legitimacy in a Christian context.

This didn't work, of course; the radical redefinition of Western Christianity that took place in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation hardened doctrinal barriers to the point that people were being burned in the sixteenth century for practices that were considered evidences of devoutness in the fourteenth. The attempt, though, made the language and concepts of the Hermetic tractates central to much of post-medieval magic in the West.

http://hermetic.com/texts/hermetica/h-intro.html

[MrMacSon]

.
More from Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. 1964 -

Festugière has analysed the state of mind of the epoch, roughly the second century after the birth of Christ, in which the Asclepius and the Hermetic treatises which have reached us in the Corpus Hermeticum collection were written. Externally that world was highly organised and at peace. The pax Romana was at the height of its efficiency and the mixed populations of the Empire were governed by an efficient bureaucracy. Communications along the great Roman roads were excellent. The educated classes had absorbed the Graeco-Roman type of culture, based on the seven liberal arts. The mental and spiritual condition of this world was curious. The mighty intellectual effort of Greek philosophy was exhausted, had come to a standstill, to a dead end, perhaps because Greek thinking never took the momentous step of experimental verification of its hypotheses—a step which was not to be taken until fifteen centuries later with the birth of modern scientific thinking in the seventeenth century.

The world of the second century was weary of Greek dialectics which seemed to lead to no certain results. Platonists, Stoics, Epicureans could only repeat the theories of their various schools without making any further advances, and the tenets of the schools were boiled down in textbook form, in manuals which formed the basis of philosophical instruction within the Empire. In so far as it is Greek in origin, the philosophy of the Hermetic writings is of this standardised type, with its smattering of Platonism, Neoplatonism, Stoicism, and the other Greek schools of thought.

This world of the second century was, however, seeking intensively for knowledge of reality, for an answer to its problems which the normal education failed to give. It turned to other ways of seeking an answer, intuitive, mystical, magical. Since reason seemed to have failed, it sought to cultivate the Nous, the intuitive faculty in man. Philosophy was to be used, not as a dialectical exercise, but as a way of reaching intuitive knowledge of the divine and of the meaning of the world, as a gnosis, in short, to be prepared for by ascetic discipline and a religious way of life. The Hermetic treatises, which often take the form of dialogues between master and disciple, usually culminate in a kind of ecstasy in which the adept is satisfied that he has received an illumination and breaks out into hymns of praise. He seems to reach this illumination through contemplation of the world or the cosmos, or rather through contemplation of the cosmos as reflected in his own Nous or mens which separates out for him its divine meaning and gives him a spiritual mastery over it, as in the familiar gnostic revelation or experience of the ascent of the soul through the spheres of the planets to become immersed in the divine. Thus that religion of the world which runs as an undercurrent in much of Greek thought, particularly in Platonism and Stoicism, becomes in Hermetism actually a religion, a cult without temples or liturgy, followed in the mind alone, a religious philosophy or philosophical religion containing a gnosis.
 
The men of the second century were thoroughly imbued with the idea (which the Renaissance imbibed from them) that what is old is pure and holy, that the earliest thinkers walked more closely with the gods than the busy rationalists, their successors. Hence the strong revival of Pythagoreanism in this age.

http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/C ... es%201.htm

[MrMacSon]

George Mead has noted the Shepherd of Hermas aligns with Hermetic literature and noted others have also thought similarly (ie. Hilgers1, Reitzenstein2,) -

“It is also of very great interest to notice the many intimate points of contact between the contents of the Apocalyptic Hermas and the teaching of the Early ‘Shepherd of Men’ tractate of the mystic school who looked to Hermes the Thrice-Greatest as their inspirer; that is to say, the earliest deposit of the Trismegistic literature."

Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?—An Enquiry into the Talmud Jesus Stories, the Toldoth Jeschu, and Some Curious Statements of Epiphanius (London, 1903), pp. 365 ff.

