particular demon, and, with the help of these names and of sundry amulets and incantations, we are to make shift. The exclusive use of the name of Jesus Christ or of the living God is not here advocated by the Testament as it is by Origen. Clearly the Christianity of the Testament, if it be originally Christian at all, is of a very different type to Origen's. The real analogue to the faith here revealed is to be found among the Palestinian Essenes, who cherished as a secret lore "the names of the angels," so that the neophyte, on entering their order, took an oath not to reveal them (Josephus, De Bello Iud., ii. 142). The same Essenes had great skill as leeches, because they had sought and found roots and qualities of stones which warded off disease. The entire section of the Testament in which these thirty-six decani and their functions and countervailing angels are enumerated has nothing Christian about it. The coincidence with Paul's epistle must therefore be due to the fact that he and the writer of the Testament had, as Jews, a common stock of demonological beliefs.
These thirty-six world-rulers, so we read in the Testament, had heads shaped like dogs, asses, oxen, and birds. So in a passage of Celsus which Origen (vi. 33) quotes we learn that the shapes of the world-rulers[1] were those of lions, oxen, dragons, eagles, bears, or dogs. Such is the circle of superstition in which the writer of the Testament moves. When the Testament calls these thirty-six kosmokratores by the name of elements, stoicheia, it explains several enigmatical passages in Paul's epistles, e.g. Gal. iv. 3: "So we also, when we were children, were held in bondage under the elements (stoicheia) of the world: but when the fulness of time came, God sent forth his Son … that he might redeem them that were under the law." Again, in Gal. iv. 9 Paul exhorts his converts, who have now come to know God and to be known of God, not to turn them back again to the weak and beggarly elements (stoicheia), whereunto they desire to be in bondage
- ↑ ἀρχοντικὰς μορφάς
