A Rejected Candidate Founds His Own School

Valentinus, the Egyptian-born teacher after whom Valentinianism is named, was educated in Alexandria and later moved to Rome around the year 136, where he taught and gained real influence for roughly a quarter century. Ancient sources, including the later heresiologist Tertullian, report that Valentinus was himself a serious candidate for the office of bishop of Rome and that his failure to be chosen contributed to his break with the mainstream church and the development of his own distinctive teaching, though how much this account should be trusted as literal history rather than a later polemical framing is debated among historians of early Christianity. Whatever set the break in motion, Valentinus emerged as the most influential Christian Gnostic teacher of the second century, and communities founded by his own students carried his teaching from Rome and Alexandria outward across the Roman Empire, from northwest Africa through Egypt and into Asia Minor and Syria. Valentinian communities became, in the judgment of modern historians of the period, the single most serious internal theological challenge that mainstream second and third century Christian bishops had to confront and answer.