The many different answers that they gave to this question showed more eloquently than anything else the difficulties with which it was surrounded. Simon, according to Hippolytus, said that Jesus only appeared on earth as a man, but was not really one, and seemed to have suffered in Judaea, although he had not really done so[56]. Basilides the Egyptian, the leader of another sect, held, according to Irenaeus, that the body of Jesus was a phantasm and had no real existence, Simon of Cyrene having been crucified in his stead[57]; while Hippolytus, who seems to have drawn his account of Basilides’ teaching from a different source from that used by his predecessor, makes him say that only the body of Jesus suffered and relapsed into “formlessness[58],” but that His soul returned into the different worlds whence it was drawn. Saturninus, another heresiarch, held, according to both authors, to the phantasmal theory of Jesus’ body, which attained such popularity among other Gnostic sects that “Docetism,” as the opinion was called, came to be looked upon by later writers as one of the marks of heresy[59], and Hippolytus imagines that there were in existence sects who attached such importance to this point that they called themselves simply Docetics[60]. Valentinus, from whose teaching, as we shall see, the principal system of the _Pistis Sophia_ was probably derived, also adhered to this Docetic theory, and said that the body of Jesus was not made of human flesh, but was constructed “with unspeakable art” so as to resemble it, the dove-like form which had descended into it at His baptism leaving it before the Crucifixion[61]. According to Irenaeus, too, Valentinus held that the Passion of Jesus was not intended as an atonement or sacrifice for sin, as the Catholics taught, but merely as a symbol or reflection of something that was taking place in the bosom of the Godhead[62].