ABSTRACT
Most of the earliest Christians were Jewish, with their movement taking inspiration from John's message and practice of cleansing. As an obviously missionary movement, the Christian "Way" soon bridged the Jewish/Gentile divide and the conversion process inevitably involved syncretistic and acculturative complexities, with some free-floating of Gospel messages detached from the old well-established authorities. As Moritz Friedlander had already argued, and even before him Moshe Gaster, ancient fragments preserved in rabbinic literature showed the "Jewish-Gnostic" speculations sprouting in the first centuries ce, to inspire that "Gnosticism" countered by the Church Father. The Jewish mystical preoccupations are centered very decidedly on the awesome glory of the godhead and the enormous range of angels around the heavenly throne, while for "classic Gnosticism" the High God is hidden and beyond attention. The Mandaean "aeonic system", might seem to have a more likely source in a syncretic Perso-Hellenistic milieu in which some influential Jewish input was accepted.
