A Secret Tradition Traced to an Apostle

Basilides, who taught in Alexandria during the reigns of the Roman emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius in the second century, founded the Gnostic school that came to be called the Basilideans or Basilidians. According to the later Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria, Basilides claimed to have received his esoteric teaching, his gnosis, through a chain of secret transmission traced back to Glaucias, who was said to have served as an interpreter for the apostle Peter, a claim of apostolic pedigree that, whether or not it was historically accurate, was clearly meant to give Basilides's teaching an authority independent of and prior to the wider church's own developing tradition. Basilides also imposed on his followers a period of silence lasting five years before they were permitted to speak openly of the teaching, a discipline explicitly modeled on the practice long associated with the followers of Pythagoras, linking the Alexandrian school to an older Greek tradition of guarded, gradually revealed wisdom. The sect proved durable: the fourth century heresiologist Epiphanius recorded Basilidean communities still active in the Nile Delta more than two hundred years after the school's founding.