FORERUNNERS AND RIVALS OF CHRISTIANITY
PREFACE
The following pages are a modest attempt to bring beforethe public certain documents of great importance forthe understanding of the growth and development of theChristian religion. They are not new, almost all of themhaving been translated at one time or another into English,French, German, or Italian: but they are all practicallyunknown save to scholars, are all fragmentary, and withhardly an exception, are difficult to understand without arunning commentary. In these circumstances, I have venturedto follow, not for the first time, the advice given by Sir GastonMaspero to his pupils in one of his luminous lectures at theCollège de France. “If” said in effect that great master ofarchaeology, “you find yourselves in the presence of scatteredand diverse examples of any monument you cannot understand—funerarycones, amulets of unusual form, hypocephali, oranything else—make a collection of them. Search museums,journals of Egyptology, proceedings of learned societies, untilyou think they have no more novelties of the kind to offer you.Then put those you have collected side by side and study them.The features they have in common will then readily appear a