The Dating That Changed What the Texts Meant

The Renaissance received these writings as a revelation older than Moses, prophetic of Christianity, and preserved from the earliest Egyptian wisdom. That reading is what gave them their standing: they were translated into Latin ahead of Plato's own dialogues, and they underwrote a whole conception of an ancient theology running beneath the religions. Philological work in the early seventeenth century undid the claim. Isaac Casaubon showed on linguistic grounds that the Greek treatises belong to the Roman imperial period rather than to remote antiquity, and the argument was accepted. The effect on their reputation was severe and lasting, since a text valued for being older than Moses has little left if it is not.

Modern scholarship has restored their interest on different grounds. Read as products of Roman Egypt they become evidence for how Greek philosophy, Egyptian religion and Jewish and early Christian ideas met in one place, and the question of genuinely Egyptian content in them is argued seriously rather than assumed either way. The atlas records the late dating as established, the Renaissance reading as historically important and mistaken, and the extent of Egyptian material as a live question.