Marcus held his knowledge to be the product of a divine revelation of the body of the
Anthropos:
Episemon In the account of his system given by Irenaeus (I. xiv.), copied by Hippolytus (
Ref. vi. 45) and by Epiphanius (
Haer. 34), τὸ ἐπίσημον is repeatedly used to denote the numerical character for six; the number 6 is ὁ ἐπίσημος ἀριθμός; the six-lettered name Ἰησοῦς is τὸ ἐπίσημον ὄνομα, etc., language perplexing to the old Latin translator, who renders the word by "insignis."
Eusebius (
Quaest. ad Marin. Mai,
Nov. Pat. Bib. iv. 299), copied by
Jerome or Pseudo-Jerome (
Brev. in Psal. 77, vii. 198, ed. Vallars.), suggested, as a way of reconciling the difference between the evangelists as to whether the Lord suffered at the third or the sixth hour, that a transcriber's error may have arisen from the likeness of Gamma and the Episemon,
i.e. apparently Γ and Ϝ. The source from which all modern writers have learned their use of the word
episemon is
Joseph Justus Scaliger's essay on the origin of the Ionic letters. He quoted from
Bede,
de Indigitatione, a statement of an old grammarian, who mentioned that the Greeks denote numbers by letters and for this purpose join to the letters of their alphabet three other characters:
Prima est ς quae dicitur Episimon et est nota numeri VI.; secunda est G quae vocatur kophe et valet in numero XC.; tertia est ϡ quae dicitur enneacosia quia valent DCCCC.The true account of these three characters seems to be that though the Phoenicians themselves did not use the letters of their alphabet for purposes of numeration, the Greeks, who derived their alphabet from them, did so in the 5th century BC; that their alphabet then still contained two of the Phoenician letters which in the next century were disused, viz., βαῦ in the sixth place, and κόππα, the Roman Q, coming after π; that these letters then took their natural place in the system of numeration, which was afterwards made complete by the addition, at the end of the letters of the alphabet, of another character to denote 900, which from its shape was at a considerably later period called σανπῖ.
Six With regard to the properties of the number six, Marcus and Clement were in part indebted to
Philo of Alexandria, who explained (
De Op. Mund. 3) that it is the first perfect number,
i.e., according to
Euclid's definition, one equal to the sum of the numbers 1, 2, 3, which divide it without remainder (
Aug.
de Civ. Dei, xi. 30), the second such number being 28, which is the sum of its divisors 1, 2, 4, 7, 14 (
Orig. t. 28 in
S. Joann.); that being 2 × 3 it arises from the marriage of a male and female,
i.e., odd and even number; that there are six directions of motion, forward, backward, right, left, up, down; etc. Marcus observed that • the world was made in
six days • in the new dispensation Jesus after
six days went up to the
Mount of Transfiguration • by the appearance of
Moses and
Elijah, the number of His company became
six • he suffered at the
sixth hour of the
sixth day of the week and concludes that this number has the power not only of production, but of regeneration. As seven is the number of the heavens, and eight is the supercelestial ogdoad, so six denotes the material creation (see also
Heracleon); and, in particular, the material body through which the Saviour revealed Himself to men's senses, and conveyed to them that enlightenment of their ignorance in which redemption consisted. Clement, if not Marcus, finds the Saviour's higher nature represented by the episemon, which is not taken into account by one who looks merely at the order of the letters in the alphabet, but reveals itself in the system of numeration. Irenaeus points out that the mysteries of Marcus all depend on the employment of the modern form of the Greek alphabet, and that they disappear when a
Semitic alphabet is used. He shows also (ii. 24) that it is possible to say as fine things about the properties of the number 5 as about those of the numbers which are glorified by Marcus. ==Practices==