Having wended our way through the labyrinth of authentic excerpts, heresiological texts, and what is probably a modern forgery, it should be clear by now that we can say very little about the Carpocratian movement beyond profiling the life and thought of its recognized leaders: Carpocrates, Epiphanes, and Marcellina. The best way to understand these figures is through the thick texture of their own cultural and historical contexts. Their context is sketched in this final chapter, with particular attention to the metropolis where we know Carpocratian Christians first emerged and thrived, Alexandria in Egypt.
The Alexandrian context
An ancient eyewitness of Alexandria called the city “a spectacle that surpasses all human spectacles with regard both to beauty of sanctuaries and multitude of inhabitants” (Dio Chrysostom, Or. 32.41). Alexandria was the global entrepôt for all manner of goods bustling to and fro, in a network spanning from Spain to India. She housed at least two great libraries and a research center (the mouseion) known for its scientists, poets, doctors, and philosophers. With relatively easy access to Palestine by sea, we would expect Alexandria to be one of the first areas accessed by the earliest followers of Jesus. Yet the first 150 years of Christianity in Alexandria are shrouded in mystery.1
The historian Walter Bauer famously proposed that orthodox Christian writers did not wish to remember the earliest Jesus movements in Alexandria.2 In fact, they deliberately maintained silence, since those early days were dominated by those whom they considered “gnostic.” Since the work of Michael A. Williams and Karen L. King, however, it has become widely recognized that “gnostic” is an essentializing and stereotyped heresiological category, despite recent attempts to specify or redefine it.3 For the last quarter-century at least, scholars have tried to transcend the essentializing categories and anachronistic dualisms (gnostic vs. orthodox) in order to start their historical redescription afresh.
One way of beginning anew has been to identify texts written in Alexandria. Scholars have proposed that a large number of ancient texts were written in the city, for instance, 2 Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Epistle of Barnabas.4 Unfortunately, uncertainty will always remain when historians try to identify a text’s provenance. Since in this inquiry I do not have the space to argue for the Alexandrian provenance of these and other texts, I will for now accept secure data about Alexandria only from known Alexandrian figures.
The author of Acts presents a single Alexandrian Christian leader, Apollos, as deficient in his understanding of Christianity. “He only knew the baptism of John” (Acts 18:25). This remark is difficult to accept, since the same verse records that Apollos was “boiling in spirit (or: Spirit)” and that he “accurately taught the matters concerning Jesus.” Codex Bezae presents Apollos as taught “the Way” or “the teaching” (λόγος, that is, the Christian message) in Alexandria.5 But this reading, even if credited, would only reinforce the implication that Apollos’s Christian training in Alexandria was somehow lacking. If Apollos competed with Paul for leadership at Corinth (1 Cor 1:12; 4:6–7, 14–16), then having Apollos be corrected by Pauline disciples (Priscilla and Aquila in Acts 18:26) was a brilliant way to promote Paul’s gospel and subordinate the Alexandrian Apollos.6
It is hazardous to speculate about Apollos’s message, which is typically derived from mirror readings of 1 Corinthians and sometimes Philo. It is equally dangerous, however, to accept the data of Acts, an apologetic historiography in the business of heroizing Paul.7 Apollos’s connection to a group of John the Baptist’s Ephesian followers (Acts 19:1–7) is probably redactional.8 All we can safely gather is that Apollos was a gifted Alexandrian Christian recruiter confident enough to move out of Alexandria and to teach his version of the gospel in major urban areas like Ephesus and Corinth. Apollos’s version of the gospel was not completely antithetical to Paul’s. At the same time, Paul manifested a certain rivalry vis-à-vis Apollos. Paul “planted” the Corinthian church, while Apollos only “watered” (1 Cor 3:5–6). Apollos was the pedagogue, whereas Paul was the founder and father (1 Cor 4:15).9 It should have been clear to the Corinthians, according to Paul, who had the larger claim to authority.
Since the reliable data in Acts is thin, scholars often turn to Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. But Eusebius is perhaps even more problematic. For instance, although Eusebius knew lengthy reports about the Alexandrian teachers Valentinus, Basilides, and Carpocrates (from Irenaeus, AH 1.1–11; 24–5), he only reported small snippets about them (ΗΕ 4.7). He said nothing about Cerinthus, though he knew him (from Irenaeus, AH 1.26.1). Eusebius also said nothing about Carpocrates’s son Epiphanes (from Clement, Strom. 3.2.5.1–3) or Marcellina (from Irenaeus, AH 1.25.6). He wrote nothing, furthermore, about Ptolemy or Heracleon, Valentinus’s most famous disciples.10 Eusebius stated nothing about Prodicus and Julius Cassianus, two mid-second century Alexandrian teachers whom he also would have known from Clement’s Stromata (1.21.101.2; 3.13.92.1; 3.14.94–5; 3.16.100–3.17.102).11
To portray the founding of the Alexandrian church, Eusebius offered a legend: a figure called Mark, viewed as the author of the second gospel, became the first bishop of Alexandria in a long succession (HE 2.16.1–2). This legend was not apparently known to two of the most famous Alexandrian theologians—Clement and Origen—both of whom never mention it. The legend of an apostolic or para-apostolic founder for Alexandria probably arose sometime in the course of the third century CE, when Alexandrian bishops claimed increasingly more power and prestige. One suspects that it was a countertradition crafted to oppose the tradition of Glaucias coming to Alexandria and teaching Basilides, the first known Christian theologian of Alexandria (dated to Hadrian’s reign, 117–138 CE).12 Both Glaucias and Mark were said not only to be disciples of Peter, but also his “interpreter.”13
An alternative history for early Alexandrian Christianity
Realizing the insufficiency of Acts and Eusebius, we ask anew: how did the earliest Jesus movement(s) first arrive in Alexandria? In the welter of human events, followers of Jesus could have come to the city through any number of run-of-the-mill social actors: traveling businessmen, doctors, students in search of teachers, and so on. Sylvia Honigman notes, “Mobility from the Levant to Egypt was constant, and was periodically revitalized by political and economic vicissitudes.”14
The flow of traffic need not have come solely from Jerusalem, a thesis which tends to reinscribe the ideology of Acts (1:8)—that the mother church in Jerusalem sent forth her apostolic sons.15 On this point, Acts is an outlier even among texts later canonized. The gospels do not agree that Jesus’s disciples had their base in Jerusalem. Mark (16:1–8), Matthew (28), and John (21) indicate that Jesus’s disciples returned to Galilee, the site of Jesus’s post-mortem appearances. When Christianity spread to places like Caesarea Maritima, Antioch, Cyprus, and Asia Minor, social actors in these regions could have come to Alexandria for any number of ordinary reasons (business, leisure, military service) and spread word about the new Jesus movement(s) through pre-established social networks.16
In a recent article, we are told that there is “growing support to see Alexandrian Christianity spawning from the missionary activity of Palestinian Jewish Christians, who first evangelized the hellenized Jews in Alexandria.”17 But was Christianity in late first and early second-century Alexandria primarily Jewish? Despite the urging of several scholars,18 the answer is—once again—we do not know because we lack reliable data. We can concur that all forms of earliest Christianity were Jewish, yet this point does not take us very far as we enter the second generation of early Christianity.19 We can at least imagine a scenario in which the first Christians in Alexandria were motivated to expand quickly to Gentile populations with the result that the earliest devotees of Jesus in Alexandria were of mixed cultural and ethnic heritage from early on.
The author of Acts indicates that early Christianity swiftly spread to non-Jewish persons in places like Caesarea, Samaria, and Antioch. We need not believe the details of Cornelius’s conversion (Acts 10) to acknowledge the more general point—that the Jesus movement, when it spread to Gentile-dominated cities, attracted members of the majority (non-Jewish) populations. Despite the narrative of Acts, the early recruitment of Gentiles did not require apostolic validation, church councils, or transmission through Judean and/or Jerusalemite channels.
Factors motivating Gentile recruitment
In fact, there were factors distinctive to Alexandria that probably motivated the swift recruitment of Gentile populations. During the first 80 years of Christianity in Egypt, three major events shaped the attitude of Alexandrians toward Jews living in the city. They were:
1. Conflicts raging from 38 to 41 CE
2. A massacre of Jews in 66 CE
3. The Jewish uprising in Libya, Egypt, and Cyprus from 115 to 117 CE.
Let’s take each event in turn. In the summer of 38, Philo reported at least ten setbacks suffered by Jews in Alexandria:
1. The seizure of Jewish homes and personal property
2. Setting up imperial statues/portraits in the synagogues
3. Ghettoization (the restriction of Jewish residents to one-quarter of the city)
4. The flagellation of 38 Jewish elders
5. Jewish women tortured for not eating pork
6. A government-sponsored search of Jewish houses
7. The cessation of Jewish businesses
8. Mob lynching in the marketplace (burning, crucifixion, and dragging, with no burial of the victims)
9. The withholding of the Jewish decree honoring the emperor
10. The governor’s decree calling the Jews “foreigners”20
These attacks made it clear that the majority of Jews were not citizens of Alexandria and threw into question whether they had confirmed civic rights in the city at all. These setbacks must have been shocking for Alexandrian Jews. The historian Josephus wrote that the Jewish nation in Alexandria was “humiliated” (τεταπεινωμένον) and terribly abused (δεινῶς ὑβρισμένον) at this time (Antiquities 19.278). In the wake of the attacks in 38 CE, Jewish bankers lost their loans; Jewish farmers could not till the soil, shippers and merchants could not sail the seas, and artisans could not sell their wares (Philo, Flaccus 57). Matters may have stood thus for quite some time (a Jewish embassy to the emperor Gaius was not heard in Rome until two years later in 40 CE). A letter written by a Greek merchant to a friend in Alexandria in 41 CE has a warning to avoid Jewish creditors: “like everybody else, you too beware of the Jews” (CPJ §152). One has the sense that Alexandrian Jews were socially and economically isolated over a considerable period.
When Gaius was assassinated in January 41 CE, Alexandrian Jews were emboldened and “immediately took up arms” (Josephus, Antiquities 19.278). They called in comrades from Syria, Palestine, and the Egyptian countryside (CPJ 2 §153.96–7). There was some kind of Jewish-led skirmish within the city, leading to what the emperor Claudius called a “war” (πόλεμος) against the Jews (CPJ 2 §153.73–4). This war only fully ceased, it seems, with Claudius’s decree in November 41 CE. In this decree, Claudius allowed Alexandrian Jews to practice their ancestral customs. Yet all hopes of obtaining Alexandrian citizenship were dashed. Claudius confirmed the migrant status of local Jews: they lived “in a city not their own” (CPJ 2 §153.95). The emperor threatened these Jews in no uncertain terms that if they continued the disruptions, he would proceed against them with military force—as if fighting “a global plague” (CPJ 2 §153.100).
Physical violence erupted again in 66 CE when certain Jews secretly entered an Alexandrian civic assembly. Members of the assembly not only rose to defame these persons as enemies and spies, they ordered their immediate arrest. Some Jews may have been killed on the spot. Three of them were arrested and ordered to be burned alive. The “whole Jewish populace” (πᾶν τὸ Ἰουδαϊκόν) in Alexandria rose to their defense, heaving stones and waving torches (Josephus, JW 2.492). The governor Tiberius Julius Alexander, himself of Judean descent, initially sent ambassadors. When these were rebuffed, Tiberius released the full force of two legions plus auxiliaries against the Jewish quarter (indicating, incidentally, that the Jews had continued to be ghettoized after 41 CE). These soldiers had freedom to kill, pillage, and burn Jewish houses in the city. Josephus reported that 50,000 Jews were killed in the conflict (JW 2.497). Even if the number was inflated, it was a significant percentage of the Jewish population in the city.
We know, then, that just as the earliest Jesus movements were gestating in Alexandria, political events for Jews in the city turned sour. Its effects—social, economic, and psychological—must have been devastating, and were only compounded when the Jews learned that Rome ravaged their motherland and destroyed their most sacred temple in 70 CE. The Romans added insult to injury when they charged all Jews in their domains with a reparations tax initially purposed for the rebuilding of a Roman temple to Jupiter (the fiscus Judaicus).21 Alexandrian leaders insulted the Jews by petitioning Vespasian to remove any remaining civic rights of Jews in their city (Josephus, Ant. 12.121). The emperor refused. Nevertheless, he ordered the closure and dismantling of the Jewish temple in the Egyptian city of Leontopolis (73 CE).
“It is only on the assumption,” wrote John Barclay, “of prolonged and profound alienation between Jews and non-Jews that we can explain the ferocity of the Jewish uprising in 116–117 CE.”22 As Emperor Trajan was at the peak of military success in Mesopotamia, the Jews of North Africa revolted about 115 CE. Taking over several cities of Cyrene, a Jewish army marched east toward Alexandria. Repulsed from the city, the non-Jewish inhabitants of Alexandria turned against their Jewish neighbors.
Meanwhile, the repulsed Jewish army wreaked havoc in middle Egypt until the emperor Trajan sent a top general, Marcius Turbo, with crack troops who proceeded to mow down the Jews in Egypt (about 117 CE).23 Scholars generally agree that the result of these combined attacks was the near annihilation of Jews in Alexandria.24 “The synagogues were destroyed, the Jewish court ceased to function, and Jewish land was easily confiscated because the Jews themselves were gone. Indeed, Alexandrian Jews nearly vanished from the historical record.”25 The “nearly” is important because there is slight evidence of a remnant of Jews in Alexandria after the revolt.26 At the same time, we can speak of the Jews’ near-total loss of cultural and political capital at the time. There was no full recovery of Jewish communities until sometime in the third century CE. In the words of Roger Bagnall, “There is no way of estimating the extent of the slaughter and enslavement inflicted on the Jewish community by the Roman authorities, but it was decisive and permanent.”27
To sum up: the evidence of Jewish conflict in Alexandria—the pogrom in 38 CE, the massacre in 66 CE, and the decimation under Trajan in 117 CE—must be taken into account when we speculate about the identity and expansion of the earliest followers of Jesus in Alexandria.28 If we are looking backward from 38 CE, we can agree with Erich Gruen that the pogrom under Gaius was an aberration.29 Yet looking forward in time, hostility and tragedy thrived. During the roughly 80-year period between 38–117 CE, it seems reasonable to suppose that local Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans considered Jews—including Alexandrian Jews—to be a fractious and even seditious people.30 Although Jews in Alexandria mustered considerable social and cultural capital before the reign of Gaius—when Christian recruitment probably began—their political, cultural, and monetary capital began to decline. Jews went from being a privileged, dominant minority to a shrinking and increasingly isolated enclave.
Under these circumstances, many followers of Jesus in Alexandria may have cherished their Jewish identity. Many if not most of them could have been of Judean descent. At the same time, these early disciples had, if only for the sake of their own survival, a social interest in expanding their social networks, in particular their status-bridging capital.31 Christians elsewhere indicated that they wanted to appeal to local elites—men represented by the centurion Cornelius in Acts 10, by the proconsul Sergius Paulus in Acts 13, and by the Asiarchs in Acts 19:31 (cf. Rom 13:1; 1 Pet 2:13; Barn 21:2). Connections to these elites came through appealing to local Gentiles in power—those with access to the gymnasium (with all its trappings of intellectual respectability), the civic courts, as well as political networks that offered patronage and protection. In Alexandria between 38–117 CE, the people who could possess this kind of capital were mostly Roman and Alexandrian citizens, who were typically Greeks of mixed (Macedonian and Egyptian) heritage. Even if it is unlikely that early Christians recruited many of these elites in the first century, they would have striven not to appear subversive.
One can hypothesize, then, that the decrease in Jewish political and cultural capital between 38–117 CE meant that at least some of the earliest Christians in Alexandria would not have wanted to advertise themselves as Jews. They would have sought to avoid the stigma of seditiousness, which would have reduced the political capital of the earliest followers of Jesus at a time when they strove to maximize it. In turn, the earliest devotees of Jesus had strong motivation to propagate their message among the Gentile populations of Alexandria. We know that in urban centers like Caesarea and Antioch at the time, Gentile recruitment grew. In those cities we are also aware of tensions between Jewish and Gentile populations, especially between 60–73 CE.32 During this time, disassociation from Jews of decreasing cultural capital and association with Gentiles of stable or increasing political capital probably fostered the growth of the Jesus movement(s). Even for those devotees of Jesus who identified as ethnic Judeans, they eventually found that it was socially advantageous to present their movement as theologically and organizationally distinct from Judaism.
If Christianity was a sect within Judaism in 115 CE, presumably it would have been devastated in 117 CE. But it was not. Gentile Christian leaders—among them Basilides, Valentinus, and Carpocrates—emerge already in Hadrian’s reign (beginning in 117 CE).33 These mature and sophisticated theologians did not appear out of nowhere. They probably already belonged to religious assemblies that were distinct from Jewish synagogues.34 To some extent, these thinkers still employed the Judean scriptures and organizational structures, but they showed no devotion to the Judean deity or his Law. Basilidean Christians reportedly said that they were “now not Jews” (Iudaeos quidem iam non esse) (Irenaeus, AH 1.24.6).35
To be clear: this is no argument for a straightforward “parting of the ways” between religious Jews and Christians in Alexandria. There are many ways to define a “parting” and many motivations for it.36 Here I speak of parting only in the sense that, probably in the late first century CE, Christians began to form separate religious groups with differences in leadership and liturgy.37 The institutional divisions did not mean that there was any cessation of social and intellectual interaction between Jews and Christians. Rather, Jews and Christians continued to dialogue and overlap even as they came to recognize themselves as belonging to different parties.
When Jewish cultural and political capital was effectively demolished in Alexandria after 117 CE, Christianity did not have to begin anew. There was no “pagano-Christian reconstruction”;38 nor did “another type of Christianity” arise.39 Some—possibly even most—of the Christian groups in the city continued to function after 117 CE. The emergence of a highly educated, Gentile Christian leadership in Hadrian’s reign (Basilides, Valentinus, Carpocrates) indicates that Christianity not only survived the Trajanic revolt, but thrived. These Christians were not, it seems, blocked from using the rich cultural and educational resources of the city. They were creative and elite writers who were culturally and intellectually at home in the Alexandrian metropolis.
Perhaps the best way to introduce Carpocrates is to examine the teachings of his close theological contemporaries in Alexandria: Basilides, Valentinus, and Prodicus.40
Carpocrates’s theological contemporaries
Basilides
Winrich Löhr’s monograph on Basilides has shown that, of the three main sources for understanding Basilides (Irenaeus, the Refutator, and Clement), the Clementine fragments should receive priority.41 From these fragments, we gather that Basilides practiced distinctively Christian rituals, such as an all-night vigil featuring (apparently scriptural) readings in celebration of Christ’s incarnation on January 6th or 10th.42 Agrippa Castor, a second-century writer quoted by Eusebius, said that Basilides wrote a 24-book commentary, the Exegetica, on “the gospel.”43 Which “gospel” Basilides commented on is unclear—it need not have been one of the four familiar today. At least one of the parables upon which Basilides commented—that of the Rich Man and Lazarus—comes from what is now known as Luke (16:19–31).44 Basilides also valued Paul’s writings, appealing to Romans 7:9 to support a theory of transmigration. In this verse, Paul wrote that he once lived apart from Jewish law. Since Paul was a Jew born under Torah, there was technically no time for him to have lived apart from law. Therefore Paul must have been referring, according to Basilides, to a previous life different from the one he lived as a Jew under law.45
The great moral problem for Basilidean Christians were the passions—uncontrolled emotions that attach themselves like appendages to the soul. These appendages were conceived of as “spirits” that disturbed and confused the soul. Some of these spirits were animalic in nature, manifesting the traits of a wolf, monkey, lion, and goat. Humans possessed by these spirits have irrational desires and perform what Basilides considered to be animalistic.46
Basilidean ethics was informed not only by the Platonic, but also by Stoic tradition. As discussed above, the Stoics presented a mediating category for human action. They said that some acts were good, some bad, while others were indifferent. For Basilides, one indifferent act was, apparently, eating meat sacrificed to Greco-Roman deities.47 Some Christian readers of Paul (1 Cor. 8, 10) did not see a problem with eating meat sacrificed to gods whom they considered to be nonexistent. Eating—in fact eating anything—was indifferent, “for the kingdom of God is not a matter of food and drink” (Rom 14:17).
Basilides was not ascetic. He had a son, Isidore, and so presumably a wife (unfortunately unnamed).48 Though not ascetic, Basilides hardly advocated a life of luxury. Rather, he preached an ethic of self-sufficiency in which one was called to “desire nothing, love everything, and hate nothing.”49 God—not demons—was in control of the earth and human events. Therefore what happened occurred according to God’s will and loving care for the world, or providence. Providence was considered to be as much a biblical as a philosophical tenet. Those who denied divine providence were widely considered to be impious. Basilides himself preferred to say anything rather than deny divine providence.50
Valentinus
The fragments of Valentinus are, once again, largely provided by Clement, and must be prioritized over conflicting heresiological reports.51 Scholars debate whether Valentinus preached the homily called the Gospel of Truth (NHC I,3; XII,2), though I am inclined to say he did.52 While in Alexandria and Rome, Valentinus preached sermons, published biblical interpretations, and wrote pedagogical letters. Just as Basilides claimed a kind of apostolic succession from Peter through Glaucias and Matthias, Valentinus apparently claimed to be in the line of Paul through a man called Theudas (perhaps Jesus’s disciple better known as Thaddeus).53
Valentinus called God the “one” and “good” (Matt 19:17). He believed that God works to sanctify the human heart and to fill it with light (Matt 5:8).54 The material world, for Valentinus, was a place of ordered, interlocking beauty where flesh, though lowest on the chain, was not despised (Ref. 6.37.7). Valentinus believed that angels formed the body of the first human being. Angels were the plural “us” referred to in the phrase, “Let us make humanity according to the image” (Gen 1:26). The “image” was the higher model of the “preexisting Human.”55 According to Valentinus, the first human Adam stood up and talked back to his creators because the “seed of superior reality” was invisibly invested in him (Gen 2:7).56
In his sermon On Friends, Valentinus wrote that “Many of those things written in publicly available books are found written in the church of God. They hold in common expressions from the heart, a code written in the heart” (Clement, Strom. 6.6.52.3–6.6.53.1). The quote indicates that Valentinus rejected a firm boundary between sacred and secular literature. He was a scholar prepared to accommodate all sorts of Greco-Roman lore and philosophy into his thought. The fragment may even hint at Valentinus’s teaching practice. In a study group setting, Valentinus would not have limited himself to scriptural texts, but would have included philosophical and scientific sources from non-Christian authors as well.57 Perhaps Valentinus was inspired by Paul’s statement that there is a law written in the human heart by which humans know what is good (Rom 2:15).
Valentinus acknowledged the dangers of this world. The angels hostile to humanity at creation are akin to the demons who invade the human heart, stirring in it a whirlpool of wicked desires. Yet death is a problem only for those who do not realize that the seed of divinity in them cannot die. Death is expended by believers in this life and ultimately when they shed their mortal bodies and rise as purified spirits to the living realm above. For Valentinus, the Logos of God became incarnate in Jesus, since otherwise he would not have come as a baby or have eaten real food. Jesus served as a model of bodily self-control by enduring or suffering “all things.”58
Prodicus
Prodicus was another Alexandrian theologian noted by Clement and mentioned in passing by Tertullian. Evidently, Clement did not know Prodicus himself, but only his followers. If his followers flourished between 180–200 CE, then presumably Prodicus flourished in the generation before this (about 140–180 CE). Clement represented Prodicus’s followers as a coherent group who called themselves “gnostics” (Clement, Strom. 3.4.30.1). Prodican Christians were “gnostics” evidently because they claimed a special knowledge of God. This God they called the “primal God,” a being above the creator.59 Prodicans believed themselves to be children of this primal God. This perceived status as God’s children reportedly fostered a sense of spiritual worth. Prodican Christians viewed themselves as “royal children.” According to Clement, Prodicans did not think that they were subject to the regulations of Jewish law. Instead, they obeyed an unwritten—apparently divine—ordinance (Clement, Strom. 3.4.30.1).
