The successor of Simon Magus was Menander, a Samaritan by birth, who also became a perfect adept in magic. He affirms that the first power is unknown to all, but that he himself is the person who has been sent forth by the invisible beings as a saviour for the salvation of men. The world was made by angels, who, as he also, like Simon, says, were produced by the Ennœa, He gives also, as he affirms, by means of the magic which he teaches knowledge, so that one may overcome those angels that made the world. For his disciples obtain the resurrection by the fact that they are baptized into him, and they can die no more, but remain immortal without ever growing old.
(d) Irenæus, Adv. Hær., I, 26. (MSG, 7:686.)
The system of Cerinthus. For additional source material, see Irenæus, III, 3, 4; Hippolytus, Ref. VII, 33; X, 21; Eusebius, Hist. Ec., III, 28.
Cerinthus, again, taught in Asia that the world was not made by the supreme God, but by a power separated and distant from that Ruler [principalitate] who is over the universe, and ignorant of the God who is above all. He represented Jesus as not having been born of a virgin, for this seemed impossible to him, but as having been the son of Joseph and Mary in the same way that all other men are sons, only he was more righteous, prudent, and wise than other men. After his baptism Christ descended upon him in the form of a dove from the Supreme Ruler; and that then he proclaimed the unknown Father and performed miracles. But at last Christ [pg 082] departed from Jesus, and then Jesus suffered and rose again, but Christ remained impassable, since He was a spiritual being.
§ 22. The Greater Gnostic Systems: Basilides and Valentinus
The Gnostic systems having most influence within the Church and effect upon its development were those of Basilides and Valentinus. Of these teachers and their followers we have not only the accounts of those opponents who attacked principally their esoteric and most characteristically Gnostic tenets, but also fragments and other remains which give a more favorable impression of the religious and moral value of the great schools of Gnosticism. In their “systems” of vast theogonies and cosmologies, in their wild mythological treatment of the most abstract conceptions and their dualism, the Church writers naturally saw at once their most vulnerable and most dangerous element.
A. The School of Basilides
The school of Basilides marks the beginning of the distinctively Hellenistic stadium of Gnosticism. Basilides, its founder, apparently worked first in the East; circa 120-130 he was at Alexandria. He was the first important Gnostic writer. Of his Gospel, Commentary on that Gospel in twenty-four books (Exegetica), and his odes only fragments remain of the second, preserved by Clement of Alexandria and in the Acta Archelai (collected by Hilgenfeld, Ketzergeschichte, 207-213).
Additional source material: Clement of Alexandria, Strom., II, 3, 8, 20; IV, 24, 26 (ANF. II); Hippolytus, Ref., VII, 20-27; X, 14 (=VII, 1-15, X, 10, ANF, V); Eusebius, Hist. Ec., IV. 7. The account of Hippolytus differs markedly from that of Irenæus, and his quotations and references have been the subject of long dispute among scholars.