The Debt to Irenaeus

This, then, is what the school of Valentinus puts forward about the creation and about the universe, and every time they produce opinions newer than the ones before. In their system this is what counts as fruitfulness: that a man who in the same way comes up with some larger discovery should be taken for a worker of wonders. And when they find that every detail of Scripture agrees with the numbers already set out, they bring a charge against Moses and the prophets, claiming that these men were speaking in figures about the measurements of the Aeons. [a]

Since these statements are trifling and will not stand, I do not think it worth setting them before the reader — the less so because the blessed elder Irenaeus has already refuted the opinions of these men, powerfully and at length. It is to him that we owe our knowledge of their inventions, and by his help that we have proved that these heretics took their opinions over from Pythagorean philosophy and from the spun-out theories of the astrologers, and then laid the charge at Christ’s door, as though he were the one who handed such teachings down. But since I take it that the worthless opinions of these men have now been explained fully enough, and that it has been clearly proved whose disciples Marcus and Colarbasus are — the successors of the school of Valentinus — let us see what Basilides has to say for his part.