I’m not sure what you mean by “Gnostcism is false.” The article explains that Gnosticism didn’t exist; but that doesn’t mean some of the disparate things stuffed under the term didn’t. I carefully explain the difference, so you should attend to the article and read it as carefully as it was written.

And Platonism has nothing to do with that question so I don’t know what you mean by including it here.

Nor even does theism. Nothing in my article changes, whether God exists or not. Atheism is irrelevant to this article.

But if you want to confront why it is your belief about that that is false, start with Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? and work out from there.

There is a reason you aren’t an expert in this field and all experts specializing in gnostic studies disagree with you now.

To wit:

treating early Christianity as just a variety of eclectic collections of ideas, without any underlying identifiable coherency.

That’s exactly what it is, and that is exactly these specialists’ point: Christianity was an incoherent chaos of sectarian developments. You are the one being naive here. And you are on the other side of this very shift, where specialists used to be but left for a reason.

Christianity started as a Jewish messianic apocalyptic cult. Then shattered into endless diverse factions with a dizzyingly complex set of interacting pedigrees. Even Paul said there were multiple sects and some so divergent he had to condemn them as anathema and demand they be shunned. And that was just in the first two decades of the religion. By a hundred years later the explosion of divergent Christianities is beyond our ability to track, especially as almost all we know about them comes from unreliable polemics against them another hundred years later.

This was also true in philosophy. There were no longer clean divisions among sects. You could find a sect declaring for a trend (the basic five schools; most universities at the time even had endowed professorships for four of them) and declare for it, but in reality each sect was fractured into countless subsects, and worse, most philosophers did not declare for a sect but were eclectics. There is a whole literature on philosophical eclecticism in the early Roman Empire (I cite a bibliography on it in Scientist). So even philosophy was not “clean.” The evidence establishes that Christianity was way worse than philosophy in this regard.

It is naive to behave any other way. There are no false dischotomies. All Christianities were awash in Platonism and only differed in what pieces they took or how they adapted them. And they resemble each other only in respect to pedigrees and influences, which were complex and not linear.

Case in point: you still think there was a Christianity that wasn’t angelomorphic. There is actually no evidence there ever was. Orthodoxy was angelomorphic. Every heresy documented well enough to know either way, was angelomorphic. Marcionism was angelomorphic. Valentinianism was angelomorphic. They were all angelomorphic. They differed only in which angel, and in which way the incarnation was effected.

There simply is no “two streams.” And Irenaeus and Tertullian would have been horrified by your suggestion that there was. They well knew there were an array of “heresies” and only a few grouped even as you want, much less as the word “Gnosticism” has been defined and employed in the field for over a century (which is not at all your new attempt at a “fixed” definition that abandons even the relevance of Gnos- in Gnostic and thus makes no sense of why you want to keep the word).

Everything believed of Gnostics is true of Orthodoxists: cosmological dualism, the importance of gnosis to salvation (including secret knowledge), Platonist foundations (resulting in numerous distinctly Platonist elements, differing only in which ones and how apapted), elaborate angelological and demonological cosmologies, a divine enemy who caused the ruination of flesh, and “escape from a fallen world” ideation.

The Marcionite shift simply moved the enemy who corrupted creation from Satan to the Demiurge (making Christianity more Platonist) and thus replaced the Logos with the Demiurge as the creator; and subsequent sects that spun off of Marcionism retained or adapted that idea; but most sects traditionally classified as Gnostic (based on the mistranslation of the title of Irenaeus’s book) did not.

So there is no sect that has all the properties of Gnosticism; but every sect had some version of every property of Gnosticism (e.g. Satan or Demiurge, it’s the same thing, just one more Jewish-Zoroastrian, the original faith, and the other more Middle Platonist, the Marcionite strand of sects; they all had essential and even secret gnosis, and only differed on its content; they all had elaborate cosmological/angelological mysteries, e.g. as alluded to by Ignatius and Clement; etc.).

