§ 27.1. =Cerinthus=, as Irenæus says, resting on the testimony of Polycarp, was a younger contemporary of the Apostle John in Asia Minor; the Apostle meeting the heretic in a bath hastened out lest the building should fall upon the enemy of the truth. In his Gnosticism, resting according to Hippolytus on a basis of Alexandrian-Greek culture, we have the transition from the Jewish-Christian to a more Gentile than Jewish-Christian Gnostic standpoint. The continued hold of the former is seen according to Epiphanius in the maintaining of the necessity of circumcision and of the observances by Christians of the law given by disposition of angels, as also, according to Caius of Rome, who regards him as the author of the New Testament Apocalypse, in chiliastic expectations. Both of these, however, were probably intended only in the allegorical and spiritual sense. At the same time, according to Irenæus and Theodoret, the essentially Gnostic figure of the Demiurge already appears in his writings, who without knowing the supreme God is yet useful to Him as the creator of the world. Even Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, knew him not, until the ἄνω Χριστός descended upon him at his baptism. Before the crucifixion, which was a merely human mischance without any redemptive significance, the Christ had again withdrawn from him. § 27.2. =The Gnosticism of Basilides.=--=Basilides= (Βασιλείδης) was a teacher in Alexandria about A.D. 120-130. He pretends to derive the gnostic system from the notes of the esoteric teaching of Christ taken down by the Apostle Matthew and an amanuensis of Peter called Glaucias. He also made use of John’s Gospel and Paul’s Epistles to the Romans, Corinthians and Ephesians. He himself left behind 24 books Ἐξηγητικά and his equally talented son Isidorus has left a treatise under the title Ἠθικά. Fragments of both are found in Clement of Alexandria, two passages from the first are given also in the “Acts of Disputation,” by Archelaus of Cascar (§ 29, 1). Irenæus, i. 24, who refers to him as a disciple of Menander (§ 25, 2), and the Pseudo-Tertullian, c. 41, Epiphanius, 21, and Theodoret, i. 4, describe his system as grossly dualistic and decidedly emanationist. Hippolytus, vii. 14 ff., on the other hand, with whom Clement seems to agree, describes it as a thoroughly monistic system, in which the theogony is developed not by emanation from above downwards but by evolution from below upwards. This latter view which undoubtedly presents this system in a more favourable light,--according to Baur, Uhlhorn, Jacobi, Möller, Funk, etc., its original form: according to Hilgenfeld, Lipsius, Volkmar, etc., a later form influenced by later interpolations of Greek pantheistic ideas,--makes the development of God and the world begin with pure nothing: ἦν ὅτε ἦν οὐδέν. The principle of all development is ὁ οὐκ ὢν θεός, who out of Himself (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων)