Gnostic and early Christian scholarship

Francis Legge

1853 – 1922

Francis Legge was a British journalist, archaeologist, and scholar of early Christianity and Gnosticism who served as president of the Royal Archaeological Institute. His two-volume Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity (1915) provided one of the earliest comprehensive surveys in English of the pre-Christian mystery religions, Gnostic sects, and magical traditions of the Hellenistic world, drawing on the full range of then-available papyrological and patristic evidence. His work helped establish the Greco-Roman religious background of early Christianity as a serious field of scholarly inquiry.