The disciples of Prodicus affirmed that they had arrived in this world as strangers (Clement, Strom. 3.4.31.3; cf. Heb 11:13).60 This belief may imply a doctrine of the soul’s preexistence before entering the body. We are told, furthermore, that Prodicans discouraged martyrdom for theological reasons: to oppose the view that God is bloodthirsty and to promote the idea that Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient (Tertullian, Scorp. 15.6). Finally, Prodicans, according to Clement, understood petitionary prayer as unnecessary, perhaps because Prodican “knowers” already recognized and accepted God’s will (Clement, Strom. 7.7.41.1).
The ideal Prodican Christian resembled the Carpocratian Christ. Jesus, according to Carpocrates, came into his (Jewish) world as a stranger. He discovered that the regulations of Jewish law were unjust and so rejected them. He lived according to another, natural and higher law, ruling over his passions and attaining perfect self-control.61 Prodicans, for their part, also arrived as strangers in this world. They considered themselves to be above human laws. Still, they endeavored to rule over all sins and passions by virtue of knowing and living according to a higher, unwritten law.
For both Carpocratian and Prodican Christians, their life above human law was taken by their enemies as a sign of lawlessness.62 One should be cautious about this charge.63 Prodican Christians—according to their own ethical ideal—needed no written law because they had already attained a state of bodily and mental control. In my commentary in Chapter 1, I discussed the notion that sages who had been perfectly formed or matured in the virtues would not need written directions to achieve moral excellence (Philo, Leg. All. 1.94; Clement, Strom. 7.2.10.1). Prodican Christians considered themselves “mastered by nothing.”64 This would apparently mean that Prodicans felt themselves to be above human law since they managed to rule over their sinful desires.65
Comparison
When we compare Carpocrates with his Alexandrian contemporaries, we note some key points of overlap. Carpocrates, Basilides, Valentinus, and Prodicus were informed by contemporaneous Platonic-Pythagorean metaphysics as well as by Cynic-Stoic ethics regarding matters of ethical indifference and the sage’s victory over negative emotions (the passions). They all to a certain extent promoted a transcendent deity,66 the pre-existence of the human soul, the soul’s arrival as an alien on earth, its gradual maturation through emotional control, and so on. There was thus a moderate asceticism in play, but nothing like a demand for celibacy (as seen in Julius Cassianus).67 Christians like Carpocrates and Basilides agreed that there was a system of moral purgation involving the soul’s rebirth (transmigration). Soteriology, for most of these thinkers, seems to have involved the transcendence of physical flesh (which did not mean its denigration). Human regulations, including Jewish laws, were subordinated to a higher, unwritten, and divine law. The point, it seems, was not to be antinomian, but to treat human conventions with an air of indifference. None of these thinkers followed the path of Philo in commenting on Jewish Law. Indeed, apart from some attention to Genesis, these thinkers did not thoroughly engage with Jewish scriptures (cf. Clement, Strom. 5.1.3.3).
Carpocrates, Basilides, Valentinus, and Prodicus might give the impression that Alexandrian Christianity in the early to mid-second century was an “intellectual religion.”68 This impression is primarily due, I suspect, to the limitations of our data. Alexandrian Christianity in the second century appealed to people of different social strata. People of the lower and middling classes—who were always the majority—left behind few traces of their life and thought. Those who did leave behind data—and this mostly in fragments—were literate intellectuals. They presented Christianity as a particular kind of religion, that of the elite cultural producer.69 There is little doubt that Carpocrates was one of these elite cultural producers, along with Epiphanes and Marcellina. It is time now to focus specifically on these three figures, the subjects of this study, applying what we have learned from Chapters 1–3.
Carpocrates
Name, provenance, and date
Carpocrates, sometimes called “Carpocras” (Epiphanius, Pan. 27.1.1; Filastrius, Div. Haer. 35.1) was probably born in the late first century CE. His name means “master of the harvest,” and it was an epithet or alternative name of the Egyptian god Harpocrates.70 Harpocrates, or Horus the Child (Har-pa-chered), was son of the divine Isis and Osiris (sometimes identified with Sarapis) (Plutarch, Is. Os. 358e). In amulets, Harpocrates appears seated “on a lotus flower or boat, representing the rising sun.”71 Horus the Child was often depicted as being suckled by his mother or by sitting with one lock of braided hair and a finger in his mouth. This sucking gesture was taken by Greeks and Romans to signify silence and mystery.72
As it turns out, a cloud of mystery hovers over Carpocrates himself, since nothing survives from his pen. His Egyptian name might indicate a man of Egyptian ancestry (cf. Pliny the Younger, Ep. 10.6–7). Biographical data on Carpocrates only comes from Clement (Strom. 3.2.5.1–2). Carpocrates had a wife named Alexandreia. He also had a son, Epiphanes, whom he instructed in encyclical and Platonic studies. This notice assumes that Carpocrates was himself competent in the subjects of arithmetic, geometry, rhetoric, music, and astronomy along with Platonic philosophy. Carpocrates’s education and intellectual profile suggests that he was thoroughly Hellenized—adapted, that is, to the codes and modes of Greek culture. He was apparently a man of wealth and high status, as indicated by his extraordinary outlay for the deification of his son.
The tradition that Carpocrates was Alexandrian is stated by Clement (Strom. 3.2.5.2, followed by Theodoret, Fab. 1.5.1). We might hypothesize that a man of such means and education was more than a mere Alexandrian, but an Alexandrian citizen (as were other high-status Egyptians like Apion and Chaeremon), a fact which would have made it suitable for Carpocrates to marry a wealthy Greek lady from Cephallenia.73 Clement revealed that Carpocrates’s wife was from Cephallenia, and Carpocrates’s son was buried on this island—probably on Alexandreia’s family estate.
Although one might still insist that Carpocrates’s Alexandrian provenance is not secure, his name at least suggests an origin from somewhere in Egypt. Carpocrates could have come to Alexandria from some other city or town of Egypt, as Valentinus reportedly did (Epiphanius, Pan. 31.2.2–3). Alfons Fürst opted for Carpocrates’s Alexandrian provenance because Carpocrates formed a Christian philosophical school that combined biblical and Platonic learning.74 Yet biblical and Platonic learning could be combined in virtually any Greco-Roman city, and the Carpocratians were more than a philosophical school. In later heresiology, Carpocrates was said to be a native of Asia Minor.75 This detail probably emerges from the heresiological habit of conforming Carpocrates to Cerinthus, who was said to be from there.
Eusebius reported that Carpocrates flourished with Saturninus and Basilides during the reign of Hadrian (117–138 CE).76 The historian’s dating may only be based on the fact that Carpocrates closely follows Saturninus and Basilides in Irenaeus’s heresy catalog. A better anchor for dating is Irenaeus’s observation that Marcellina arrived in Rome during the time of Anicetus (155–166 CE). If Marcellina was Carpocrates’s student, then presumably Carpocrates himself was still active up until this time. It is conceivable that Carpocrates flourished between 117–166 CE, but we can plausibly narrow his floruit to about 135–165 CE. This range indicates that, if Carpocrates was active during the (later) reign of Hadrian, most of his career was spent during the reign of Antoninus Pius (reigned 138–161 CE). Additional confirmation of this date emerges from Justin, who reported on Basilides in the Syntagma, but not on Carpocrates. Basilides was already a well-known Alexandrian theologian. Carpocrates was apparently somewhat younger, and Justin’s knowledge of the Carpocratian movement—if indeed he encountered it—would only emerge with the advent of Marcellina in Rome (155 CE at the earliest).
The first known Christian writer to mention Carpocratians was apparently Hegesippus, who sojourned in Rome probably in the late 170s CE. The Valentinian Heracleon, who was perhaps also living at Rome at the time, noted Carpocratian aural cauterization—though he did not call the practice Carpocratian. Celsus mentioned Carpocratian groups around 177 CE.
Carpocrates in the heresy catalogs
By the mid-170s CE, I hypothesize that an anonymous editor had updated Justin’s Syntagma to include Carpocrates. He was placed between figures who reportedly upheld angelic creation (Simon of Samaria, Menander, Saturninus) and those who emphasized that Christ was born like all other humans (Cerinthus and the “Ebionites”). Carpocrates was said to have maintained both teachings. Carpocrates was thus conceived of as something of a bridge figure, as can be seen from the various succession lists:
|
Irenaeus, AH 1 |
Ref. 6–8 |
AAH |
Epiphanius, Pan. 21–46 |
Filastrius, Div. Haer. 29–51 |
|
Valentinus and disciples |
Jewish sects (Dositheans, etc.) |
|||
|
Simon |
Simon |
Simon |
Simon |
Simon |
|
Menander |
Valentinus and disciples |
Menander |
Menander |
Menander |
|
Saturninus |
Basilides |
Saturninus |
Saturninus |
Saturninus |
|
Basilides |
Saturninus |
Basilides |
Basilides |
Basilides |
|
Nicolaitans |
Nicolaitans |
Nicolaitans |
||
|
Ophites |
Gnostics |
|||
|
Marcion |
Cainites |
Judas-ites |
||
|
Prepon |
Sethians |
|||
|
Carpocrates |
Carpocrates |
Carpocrates |
Carpocrates |
Carpocrates |
|
Cerinthus |
Cerinthus |
Cerinthus |
Cerinthus |
Cerinthus |
|
Ebionites |
Ebionites |
Ebion(ites) |
Nazoreans |
Ebion(ites) |
|
Nicolaitans |
Theodotus I |
Valentinus and disciples |
Ebionites |
Valentinus |
|
Cerdo |
Theodotus II |
Cerdo |
Valentinus |
Ptolemy |
|
Marcion |
Nicolaus |
Marcion |
Secundus |
Secundus |
|
Tatian |
Cerdo |
Apelles |
Ptolemy |
Heracleon |
|
“Barbelo-Gnostics” |
Apelles |
Tatian |
Marcus |
Marcus |
|
“Ophites” |
Docetai |
Phrygians (Proclus and Aeschines) |
Colorbasus |
Colorbasus |
|
Cainites |
Monoimus |
Blastus |
Heracleon |
Cerdo |
|
Tatian |
Theodotus I |
Ophites |
Marcion |
|
|
Hermogenes |
Theodotus II |
Cainites |
Lucan |
|
|
Quartodecimans |
Praxeas |
Sethians |
Apelles |
|
|
Phrygians |
Archontics |
Tatian |
||
|
Cerdo |
Phrygians |
|||
|
Marcion |
Theodotus |
|||
|
Lucian |
||||
|
Apelles |
||||
|
Severus |
||||
|
Tatian |
As can be seen from this chart, Carpocrates was a consistent character in heresiographical literature. He regularly emerges toward the beginning of the Christian sects, situated after a succession of so-called “gnostics”: Simon, Menander, Saturninus, and Basilides (though the Refutator omits Menander and interchanges Saturninus and Basilides). Carpocrates is then followed by two figures or groups: Cerinthus (or Cerinthians) and Ebion(ites) (though Epiphanius inserts another “Jewish-Christian” sect between the Cerinthians and “Ebionites”). Roelof van den Broek represents the Ebionites as “pupils” of Carpocrates, but they are united in only one doctrine: the human birth of Jesus through male insemination.77 Outside of heresiography, there seems to be no connection between Carpocrates and “Jewish Christianity.” For heresiologists, Carpocrates was a hinge figure standing at the midpoint of the “gnostic” succession and the “Jewish Christian” succession, and somehow part of both. Historically, however, it is misleading to characterize Carpocrates by either of these heresiological categories. Carpocrates practiced a highly Hellenized and philosophically informed version of Christianity that may have been common in Alexandria at the time.
