other · 130 · Alexandria
Basilides taught at Alexandria under Hadrian and is the earliest of the great Gnostic teachers this dataset carries. The claim that matters is not the cosmology but the credential: he said he had received a hidden tradition from the apostle Matthias, or from Peter through his interpreter Glaucias, which is exactly the move the church answered with public succession — an open list of bishops in every see, teaching the same thing in the open, which is what this dataset is a map of. The system itself is elaborate and known mostly through its enemies: an unbegotten Father, a descending series of powers, three hundred and sixty-five heavens with the God of the Jews ruling the lowest, and a docetic passion in which Simon of Cyrene is crucified in Jesus' place while Jesus stands by. He wrote twenty-four books on the gospel, and none of them survives. Irenaeus and Hippolytus describe him so differently that scholars dispute which is nearer the original. Eusebius, in the volume this project holds, has him as one of the two heads of a serpent-like power, invented monstrous fables, and carried the fictions of his impious heresy quite beyond bounds - the tone being itself worth recording as evidence of how the second century argued.
What did a Gnostic teacher actually claim to have?
A secret apostolic tradition — from Peter, through an interpreter.