Valentinian & other Gnostic Christianities

Valentinus was an Alexandrian teacher who came to Rome around 136 and, according to Tertullian, was nearly elected bishop there. He and the students who carried his name — Ptolemy, Heracleon, Theodotus — taught that the visible world was made not by the highest God but by a lesser craftsman, that human beings carry within them a spark of the divine that has fallen into matter, and that Christ came to bring the knowledge that wakes it up. Along with related currents around teachers like Basilides, they mostly did not build rival churches: they sat in ordinary congregations and offered their teaching as the deeper meaning available to those ready for it, which is precisely what alarmed bishops like Irenaeus, whose five-volume Against Heresies of about 180 was written to drag the system into the open and refute it. For eighteen centuries they were known almost entirely through such opponents — until 1945, when farmers digging near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt turned up a sealed jar of papyrus codices in Coptic, including the Gospel of Truth, giving these currents their own voice for the first time since antiquity.