• 1 Hilgers (J.), De Hermetis Trismegisti Poimandro Commentatio (Bonn, 1855)
  
  2 Reitzenstein, Richard (1904) Poimandres; studien zur griechisch-ägyptischen und frühchristlichen literatur. Leipzig, Tuebner
  
  • See reference to this in Pagan Regeneration: A Study of Mystery Initiations in the Graeco-Roman World by Harold R Willoughby (p.199)
    
    and in Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity by Luke Timothy Johnson

  Reitzenstein ...holds that the figure of the Shepherd in the Christian writing of the Shepherd of Hermes, belonging to the earlier part of the second century, was borrowed from that of Poimandres in which Hermes appears in treatis No. 1 of the Corpus [Hermeticum).
  
  The Gospels as Historical Documents, Part III: The Fourth Gospel By Vincent Henry Stanton

  (footnote 1; p.195)

It seems that Hilgers thought 'Hermes' was a response to Hermas, but Mead thinks otherwise saying -

In my opinion, indeed, the very name Hermas betrays more clearly than anything else the “Hermes” source of the Christian writer’s setting of part of his most interesting apocalyptic. “Hermas” is because of “Hermes”

although Mead then says -

This, however, does not mean to say that “Hermas” took the setting of the introduction of his Pastoral apocalypses from precisely the same text of the “Pœmandres” which now lies before us, for our present text is manifestly the redaction of an earlier form; so that if we could recover the other earlier form we should in all probability find some additional verbal agreement of “Hermas” with “Hermes.”

http://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v1/th144.html

[DCHindley]

Mac,

The parallels to Christianity are scant. You will see a much closer analogue with Judean creation myths from Genesis.

As for the Shepherd of Hermas, I believe that Jesus Christ is only mentioned once in it! That there might be a parallel or two with the Hermetic literature is just as unimportant.

FWIW, the number of non-alchemical Hermetic tracts differs by edition, but Walter Scot's edition of the Hermetica (4 vols 1924-1936) breaks the Greek fragments into 18, the most famous being the first one, often known as The Poimandres. There are three more tracts preserved in Latin translation, known as The Asclepius, and more fragments are to be found in Stobaeus. You can still find these volumes in print, the one with the texts and translations being volume 1, or at least not too hard to find used online. The problem with these volumes is that Scott took some pretty serious liberties WRT textual emendations, so some folks do not like his edition at all. Because they were published after 1925 they are still under copyright here in the US of A. There might be online versions of parts of them, but I don't think you can download them as PDFs (well, at least not legally). Personally I found it interesting, but it was very difficult to follow his emendations (I think he brackets what he thinks is in the wrong place, and then double brackets the same text where he thinks it should have been "originally"). Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

In his 1906 Thrice Greatest Hermes, Mead published a Prolegomena (vol 1), and translations of the 18 Greek tracts and the Latin Asclepius as a single chapter (vol 2). Excerpts from Stobaeus are in vol 3. IIUC, he sticks closer to the text as found in the mss and does not try to emend it nearly as much as Scott later did. Vol 3 also has a summary of quotes and allusions to the known tracts in the Church fathers and in ancient philosophers. These volumes are all available for download online. Although a Theosophist in the highest echelons of that movement, Mead seems erudite (he had full academic credentials for his day) and doesn't seem to grandstand or make more of things than seems due, so I like his stuff. However, he was speculating a lot, especially in the Prolegomena volume.

For an idea how much he speculates, see what he did with Gnosticism as described by Irenaeus and other Church Fathers in his Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1901, 2nd ed 1906). Now that we have the Nag Hammadi books, we can see that the Church fathers were closer than Mead suspected, but not so close to not be speculative themselves.

If one has interest, he also translates the fragments of The Chaldean Oracles in 2 volumes (1908), speculates about the figure of Apollonius of Tyana (1901), and of course goes into quite a lot of detail about whether Jewish literature (Talmuds, Toledot Jeschu, etc) presents a case for Jesus being based on a Judean figure who lived 100 BCE (Did Jesus Live 100 BC?, 1903), and speculates again about Simon Magus - An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism (1892).

Fun fun!

DCH (gotta sleep)

[MrMacSon]

Mac,

The parallels to Christianity are scant. You will see a much closer analogue with Judean creation myths from Genesis.

