Cerinthus, again, taught in Asia that the world was not made by the supreme God, but by a power separated and distant from that Ruler [_principalitate_] who is over the universe, and ignorant of the God who is above all. He represented Jesus as not having been born of a virgin, for this seemed impossible to him, but as having been the son of Joseph and Mary in the same way that all other men are sons, only he was more righteous, prudent, and wise than other men. After his baptism Christ descended upon him in the form of a dove from the Supreme Ruler; and that then he proclaimed the unknown Father and performed miracles. But at last Christ departed from Jesus, and then Jesus suffered and rose again, but Christ remained impassable, since He was a spiritual being. § 22. The Greater Gnostic Systems: Basilides and Valentinus The Gnostic systems having most influence within the Church and effect upon its development were those of Basilides and Valentinus. Of these teachers and their followers we have not only the accounts of those opponents who attacked principally their esoteric and most characteristically Gnostic tenets, but also fragments and other remains which give a more favorable impression of the religious and moral value of the great schools of Gnosticism. In their “systems” of vast theogonies and cosmologies, in their wild mythological treatment of the most abstract conceptions and their dualism, the Church writers naturally saw at once their most vulnerable and most dangerous element. A. The School of Basilides The school of Basilides marks the beginning of the distinctively Hellenistic stadium of Gnosticism. Basilides, its founder, apparently worked first in the East; circa 120-130 he was at Alexandria. He was the first important Gnostic writer. Of his Gospel, Commentary on that Gospel in twenty-four books (_Exegetica_), and his odes only fragments remain of the second, preserved by Clement of Alexandria and in the _Acta Archelai_ (collected by Hilgenfeld, _Ketzergeschichte_, 207-213). Additional source material: Clement of Alexandria, _Strom._, II, 3, 8, 20; IV, 24, 26 (ANF. II); Hippolytus, _Ref._, VII, 20-27; X, 14 (=VII, 1-15, X, 10, ANF, V); Eusebius, _Hist. Ec._, IV. 7. The account of Hippolytus differs markedly from that of Irenæus, and his quotations and references have been the subject of long dispute among scholars. (_a_) _Acta Archelai_, 55. (MSG, 10:1526.) The _Acta Archelai_ purport to be an account of a disputation held in the reign of the Emperor Probus (276-282) by Archelaus, Bishop of Kaskar in Mesopotamia, with Mani, the founder of Manichæanism. The work is of uncertain authorship; it belongs to the first part of the fourth century. It is the most important source for the Manichæan doctrine (_v. infra_, § 54). It exists only in a Latin translation probably from a Greek original.