Carpocratian teaching
Carpocrates’s putative connections with Saturninus, Menander, and Basilides based on the doctrine of angelic creation are fragile.78 Those heresiologists who discuss Carpocratian theology (AAH, Epiphanius, Filastrius) refer to Carpocrates’s belief in a single God or principle, a “creator and father of all,” who—if he did not directly create all things—seems to be their source. The doctrine of a single father does not necessarily conflict with the demiurgical activity of subordinates (as in Plato’s Timaeus and in some Jewish stories of creation79), though Carpocratians, if they accepted these subordinates, did not apparently think of them as gods, but as angels subordinate to a single (monadic) God.
Heresiologists took offense that Carpocratians portrayed Jesus as born by normal human processes (with a human father). The Carpocratian emphasis, however, seems to have been on the divinity of Jesus’s soul, which needed no parent but God. Jesus’s soul was the soul of a sage, purer and more righteous than other human souls, and able to remember the heavenly vision of the supercelestial realm. Nevertheless, human souls as such were apparently considered to be ontologically equal. Every soul, at least, had a chance to behold the heavenly vision. Accordingly, every soul preexisted its earthly life.
Carpocratians strongly emphasized the imitation of Jesus, the only person, it seems, who fully conquered his passions (attaining ἀπάθεια). This implies that Carpocratians also strove to rid themselves of passions in order to match the righteousness of Jesus and to purify their souls. Heresiologists accused Carpocratians of claiming equality or superiority to Jesus. If we take such charges at face value, it is unclear in what sense Carpocratians claimed equality and/or superiority to Jesus. Superiority may only have meant superiority in works of virtue or of miracles. Jesus himself, according to some gospel traditions, exhorted his followers to outperform him in good deeds (John 14:12; Ap. James [NHC I,2] 4.32–5.3; 6.19; 7.13–15).
Recently scholars have emphasized Carpocrates’s Greek philosophical (specifically, Platonic-Pythagorean) heritage.80 To some extent, this emphasis accords with the heresiological tradition. Irenaeus, after all, underscored Carpocrates’s doctrine of transmigration, connecting it with a peculiar theory about living every form of life. At the same time, one cannot deny that traces of Platonized Pythagoreanism abound in Carpocratian thought. The preexistence of the soul and its descent from the heavenly revolution are distinctive Carpocratian notions, and they emerge clearly from language in Plato’s Phaedrus.
Transmigration was a widely known doctrine in antiquity, even if it was not the common belief of the person on the street. It was a teaching promoted by so-called Pythagoreans and Platonists (e.g., Plutarch, Sera 565d; 567e), as well as by Christian Platonists (Basilideans, Sethians, and the so-called Doketai). Carpocratians had their own particular theory of transmigration. They never acknowledged the transmigration of human souls into animals. Accordingly, they did not insist on vegetarianism (for fear of damaging rational souls in animals). Carpocratians also disagreed with Plato, who wrote that philosophic (i.e., pure) souls require at least three incarnations to break out of the cycle of transmigration (Phaedrus 249a). Carpocratians daringly opined that one could break out of the system in a single advent, which was the accomplishment modeled by Jesus himself.
The Carpocratian idea of performing every deed or employment of life has no exact correlate, to my knowledge, in other Greco-Roman theories of transmigration. It may recall, however, that scene in Plato’s Republic in which souls pick various “lives.” Many souls who did not learn their lesson in their previous incarnations pick the wrong sorts of lives—the lives of cannibalistic tyrants and animals, for instance (Plato, Resp. 619b–20d). It takes them many lives of suffering, in this viewpoint, to realize that the just and simple life of the philosopher is best. Perhaps Carpocratians adapted this idea. All recalcitrant and passion-filled souls, to learn their lesson, must experience a variety of employments in a variety of lives (cf. Plato, Phaedrus 248d–e).81
Carpocratians wanted to train the soul to exit the cycle of transmigration in a single advent. Careful analysis of Irenaeus’s language is needed to recover how Carpocratians conceived the ethics of salvation. Redeemed souls, we are told,
· “Come to be in every life and in every act” (in omni vita et omni actu fieri)
· “Experience every employment of life” (in omni usu vitae factae)
· Perform “every work in the world whatsoever” (in omni omnino operatione quae in mundo est fiat)
· “Engage with all deeds” (in omnibus misceantur operationibus),
· Arrive “in each type of life” (in unaquaque specie vitae) (Irenaeus, AH 1.25.4)
· Are saved “by going through all things” (nec enim aliter salvari eos nisi per omnia eant) (AH 1.31.2)
What Carpocratians meant by such language, assuming it was their language, remains elusive. It seems that Carpocratians encouraged the experience of different occupations, arts, life situations, fields of knowledge, and types of life. When Carpocratians went through the full range of human experience, they would realize that this earthly life had nothing to offer them, and that true life was the blissful contemplation of reality above.
Performing every employment or deed, whatever exactly it meant, had nothing to do with sin, despite the repeated claims of the heresiologists. Irenaeus, despite his efforts to represent, I suspect, actual Carpocratian language, still ended up inviting this line of hostile interpretation. He referred to the “wicked” Carpocratian “doctrine about actions (operationes), namely, that it is necessary for them to have experience in every kind of deed (in omnibus operibus), even”—he added—“in all the bad ones (in omnibus operibus etiam quibuslibet malis fieri)” (AH 2.32.1).
This and similar reports are, I believe, conscious distortions of the Carpocratian position. Irenaeus himself could not avoid depicting the Carpocratians as followers of a righteous, pure, and passionless Jesus—the major ethical model for Carpocratians. Jesus, if he was the model for escaping reincarnation in a single advent, presumably engaged in every employment of life. Yet none of his employments are said to have involved sin. If Carpocratians outperformed Jesus in deeds, theoretically they could only have been morally better than Jesus, not worse.
Licentiousness?
The Carpocratian understanding of a just, pure, and passionless Jesus, combined with their striving to imitate him, collides head-on with rumors of their supposedly licentious practices. For these practices, heresiologists seem to have had no evidence apart from slanderous rumors—rumors that were spoken by outsiders against all Christians. Crediting and spreading the rumors, heresiologists accused Carpocratians of ruining the moral reputation of all Christians. Such discourse was a form of scapegoating: deflecting the blame for anti-Christian rumors onto a particular Christian group.
The followers of Carpocrates and Epiphanes—not they themselves—were accused of claiming that wives were common (Clement, Strom. 3.2.5.1). Rumors about group orgies held day and night circulated to their disadvantage. In the end, however, heresiologists could not come up with a single example of a sinful act that they had actually seen Carpocratian Christians perform. This is not to say that all Carpocratians were in fact righteous and pure by ancient (or modern) standards. It is simply to say that accusations of Carpocratian “licentiousness” contradict the theoretical foundations of Carpocratian ethics (the imitation of a just, pure, and passionless Jesus) and therefore seem unjustified.
To reinforce their charges of licentiousness, heresiologists accused Carpocratians of the worst kind of moral relativism and indifference. Yet the only Carpocratian whose writings we know (Epiphanes) exhorted his readers to follow an apparently objective and universal law of nature. When we strip away heresiological rhetoric, we observe that Carpocratians did consider certain phenomena to be evil—for instance, injustice and the passions. They seem to have gained a reputation for antinomianism based on their rejection of human conventions. The only specific law code mentioned, however, is the law of Moses, which Jesus was said to have despised, and which Epiphanes called, at least with regard to the Tenth Commandment (Exod 20:17), “comical” (Clement, Strom. 3.2.9.3).82 Yet the (selective) rejection of the Mosaic law, at least in terms of practice, was hardly unique among second-century Christians. What’s more, if Carpocratians considered private ownership ridiculous, they did not scorn marriage itself. Carpocrates himself was married to one woman called Alexandreia—and nothing indicates they had an open relationship.
Authoritative texts
The selective rejection of Mosaic law helps to explain why Carpocratians manifested little interest in most texts of Jewish scripture. The Carpocratians were readers of Plato (the Republic and Phaedrus in particular) and perhaps Pythagorean lore, but they did not regard these writings as scripture. The only authoritative texts mentioned for them are gospel texts, although Carpocratian gospels seem not to have been identical with what later became canonical texts like Matthew and Luke. Epiphanes alluded to a text in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:45), but he may not have known the text as Matthew. Carpocratians may also have appealed to John 1:21 to support a doctrine of transmigration.83
All we know for sure is that Carpocratian gospel literature included the “parable” of Jesus about paying the last penny. It also presented Jesus as offering teaching in private to his disciples, with the charge to pass it on to worthy believers. The latter motif is present in many Christian gospels. Unfortunately, the name of the distinctive Carpocratian gospel is never supplied, and we have no reason, outside of the (forged) Epistle to Theodore, to believe that it was a form of Mark. The last penny “parable” is, after all, not Markan.
Ritual life
As for Carpocratian ritual, Carpocratians probably practiced water baptism like other Christians. What caught the attention of the heresiologists was the Carpocratian baptism of fire, which Carpocratians probably thought was prophesied by John the Baptist (Matt 3:11; Luke 3:16). They signified this higher baptism by a brand mark on the back of the right earlobe. This practice was distinctive to Carpocratians, though it should be kept in mind that other Christians introduced modifications and stages in their baptismal rituals (such as anointings with myrrh and oil) that were also associated with light and fire.84
Carpocratians also venerated images of Jesus, which they believed to be accurate depictions, putatively based on a model made in Pilate’s time. Although they placed Jesus’s image among other philosophers (at least Pythagoras and Plato), to them, Jesus was more than a philosopher. He was the ultimate exemplar for breaking out of the cycle of transmigration and ascending again to heaven. Needless to say, Carpocratians never worshiped a material object, nor would they have been tempted to do so if—as the heresiologists insisted—they believed that angels made the world. The only being recognized as divine par excellence was the single, invisible, immaterial, and unborn Father. Likely Carpocratians also venerated the soul of Jesus who obtained redemption and release from transmigration. If Jesus was not the Carpocratian “savior,” he was at least their salvific model.85
“Magic”?
Heresiologists accused Carpocratians of other practices that they categorized under the label of “magic.” Such practices were typically considered non-normative by literate professionals who represented the aristocratic values of the Greco-Roman elite. Practices of healing, interpreting dreams, exorcising demons, wearing charms, and other phylacteries, were common in the “religion of everyday social exchange” (Stanley K. Stowers) throughout the Roman Empire, particularly in Egypt. Insofar as such practices were performed by a wide variety of Christians, usually with references to Christian deities and scriptural stories, these Carpocratian practices can be considered Christian.
It is possible that some Carpocratians may have considered their souls to be more powerful than any material realities on earth, and thus able to manipulate these realities. They may also have invoked angels to perform tasks or provide information through dreams (a divinatory practice). It seems unlikely, however, that Carpocratians, who aimed to imitate the passionless Jesus, would be engaged in any practice that excited or enflamed the passions (such as love potions and love charms).
Salvation and deification
According to Carpocratians, all souls would—at least at some point—be saved. The system of reincarnation—although full of pain and suffering for souls—was a system evidently established by the supreme God to purify and train souls for heaven. A few rare souls would be fully purified in a single advent. Sinful and impure souls would go through many transmigrations, trying every type of life before they were ready again to reascend to the supercelestial realm far above rulers and powers.
Carpocratians are the first Christians we know of to assert a doctrine of universal salvation, a teaching later associated with the Alexandrian Origen (cf. 1 Tim 2:4).86 This teaching contradicts the still common assumption that for “gnostics,” salvation was reserved for an intellectual elite. If some Carpocratians called themselves “gnostics,” they probably meant it, not as a proper name, but in the more general sense of “knowers of esoteric lore.” Yet Carpocratians were not saved by their knowledge, but—as they themselves affirmed—by their faith in the righteous and passionless Jesus, and by their love for God and for one another.
