rationalskepticism.org

duvduv wrote:Is it possible to reconstruct the whole environment and person of Chrestus to gain a clearer perspective of who he and his followers were, and when they ceased to exist to be replaced in the conventional narrative by Jesus of the NT and the Christians?

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 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; [so can be] seen as an early precursor to what was to be Christianity ...

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

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 [believed to have been] 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, [i] a contemporary of Moses[17], or [ii] 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], [iii] 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