Paul Kalligas, Plotinus against the Gnostics
Additionally, per Trinity College's (Dublin) Paul Kalligas' discussion in Plotinus against the Gnostics,"The arrival in Rome of the heresiarch Valentinus, around the year 140, and his stay there for more than two decades, when he was nearly appointed to the Episcopal see of the city, but was eventually outvoted by a colleague with stronger credentials as a martyr, symbolizes, one might say, the beginning of a process of crystallization of this theosophical movement into a more or less philosophically structured theological system, based on Platonic and Pythagorean principles. Valentinus himself is commonly described in our sources as a Platonist, and Hippolytus maintains, not without some plausibility, that his system was based on a famous passage from the Second pseudo-Platonic Epistle, which we know had inspired several other Pythagorising Platonists of the time, like for instance, Numenius. Within the following century, the process continued and acquired considerable momentum through the of 240 256contribution of numerous disciples of Valentinus, some of whom, like Heracleon and Ptolemaeus, were, according to the testimony of Hippolytus, also active in Italy. A sure indication of the amount of Gnostic material that was circulating in Rome a few years before the arrival of Plotinus is given by the fact that Hippolytus, while compiling his massive Attack Against the Heresies, was able to collect there the immense material of Gnostic provenance that is used in this work. Further fascinating testimony on the presence and the activities of Gnostic sects in Rome during the first half of the third century is provided by the famous hypogaeum of the Aurelii, with the imaginative depiction ofGnostic allegorical scenes on its murals.”
Kalligas continues: "The continuing tendency to formulate such speculations in ever more theoretical terminology, their formidable complexity and the effort to support or embellish them by employing philosophical concepts or even forms of argumentation led to the production of treatises where, under the guise of phantasmagoric allegories of a revelatory character and the intricacies of a complicated symbolism, one can discern an effort to tackle theological issues that had preoccupied Greek philosophy since the time of the Presocratics. To this category seem to belong at least two of the treatises mentioned by Porphyry in Chapter 16 of his Life of Plotinus, which have miraculously emerged again among the codices found buried in a jar, near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi. These are the ‘Revelations' of Zostrianus and Allogenes, which contain some of the most theoretically pretentious passages in the whole library. Other Sethian texts included in the collection are the ones under the titles The Apocryphon of John, The Hypostasis of the Archons, The Gospel of the Egyptians, The Three Steles of Seth, Marsanès and the treatise entitled Trimorphic Protennoia. However, we have to note that although Porphyry explicitly characterizes those who circulated these texts in Rome as Christians', the only one of them which bears any distinctively Christian elements is The Apocryphon of John." (However, I do believe Trimorphic Protennoia does as well given the close relationship.)