Epiphanes
Perhaps the famous church historian Henry Chadwick (1920–2008) can be pardoned as a man of his time for dismissing Epiphanes as “a nasty-minded adolescent of somewhat pornographic tendencies.”87 Still, an important English translation of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies book 1 (1992) labels Epiphanes’s treatise as (1) “very immoral” and (2) claims that Epiphanes “astonished the world” with his “immoral conduct.”88 The former claim is unsupported by evidence, while the latter is simply false. Even in 2018, we learn from The Columbia Encyclopedia (eighth edition) that Carpocrates and Epiphanes were “notoriously licentious,” and that Epiphanes is said to have advocated “communal ownership of property, including women”—as if owning a free woman was even possible in Epiphanes’s time.89
There are other misconceptions about Epiphanes that are worth bringing out into the open. These misconceptions are represented in mostly older scholarship, but they still occasionally crop up. Eugène de Faye, for instance, proposed that Epiphanes did not use scripture to support his arguments, that he employed bare logic, that he protested against marriage, and was “purely pagan.”90 Heinz Kraft repeated the charge that Epiphanes was “pagan,” and that his treatise On Justice could not be called Christian.91 More recently (1999), Peter Karavites avowed that Epiphanes “did not rely on the source of revelation, but on natural observations as the theories of Greek philosophers.” In the process, Epiphanes “completely distorted the true meaning of justice.”92
Removing the heresiological framework
If we attempt to generate a fairer portrait of Epiphanes himself, we must, at minimum, remove him from the polemical frame of reference first inscribed by Clement. By quoting large sections of Epiphanes’s work, Clement provided important data about Epiphanes, even if Clement’s evaluation of that data must be judged problematic. Clement’s main theses, or rather assumptions, were that Carpocratians are sexually immoral and that they give Christians and/or Christ a bad name. When Clement turned to Carpocratian practices, he stopped quoting Epiphanes’s text and related what are manifest rumors.
There are other problems with Clement’s report. Although Clement seems to have wanted to make Epiphanes a kind of Carpocratian founder or co-founder, we have no evidence for any Carpocratian followers (as opposed to mere readers) of Epiphanes.93 Clement’s polemical strategy tended to blur his opponents. In Stromata 3.2 alone, Clement’s opponents are named as “Epiphanes,” “Carpocrates,” the “followers of Epiphanes and Carpocrates,” “competitors in the same vices,” and “like heresies.” Clement indicted all of these persons and/or groups as licentious. The excerpts of Clement’s central target (Epiphanes), however, never referred to any action that corresponded to the salacious rumors Clement reported (e.g., group orgies during love feasts).94
Clement’s central concern was to portray his own version of Christianity as true while excluding those whom he thought insulted Christ. He assumed, with many Christians of his day, that a true Christian was defined in terms of correct sexual practices. Accepting rumors of Carpocratian sexual practice, he tried to exclude them from the category of Christian—in particular from his own ecclesial registry. In making his case, Clement used the technique of scapegoating. Many elite Greco-Roman writers of the second century had written off all Christians as sexual reprobates. Clement wished to clarify that the accusations of group orgies were actually the practice of a particular group (the Carpocratians). By this means, he thought he could avoid charges directed against Christians in general. Unfortunately for Clement, his “Exhibit A” testimony of Carpocratian thought—the excerpts from Epiphanes’s On Justice—said nothing about group orgies. Nor did Epiphanes posit a “community of women/wives”—any more, at least, than a “community of men/husbands.”
Epiphanes’s central thesis, it seems, was that private property ought to be abolished by natural and divine law. This thesis, from what we can tell, remained on the level of theory. As Winrich Löhr has observed, Epiphanes did not make a practical recommendation for the common ownership of goods, let alone the “community of wives.”95 This is an argument from silence, to be sure, but it gains force from the heresiographical context. If the teenage Epiphanes actually did live in something like a commune full of “free love,” Clement would surely have seized upon it. As it turns out, we lack any evidence that Epiphanes’s communalistic ideals were ever implemented by any Carpocratian Christian either before or after him.
Part of Clement’s frame of reference was to categorize all his opponents as “hypocrites of gnosis falsely-so-called” (Strom. 3.18.110.3). We should, accordingly, be wary of any modern categorization that—intentionally or unintentionally—reinscribes Clement’s rhetoric and puts Epiphanes in the generalized category of “Gnosticism” or “Carpocratian Gnosticism.” As already pointed out by Michael Williams, Epiphanes is a good example of how so-called “gnostics” do not actually fit the protean category of “Gnosis/Gnosticism.” It is best, as far as we can, to wipe the slate clean of heresiological presuppositions.
Theology
In terms of theology, Epiphanes’s understanding of God and the world was in diametric opposition to anti-cosmism and world hatred (chief “Gnostic” traits according to Hans Jonas).96 Epiphanes believed in a good creator who made a good world and good human beings with fundamentally good desires—including sexual desires. He never mentioned demons, angelic creators, a fall of humanity, or the corruption of the natural world. It is therefore unacceptable to believe, with Morton Smith, that “Epiphanes, being a Platonist, probably held that daimones had created the world according to a divinely given form.”97 Not even heresiologists accused Epiphanes of believing in creation through daimones.
On the contrary, Epiphanes affirmed the God of Genesis who encouraged human reproduction between males and females (Gen 1:27–8). Consequently, I cannot agree that Epiphanes represented “a non-dualist rejection of the God of the Old Testament,”98 or that he imagined the God of Jewish law as absurd.99 The object of Epiphanes’s polemic was, I have argued, a human legislator—namely, Moses—not the Jewish deity. It is also hasty to posit that Epiphanes rejected Jewish scripture or the Pentateuch entirely. He scorned certain laws of the Decalogue (Exod 20:17)—laws which he probably attributed to a human origin. Epiphanes scorned these laws not out of spite or rebellion, but because he thought that the presuppositions of certain Mosaic laws conflicted with divine and natural law.100
Philosophy and the use of scripture
The only “gnosis” that Epiphanes was said to have advocated was “monadic gnosis” (Strom. 3.2.5.3), which apparently referred to monistic Pythagorean metaphysics. Epiphanes himself, however, did not claim special knowledge, Pythagorean or otherwise, and wrote a treatise that shows only slight influence from (Neo-)Pythagorean thought. Moreover, despite Clement’s notice that Carpocrates trained Epiphanes in Platonic philosophy, Epiphanes’s emphasis on natural law and common ownership shows greater influence from the older Stoa (Zeno and Chrysippus), as Kathy Gaca has observed.101
Clement implied that Carpocratian Christianity emerged from Pythagorean philosophy as opposed to scriptural teaching, but this was and remains a false opposition. Epiphanes was familiar with and interpreted traditions that today appear in at least six scriptural books, namely Genesis (Strom. 3.2.8.1), Exodus/Deuteronomy (3.2.9.3), Matthew (3.2.7.4), Romans (3.2.7.2), Galatians (3.2.6.2), and 1 Corinthians (3.2.8.2). He alluded to verses now found in Matthew and Romans several times, and probably quoted Romans 7:7.102 His direct quote of Exodus or Deuteronomy (the commandment not to covet a neighbor’s wife) rejects the commandment’s presuppositions regarding private property. In making his criticisms, however, Epiphanes assumed a creationist theology in which God the creator supports human procreation and sexual desire (Gen 1:28).
Biographical data and deification
What can we say about Epiphanes himself? Despite Clement’s polemical views, we have no reason to reject his biographical data (which he may have taken from a Carpocratian source).103 Epiphanes was only seventeen when he died, and he apparently died before his father. He was something of a child prodigy. He was well educated in the traditional subjects of Greco-Roman education, along with Platonic (and we can add Stoic and Pythagorean) philosophy. When Epiphanes perished, his parents Carpocrates and Alexandreia set up a shrine and monthly rites for him on the island of Cephallenia. They also established a sacred study space (mouseion) in his honor, apparently as a tribute to his learning.
The Cephallenians venerated Epiphanes as one would a god. To modern people, Epiphanes might look rather more like a hero or saint. With whatever analogy we choose to understand the deification of Epiphanes, it seems that his worship did not threaten or diminish the Carpocratian worship of Jesus.104 Those who venerated Epiphanes, at least, seem to have felt no contradiction between the worship of Jesus and the honors paid to Epiphanes. Divinity, for Carpocratian Christians, was not a zero-sum game. The soul itself was divine, and God further divinized it by adorning it with virtues. One of these supremely upright and intelligent humans was Jesus; a candle lit from the same flame was Epiphanes. The stories of Jesus and Epiphanes, moreover, were in some way parallel: both seem to have been God-taught, both manifested extraordinary wisdom, and both perished relatively young.
Interpreting On Justice
We can call Epiphanes a Carpocratian—a follower, that is, of his biological father Carpocrates, who was also his teacher. Epiphanes is the only Carpocratian whose writings have been preserved by direct quotation. This is of paramount importance. All other information about Carpocrates and the Carpocratians passes through the distorting lens of heresiological summaries—summaries which were increasingly detached from reality due to heresiological techniques (omission, imaginative additions, character assassination, and so on). This means that, when we endeavor to understand Carpocratian Christianity historically, the text of Epiphanes merits priority. This is why in this book I started with Epiphanes, rather than with the heresiological reports about his father.
At the same time, Epiphanes’s On Justice cannot be called an instance of official Carpocratian “doctrine”—if there was, that is, any set of beliefs stable enough to be called “Carpocratian doctrine.” Epiphanes was not, in other words, a systematizer of Carpocratian ideas. He was stating his own, likely idiosyncratic views about the unnaturalness of private property. These views are not represented or even mentioned in the summaries about Carpocrates and Marcellina, the two other Carpocratian leaders whose ideas and practices were blacklisted. On the question of Christian communalism and of God’s justice as radical equality, Epiphanes probably stood apart from his father and from fellow Carpocratians. Epiphanes was taught by his father, to be sure, but he was also an independent thinker with his own creative thought.
At the same time, even if Epiphanes was not articulating “official” Carpocratian doctrine, his text exemplifies certain assumptions about God and the world that other Carpocratians were likely to have maintained. Epiphanes believed in a single, good “maker and Father” of an apparently singular and good world. This world was not haunted by angelic or demonic creators. All humans have an equal share of divinely provided goods, as do other animals. Human and animal desires for self-preservation and propagation are good and even holy; for they are the outworking of natural and divine law.
Epiphanes’s theological assumptions, therefore, collide head-on with Irenaeus’s report on Carpocrates, that the world was made by “angels much inferior to the unborn Father” (AH 1.25.1), and that Jesus despised these angels (aka “rulers”) (AH 1.25.2, 4). If we only had Irenaeus, we might suppose that for Carpocratians, the creators were malign and their creation evil. Epiphanes shows that this view was, for Carpocratians, not accurate. Irenaeus, by 180 CE, was already in the business of gnosticizing the Carpocratians. That is to say, angelic creators were already a key feature of the groups in Irenaeus’s globalizing category of “gnostics” (including Simon, Saturninus, and Basilides). Irenaeus pigeon-holed Carpocratians into this category.
In Irenaeus’s report on Carpocrates, there is an emphasis on the preexistence of the soul, a system of transmigration maintained by world-makers, the practice of magic, and moral relativism. None of this material appears in Epiphanes’s excerpts.105 Admittedly, we lack the entire text of On Justice, but what we do have can still serve as a check on Irenaeus’s report.
That being said, there are some overlaps between Epiphanes’s On Justice and Irenaeus’s summary. Transmigration was a Pythagorean doctrine, and we have no reason to deny that Epiphanes was familiar with Pythagorean thought (expressed by “monadic gnosis”). Epiphanes’s rejection of human laws in favor of natural and divine law might, in a tendentious and selective sense, be portrayed as a kind of antinomianism and/or indifference toward human laws (an Irenaean emphasis).
