Basilides and the God Who Is Not
I picked up Bentley Layton’s chapter on Basilides expecting to find the God who is not. That phrase is the reason most people have heard of him, if they’ve heard of him at all. It turns out to sit in a footnote, attached to a source Layton thinks probably wasn’t written by Basilides. That’s a strange discovery to make about a man whose name Carl Jung borrowed for the Seven Sermons to the Dead. It’s also a pretty good summary of what studying him is like. Almost everything we know comes secondhand, from people who were arguing with him, and the reports don’t agree with each other. ...