Perhaps. Yet perhaps there is some confluence in the philosophy of early antiquity among Judean creation myths from Genesis, Greek philosophy, Egyptian philosophy (such as the Corpus Hermeticum), and the philosophy of the likes of Philo, Plutarch, etc,

As for the Shepherd of Hermas, I believe that Jesus Christ is only mentioned once in it! That there might be a parallel or two with the Hermetic literature is just as unimportant.

The Shepherd of Hermas - "the Angel of repentance" - may have been attached to some figurines of 'the Good Shepherd'* as well as a symbol for Christ, or a traditional pagan kriophoros. In parable 5, the author mentions a 'Son of God', as a virtuous man filled with a Holy "pre-existent spirit" and adopted as the Son.

• * Psalm 23; John 10:1-21; Matthew 2:6, Matthew 9:36, Matthew 25:32, Matthew 26:31, Mark 6:34, Mark 14:27, Hebrews 13:20, 1 Peter 2:25, 1 Peter 5:4, and Revelation 7:17.

The Shepherd of Hermas is considered to have been written by a Hermes of Philippopolis, one of the 'Seventy Disciples' (Luke 10:1–24) and supposedly was bishop in Philippopolis in Thrace (today's Plovdiv, Bulgaria). He is supposedly referenced in Romans 16:14 -

Rom 16:14 - Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers who are with them.

Interestingly, in the long list of greetings of Romans 16 is Rom 16:4 - "all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks as well".

The Shepherd of Hermas (Hermes of Philippopolis(?)) stated that he was a contemporary of Clement of Rome (possibly Pope Clement I; d. c. 95). However, the Muratorian Canon (and other ancient sources(?)) asserts that he was a brother of Pope Pius I (d. 155), and internal evidence in the Shepherd seems to support the later date.

The Shepherd of Hermas was regarded as scripture by Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian. Yet, St. Jerome stated that it was known very little in the Western Church. It was much more popular in the Eastern Church.

For an idea how much he [Mead] speculates, see what he did with Gnosticism as described by Irenaeus and other Church Fathers in his Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1901, 2nd ed 1906). Now that we have the Nag Hammadi books, we can see that the Church fathers were closer than Mead suspected, but not so close to not be speculative themselves.

What do you mean by " the Church fathers were closer than Mead suspected"? -and by "but not so close to not be speculative themselves"?

• the Church fathers were closer to the Corpus Hermeticum than Mead suspected? closer to paganism or gnosticism?

[MrMacSon]

Acts 14:8-18 makes a clear reference to Greek mythology, and may be interacting with a story that also appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 8.626ff

Paul heals a man in Lystra who was crippled in the feet.

Among the many inscriptions associated with Lystra is a dedication to Zeus of a statue of Hermes.

There are other inscriptions which mention priests of Zeus and an altar dedicated to the “hearer of prayer,” presumably Zeus (Witherington, Acts, 422.). The local Zeus was known as Zeus Ampelites and was pictured as an elderly man with a beard, accompanied by Hermes, a young male assistant (The krater to the left depicts Zeus and Hermes in this way, although it dates to about 450 B.C.) Witherington suggests that we have a hint of the relative ages of Barnabas (called Zeus here) and Paul; Barnabas was the elder, Paul was likely no more than 40 by this time.

... When [Paul] heals the man he creates a sensation, and a crowd forms claiming that the gods have come in human form. Paul is called Hermes, (or Mercurias in the Latin, KJV, the Greek is Hermes). Hermes was the messenger of the gods, Paul is given this name because he was the chief spokesperson. Barnabas is called Zeus (or Jupiter, Latin, KJV), Zeus was the “father” of the gods. Why does the crowd make the connection between Paul and Hermes? There is a legend which may shed some light on this incident.

In Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.626ff there is a legend that Zeus and Hermes had visited the towns and villages of the region in human form, but did not receive any hospitality. When they came to the home of the poor and elderly Baucis and Philemon they were invited in, the couple gave them the last of their food and the best comfort they could. As Baucis prepared the meal, there was plenty of food and the wine kept “welling up of itself.” The couple became greatly afraid because of the miracle, so the gods revealed themselves and told them that they were the only people to welcome them; they would be blessed while the whole region was destroyed. The couple asked only to be priests in the temple of Zeus and that they die at the same time, so that neither had to see the tomb of the other.

https://readingacts.com/tag/zeus-and-hermes/

(NIV)
11 When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!”
12 Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker.

