Gnosticism is the "true religion" of jesus christ

Welcome to our new overlords: Study suggests alien worlds could be full of super-intelligent dinosaurs

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List of Gnostic sects

Ancient

Syrian-Egyptic Gnosticism

Bardesanites
Basilidians
Heracleonites
Hermeticism
Ptolemaeans
Satornilians
Sethians
Valesians
Thomasines (also called Thomasenes)
Valentianism

Persian Gnosticism

Mandaeanism
Manichaeism
Al-Dayhuri's Sect
Albanenses
Astati
Audianism
Shinang's Sect
Sabians (also called Sampsaeans)
Not-classified Christian Gnosticism
Cerdonians
Marcionism (not entirely Gnostic)
Apelliacos
Lucianists
Colorbasians
Dositheans (could be offshoot of Simonianism or proto-Gnostic)
Simonians
Menandrians

Others

Abelonians
Agapetae
Alogians
Angelici
Antitactae
Aquarii
Archontics
Ascodroutes
Barbeliotae
Bardaisan
Borborites
Coddians (also called Koddians)
Levitics (also called Levitici)
Phibionites
Stratiotici
Cainites
Carpocratians
Cerinthians
Adamites (also called Adamians)
Marcellianas
Cleobians
Docetae
Elcesaites
Encratites
Apotactics (also called Apostolics)
Severians
Marcosians
Messalians
Nicolaism
Ophites
Naassenes
Perates
Priscillianism
Secundians
Seleucians
Middle Ages
Athinganoi
Bagnolians
Bogomils
Bosnian Church
Cathars
Black Brotherhood
Credentes
Pasagians
Pataria
Novgorodians - the owners of the Novgorod Codex; it is likely that the owners of the codex were dualistic like the Bogomils
Paulicianism
Arnoldists
Picards (Neo-Adamites)
Tondrakians

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Esoteric Christianity

Esoteric Christianity (also known as Hermetic Christianity or Mystic Christianity) is an ensemble of spiritual currents which regard Christianity as a mystery religion, and profess the existence and possession of certain esoteric doctrines or practices of which the public is unaware (or even to which they may be denied access) but which are understood by a small group of people.

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You just want to not believe Jesus Christ.

You just want to believe anything else.

You are free to do as You Will.

you've been brainwashed into believing in a fake jesus and refuse to accept the truth of the real jesus

you side with pedophile priests and murderers

Nonsense.

As if they have anything to do with Jesus Christ.

Catholic Church sexual abuse cases

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The Elect (Parfaits and Parfaites)

When a believer underwent the Consolamentum, his or her life changed for ever. After this rite they were members of the Elect. From now on they would lead the life of an ascetic. They were to be completely chaste, and were not permitted even to touch members of the opposite sex. They were not permitted to tell a lie, swear an oath, nor kill any living creature. They would have to undertake frequent fasts, including three 40 day fasts each year.

For those who expected to die within hours this had less significance than for those who undertook the rite without the expectation of imminent death. They lived simple, peaceful, devotional, chaste lives of poverty, often travelling on foot in pairs like the disciples, preaching and working in simple trades like weaving to earn their living. To their followers the Elect were living saints. Touched by the Holy Spirit, they were God's ambassadors in an alien world. The contrast with bejewelled, warmongering, sybaritic, indolent, lascivious Churchmen living on forcibly extorted tithes was difficult for the slowest peasant to miss.

The Elect were not an ordained priesthood, though their Catholic critics never seem to have fully understood this (and even modern works still refer to Parfaits as "priests"). The defining feature of a priest is that he makes sacrifices to a divinity - something that Parfaits did not do, and so cannot correctly be called priests. They did however minister and preach, and they also controlled the Church, electing their own bishops. They received from the Believers unquestioning obedience. As vessels in whom the Holy Spirit dwelt, they were adored by the faithful, who would prostrate themselves before them whenever they asked for their prayers. (Another practice dating from the earliest days of Christianity). The Elect alone were adopted sons of God. Ordinary believers would ask members of the Elect to pray to the Good God for them - specifically for the Good God to lead them to a good death.

