Valentinius, more usually called Valentinus (c. 100 - c. 153), was the best known and for a time most successful Christian Gnostic theologian. He founded his school in Rome. Tertullian in Adversus Valentinianos iv, said he was a candidate for bishop of Rome (the date would be about 143) and that he lost the election by a narrow margin. Tertullian also said he was declared heretical after his death, in 175. "Valentinus has disappeared, yet these are Valentinians who derive from Valentinus. At Antioch alone to this day Axi ...
He was born in Phrebonis in the Nile delta and educated in Alexandria, an important and metropolitan early Christian center. There he may have heard the Christian philosopher Basilides and certainly became conversant with Hellenistic neo-Platonic philosophy and the culture of Hellenized Jews like the great Alexandrian Jewish allegorist and philosopher Philo Judaeus. His Alexandrian followers claimed that Valentinus was a follower of Theudas, who was in turn a follower of St. Paul of Tarsus. Valentinus claimed that Theudas imparted to him the ...
Valentinus professed to have derived his ideas from Theodas or Theudas, a disciple of St. Paul, but his system is obviously an attempt to amalgamate Greek and Oriental speculations of the most fantastic kind with Christian ideas. He was especially indebted to Plato. From him was derived the parallel between the ideal world (the pleroma) and the lower world of phenomena (the kenoma). Valentinus drew freely on some books of the New Testament, but used a strange system of interpretation by which the sacred authors were made responsible for his own cosmological and pantheistic views. In working out his system ...
