The simple answer to this question is: “No, he wasn’t. Hermes never existed as a historical person and, for that reason, cannot possibly have been a prophet of Christianity.” The truth of this answer cannot be contested, but nevertheless it is too limited. The late antique and medieval view that Hermes had been a teacher of divine wisdom in Egypt's remote past was incorrect, indeed. There is no place for him in the kind of history that deals with verifiable facts about a person's life and death and the world he lived in, but if we look at him from the perspective of the history of ideas, then this mythical figure was, and for many people even still is, an inspiring teacher of a strong religious view of the world. Hermes never lived but is still very much alive.

The belief that in pre-Christian Egypt Hermes had prophesied some typically Christian doctrines was in fact a rather late offshoot of a very complicated tradition, of which only a brief outline can be given here. The first centuries of our era saw the appearance of a great number of religiophilosophical writings that were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. These are usually called the “philosophical Hermetica,” in contrast to another group of texts that also circulated under his name and dealt with magic, astrology and alchemy, the so-called “technical (or: practical) Hermetica.” The best-known treatises of the first group are the seventeen tractates of the Greek Corpus Hermeticum (henceforth CH) and the lengthy Latin Asclepius, but there are also many fragments of unknown books that are quoted by Greek and Latin authors. In the second half of the last century, new fragments and even complete previously unknown books came to light, of which the Coptic Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth Sphere and the Armenian Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius are the most important. There is nothing typically Christian in these writings. As a matter of fact, Hermetism was a characteristic product of the “Late Pagan Mind” (Fowden). It taught a holistic vision of the universe, based upon the idea of an indissoluble interrelationship between God, the cosmos and the human being. As will become evident in the course of this chapter, the core elements of Hermetic teaching and practice that were based on this view were irreconcilable with those of Christianity.