In spite of himself, Irenaeus may have provided some of the Carpocratian rationale for Epiphanes’s deification. The Carpocrates of Irenaeus believed that Jesus’s soul was not unique. It was one of the many divine souls that saw divine realities in the superheavenly perambulation (Plato, Phaedrus 247c). Any soul who on this earth despised wicked angelic rulers like Jesus could assume the powers of Jesus and return to the same supercelestial region (AH 1.25.2). Such a soul would, logically, be honored with similar honors as were offered to Jesus. The deifications of Jesus and Epiphanes would not, in this framework, be seen to conflict.106 In short, both Jesus and Epiphanes had beheld divine realities in the supercelestial realm and, in the course of their lives, revealed, through wisdom, the sparks of divinity and truth that they beheld above.
Marcellina
Epiphanes, echoing Galatians 3:28, wrote that God does not discriminate between “ruler and subject, stupid and intelligent, male or female” (Clement, Strom. 3.2.6.2).107 As Peter Lampe points out, Carpocratians lived up to this ideal at least in their promotion of female leadership.108 Marcellina is the only known female leader of an autonomous Christian movement in second-century Rome. She is known chiefly through two early and independent witnesses: Celsus and Irenaeus.
According to Irenaeus (AH 1.25.6), Marcellina was a Carpocratian who came to Rome in the time of Anicetus (155–166 CE). She attracted “many people” (multos) to join her movement. Celsus called her a “Siren” (Origen, Cels. 5.62), pejoratively underscoring her persuasive power, and possibly her popularity. He also called her group “Marcellinians” (Μαρκελλιανούς). This name indicates a degree of independence from Carpocrates and other Carpocratians.
In fact, neither Irenaeus nor Celsus explicitly say that Marcellina was a student of Carpocrates. This is a scholarly inference. Interestingly, Celsus says that “Salome” led the “Harpocratians” (i.e., Carpocratians), while Marcellina led the “Marcellinians,” with “Mariamme” and “Martha” apparently leading different groups (Origen, Cels. 5.62). Other heresiologists, however, do not mention multiple Carpocratian groups in Rome. If they knew of this kind of inner-Carpocratian competition, they would certainly have emphasized it. There was thus probably a single Roman group: Marcellinians, a group that emphasized the importance of several female apostles like Salome, Mariamme (Mary), and Martha.
Marcellina came to Rome from elsewhere, but we do not know where. Most scholars believe that, if she was Carpocrates’s disciple, she came from Alexandria. This is the most reasonable hypothesis. Great Christian theologians like Basilides had sojourned in Alexandria. Marcellina, like Valentinus in this respect, had bolder prospects. She set sail for Rome, the beating heart of Empire. H. Gregory Snyder calls her an “intrepid lady.”109 In the words of Madeleine Scopello: “She undertook a long voyage to arrive at the capital, probably with a clear purpose and charged with a defined mission.”110 We know nothing about the content of Marcellina’s mission. Still, her taking the risk to travel to Rome, combined with her success in the hyper-competitive capital, is testimony to her drive and determination.111
When Marcellina labored in Rome, the city was awash with rival Christian leaders. During the course of her time there, Marcellina could and probably did encounter Marcion and his followers, followers of Simon, Tatian, Valentinus, Heracleon, Ptolemy, not to mention incipient catholics like Justin Martyr, Anicetus, Eleutherus, and so on. Between 174–189 CE, Hegesippus identified Carpocratians as one of six competing Christian groups at the time, among Menandrians, Marcionites, Basilideans, Valentinians, and Saturninians.112 Celsus mentioned Marcellina’s group around 175–177 CE. Irenaeus discussed the group about 180 CE. Possibly Marcellina was still alive and active at the time.
Marcellina as teacher and initiator
There is no reason to think that Marcellina gained notoriety in Rome simply because she owned the house church in which Carpocratians met.113 We are given the impression that she led the Carpocratian movement in Rome. Celsus called her a “sophist” (σοφίστρια) (Origen, Cels. 5.64). This name (the feminine version of σοφιστής) may have had a negative edge, but it also denoted an expert teacher with rhetorical training. What exactly Marcellina taught is never spelled out, but one can reasonably suspect it included some of the material in Irenaeus, AH 1.25.1–5 (the life of Jesus, an ethic of redemption, a doctrine of transmigration). To be sure, Marcellina is never called by an official title (such as “presbyter”), but she needed no title to lead a church. Marcellina is rightly contrasted with other women mentioned by Irenaeus: Simon’s Helen and the women around Marcus the Valentinian (AH 1.13.5–7; 1.23.2). These women are depicted as dependent upon and misled by a man. Marcellina was neither dependent on a man nor seduced by one.
If Irenaeus derived Carpocratian writings from Marcellina’s group, then Marcellina may be the author of the allegory Irenaeus mentioned in AH 1.25.4 (that angelic figures managed a system of transmigration until people “pay the last penny”). If so, Marcellina should be seen as an interpreter of scripture. Indeed, if she was leading a Christian group in Rome, her exegetical activity is hardly surprising.
Evidently Marcellina acknowledged a plain sense of this passage of scripture (settling with one’s creditors) along with a deeper, allegorical sense (dealing with transmigration). This may indicate that she had two levels of teaching, public and private. Her private teaching finds additional support in Celsus, who presents her as “dancing out” (i.e., revealing) mysteries or secret teachings. Marcellina thus probably had a basic level of teaching for beginners and a higher one for more advanced initiates (as was common in ancient pedagogies).
These higher initiates may have been dubbed “firebrands of hearing” and “gnostics” (that is, knowers of spiritual truths) who received—perhaps from Marcellina herself—a brand mark behind the lobe of their right ear (Irenaeus, AH 1.25.6). Marcellina was thus not only a teacher but an initiator with distinctive Christian rites and practices. We do not know if she adapted these rites from Carpocrates or some other Carpocratian leader. When it came to the brandmark, she may have been original.
If Marcellina administered a version of baptism, we might liken her to Thecla in contemporaneous Christian fiction.114 Thecla evidently baptized herself, and she taught a Christian message to others (Acts of Paul and Thecla 4.9–18).115 Tertullian tried to undercut Thecla’s influence by discounting the text in which she appears. The North African never mentioned Marcellina, but he did say that “perhaps” (fortasse) his opponents allowed women to baptize (Praescr. 41.5; cf. Bapt. 1, 17). If Marcellina baptized, she baptized not just with water, but with the fire of the holy Spirit—as was prophesied in the gospels (Matt 3:11; Luke 3:16). Her baptism of fire was probably not a second baptism, but a higher baptism that trumped the mere water baptisms of her competitors. For churches increasingly promoting male authority, Marcellina was probably felt to be more dangerous than Thecla, not least because Marcellina was a flesh-and-blood leader in the heart of the empire.
Although Tertullian and certainly the Refutator had read Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, they both remained silent about Marcellina. Instead of thinking that they had a different (earlier) version of Irenaeus’s text, it is more likely that they deliberately omitted Marcellina because they were threatened by the very idea of female leadership.116 They wanted no woman to invade Peter’s See, even partially. The tendency to omit women was itself part of heresiological polemic.117 Even though Tertullian did not mention Marcellina by name, one wonders if a memory of her is present in Tertullian’s disgruntled observation: “How bold these heretical women are! What things they dare to teach and dispute about. They perform exorcisms and promise cures; perhaps they even baptize” (Praescr. 41.5).
Marcellina was probably an innovator in early Christian iconography. In her time, images of Christ as a philosopher were rare, if they existed at all.118 Marcellina is the only named Carpocratian who set up an image of Christ among other philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, and perhaps Aristotle). She believed that these images—painted pictures and/or statues—went back to an archetype made in the time of Pilate. She herself may have claimed to have had this archetype at her disposal. For her, artistic accuracy was evidently important. The image of Jesus was thought to resemble his physical face. This emphasis on accuracy indicates that for Carpocratians the flesh of Jesus had at least of some importance. If Carpocratians only believed in the salvation of the soul—as heresiologists alleged—they did not despise the body as such. They venerated, it seems, the embodied image of Jesus.
Female apostolicity
The fact that Celsus grouped Marcellina with three first-generation female disciples of Jesus—Salome, Mariamme, and Martha (Origen, Cels. 5.62)—may indicate that Marcellina, in the words of Anne McGuire, “was revered not merely as a teacher of Carpocratian gnosis, but as an authoritative source of apostolic tradition.”119 This helpful hypothesis requires unpacking.
First, one should inquire about Celsus’s source(s) for his information on “Marcellinians.” If he depended on Justin’s Syntagma, or an updated version of it, we would expect him to record a succession of male leaders (like Carpocrates and Epiphanes).120 Yet Celsus focused entirely on Carpocratian female leaders. This point suggests that whoever originally transmitted this information to Celsus had an interest in female leadership. I can think of no one better suited for emphasizing female leadership than Marcellina herself, the female leader of the Roman Carpocratians. This inference would indicate that Celsus had done enough research on Marcellina’s group to represent her interests in female Christian leaders of the past, despite the fact that Celsus’s report ends up being confused (he split Carpocratians into four groups with four different female leaders).
Celsus seems to have put Marcellina on a par with three women of the gospels. Marcellina was not, of course, a biblical figure or a first-generation disciple of Jesus. At the same time, she probably would have benefited from being associated with these first-generation disciples. Salome, Mary, and Martha were more than marginal disciples of Jesus. At least Salome and Mary were known at the time as recipients of Jesus’s secret teaching (from the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel according to the Egyptians). They in turn became teachers of others. In this capacity, they filled the role of apostles in the early church. (Compare Junia, the “outstanding” female apostle in Rom 16:7.)121 If Marcellina highlighted the teaching and apostleship of Salome, Mary, and Martha, she may have put herself in their succession. The idea of apostolic succession was becoming increasingly important in late second-century Rome; but the typical Roman apostles there were solely male (Peter and Paul). Marcellina’s focus on female disciples is thus distinctive and important for understanding early Roman church history.122
It is significant, furthermore, that both Salome and Mary were viewed as champions of asceticism in early gospel literature (note again the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of Mary). That is to say, Salome and Mary not only transmitted some of Jesus’s private teaching on asceticism; they also modeled it. If Marcellina did highlight Salome and Mary as apostolic heroes for her church, this is still more evidence that Carpocratians would not have engaged in “licentious” behavior. Marcellina herself was certainly not known for dissolution. Her husband is never mentioned, which probably indicates that she was unmarried. If the heresiologists could uncover some rumor to defame Marcellina’s sexuality, they would certainly have used it (as they did for Simon’s Helen).123 Their silence in this regard indicates that they had nothing with which to blacken Marcellina’s reputation.
The fate of Marcellina’s group
What happened to Marcellina’s Christian group in Rome? We know that Origen traveled to Rome in the early third century CE. The fact that he did not encounter any “Harpocratians” (as he, following Celsus, says) or Marcellinians (Cels. 5.62) is not evidence that he did not know any Carpocratians there or elsewhere. Thus his statement cannot be taken as secure evidence that the Carpocratians died out after the second century CE. We simply do not know the fate of Carpocratian Christian groups, including Marcellina’s group in Rome. It is only because we do not hear of Carpocratians in third-century Rome that scholars have assumed their demise.
When Marcellina died, her group probably came under increasing pressure from the emerging and increasingly powerful “catholic” church in Rome. It is little wonder that a group with a female leader, which venerated female apostles, struggled to survive in late second-century Rome. This was the age in which the Pastoral Epistles were accepted as genuine by early catholics, a set of epistles that reinforced norms limiting a woman’s speech and independent leadership (e.g., 1 Tim 2:11–15). We can only imagine what catholic bishops like Victor (189–199 CE)—who ended up opposing Montanism with its famous female prophets (Epiphanius, Pan. 49.2.2, 5)—would have thought of Marcellina in his own backyard.124
The real wonder, perhaps, is that Marcellina and her group enjoyed the success that she had, weathering, as she did, written attacks from within Christian circles (Irenaeus) and without (Celsus). If Carpocratian Christianity went the way of most religious movements (extinction or absorption into other religious groups), this says nothing against Marcellina’s achievement in her own time. She was arguably the greatest and most influential of Carpocrates’s disciples, and due in part to her influence, heresiologists would hound Carpocratians in their literature for the next thousand years.
