This openness to Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum was due to the view that Trismegistus had come from biblical antiquity, as well as his resemblance to the arisen Christ through his various resurrective incarnations. Since the first incarnation of Trismegistus had already been ascribed by Egyptian and Jewish authors as being Enoch, Christians saw him as coming from a time where God�s (Christ�s) presence was far more intimate and His numina directly impacted His creations (12 Mead).

Thus, Trismegistus may have been regarded as a �source� from which one is promised �the revelation of all mysteries,� �for there is nothing veiled which shall not be revealed, and hidden which shall not be made known� by way of inspired revelation (Mark 4:22; Luke 8:17).

Also, Trismegistus� succesive incarnations (See bottom of pg. 7) were reminiscent of the resurrection of Christ, simultaneously linking Trismegistus to Christ, humanizing the Pagan Trismegistus, and further substantiating his inclusion into the Christian tradition. Since figures such as Noah and Enoch were �unquestionably believed in those days,� Trismegistus� ancient gnosis and similarity to Christ�s having been resurrected made his doctrine almost as infallible as the gospels (Mead 13).

As Christ�s death and resurrection made him a humanized divine interlocutor between humanity and God, Trismegistus� trascendent nature would have humanized himself in the eyes of early Christians, who would have seen his divinely inspired teachings as readily accessible through his personalized nature. This presumed behavior is reflected in Fincino�s editio princeps, where he states that �ancient Christian theologians� were held �in utter stupefication at [his] doctrine of things divine� (Mead 12, 13). Since Trismegistus� Corpus Hermeticum offered a metaphysically intimate method of achieving closeness with the divine via spiritual ascension and gnosis, his personalized influence may have led some early Christian mystics to accept his frameworks.

The early Christian Gnostics illustrated this possibility by borrowing the concept of celestial asension from Trismegistus and developed it in relation to achieving closeness to Christ. The free exchange of ideas between Pagan and Christian mysticism was easily possible, as one �can follow in the Hermetic books�Judaeo-Egyptian gnosis, which, during the 1st century C.E., existed side by side with Christianity� (Mead 20, 28). Due to this cultic proximity and the immense popularity of Trismegistus among the church fathers heretofore mentioned, it is feasible that some the theosophic and mystic doctrines of the Corpus Hermeticum were incorporated into the early Christian Gnostic tradition (Mead 28). In particular, the concept of achieving successively higher spiritual states through the celestial spheres would have appealed to Christian mystics who sought to come closer to the numina of Christ and be imbued with gnosis, thus internalizing the Logos of His teachings and preparing them for the Second Coming.

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