is found among the Valentinians, some of whose prominent leaders
made a very complicated phenomenon of Christ, and gave him also a direct
relation to the demiurge. There is further found here the doctrine of
the heavenly humanity, which was afterwards accepted by ecclesiastical
theologians. Along with the fragments of Basilides the account of Clem.
Alex. seems to me the most reliable. According to this, Basilides taught
that Christ descended on the man Jesus at the baptism. Some of the
Valentinians taught something similar: the Christology of Ptolemy is
characterised by the union of all conceivable Christology theories. The
different early Christian conceptions may be found in him. Basilides did
not admit a real union between Christ and Jesus; but it is interesting
to see how the Pauline Epistles caused the theologians to view the
sufferings of Christ as necessarily based on the assumption of sinful
flesh, that is, to deduce from the sufferings that Christ has assumed
sinful flesh. The Basilidean Christology will prove to be a peculiar
preliminary stage of the later ecclesiastical Christology. The
anniversary of the baptism of Christ was to the Basilideans, as the day
of the [Greek: epiphaneia], a high festival day (see Clem., Strom. I.
21. 146): they fixed it for the 6th (2nd) January. And in this also the
Catholic Church has followed the Gnosis. The real docetic Christology as
represented by Saturninus (and Marcion) was radically opposed to the
tradition, and struck out the birth of Jesus, as well as the first 30
years of his life. An accurate exposition of the Gnostic Christologies,
which would carry us too far here, (see especially Tertull., de carne
Christi), would shew, that a great part of the questions which occupy
Church theologians till the present day, were already raised by the
Gnostics; for example, what happened to the body of Christ after the
resurrection? (see the doctrines of Apelles and Hermogenes); what
significance the appearance of Christ had for the heavenly and Satanic
powers? what meaning belongs to his sufferings, although there was no
real suffering for the heavenly Christ, but only for Jesus? etc. In no
other point do the anticipations in the Gnostic dogmatic stand out so
plainly (see the system of Origen; many passages bearing on the subject
will be found in the third and fourth volumes of this work, to which
readers are referred). The Catholic Church has learned but little from
the Gnostics, t