“spirit,” and that they will receive further instruction in the Heaven of Sophia. Thus, he continues, the lapses[398] of the Demiurge had been set straight and it was necessary that those here below should go through the same process. Jesus was accordingly born of the Virgin Mary; He was entirely pneumatic, that is His body was endowed with a spiritual soul, for Sophia Without herself descended into Mary and the germ thus sown by her was formed into a visible shape by the operation of the Demiurge[399]. As for His Mission, it seems to have consisted in revealing to man the constitution of the worlds above him, the course to be pursued by him to attain immortality, and to sum up the whole matter in one word, the _Gnosis_ or knowledge that was necessary to salvation[400]. Here the account of the teaching of Valentinus, which has been taken almost entirely from the _Philosophumena_ or from quotations from his own words in trustworthy writers like Clement of Alexandria, abruptly ends, and we are left to conjecture. We cannot therefore say directly what Valentinus himself taught about the Crucifixion. Jesus, the historical Jesus born of the Virgin Mary, though purely pneumatic or spiritual at the outset, received according to one account some tincture of the nature of all the worlds through which He had descended, and must therefore, probably, have had to abandon successive parts of His nature, as He reascended[401]. Probably, therefore, Valentinus thought that the Spiritual or Divine part of Him left Him before the Passion, and that it was only His material body that suffered[402]. As we shall see later, this idea was much elaborated by the later Gnostics, who thought that all those redeemed from this world would in that respect have to imitate their Great Exemplar. If this be so, it is plain that it was only that part of the soul of Jesus which He had received from Sophia which returned to her, and was doubtless re-absorbed in her being. Yet there is nothing to make us believe that Valentinus did not accept the narrative of the Canonical Gospels in full[403], or to doubt that he taught that Jesus really suffered on the Cross, although he doubtless interpreted this in his usual fashion, by making it a symbol of the self-sacrifice of Jesus the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma, when He left that celestial abode to give form and salvation to the miserable Ectroma of Sophia[404]. Here again we can but gather Valentinus’ opinions from those of his followers, who may have altered them materially to fit them to the exigencies of a situation of which we can form no very precise idea.