They are said to have replied -

14 But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of this, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd, shouting: 15 “Friends, why are you doing this? We too are only human, like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them...

Interestingly, in between, Acts 14:13 has -

13 The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them ...

and later Acts 14:18-

18 Even with these words, they had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them.

and Acts 14:19 -

19 Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead.
20 But after the disciples had gathered around him, he got up and went back into the city. The next day he and Barnabas left for Derbe.

[billd89]

"The Corpus Hermeticum" is a ~10th C. AD collection; that little library's impact on orthodox Christianity after the 14th C. is therefore limited to whatever influence re-publication had on (later) offshoots like the Freemasons, Swedenbourgism, etc. (Negligible, I think.) If you would call a 20th C. cult like Alcoholics Anonymous 'significant', then the Corpus Hermeticum warrants greater acclaim; personally, I would characterize that "relation to Christianity" as trivial, merely incidental, however.

What is the impact of Hermeticism on Early Christianity? If the subculture may be dated to the 1st C BC, then any parallel Xian themes might be derivative from passing Hermetica of the day (50-250 AD). That's what's important -- not any influence after the 3rd C. AD. Unfortunately, the general opinion (i.e. most scholars, who Late Date) would foreclose that possibility altogether. This 'consensus' is wrong, however; see how.

M. Escolano-Poveda, Zosimos Aigyptiakos. Identifying the Imagery of the “Visions” and Locating Zosimos of Panopolis in His Egyptian Context [2022] p.115:

Fowden has pointed out the phenomenon of Hermetism was not known outside of Egypt before the 3rd cent. CE, ¹⁵⁵

155. Fowden, 1986, p.198.

Is this dominant/consensus opinion true: 'Hermeticism was unknown outside Egypt before c.250 AD' ..... YES or NO?

Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science [2009], p.11:

The earliest external references to Hermes Trismegistus as an authoritative figure come into view in early Christian writings of the second and third centuries. Athenagoras (late second cent. {c.180 AD}) cites a passage of an unknown Hermetic work to support the well-known antipagan argument that the beings worshipped as gods by the polytheists were all really men of bygone times. Tertullian (fl. ca 200 {c.210 AD}) points to the limits of human knowledge when he says that not even Hermes, “the master of all natural philosophers,” could explain the origin of matter. One can see from such a remark that even from the beginnings of the attestation of the Hermetica, authors who knew them believed them to be very ancient.

Athenagoras and Tertullian were outside Egypt, 2nd C. AD. Yet even the earliest surviving attestations cannot be the very first time something was ever read or known. In antiquity, we know the chronological discrepancy between a famous author and answering critic elsewhere 'recording for posterity' was typically +50-75 years, but those discussing Hermes Trismegistus also themselves believed the material was much older. In any case, Hermeticism was well-known outside Egypt by the 2nd C. AD, and we can safely 'Late Date' the Hermetica's emergence closer to c.75-150 AD, not "the 3rd cent. CE".

Fowden and followers are wrong, simply.

Philo of Byblos, composing Sanchuniathon c.135 AD, refers to very old books of Hermes Trismegistus; again, we can assume the Egyptian material should be at least +75 years older (conservatively, c.60-75 AD) -- and not at all recent -- to be thought 'ancient' in Lebanon ("outside Egypt"). It is therefore reasonable to conclude the Hermetica in its earliest form(s) was known outside Egypt by the early 2nd C. AD, if not in the 1st C. AD.

[nightshadetwine]

Scholars have come to the conclusion that the Hermetic texts contain actual Egyptian concepts. Christianity also has Egyptian concepts so instead of one of them influencing the other, it seems more likely to me that Hermeticism and Christianity are coming out of similar contexts and both contain Egyptian concepts.

Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2008), Jan Assmann:

In this context, the motif of One-and-millions returns frequently and in a number of variants. The “millions” are stated to be god’s body, his
limbs, his transformation, and even his name: “million of millions is his name.” By transforming himself into a millionfold reality, God has not ceased to be a unity. He is both one and millions, unity and plurality, simultaneously hidden and present in that mysterious way in which this theology is trying to grasp by means of the Ba concept... In my Moses the Egyptian I suggested that this new concept of god is not only a response to Amarna but also the origin of the Hermetic ideaof god—le dieu cosmique, deus mundus—a god who is anima mundi and whose body is the world. I also proposed that the Ramesside formula of One-and-millions not only echoes the corresponding Amarna formulations but also anticipates such Hermetic formulations as Hen kai pan, unaquae es omnia, etc. There is an uninterrupted line of textual tradition from the Ramesside age down to the Greco-Roman era... The idea of the world as the embodiment of a soul-like god and of god as a soul animating the world remained central in Egyptian theology even after the New Kingdom and the flourishing of theological dis-course. One is dealing here with the origin of a conception of the divine that was to become supremely important in late antiquity, namely, the “cosmic god,” the supreme deity in Stoicism, Hermetism, and related movements...

Poimandres: The Etymology of the Name and the Origins of the Hermetica, Peter Kingsley, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 56 (1993):

It would be easy to assume that the creation of an abstract entity called 'Understanding of Re' is the work of the Greeks, with their supposedly unique facility for philosophical abstraction. But that is not the case. The hypostasising--or personifying as a divine being in its own right--of a specific abstraction called P-eime nte-re, 'Understanding of Re' or 'Intelligence of Re', may not be attested elsewhere in Coptic; however, it is very familiar indeed in Egyptian religion itself. From the earliest known period the Egyptians were extremely fond of personifying--and divinising--abstractions, but the most important of all these deities were two in particular: Sia, 'Understanding' or 'Intelligence', and Hu,
'Word' or 'Command'. Already in the Pyramid Texts Sia stands at the right hand of Re. From then on he is 'the representative of Re' or Re's messenger; sometimes he is effectively equated with Re, but usually he is 'the son of Re', his chief assistant along with Hu-in the creation of the universe. It is certainly no coincidence that we find the same fundamental idea of a divine, personified Intelligence coupled with a divine, personified Word in the first of the Hermetica, where Poimandres as the divine Intelligence (Nous) is assisted by a personified Word (Logos) in the creation of the universe. But that is a matter we shall come back to later...

As noted earlier, the tendency among scholars who adhere to the Greek etymology of the name has been to claim--with more than a little proprietorial interest--that here we have a revealing example of the Hermetica's indebtedness to Judaeo-Christian tradition, in the form of the idea of a divine 'shepherd of men'. But apart from the fact that the notion of a shepherd of men has a long history stretching back to the dawn of Greek literature, and apart from the further fact that this history can be traced back earlier still, via Mycenaean culture, to its roots in the Near East what has also been missed is the evidence indicating that the Jewish and Christian ideas of God, saviour or spiritual guide as a shepherd evolved out of one religious tradition in particular: the Egyptian. There, naturally enough, the role was associated with one god above all--Re, 'the good shepherd of men', ever attentive, ever-conscious of the needs of his flock--and also with other Egyptian gods who performed the function of delegate or executor for Re. For Thoth, 'minister and counsellor of Re in the government of the world', there could be few more appropriate resurrections. In the case of Poimandres, just as in the case of Pancrates, the process of re-etymologising validates itself: the end justifies the means. Everything becomes very simple when we start to approach the Hermetica as arising in the first instance out of the humus of Egyptian social, cultural and religious traditions. From this basic perspective all the other contributing factors Greek and also Jewish (although not Christian: of Christian influence on the Hermetica there is not a trace) - fit naturally into place...

Then we come to the roles attributed, throughout the first of the Hermetica, to a divine personified Intelligence (nous) and a divine personified Word (logos) as responsible for the creation of the universe. Certain superficial, and dissatisfying, analogies can be drawn here with the roles played by logos and nous in earlier Greek philosophical tradition or in Philo of Alexandria; but in the vividness of the personifications and the exactness of the details these Hermetic figures correspond unmistakeably to the functions of Thoth-or Sia-and Hu in Egyptian theological tradition. It is the same with the repeated identification, again running through the first of the Hermetica, of the divine Nous or Poimandres with Life. This, too, makes little sense in terms of Greek philosophy; but it corresponds exactly to the fact that in Egyptian tradition Thoth, like Sia, is the giver of abundance and the 'lord of life'. Similarly, Poimandres's revelation starts with him undergoing a number of changes in appearance: he turns into light, then the light turns into dark, then the darkness turns into a watery, primal chaos. Scholars have repeatedly insisted on reducing the role of light and darkness in this first Hermetic treatise to one of strict dualism. But when we put aside these schematisations and read the text with fresh eyes we see that this is not the case at all. The light turns into darkness, fire leaps up out of the darkness. Here is no radical dualism: in Greek philosophical terms it is more or less baffling, but what it does correspond to exactly is the fundamental, subtle and often highly ambiguous idea in ancient Egypt of cosmology mirroring the everyday disappearance and reappearance of the sun, with darkness in one sense the opposite of the light but in another sense simply its primeval form. And to disperse any possible doubt that this is indeed the idea involved here, one need only add that our Hermetic text describes the frightful darkness which is transmuted into the primeval, watery chaos as being a coiled serpent. It is usual to compare this image with the theme of the 'outer darkness' as a great serpent in the Gnostic Pistis Sophia. But this, yet again, is to miss the essential point. The description in the Pistis Sophia, like similar ones in other Gnostic texts, derives its origin from Egyptian cosmological tradition. As for our Hermetic passage, it has far more exact and detailed parallels not in these contemporary or slightly later Gnostic texts but in ancient Egyptian descriptions-dating back to the Pyramid Texts-of the cosmic serpent coiled 'with its many coils' in the dark, chaotic waters of the primal abyss, representing the first stage of divine manifestation in the mythological past prior even to the appearance of the sun, and 'arising out of the darkness of the Primeval Waters before any definite thing yet existed'. What is more, this serpent-whose outer coils are the limits of creation-is the primordial form of God as he 'devises the Logos, the creative Word which lays down the laws of what is to be made'.

Some Notes on Biblical and Egyptian Theology" by John Strange in Egypt, Israel, and the Ancient Mediterranean World. Studies in Honor of Donald B. Redford, (Brill Academic Pub, May 2004) edited by Gary N. Knoppers:

And this borrowing from Egyptian wisdom is not superficial, as can be seen in Proverbs 1-9, in which a long praise of Lady Wisdom culminates in her own speech (chapter 8). She says that she is created as a kind of goddess, the firstborn of creation, and herself a collaborator in creation... The personification of wisdom is also found in Job 28, Sir 24:1-22, obviously partly modeled on Proverbs; Wis 7:7-9:18...It is impossible not to think of the goddess Ma'at and Egyptian concepts of wisdom...

The most profound influence from Egyptian theology on Biblical and Christian theology is to be found in creation theology... Already Breasted saw that the Shabaka-text contained a conception of the world and its creation which was the root of the later Greek notions of "nous" and "logos," and that "the Greek tradition of the origin of their philosophy in Egypt undoubtedly contains more of truth than has in recent years been conceded," and that "the habit... of interpreting philosophically the functions and relations of the Egyptian Gods... had already begun in Egypt" (Breasted 1901:54). This has been taken up in the penetrating and profound investigation by Erik Iversen: "Egyptian and Hermetic Doctrine" (1984). There the author, in a comparison between the text of the Shabaka-stele and key notions in the Hermetic literature, has demonstrated how the Hermetic literature is associated "with genuine and well-established Egyptian concepts and notions" and that "it seems hardly just... to discard or mistrust outright the unanimous statements of all Greek writers on Egypt, that although translated into philosophical terms their accounts of Egyptian philosophy and religious doctrine were to the best of their conviction fair renderings of them" (Iverson 1984:54)... He [Ptah] was the fount of divinity, comprising all the other gods who were parts of his immaterial body. His first creation act was Atum, a second god together with Ptah turned intelligible creation into sensible creation, thus creating the All, i.e., the sensible body of the creator, in which Atum functioned as the heart and the tongue, i.e. the thought and the word expressing the will of the creator... When we last approach the New Testament counterpart to the creation story in Genesis 1, the prologue to the Gospel of John (chap. 1), it should be taken into account that the Gospel of John uses a number of ideas which bear a very close resemblance to Hermetic literature (Dodd 1953:10-53). This is the more significant as the Gospel of John is possibly written in the Jewish Christian community in Egypt...

