Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
Was He the husband of Acharamoth, that degraded Sophia, as the Valentinians aver? or the son of Pantherus, as say the Jews? or Kalakau, as contends Basilides? or was it, as the Docetes taught, only a tinted cloud in the shape of a man that went from Jordan to Golgotha? Or were the Merinthians right? These are a few of the questions, Messire de Logreus, which naturally arise.
There flourished for a while and died fantastic eclectic creeds, pagan theosophies masquerading as Christianity. Gnosticism was a typical product of the city. Valentinus and Basilides and the other gnostics made in that cosmopolitan atmosphere their attempts to reconcile Christianity with Greek and oriental thought.
Six others Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion, Ptolemaeus, Heracleon, and Celsus are heretical or infidel writers whom we only know through notices or scraps of their works in the writings of the Christian Fathers who refuted them. The Epistle of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons is only in part preserved in the pages of Eusebius. The Canon of Muratori is a mutilated fragment of uncertain date.
Tacitus relates, that when Vespasian was going to the Serapeum, ut super rebus imperii consuleret, Basilides, an Egyptian, who was at the time eighty miles distant, suddenly appeared to him; from his name the emperor drew an omen that the god sanctioned his assumption of the Imperial power. Hist. iv. 82.
Out of that which was not he says was made the seed of the world, the word which was spoken, "Let there be light;" and this he says is that which is spoken in the Gospels; "That was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." We must not indeed overlook the fact that the plural occurs once in the middle of this passage as introducing the words of Moses; 'as these men say. And yet, though this decidedly modifies, I do not think that it removes the probability that Basilides himself is being quoted.
It is quite enough that Irenaeus evidently attributes to them an antiquity considerably beyond his own; that, in fact, he looks upon them as supplying the intermediate link between his age and that of the Apostles. Two quotations from the fourth Gospel are attributed to Basilides, both of them quite indisputable as quotations.
We conclude then that there is a probability not an overwhelming, but quite a substantial, probability that Basilides himself used the fourth Gospel, and used it as an authoritative record of the life of Christ.
The other indications tally quite sufficiently with the date 170-190 A.D. Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion, the Marcionites, we know were active long before this period. I can see no sound objection to the date 170-180 A.D., but by adding ten years to this we shall reach the extreme limit admissible.
He went into the inner sanctuary alone, and, to his surprise, there he beheld the old Basilides, the freedman of Claudius, one of the chief men of Alexandria, whom he knew was then lying dangerously ill, and several days' journey from the city. He inquired of the priests whether Basilides had been in the temple, and was assured that he had not.
The array of witnesses examined runs thus: Clement of Rome, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Hegesippus, Papias of Hierapolis, the Clementines, the Epistle to Diognetus, Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion, Tatian, Dionysius of Corinth, Melito of Sardis, Claudius Apollinaris, Athenagoras, Epistle of Vienne and Lyons, Ptolemaeus and Heracleon, Celsus and the Canon of Muratori.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking