Pastor of the influential Baucalis Church in Alexandria where Alexander was bishop. Around A.D. 318, Arius challenged Alexandrian teachers by asserting that Christ's divinity was not of the same order of God's, since he was a created Being — sort of half-God, for "the Son has a beginning, but … God is without beginning." He spread his doctrines with simple jingles. His teaching appealed to the common people and former pagans, since it resembled the Gnosticism of their youth. Quarreled with Bishop Alexander at a synod in Alexandria in A.D. 320 and won the partial support of Eusebius, the Bishop of Nicomedia. His heresy spurred the formulation and acceptance of the Nicene Creed. All bishops present, excepting Arius and two others, accepted this creed. Arius and the remaining two bishops were consequently exiled.

[tags]Alexander, Arius, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, Creed, Gnosticism, history, Nicene-Creed[/tags]

An Oxford Scholar who wrote that in Gnosticism, there is a Supreme God, under whom there are lesser gods, emanations, until at the very bottom of the chain is a god who, "while powerful enough to create is silly enough not to see that creation is wrong."

[tags]BlogRodent, Charles-Bigg, church-history, ChurchRodent, Gnosticism, history[/tags]

A second century dualistic heresy that stressed the importance of philosophical knowledge (Gk. gnosis) for salvation. Gnosticism taught that a series of emanations of deity come forth in which a lower god, the God of the Old Testament, created the material world and was in conflict with the higher, supreme God, who could not have association with the evil, material world.

[tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, Gnosticism, history[/tags]

Mani was its founder who had taught in Persia, and had met there a martyr's death by crucifixion in 276 or 277. The fundamental belief of the religion pictured the universe as the scene of an eternal conflict of two powers, the one good, the other evil. Man, as we know him, is a mixed product, the spiritual part of his nature consists of the good element, the physical of the evil. His task, therefore, is to free the good in him from the evil; and this can be accomplished by prayer, but especially by abstinence from all the enjoyments of evil: riches, lust, wine, meats, luxurious houses and the like. Like Gnosticism, taught that the true spiritual Jesus had no material body and did not actually die. Augustine was a Manichean for nine years, from 372-383, before dissatisfaction with its teachings arose in his mind.

[tags]Augustine, BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, Gnosticism,

By A.D. 185 Pantanaeus was teaching at Alexandria. He was a converted Stoic philosopher and was a very able thinker. Clement was his pupil. He lectured on Christianity as the true philosophy. He aimed to enter the thought-world of the pagans to show the superiority of the catholic faith. His teaching asked the big questions of meaning (thus, was "gnostic"), but it also refined orthodox answers (and thus, "Christian Gnosticism").

[tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, Gnosticism, history, Pantanaeus[/tags]