So there just is no distinction “Gnosticism” as a word can make. You can talk about the Marcionist wing of sects, but that’s simply that (Demiurgic Christianities). It is not distinctively “Gnostic.” It is not distinctively centered in gnosis. Most of its ideas overlap orthodoxy hazing any real (non-polemicized) distinction. For example, apart from the Demiurgic components of Marcionism, Marcion was an orthodox Paulinist about the incarnation and resurrection, just as Origen was, and Tertullian et al. were actually the heretics “revising” history to make Paul a sarcicist when, as Origen points out, he wasn’t. So there is no clean story. And nothing distinctively “gnostic” about any of these sects.

To simply “recycle” the word Gnostic (why “gnos-“???) to mean Demiurgist is not useful, but confusing. And this is why all specialists in this field have abandoned it. I strongly recommend you actually read what they have to say about why they gave up on the word. Again, the bibliography is in Obsolete Paradigm.

I think we are going to have to agree to disagree about this, Richard. My basic response is that I think you are not seeing the forest for all of the trees, and are treating early Christianity as just a variety of eclectic collections of ideas, without any underlying identifiable coherency.

Of course the intersection of Judaism and Platonism predates Christianity, and I discussed that in my paper. But what I don’t think you acknowledge is that this intersection was not resolved coherently immediately. There was a lot of playing around with differing ideas over time, and the inherent problems with these ideas only became apparent gradually. A very common approach at the Hebrew/Platonic synthesis was the Angelomorphic approach of Justin, Clement and Origen, which is also found extensively in the New Testament. This has all been discussed in detail by both Jarl E. Fossum and Charles A. Gieschen. But it became apparent over time that this approach was flawed theologically and could not endure without revision. It either had to be taken in one of two directions, these being the “Gnostic” or the “orthodox”. Obviously, Gnosticism did not reach final form until the 3rd century CE, and orthodoxy until the 4th century. It is necessary to trace these streams backwards in time from the developed forms, otherwise you will just end up with an apparently incoherent diversity of ideas and you will fail to see the underlying developing dialectic.

You are basically correct in saying that there was massive diversity of viewpoints in early Christianity. What I don’t think you recognize, is that underlying this diversity are certain philosophical streams that ultimately flow into two distinct possible types of theology.

As regards my definition, I think you have misconstrued criterion (3) in particular. It does not mean merely “elements of Platonism”. It requires a hierarchical ontology with something corresponding to an ineffable first principle (the One), Intellect with the Forms (the Pleroma in Gnosticism), and then Soul. Marcionism simply does not have these identifiable features. Whereas the Classic Gnosticism of Valentinianism, Sethianism, and so forth does.

My primary concern with your approach is that it really is an attempt to erase Gnosticism from history as a coherent intellectual position. And I think that nothing would be more pleasing to Irenaeus and Tertullian, and Christian orthodoxy in general. But I will leave my paper to speak for itself.

I think that early Christianity is, in theological terms, fundamentally a result of the collision between Judaism and Platonism.

I fear this conflates different periods. Early Christianity (e.g. Paul, Hebrews) is philosophically eclectic, with influence from Stoicism (e.g. pneuma theory) and Aristotelianism (e.g. sarx theory) as well as Platonism, and the Platonism at that stage is filtered: the syncretism of Judaism and Platonism was pre-Christian (e.g. Philo) and only inherited, not something newly developed by Christians. All the Platonism in Paul and Hebrews is probably Jewish, with no direct contact with the Platonic tradition.

More influx of Platonic ideas appears in the second century, not the first, and is initially of mixed popularity. Heretics went bonkers with it (with some rare and poorly understood exceptions, like the explicitly “Aristotelian” sect of Christians who revered the logical writings of Galen and whom Origen appears to have called his students to shun); while orthodoxists were appreciative but wary: e.g. Clement’s and Justin’s “takes” on the philosophical schools is illustrative (hostile and wary even of Platonism, but eclectic in adoption and adaptation), whereas Tertullian’s sarcicism reflects resistance to Platonism yet he loves using Platonism to attack opponents polemically, yet he is an unreliable narrator and thus cannot be trusted to correctly describe the views of men like Marcion. The Platonism of Origen is also illustrative: more honest than Tertullian’s, yet more Aristotelian in flavor, and he was declared heretical a century or so later, even though he was anti- everything you define as Gnostic.

So there just is no simple dichotomous narrative here.

