102 Major Trends, p. 43.
102Major Trends, p. 43.
103Paul locates Paradise in the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2-3). In Test. Levi 2.7-9 there appears to be an amalgamation of an earlier recension which spoke of three heavens with a later one which spoke of seven. For seven heavens cf. Asc. Isa. 6:13; 7:13-9:42; TB Hagigah 12b; Pesiqta Rabbati 98b. In 3 Baruch 2-11 there are five heavens (cf. Apocalypse of Zephaniah in Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 5.11.77.2); in 2 Enoch 9-22 there are ten.
104K. Preisendanz, Papyri Magicae Graecae, II (Leipzig, 1931), 160, reproduces an amulet inscription of the fifth century A.D. giving the names of six of the heavens and their respective archons.
105From these “palaces” some of the principal treatises receive their names: the Lesser Hekhaloth, the Greater Hekhaloth, the Book of the Hekhaloth (edited with an English translation by H. Odeberg: 3 Enoch or the Hebrew Book of Enoch [Cambridge, 1928]); the Treatise of the Hekhaloth (German translation by A. Wünsche in Aus Israels Lehrhallen, III [Leipzig, 1909], 33-47).
106From Origen, Against Celsus 7.40, it may be inferred that as early as Celsus (c. A.D. 180) the names of the heavenly gatekeepers featured in the ritual of the gnostic sect of Ophites.