Notes
1. On early Christianity in Alexandria, see, e.g., Wilfred C. Griggs, Early Egyptian Christianity from its Origins to 451 CE (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 94–103; Attila Jakab, Ecclesia alexandrina: Évolution sociale et institutionnelle du christianisme alexandrin (IIe et IIIe siècles) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001); Birger Pearson, Gnosticism and Christianity in Roman and Coptic Egypt (London: T&T Clark, 2004); Wilhelm Pratscher, Markus Öhler, and Markus Lang, eds., Das Ägyptische Christentum im 2. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008); Gerhard Van den Heever, “Early Christian Discourses and Literature in North African Christianities in the Context of Hellenistic Judaism and Greco-Roman Culture,” in Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa, ed. Elias Kifon Bongmba (New York: Routledge, 2015), 61–78; Tobias Georges, Felix Albrecht, and Reinhard Feldmeier, eds., Alexandria, COMES 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013); Benjamin Schliesser et al., ed., Alexandria: Hub of the Hellenistic World. WUNT 460 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021).
2. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, ed. Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971 [original German in 1934]), 44–9.
3. David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010);April D. DeConick, The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
4. Markus Lang, “Das frühe Ägyptische Christentum. Quellenlage. Forschungslage und-Perspektiven,” in Das Ägyptische Christentum, 9–44, at 34–6; Ian Phillip Brown, “Where Indeed Was the Gospel of Thomas Written? Thomas in Alexandria,” JBL 138, no. 2 (2019): 451–72; Benjamin Schliesser, “Jewish Beginnings: Earliest Christianity in Alexandria,” in Alexandria: Hub 367–98; Wolfgang Grünstäudl, Petrus Alexandrinus: Studien zum historischen und theologischen Ort des zweiten Petrusbriefes, WUNT 2/353 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).
5. Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 1994), 413; Joseph Rius-Camps and Jenny Read-Heimerdinger, The Message of Acts in Codex Bezae: A Comparison with the Alexandrian Tradition. Volume 4 (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 18–27.
6. M. Wolter, “Apollos und die ephesinischen Johannesjünger (Act 18:24–19:7),” ZNW 78 (1987): 49–73. Paul himself—who preferred to spread the gospel where it had not previously been sown (Rom 15:20–1)—evidently considered Alexandria a plowed field.
7. Gregory E. Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephus, Luke-Acts, and Apologetic Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
8. Samuel Vollenweider, “Apollos of Alexandria: Portrait of an Unknown,” in Pace Alexandria: Hub 325–44 at 344; cf. Schliesser in ibid. 385–6.
9. On Apollos, see further Jürgen Wehnert, “Apollos,” in Alexandria, ed. Georges, et al. 403–12; G. Dorival, “Les debuts du christianisme a Alexandrie,” in Alexandrie: Une mégapole cosmopolite: Actes du 9ème colloque de la Villa Kérylos à Beaulieu-sur-Mer les 2 & 3 octobre 1998 (Paris: Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1999), 157–74 at 160–2; Claire Clivaz, “Reading Luke-Acts in the Second Century: From Paul to the Shadow of Apollos,” in Engaging Early Christian History: Reading Acts in the Second Century, ed. Todd Penner and Rubén R. Dupertuis, (London: Acumen, 2013), 209–24. The speculative mirror-reading of Pétrement (Separate God 276–97) and P.F. Beatrice (“Apollos of Alexandria and the Origins of the Jewish-Christian Baptist Encratism,” ANRW 26/2. ed. Wolfgang Haase [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995], 1232–75) is best avoided.
10. Ptolemy appears in Irenaeus, AH 1, pref. §2 and possibly 1.8.5. Eusebius mentioned the martyr Ptolemy (ΗΕ 4.17.8) known from Justin’s 2 Apol., but he is probably not the Valentinian. Heracleon received mention by Irenaeus (AH 2.4.1) and Tertullian (Against the Valentinians 4.2). Origen knew him and quoted about fifty fragments of his writings in his Commentary on John.
11. Eusebius mentioned a Cassianus in HE 6.13.7, but seems to have been unaware that this was—or was likely to be—the Julius Cassianus mentioned by Clement. For Eusebius’s knowledge of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Clement, see Andrew James Carriker, The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 196–8, 209–15, 217–19.
12. Clement, Strom. 7.17.106.4. See the comments of Löhr, Basilides 19–23.
13. Γλαυκίαν … τὸν Πέτρου ἑρμηνέα (Basilides in Clement, Strom. 7.17.106.4). Cf. Papias in Eusebius: Μάρκος μὲν ἑρμενευτὴς Πέτρου (HE 3.39.15). Löhr considers the Mark-as-interpreter tradition earlier than the Glaucias-as-interpreter tradition because the former comes from Papias (“Christliche ‘Gnostiker’ in Alexandria im zweiten Jahrhundert,” in Alexandria, ed. Georges, et al. 413–33 at 420). Basilideans, however, would not have tried to compete with the Papian tradition, since Papias never placed Mark in Alexandria.
14. Honigman, “Ethnic Minority Groups,” in A Companion to Greco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt, ed. Katelijn Vandorpe (New York: Wiley and Sons, 2015), 315.
15. Griggs, Pace Early Egyptian Christianity, 3–5, 15–17. See further Dennis E. Smith, “What Do We Really Know about the Jerusalem Church? Christian Origins in Jerusalem According to Acts and Paul,” in Redescribing Christian Origins, ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2004), 237–52; Luther H. Martin, “History, Historiography and Christian Origins: The Jerusalem Community,” in ibid. 263–74.
16. Irad Malkin, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4–64; Anna Collar, Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5–78; Richard S. Ascough “Redescribing the Thessalonians’ ‘Mission’ in Light of Graeco-Roman Associations,” NTS 60 (2014): 61–82.
17. Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, “Archaeology of Early Christianity in Egypt,” The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology, ed. David K. Pettegrew, William R. Caraher, and Thomas W. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019), 665–84.
18. Birger Pearson, “Earliest Christianity in Egypt: Some Observations,” in The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, ed. Pearson and James E. Goehring (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 132–60 at 134; Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt from Ramses II to Emperor Trajan, trans. Robert Cornman (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 228; Simon C. Mimouni, “À la recherche de la communauté chrétienne d’Alexandrie aux I-II siècles,” in Origeniana Octava: Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition, ed. L. Perrone (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003), 137–64 at 160; James Carleton Paget, Jews, Christians, and Jewish Christians in Antiquity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 137; Schliesser in Alexandria: Hub 367–98.
19. Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 2018).
20. Werner Bergmann and Christhard Hoffmann examine the motives of the conflict (“Kalkül oder Massenwahn? Eine soziologische Interpretation der antijüdischen Unruhen in Alexandria 38 n.Chr,” in Antisemitismus und jüdischen Geschichte. FS Herbert A. Strauss [Berlin. Wissenschaftlicher Autoren Verlag, 1987], 15–46). Willem Pieter Van der Horst (Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom [Leiden: Brill, 2003], 152–86) offers a commentary on Philo’s views. Jan Bremmer discusses the accuracy of the term “pogrom” (“The First Pogrom? Religious Violence in Alexandria in 38 CE,” in Alexandria: Hub 245–60).
21. Josephus, JW 7.218; Dio, Roman History 65.7.2. See further Marius Heemstra, Fiscus Iudaicus and the Parting of the Ways (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
22. John Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 78.
23. Eusebius, HE 4.2–3; Dio Cassius, Roman History 68.32; 69.8; Appian, Civil Wars 2.90. See further Miriam Pucci Ben Zeev, Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil 116–117 CE: Ancient Sources and Modern Insights (Leuven: Peeters. 2005); Anna Maria Schwemer, “Zum Abbruch des jüdischen Lebens in Alexandria: Der Aufstand in der Diaspora unter Trajan (115–117),” in Alexandria, ed. Georges et al., 381–99; William Horbury, Jewish War Under Trajan and Hadrian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
24. 1.92–3; Pearson, CPJ Gnosticism and Christianity, 83.
25. Dawson, Allegorical Readers, 174.
26. Horbury, Jewish War, 215–35; Tobias Nicklas, “Jews and Christians? Sketches from Second Century Alexandria” in Jews and Christians—Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE? Reflections on the Gains and Losses of a Model, ed. Jens Schröter, Benjamin A. Edsall and Joseph Verheyden, BZNW 253 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 347-79 at 353-59.
27. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 276.
28. Katelijn Vandorpe, “Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt, ed. Christina Riggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 260–76; Andrew Harker, “The Jews in Roman Egypt: Trials and Rebellions,” in ibid. 277–87.
29. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54–83.
30. Josephus JW 7.421; CPJ 2 §156c.
31. Robert Wuthnow, “Religious Involvement and Status-Bridging Social Capital,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, no. 4 (2002): 669–84.
32. See, e.g., Josephus, JW 7.46–53 with discussion by Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean 256–8.
33. Clement, Strom. 7.17.106.4–107.1 = Löhr, Basilides Testimony 5.
34. That Modrzejewski can refer to “the sudden emergence of a Christian community, sprung up overnight” in the Severan [!] period (Jews of Egypt 227) manifests surprising ignorance about Basilides, Carpocrates, Valentinus, Julius Cassianus, Prodicus, and others in early to mid-second century Alexandria. The statement of Rubenson that “there is almost no information in any sources about Christianity in Alexandria until the end of the second century A.D.” is also untrue (“From School to Patriarchate: Aspects on the Christianisation of Alexandria,” in Alexandria: A Cultural and Religious Melting Pot, ed. George Hinge and Jens A. Krasilnikoff [Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009], 144–57 at 145). Annick Martin rightly saw some recruitment among cultivated Greeks of the early period (“Aux origines de l’Alexandrie chrétienne: Topographie, liturgie, institutions,” in Origeniana Octava: Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition, ed. L. Perrone [Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003], 105–20 at 109).
35. See further Roelof van den Broek, Studies in Gnosticism and Alexandrian Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 196; Birger Pearson, “Egypt,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity volume 1, ed. Margaret M. Mithcell and Frances M. Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 331–50 at 337. Paget (Jews, Christians, and Jewish Christians, 138–41) argued for “continuities in outlook and perspective” between the Jewish and Christian communities in Alexandria before and after 117 CE. We can grant these ideational continuities while still proposing a distinction in religious identity.
36. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); Shaye J.D. Cohen, “The Ways that Parted: Jews, Christians, and Jewish-Christians ca. 100–150 CE,” in Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: The Interbellum, ed. Joshua Schwartz and Peter J. Tomson (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 307–33; Lori Baron, Jill Hicks-Keaton, and Matthew Theissen, ed., The Ways that Often Parted: Essays in Honor of Joel Marcus (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018); Timothy A. Gabrielson, “Parting of the Ways or Rival Siblings? A Review and Analysis of Metaphors for the Separation of Jews and Christians in Antiquity,” Currents in Biblical Research 19, no. 2 (2021): 178–204.
37. Cohen, “The Ways that Parted,” 232.
38. Modrzejewski, Jewish in Egypt, 230.
39. Schliesser, “Jewish Beginnings,” in Alexandria: Hub, 396–7.
40. The following section (on Basilides, Valentinus, and Prodicus), adapts material from my monograph Found Christianities 112–23, 136–48, 267–75.
41. Löhr, Basilides, 324–37.
42. Clement, Strom. 1.21.145.6–146.4 = Löhr, Basilides frag. 1. See further Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1986), 119–129.
43. Agrippa Castor in Eusebius, HE 4.7.5–8 = Löhr, Basilides Testimony 1.
44. Acts of Archelaus 67.5 = Löhr, Basilides frag. 19.
45. Origen, Commentary on Romans 5.1.25 = Löhr, Basilides frag 18. Cf. Origen, Comm. Ser. 38 on Matthew = Löhr, Basilides frag. 17. See further Löhr, Basilides 212–18.
