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"Basilides" redirects here. For the 17th century Ethiopian Emperor, see Fasilides of Ethiopia.

Basilides (ca 117-138) was an early Christian religious teacher who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. His followers, the Basilideans, formed a Gnostic sect. Very little is known with certainty about the teachings of Basilides. An account of his purported heresy is contained in the work Adversus Haereses ("Against Heresies") by Irenaeus of Lyon, but it is impossible to determine how faithful Irenaeus's hostile reading is to the views actually held by Basilides.

Contents 1 Basilides 2 Influence 3 See also 4 External links 5 References

Basilides was a pupil of an alleged interpreter of St. Peter, Glaucias by name, and taught at Alexandria during the reign of Hadrian (117–138). He may have been previously a disciple of Menander at Antioch, together with Saturnilus. The Acta Archelai state that for a time he taught among the Persians. He composed twenty-four books on the Gospel, which, according to Clement of Alexandria were entitled Exegetics. Some fragments, preserved by Clement and in the Acta Archelai, supplement the knowledge of Basilides furnished by his opponents.

The oldest refutation of the teachings of Basilides, by Agrippa Castor, is lost, and we are dependent upon the later accounts of Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Hippolytus. The latter, in his Philosophumena, gives a presentation entirely different from the other sources. It either rests on corrupt accounts, or, more probably, on those of a later, post-Basilidian phase of the system. Hippolytus describes a monistic system, in which Hellenic, or rather Stoic, conceptions stand in the foreground, whereas the genuine Basilides is an Oriental through and through, who stands in closer relationship to Zoroaster than to Aristotle.

Twentieth-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote his Seven Sermons to the Dead and attributed them to Basilides. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was interested in Irenaeus' account of Basilides' Gnostic doctrine and wrote an essay on the subject: "A Vindication of the False Basilides" (1932). Basilides is also mentioned in Borges's short story "Three Versions of Judas" (1944), which opens with the striking passage "In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith, when Basilides published that the Cosmos was a reckless or evil improvisation by deficient angels... "

Basilides or, to be more precise, "the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides", is also mentioned in Borges' story "A Library of Babel".

• Christian mystics

• "Basilides" by T. Apiryon
• Seven Sermons to the Dead
• Fragments of Basilides
• Fragments of his son Isidore
• Catholic Encyclopedia: a point-of-view from a conservative orthodox Catholic position

• This article includes content derived from the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1914, which is in the public domain.