Now there are a number of striking similarities between some statements in the prologue[of gJohn] and passages in wisdom literature. Dodd (1953:274-75) demonstrates that "while the Logos of the prologue has many of the traits of the Word of God in the Old Testament, it is on the other side a concept closely similar to that of Wisdom, that is to say, the hypostatized thought of God projected into creation"... Finally, by making the creative word of God incarnate in Messiah, "the Son of God who was to come" (John 11:27), the Son of David, and the King of Israel, John in his prologue links the royal ideology from the Old Testament to the New Testament Christ, and we find a combination of royal ideology and creation theology. Christ is king and creator, like the kings from the temple in Jerusalem and like the Kings in Egypt. There is thus a nexus between the creation theology of Egypt, the legacy in Hellenism expressed in the Hermetic literature and Philo of Alexandria, and in the Bible, both in the creation story of Genesis and in the latest gospel, the Gospel of John.

Adoration of the Ram: Five hymns to Amun-Re from Hibis Temple (Yale Egyptological Seminar, 2006), David Klotz:

This description of Amun-Re "whose length and width are without boundaries," yet who is also "remote" and "mysterious" of visible form, as the source of "millions" should be compared with the following Hermetic description of god: "For this is his body, neither tangible nor visible nor measurable nor dimensional nor like any other body; it is not fire nor water nor air nor spirit, yet all things come from it"... The issue of intellectual and religious cross-cultural interchange is extremely complex, and no culture can be credited with being the source of all thought. Yet, the fact that many images and concepts, as formulated in the Hibis texts, reappear very similarly in Apocalyptic, Gnostic, Hermetic, Orphic, and Magical texts – in addition to the philosophical works of Plato, Iamblichus, and Plotinus – deserves serious attention. The additional fact, moreover, that many of these texts either were written in Egypt (i.e. Gnostic, Hermetic, and Magical texts) or claim Egyptian origin (e.g. Plato’s Timaeus, Iamblichus’s De mysteriis, Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride) should arouse even greater interest. In effect, classical and other texts claiming to reflect Egyptian concepts or mysteries do in fact reflect authentic Egyptian sources. More importantly, they correspond precisely with religious texts that actually date to this crucial period of heightened cultural exchange.

Handbook of Egyptian Mythology (ABC-CLIO, 2002), Geraldine Pinch:

The Hermetica were principally a development of Greek philosophy. It used to be argued that the Hermetica were written and read only by Greeks until some Hermetic texts in Coptic were found. Coptic was a form of the Egyptian language used from the second century CE onward. It was written in the Greek alphabet with the addition of six signs borrowed from the Demotic script. Most scholars now agree that the traditional wisdom of the Egyptian priests and their knowledge of Egyptian myth were among the elements that made up the Hermetica...

It [the Memphite Theology] reconciles the separate creation myths of Atum of Heliopolis and Ptah of Memphis and includes a first-person account by Ptah of how he created all life through his powers of thought and speech. This section has often been compared to the famous opening of St. John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”... From at least as early as the New Kingdom, the god Ptah could represent the creative mind. Then Sia and Hu were identified as the heart and tongue of Ptah. This concept is expounded in the so-called Memphite Theology and in various hymns to Ptah. The Ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was the organ of thought and feeling. So Ptah was said to have made the world after planning it in his heart. It was “through what the heart plans and the tongue commands” that everything was made... Sia and Hu were the principles of creative thought and speech personified as gods. Sia has also been translated as perception or insightful planning and Hu as authority or authoritative utterance... In the Pyramid Texts, Sia “who is at the right hand of Ra” is in charge of wisdom and carrying the god’s book. He is also described as being “in” the eye of Ra, so that the sun god can see and understand everything that happens in the world. In the Coffin Texts, Hu is called “the one who speaks in the darkness,” presumably the primeval dark before light was created