The Elect were not permitted to eat meat, or other animal products such as cheese, eggs or milk. All of these were held to be produced per Siam generatinis sen coitus, and everything sexually begotten was impure. Another reason why the Perfect should not eat animals was that a human soul might be imprisoned in its body. Curiously, the Elect were permitted to eat fish. Fish were believed to be born in the water without sexual connection, and on the foundation of this fallacy Christians framed their fasting rules. As they pointed out, the Jesus of Gospels was recorded as having eaten fish but not meat. (The common practice of eating fish but not meat on Fridays is a Catholic vestige of the same Mediaeval fallacy.) Vegetarianism was regarded as evidence of heresy, as was the refusal to kill any animal, as Cathars interpreted the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" as referring to all animals (The original Hebrew is ambiguous and some Jewish scholars have agreed with the Cathar reading, some with the Catholic reading).

As well as refusal to kill, Inquisitors had a range of easy ways of identifying Cathar Parfaits. Before the real persecutions started they had always worn black robes, but they stopped doing that when the persecutions began in earnest. They also refused to swear oaths in any circumstances, which made it easy to identify them once subject to questioning. To identify them in the first place a good indicator was their pale countenance. With rigorous fasting throughout the year, their pallor often gave them away. Too bad for anyone who just happened to have a light complexion. The Faithful, unless they were checked, would kill anyone that did not look like a healthy meat eater. As on other occasions the unusually liberal Bishop Wazo of Liege had trouble enforcing rationality among the faithful:

[link to www.cathar.info]

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Bardaisanites. A scientist, scholar, astrologer, philosopher and poet, Bardaisan was also renowned for his knowledge of India, on which he wrote a book, now lost.

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The Basilidians believed in a very different Gospel to that of orthodox Christians. Hippolytus summed up the Basilidians' Gospel by saying: "According to them the Gospel is the knowledge of things above the world, which knowledge the Great Archon understood not: when then it was shewn to him that there exists the Holy Spirit, and the [three parts of the seed-mass] and a God Who is the author of all these things, even the not-being One, he rejoiced at what was told him, and was exceeding glad: this is according to them the Gospel."

That is, the Basilidians believed from Adam until Moses the Great Archon supposed himself to be God alone, and to have nothing above him. But it was thought to enlighten the Great Archon that there were beings above him, so through the Holy Spirit the Gospel was conveyed to the Great Archon. First, the son of the Great Archon received the Gospel, and he in turn instructed the Great Archon himself, by whose side he was sitting. Then the Great Archon learned that he was not God of the universe, but had above him yet higher beings; and confessed his sin in having magnified himself.[11] From him the Gospel had next to pass to the Archon of the Hebdomad. The son of the Great Archon delivered the Gospel to the son of the Archon of the Hebdomad. The son of the Archon of the Hebdomad became enlightened, and declared the Gospel to the Archon of the Hebdomad, and he too feared and confessed.

It remained only that the world should be enlightened. The light came down from the Archon of the Hebdomad upon Jesus both at the Annunciation and at the Baptism so that He "was enlightened, being kindled in union with the light that shone on Him". Therefore, by following Jesus, the world is purified and becomes most subtle, so that it can ascend by itself.[12] When every part of the sonship has arrived above the Limitary Spirit, "then the creation shall find mercy, for till now it groans and is tormented and awaits the revelation of the sons of God, that all the men of the sonship may ascend from hence".[13] When this has come to pass, God will bring upon the whole world the Great Ignorance, that everything may like being the way it is, and that nothing may desire anything contrary to its nature.

"And in this wise shall be the Restoration, all things according to nature having been founded in the seed of the universe in the beginning, and being restored at their due seasons.

As for Jesus, they believed the crucifixion was necessary, because by the destruction of Jesus body the world could be restored.

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Heracleon was a Gnostic who flourished about AD 175

In his system he appears to have regarded the divine nature as a vast abyss in whose Pleroma were Aeons of different orders and degrees, emanations from the source of being. Midway between the supreme God and the material world was the Demiourgos, who created the latter, and under whose jurisdiction the lower, animal soul of man proceeded after death, while his higher, celestial soul returned to the Pleroma whence at first it issued.

He seems to have received the ordinary Christian scriptures; and Origen, who treats him as a notable exegete, has preserved fragments of a commentary by him on the fourth gospel, while Clement of Alexandria quotes from him what appears to be a passage from a commentary on Luke. These writings are remarkable for their intensely mystical and allegorical interpretations of the text.

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The Sethians

were one of the main currents of Gnosticism during the 2nd and 3rd century CE, along with Valentinianism.

Creation

From the “Unknown God” emanate aeons, a series of paired male and female beings. The first of these is Barbelo, who is coactor in the emanations that follow. The aeons that result are representative of the various attributes of God, which are indiscernible when they are not abstracted from their origin.[note 5] God and the aeons comprise the sum total of the spiritual universe, known as the Pleroma.

the Aeon Sophia imitates God's actions, performing an emanation of her own, without the prior approval of the other aeons in the Pleroma. This results in a crisis within the Pleroma, leading to the appearance of the Yaldabaoth, a "serpent with a lion's head." This figure is commonly known as the demiurge, the "artisan" or "craftsman," after the figure in Plato's Timaeus.[note 6] This being is at first hidden by Sophia but subsequently escapes, stealing a portion of divine power from her in the process.

Using this stolen power, Yaldabaoth creates a material world in imitation of the divine Pleroma. To complete this task, he spawns a group of entities known collectively as Archons, "petty rulers" and craftsmen of the physical world. Like him, they are commonly depicted as theriomorphic, having the heads of animals. Some texts explicitly identify the Archons with the fallen angels described in the Enoch tradition in Judaic apocrypha.

At this point the events of the Sethian narrative begin to cohere with the events of Genesis, with the demiurge and his archontic cohorts fulfilling the role of the creator. As in Genesis, the demiurge declares himself to be the only god, and that none exist superior to him. However, the audience's knowledge of what has gone before casts this statement, and the nature of the creator itself, in a radically different light.

The demiurge creates Adam, during the process unwittingly transferring the portion of power stolen from Sophia into the first physical human body. He then creates Eve from Adam's rib, in an attempt to isolate and regain the power he has lost. By way of this he attempts to rape Eve who now contains Sophia's divine power; several texts depict him as failing when Sophia's spirit transplants itself into the Tree of Knowledge. Thereafter, the pair are "tempted" by the serpent, and eat of the forbidden fruit, thereby once more regaining the power that the demiurge had stolen.

Most surviving Sethian texts are preserved only in Coptic translation of the Greek original. Very little direct evidence of Gnostic teaching was available prior to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of 4th-century Coptic translations of Gnostic texts which were apparently hidden in reaction to Athanasius of Alexandria's Easter letter of 367 which banned the use of non-canonical books. Some of these texts are known to have been in existence in the 2nd century, but it is impossible to exclude the presence of later syncretic material in their 4th-century translations.

The Gospel of Judas (Codex Tchacos, c. 300; mentioned by Irenaeus, c. 180)
Nag Hammadi library:
The Apocalypse of Adam
The Apocryphon of John (mentioned by Irenaeus, c. 180)
The Thought of Norea
The Trimorphic Protennoia (Codex XIII)
The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (also known as the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians)[16]
Zostrianos
Three Steles of Seth
Marsanes
Allogenes
The Untitled Apocalypse (or The Gnosis of the Light)[citation needed] (Bruce Codex, c. 5th century)
The Reality of the Rulers, Also known as The Hypostasis of the Archons
The Thunder, Perfect Mind
The Coptic Apocalypse of Paul
The Thought of Norea
The Second Treatise of the Great Seth

The Gospel of Judas is the most recently discovered Gnostic text. National Geographic has published an English translation of it, bringing it into mainstream awareness. It portrays Judas Iscariot as the "thirteenth spirit (daemon)",[17] who "exceeded" the evil sacrifices the disciples offered to Saklas by sacrificing the "man who clothed me (Jesus)".[18] Its reference to Barbelo and inclusion of material similar to the Apocryphon of John and other such texts, connects the text to Barbeloite and/or Sethian Gnosticism.

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The Thomasines

are considered Gnostic. The Thomasine religious tradition is founded not on dogma, but on a philosophical notion of Illuminism. Referring to themselves as “children of the light.”

The Thomasine Gnostics believe that knowledge is the most important and the only means of salvation. The Thomasines regard St. Thomas as the perfect teacher of Christ’s message.

[link to www.gnostic-jesus.com]

Valentinianism

Valentinus and the Gnostic movement that bore his name were considered threats to proto-orthodox Christianity by church leaders and scholars, not only because of their influence, but also because of their doctrine, practices and beliefs. Gnostics were condemned as heretics, and prominent Church fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome wrote against Gnosticism.

Most evidence for the Valentinian theory comes from its critics and detractors, most notably Irenaeus, since he was especially concerned with refuting Valentinianism.

he was born in Egypt and schooled in Alexandria.

Valentinus was said to have been a prolific writer; however, the only surviving remains of his work come from quotes that have been transmitted by Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Marcellus of Ancyra. Most scholars also believe that Valentinus wrote the Gospel of Truth, one of the Nag Hammadi texts.

According to Irenaeus, the Valentinians believed that at the beginning there was a Pleroma (literally, a 'fullness'). At the centre of the Pleroma was the primal Father or Bythos, the beginning of all things who, after ages of silence and contemplation, projected thirty Aeons, heavenly archetypes representing fifteen syzygies or sexually complementary pairs. Among them was Sophia. Sophia's weakness, curiosity and passion led to her fall from the Pleroma and the creation of the world and man, both of which are flawed. Valentinians identified the God of the Old Testament as the Demiurge,[8] the imperfect creator of the material world. Man, the highest being in this material world, participates in both the spiritual and the material nature. The work of redemption consists in freeing the former from the latter. One needed to recognize the Father, the depth of all being, as the true source of divine power in order to achieve gnosis (knowledge).[9] The Valentinians believed that the attainment of this knowledge by the human individual had positive consequences within the universal order and contributed to restoring that order,[10] and that gnosis, not faith, was the key to salvation. Clement wrote that the Valentinians regarded Catholic Christians “as simple people to whom they attributed faith, while they think that gnosis is in themselves. Through the excellent seed that is to be found in them, they are by nature redeemed, and their gnosis is as far removed from faith as the spiritual from the physical”.

Aeons

The superstructure of the celestial system, the celestial world of Aeons, is here developed in the most complicated way.[12] These Aeons belong to the purely ideal, noumenal, intelligible, or supersensible world; they are immaterial, they are hypostatic ideas. Together with the source from which they emanate they form the Pleroma.

The transition from the immaterial to the material, from the noumenal to the sensible, is brought about by a flaw, or a passion, or a sin, in the female Aeon Sophia.

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Horos

A figure entirely peculiar to Valentinian Gnosticism is that of Horos (the Limiter). The name is perhaps an echo of the Egyptian Horus.

The task of Horos is to separate the fallen Aeons from the upper world of Aeons. At the same time he becomes a kind of world-creative power, who in this capacity helps to construct an ordered world out of Sophia and her passions. He is also called Stauros (cross), and we frequently meet with references to the figure of Stauros. Speculations about the Stauros are older than Christianity, and a Platonic conception may have been at work here. Plato had already stated that the World-Soul revealed itself in the form of the letter Chi (X), by which he meant that figure described in the heavens by the intersecting orbits of the sun and the planetary ecliptic. Since through this double orbit all the movements of the heavenly powers are determined, so all “becoming” and all life depend on it, and thus we can understand the statement that the World-Soul appears in the form of an X, or a cross.

The cross can also stand for the wondrous Aeon on whom depends the ordering and life of the world, and thus Horos-Stauros appears here as the first redeemer of Sophia from her passions, and as the orderer of the creation of the world which now begins.

Naturally, then, the figure of Horos-Stauros was often assimilated to that of the Christian Redeemer. We possibly find echoes of this in the Gospel of Peter, where the Cross itself is depicted as speaking and even floating out of the tomb.

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Mandaeism

the recorded history of the Mandaeans began when a group called the Nasoreans left Palestine and migrated to Mesopotamia in the 1st century AD.

The reason given for this was their persecution by the community in Jerusalem in the course of which the city was destroyed as a punishment.

the Mesopotamian prophet Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, was brought up within the Elkesaite (Elcesaite or Elchasaite) sect, this being confirmed more recently by the Cologne Mani Codex.

Unfortunately, none of the Manichaean scriptures has survived in its entirety, and it seems that the remaining fragments have not been compared to the Ginza Rba.

Mani later left the Elkasaites to found his own religion.

Manichaeism

taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness.[5] Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Its beliefs were based on local Mesopotamian religious movements and Gnosticism.

While most of Manichaeism's original writings have been lost, numerous translations and fragmentary texts have survived.

Mani believed that the teachings of Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus were incomplete, and that his revelations were for the entire world, calling his teachings the "Religion of Light".

Augustine also noted that Mani declared himself to be an "apostle of Jesus Christ".

In 291, persecution arose in the Sasanian Empire with the murder of the apostle Sisin by Emperor Bahram II, and the slaughter of many Manichaeans. In 296, Diocletian decreed against the Manichaeans: "We order that their organizers and leaders be subject to the final penalties and condemned to the fire with their abominable scriptures." This resulted in martyrdom for many in Egypt and North Africa (see Diocletian Persecution). By 354, Hilary of Poitiers wrote that Manichaeism was a significant force in Roman Gaul. In 381, Christians requested Theodosius I to strip Manichaeans of their civil rights. Starting in 382, the emperor issued a series of edicts to suppress Manichaeism and punish its followers.

Some modern scholars have suggested that Manichaean ways of thinking influenced the development of some of Augustine's ideas, such as the nature of good and evil, the idea of hell, the separation of groups into elect, hearers, and sinners, and the hostility to the flesh and sexual activity, and his dualistic theology.

Mani's teaching

dealt with the origin of evil, by addressing a theoretical part of the problem of evil by denying the omnipotence of God and postulating two opposite powers. Manichaean theology taught a dualistic view of good and evil. A key belief in Manichaeism is that the powerful, though not omnipotent good power (God), was opposed by the semi-eternal evil power (Satan). Humanity, the world and the soul are seen as the byproduct of the battle between God's proxy, Primal Man, and Satan. The human person is seen as a battleground for these powers: the soul defines the person, but it is under the influence of both light and dark. This contention plays out over the world as well as the human body—neither the Earth nor the flesh were seen as intrinsically evil, but rather possessed portions of both light and dark. Natural phenomena (such as rain) were seen as the physical manifestation of this spiritual contention. Therefore, the Manichaean worldview explained the existence of evil by positing a flawed creation in the formation of which God took no part and which constituted rather the product of a rebellion by Satan against God.

The First Creation: Originally, good and evil existed in two completely separate realms, one the World of Light, ruled by the Father of Greatness together with his five Shekhinas (divine attributes of light), and the other the World of Darkness, ruled by the King of Darkness. At a certain point, the Kingdom of Darkness notices the World of Light, becomes greedy for it and attacks it. The Father of Greatness, in the first of three "creations" (or "calls"), calls to the Mother of Life, who sends her son Original Man (Nāšā Qaḏmāyā in Aramaic), to battle with the attacking powers of Darkness, which include the Demon of Greed. The Original Man is armed with five different shields of light (reflections of the five Shekhinas), which he loses to the forces of darkness in the ensuing battle, described as a kind of "bait" to trick the forces of darkness, as the forces of darkness greedily consume as much light as they can. When the Original Man comes to, he is trapped among the forces of darkness.

The Second Creation: Then the Father of Greatness begins the Second Creation, calling to the Living Spirit, who calls to his five sons, and sends a call to the Original Man (Call then becomes a Manichaean deity). An answer (Answer becomes another Manichaean deity) then returns from the Original Man to the World of Light. The Mother of Life, the Living Spirit, and his five sons begin to create the universe from the bodies of the evil beings of the World of Darkness, together with the light that they have swallowed. Ten heavens and eight earths are created, all consisting of various mixtures of the evil material beings from the World of Darkness and the swallowed light. The sun, moon, and stars are all created from light recovered from the World of Darkness. The waxing and waning of the moon is described as the moon filling with light, which passes to the sun, then through the Milky Way, and eventually back to the World of Light.


The Third Creation: Great demons (called archons in bar-Khonai's account) are hung out over the heavens, and then the Father of Greatness begins the Third Creation. Light is recovered from out of the material bodies of the male and female evil beings and demons, by causing them to become sexually aroused in greed, towards beautiful images of the beings of light, such as the Third Messenger and the Virgins of Light. However, as soon as the light is expelled from their bodies and falls to the earth (some in the form of abortions – the source of fallen angels in the Manichaean myth), the evil beings continue to swallow up as much of it as they can to keep the light inside of them. This results eventually in the evil beings swallowing huge quantities of light, copulating, and producing Adam and Eve. The Father of Greatness then sends the Radiant Jesus to awaken Adam, and to enlighten him to the true source of the light that is trapped in his material body. Adam and Eve, however, eventually copulate, and produce more human beings, trapping the light in bodies of mankind throughout human history. The appearance of the Prophet Mani was another attempt by the World of Light to reveal to mankind the true source of the spiritual light imprisoned within their material bodies.

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The terms "Manichaean" and "Manichaeism" are sometimes used figuratively as a synonym of the more general term "dualist" with respect to a philosophy, outlook or worldview.

The Albanenses

were a group of Manichaeans who lived in Albania, probably about the eighth century.

Little is known about them, except that they were one of the numerous sects through which the original Manichaeism continued to flourish. (cf. Bogomils, Cathars, and Paulicians.) They appear to have professed a very strict and uncompromising form of Manichaeism, rejecting all doctrinal modifications as to the eternity of the evil principle, and its absolute equality with the good principle.

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The Astati

were a Paulician sect in the 9th century, the followers of Sergius, who renewed the beliefs of Manichaeism. They prevailed much under Emperor Nicephorus I, but later, under Michael I Rhangabes, they were curbed with very severe laws.

Shinang's Sect

Lü Shinang (died 1121) was the leader of a Chinese Manichaean cult who led an uprising against the Song dynasty in Taizhou, Zhejiang. He also appears as a minor character in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.

The Cerdonians

were a Gnostic sect founded by Cerdo, a Syrian, who came to Rome about 137, but concerning whose history little is known. They held that there are two first causes — the perfectly good and the perfectly evil. The latter is also the creator of the world, the god of the Jews, and the author of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ is the son of the good deity; he was sent into the world to oppose the evil; but his incarnation, and therefore his sufferings, were a mere appearance. Regarding the body as the work of the evil deity, the Cerdonians formed a moral system of great severity, prohibiting marriage, wine and the eating of flesh, and advocating fasting and other austerities.

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Marcionism

was an Early Christian dualist belief system that originated in the teachings of Marcion of Sinope at Rome around the year 144.

Marcion believed Jesus was the savior sent by God, and Paul the Apostle was his chief apostle.

He rejected the Hebrew Bible and the God of Israel.

Marcion's canon rejected the entire Old Testament, along with all other epistles and gospels of the 27-book New Testament canon. Paul's epistles enjoy a prominent position in the Marcionite canon, since Paul is credited with correctly transmitting the gracious universality of Jesus' message in opposition to the harsh dictates of the "just god".

The premise of Marcionism is that many of the teachings of Christ are incompatible with the actions of the God of the Old Testament.

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5g brings God back to Society using tech:

Thread: Report: Nonlethal Weapons Could Target Brain, Mimic Schizophrenia

And ..... they have the tech but still no universal doctrine.

A universal doctrine doesn't work. What about believing in Tech interfacing directly as a "god".

Apelles

Apelles was a mid-2nd century Gnostic Christian. He was a disciple of Marcion, probably at Rome, but left (or was expelled from) the Marcionite society because he had become intimate with a woman.

Apelles' followers, known variously as the Apellitae, Apelliacos or Apelleasts, are likewise mostly unknown.

Tertullian mentions a teaching of this sect that flesh was constructed for seduced souls by a certain 'fiery prince of evil'.

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Lucianists

LUCANISTS, a sect so called from Lucianus, or Lucanus, a heretic of the second century, being a disciple of Marcion, who he followed, adding some new ones to them. Epiphanius says he abandoned Marcion, teaching that people ought not to marry, for fear of enriching the Creator.

He denied the immortality of the soul, asserting it to be material.

[link to www.studylight.org (secure)]

Colarbasians

sect of the 2nd century, deemed heretics, so called from their leader Colarbasus, a disciple of Valentinius. Colarbasus, along with Marcus, another disciple of Valentinius, was said to maintain the whole plenitude, and perfection of truth and religion, to be contained in the Greek alphabet; and that it was for this reason that Jesus was called the Alpha and Omega.

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Dositheos

meaning "gift of God"

assumed to be a gnostic. He is reputed to have known John the Baptist, and been the teacher of Simon Magus.

he was the first to deny the Prophets, a heresy that gave rise to the party of the Sadducees.

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