can
hardly be otherwise than a short period to allow for the necessary
intimacy with his teaching to have been formed.

But we are carried back one step further still. It is not only
Ptolemaeus but Ptolemaeus _and his party_ ([Greek: hoi peri
Ptolemaion]) [Endnote 256:1]. There has been time for Ptolemaeus
to found a school within a school of his own; and his school has
already begun to express its opinions, either collectively or
through its individual members.

In this way the real date of Ptolemaeus seems still to recede, but
I will not endeavour any further to put a numerical value upon it
which might be thought to be prejudiced. It will be best for the
reader to fill up the blank according to his own judgment.

Heracleon will to a certain extent go with Ptolemaeus, with whom
he is persistently coupled, though, as he is only mentioned once
by Irenaeus, the data concerning him are less precise. They are
however supplemented by an allusion in the fourth book of the
Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria (which appears to have been
written in the last decade of the century) to Heracleon as one of
the chief of the school of Valentinus [Endnote 257:1], and perhaps
also by a statement of Origen to the effect that Heracleon was said
to be a [Greek: gnorimos] of Valentinus himself [Endnote 257:2].
The meaning of the latter term is questioned, and it is certainly
true that it may stand for pupil or scholar, as Elisha was to Elijah
or as the Apostles were to their Master; but that it could possibly
be applied to two persons who never came into personal contact must
be, I cannot but think, very doubtful. This then, if true, would
throw back Heracleon some little way even beyond 160 A.D.

From the passage in the Stromateis we gather that Heracleon, if he
did not (as is usually inferred) write a commentary, yet wrote an
isolated exposition of a portion of St. Luke's Gospel. In the same
way we learn from Origen that he wrote a commentary upon St. John.

We shall probably not be wrong in referring many of the
Valentinian quotations given by Irenaeus to Ptolemaeus and
Heracleon. By the first writer we also have extant an Epistle to a
disciple called Flora, which has been preserved by Epiphanius.
This Epistle, which there is no reason to doubt, contains
unequivocal references to our first Gospel.

_Epistle to Flora. Epiph. Haer._ 217 A.

[Greek: oikia gar ae polis meristheisa eph' heautaen hoti mae
dunatai staenai [ho sotae