Valentinus (Gnostic)

Valentinus (also spelled Valentinius; c. 100 – c. 160 AD) was the best known and for a time most successful early Christian gnostic theologian. He founded his school in Rome. According to Tertullian, Valentinus was a candidate for bishop of Rome but started his own group when another was chosen.

Valentinus produced a variety of writings, but only fragments survive, largely those embedded in refuted quotations in the works of his opponents, not enough to reconstruct his system except in broad outline. His doctrine is known to us only in the developed and modified form given to it by his disciples. He taught that there were three kinds of people, the spiritual, psychical, and material; and that only those of a spiritual nature (his own followers) received the gnosis (knowledge) that allowed them to return to the divine Pleroma, while those of a psychic nature (ordinary Christians) would attain a lesser form of salvation, and that those of a material nature (pagans and Jews) were doomed to perish.

Valentinus had a large following, the Valentinians. It later divided into an Eastern and a Western, or Italian, branch. The Marcosians belonged to the Western branch.

Epiphaniius wrote (ca. 390) that he learned through word of mouth (although he acknowledged that it was a disputed point) that Valentinus was born in Phrebonis in the Nile Delta, and thus was a native of Paralia in Egypt, and received his Greek education in nearby Alexandria, an important and metropolitan early center of Christianity. There he may have heard the Christian philosopher Basilides and certainly became conversant with Hellenistic Middle Platonism and the culture of Hellenized Jews like the great Alexandrian Jewish allegorist and philosopher Philo.

Clement of Alexandria records that his followers said that Valentinus was a follower of Theudas, and that Theudas in turn was a follower of St. Paul the Apostle. Valentinus said that Theudas imparted to him the secret wisdom that Paul had taught privately to his inner circle, which Paul publicly referred to in connection with his visionary encounter with the risen Christ (Romans 16:25; 1 Corinthians 2:7; 2 Corinthians 12:2-4; Acts 9:9-10), when he received the secret teaching from him. Such esoteric teachings were downplayed in Rome after the mid-2nd century.

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