Francis Legge

Francis Legge was an English scholar of ancient religions, active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A member of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, of which he was foreign secretary, and of the council of the Royal Asiatic Society, he wrote on Egyptian religion and on the religious history of the Roman Empire. His best known book, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, published in two volumes in 1915, surveys the Gnostic sects, Mithraism and Manichaeism, and he also translated the Philosophumena attributed to Hippolytus.