46. Clement, Strom. 2.20.112.1–114.2 = Löhr, Basilides frag. 5.
47. Agrippa Castor in Eusebius, HE 4.7.5–8 = Löhr, Basilides Testimony 1.
48. Basilidean advice on marriage was offered by Isidore in Clement, Strom. 3.1.2.1–3.1.3.1 = Löhr, Basilides frag. 6.
49. Clement, Strom. 4.11.86.1 = Löhr, Basilides frag 8.
50. Clement, Strom. 4.11.86.1 = Löhr, Basilides frag 8; cf. Strom. 4.12.82.2. For Providence in antiquity, see further Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils, Demiurge and Providence: Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato’s Timaeus (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); George Boys-Stones, “Providence and Religion in Middle Platonism,” in Theologies of Ancient Greek Religions, ed. Esther Eidinow et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 317–38; Dylan Burns, Did God Care? Providence, Dualism and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
51. Markschies, Valentinus Gnosticus? 1–10.
52. Benoit Standaert, “L’Évangile d’Vérité: critique et lecture,” NTS 22, no. 3 (1976): 243–75; Christoph Markschies, Valentinus Gnosticus? 340–56; Smith, Valentinian Christianity, 127–8; Litwa, Found Christianities, 136–48.
53. Clement, Strom. 7.17.106.3–4; cf. “Theuda” in 2 Apoc. Jas. (NHC V,4) 44.18.
54. Clement, Strom. 3.7.59.3 = Valentinus frag. 3 (Völker).
55. Clement, Strom. 2.8.36.2–4 = Valentinus frag. 1 (Völker).
56. Clement, Strom. 4.13.89.6–90.1 = Valentinus frag. 5 (Völker).
57. We know that this was the case for Origen, about a century after Valentinus (Porphyry in Eusebius, HE 6.19.5–8).
58. Clement, Strom. 3.7.59.3 = Valentinus frag. 3 (Völker).
59. Clement, Strom. 3.4.30.1; Tertullian, Scorp. 15.6.
60. Cf. Clement, Strom. 4.26.165.3. See further Benjamin Dunning, Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
61. Irenaeus, AH 1.25.1; AAH 3.1; Epiphanius, Pan. 27.2.2.
62. Theodoret, Fab. 1.6.1.
63. Williams, Rethinking, 172–3.
64. Clement, Strom. 3.4.30.1 (κρατηθῆναι ὑπ’ οὐδενὸς νενομικότες).
65. Cf. Clement, Strom. 3.7.57.1–2. See further Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, “Akrasia and Enkrateia in Ancient Stoicism: Minor Vice and Minor Virtue?” in Akrasia in Greek Philosophy: From Socrates to Plotinus, ed. Christopher Bobonich and Pierre Destrée (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 215–47; Litwa, Found Christianities, 267–75.
66. See further Luca Arcari, “‘Monotheistic’ Discourses in Pseudo-Justin’s De monarchia: The ‘Uniqueness’ of God and the Alexandrian Hegemony,” in Alexandria: Hub, 503–18.
67. Litwa, Found Christianities, 257–66.
68. Fürst, Christentum als Intellektuellen-Religion (entire).
69. Stowers, “Locating the Religion,”; Wendt, At the Temple Gates.
70. Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, ed. W. Dittenberger (Leipzig: Herzel, 1920) §1267 (third century BCE). We possess a third–fourth-century CE inscription from Chalcis in which “Carpocrates himself speaks as the son of Isis and Sarapis (i.e., Osiris): Κα-ρποκράτης εἰμὶ ἐγώ· Σαράπιδος καὶ Ἴσιδος ὑός (in L. Vidman, inscriptionum religionis Isiacae et Sarapiacae [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969] 40, §88). Harpocras, an Egyptian ointment therapist, was granted Roman and Alexandrian citizenship in the early second century CE (Pliny the Younger, Ep. 10.6–7). See further Ernst Sittig, “Καρποκράτης,” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen 45 (1913): 242–5; Isidore Lévy, “ΚΑΡΠΟΚΡΑΤ-ΗΣ,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 26, no. 117 (1913): 262; Wilhelm Schulze, Kleine Schriften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1934), 384–91; Sandra Sandri, Har-pa-chered (Harpokrates): Die Genese eine ägyptischen Götterkindes (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), esp. 177–8.
71. Eleni Pachoumi, The Concepts of the Divine in the Greek Magical Papyri (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 64, citing PGM 1107–8. For images, see Carol Andrews, Amulets of Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum, 1994), 16, 22 and the back cover.
72. Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 132; Sandri, Har-pa-chered, 97–101.
73. See further Diana Delia, Alexandrian Citizenship during the Roman Principate (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), esp. 7–48. On Apion and Chaeremon, see Willem Pieter van der Horst, Chaeremon: Egyptian Priest and Stoic Philosopher (Leiden: Brill, 1987); Beatrice Wyss, “Cultural Rivalry in Alexandria: The Egyptians Apion and Chaeremon,” in Alexandria: Hub 145–63.
74. Fürst, Christentum als Intellektuellen-Religion, 24.
75. [Epiphanius][Epiphanius] nacephalaeosis II.27.1; John Damascene, De haeresibus compendium, 27.
76. Eusebius, HE 4.7.9, followed by Theodoret, Fab. 1.5.4.
77. Irenaeus, AH 1.26.2; van den Broek, Gnostic Religion, 128.
78. Pétrement,Pace Separate God, 347.
79. Plato, Tim., 42b–d; Philo, Opif., 72–5; Conf., 171–4; Tri. Trac. (NHC I,5) 112.19–113.1; Justin, Dial., 62.3; Josephus, C. Ap., 2.192; Fossum, Name of God, 192–213.
80. Löhr, “Christianity as Philosophy,” 160–88; Löhr, “Christian Gnostics,” 349–77; Löhr, “Modelling Second-Century Christian Theology: Christian Theology as philosophia,” in Lieu and Paget, ed., Christianity in the Second Century, 151–68.
81. Pétrement, Separate God, 348.
82. Epiphanes’s use of Exod 20:17/Deut 5:21 does not indicate it formed part of Carpocratian scripture (pace Whitley, “Blasphemy,” 99–100).
83. This datum is from the unique report of Tertullian (An. 35.5) who does not explicitly attribute it to Carpocratians.
84. G.W.H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit: A Study in the Doctrine of Baptism and Confirmation in the New Testament and the Fathers, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 1967). Stewart-Sykes, ed., Apostolic Tradition, 110–13; Logan, “Post-Baptismal Chrismation in Syria: The Evidence of Ignatius, the Didache, and the Apostolic Constitutions,” JTS 49, no. 1 (1998): 92–108.
85. Daniélou, Jewish Christianity, 84–5.
86. Gregory MacDonald, ed., All Shall Be Well: Explorations in Universal Salvation in Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann (London: James Clarke & Co., 2014); Simmons, Universal Salvation, 126–226.
87. Oulton and Chadwick, Alexandrian Christianity, 25. This remark is often re-quoted, sometimes without criticism (e.g., Sabo, Christians and Platonists, 34).
88. ACW 55.197.
89. P. Lagasse, “Carpocrates,” in The Columbia Encyclopedia, 8th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), published online by Credo Reference: https://search-credoreference-com.ezproxy1.acu.edu.au/content/entry/columency/carpocrates/0.
90. De Faye, Gnostiques, 392, 394.
91. Kraft, “Gab es,” 439.
92. Karavites, Evil, 62.
93. Epiphanius opined that the heresy of the “Origenists,” was modeled on that of Epiphanes (Pan. 63.1.3; cf. 32.3.1–5). But these people, who reportedly rejected marriage but welcomed orgasm without insemination, cannot plausibly be called Epiphanes’s followers.
94. Williams (Pace Rethinking 185), who in this rare case concedes too much to the heresiological point of view: “there is no debate about the document’s [Epiphanes’s On Justice] explicit and unambiguous advocacy of sexual license.”
95. Löhr, “Epiphanes’ Schrift,” 25–6.
96. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 43–4, 250–65.
97. Smith, CA, 273.
98. Löhr, “Carpocratians,” DGWE, 241.
99. Löhr, “Karpokratianisches,” 38. Cf. Scholten, “Yet for Epiphanes the common ownership of goods stands in the context of a radical denial of the OT law and its God” (Doch steht bei Epiphanes die Gütergemeinschaft im Kontext der radikalen Absage an das Gesetz des A.T. und seinen Gott) (“Karpokrates,” 185).
100. See further Williams, Rethinking, 186–7.
101. Gaca, Fornication, 273–91.
102. Whitley (“Blasphemy,” 98) opted for a Carpocratian use of Romans 6:14, οὐ γάρ ἐστε ὑπὸ νόμον ἀλλὰ ὑπὸ χάριν (cited by Clement, Strom. 3.8.61.1), but Clement did not mention Carpocratians in this passage.
103. See further Liboron, Karpokratianische Gnosis, 15–16.
104. de Faye, Pace Gnostiques, 392.
105. Clement mentioned transmigration in Strom. 3.3.13.3, but did not connect the idea specifically to the Carpocratians.
106. See further Löhr, “Karpokratianisches,” 36.
107. The following few paragraphs adapt and expand on language in my Found Christianities 131–2.
108. Lampe, From Paul, 319–20.
109. Snyder, “Marcellina’s Group,” 39.
110. Scopello, Femme, Gnose, et Manichéisme. De l’espace mythique au territoire du réel (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 219 (Elle avait donc entrepris un long voyage pour se render dans la capitale, et vraisemblablement dans un but précis ou chargée d’une mission bien définie).
111. For travel to Rome, see David Noy, eigners at Rome: Citizens and Strangers (London: Duckworth, 2000), 141–4.
112. Hegesippus quoted by Eusebius, HE 4.22.5.
113. Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 157–63, 214–19.
114. For Thecla, see Elisabeth Esch-Wermeling, Thekla—Paulusschülerin wider Willen? Strategien der Leserlenkung in den Theklaakten (Münster: Aschendorff, 2008); Jeremy W. Barrier et al., ed., Thecla: Paul’s Disciple and Saint in the East and West (Leuven: Peeters, 2017); Susan E. Hylen, A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 43–70.
115. Jeremy W. Barrier, The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary, WUNT 2/270 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 160–88; Outi Lehtipuu, “The Example of Thecla and the Example(s) of Paul: Disputing Women’s Role in Early Christianity,” in Women and Gender in Ancient Religions: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll, Paul A. Holloway, and James A. Kelhoffer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 349–78.
116. Snyder, “Marcellina’s Group,” 48–56.Pace
117. See further Silke Petersen, “‘Jede Häresie ist eine wertlose Frau’ (Epiphanius von Salamis): Zur Konstruktion der Geschlechterdifferenz im Religionsstreit,” in Doing Gender-Doing Religion: Fallstudien zur Intersektionalität im frühen Judentum, Christentum und Islam, ed. Ute E. Eisen, et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 99–126.
118. Graydon F. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2018), 107–10; Jensen, “Visual Representations of Early Christian Teachers,” 60–83.
119. Anne McGuire, “Women, Gender, and Gnosis in Gnostic Texts and Traditions,” in Women and Christian Origins, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D’Angelo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 257–99 at 260.
120. Snyder, “Marcellina’s Group,” 47.
121. Elden Jay Epp, Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005).
122. See further Ernst, Martha, 271–91.
123. E.g., Irenaeus, AH 1.23.2; Tertullian, An. 34.5.
124. Tertullian, Praxeas 1.5. See further Lampe, From Paul, 394–5; Christine Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 185–97; Antti Marjanen, “Montanism: Egalitarian Ecstatic ‘New Prophecy,’” in A Companion to Second-Century Christian “Heretics”, ed. Marjanen and Luomanen, 185–212; Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments: Ecclesiastical and Imperial Reactions to Montanism (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 36–40.