“All in” on Platonism, with the mods of the resistance (e.g. sarcicism won), starts in the fourth century, though you can see the enthusiasm rise in the third. But it’s a much messier and inconsistent story before that.

So Christianity is not a product of “the collision between Judaism and Platonism.” That collision was centuries before and already mainstreamed by the time Christianity arose. And when Christianity arose, Platonism was just one of several influences, with Stoicism and Aristotelianism as or more prominent. Platonism crept more and more into Christianity after, as the sectarian fights washed out in finding Platonism the least problematic (but not unproblematic) worldview to build on, and so you get by the third century Origen condemning Aristotelians as atheists to be shunned and Platonists the only worthy philosophers to listen to. All the while still retaining Aristotelian ideas (like a hybrid form theory).

And the same tack is seen in the “gnostics” who went bonkers adopting Platonist ideas, even while adapting or mixing or matching them: soul-body dichotomy, denigration of appearance over reality, a layered spiritual cosmology with good and evil intermediary spirits, knowledge through pure reason over empiricism, and a supernaturalist theory of forms with an ethical system based thereon (knowing God through contemplation in the mind is the only path to knowing right from wrong). These are all exclusively Platonic ideas (no other school had them), all found in Plutarch and Philo and Marcion.

So there just is no dichotomy here that is of any explanatory value.

Because this story is so complicated and not at all straightforward, oversimplifying it this way is as folly as continuing to use the misinforming category of Gnosticism.

I also think that there are ultimately only two possible ways of reconciling these two traditions in a reasonably stable and coherent manner. One of these approaches came to its completed form in what is traditionally called “classic Gnosticism” (i.e, Valentinianism, Sethianism, and related schools), and the other one came to its completed form in the aftermath of Nicaea, particularly with Augustine.

This theory is disproved by Origen and Justin, who went down the middle. And it creates false lemmas. Thinking “there are only two” or even “there are only three” will mislead you into falsely assuming things about early Christian thinkers, e.g. just because we have no clear outline of what philosophical school an author hitched his wagon to, does not mean we are safe to “plug him in” to one of those two or three models. He might have presented a whole other fourth or fifth model. This is the folly of “assuming” false dichotomies rather than taking each thinker as their own man with their own solution within a complex thread of influences.

For example, Clement was never an Origenist, yet he was also a Platonist, and yet his Platonism was eclectic and not straightforward—and different from the fix effected by Augustine. By contrast, Lactantius is a wholly other animal. And so on.

So we can’t do this “either this or that” stuff. That’s the same error as creating the non-existent category of Gnosticism and continuing to try and make it work when it doesn’t.

A movement is Gnostic in the narrow sense (sensu stricto) if it has all three of the following characteristics:

Now you are inventing a new definition of Gnosticism. That no one can agree on what it even refers to is why it is useless academically. It won’t communicate anything to anyone else who doesn’t know what you mean by it. So you should drop the term and just say what you mean, rather than calling it something with a compromised definition everyone thinks is different than the one you think. This is why the word has become operationally defective and useless for communication.

Drop the word. Just describe your theory.

(1) The belief that the creator of humans as physical beings is an inferior deity, not the first principle of reality, who is ignorant and/or malevolent.

That’s just Marcionism and its descendant sects (Valentinian was simply a copycat of Marcion). And you cannot assume any sect we can peg any other attribute to also adopted (1) so the definition isn’t even useful for understanding other sects. You are just identifying mammals with a list of mammals, not a useful category that can find mammals. And that’s why the word has no use anymore.

(2) The identification of this inferior deity with both the God of the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh (even if not by that name), and the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus.

There is no Christian sect that adopted (2) and not (1). So this is just an elaboration of (1).

(3) This inferior deity is contextualized within a broader metaphysical system which is recognizably Platonic.

Whereas this is an impossible criterion to employ because all sects of Christianity, including Paulinism and Marcionism, adopted elements of Platonism, and vary only in how many or what they did with them; and vary completely (every sect is different). So there is no way to identify any sect as meeting or not meeting this criterion without arbitrary (and therefore useless) criteria for calling some sects “more” or “most” Platonic.

Hence if you drop the “this inferior deity” (which redundantly repeats (1)) you are describing almost every post-first-century sect of Christianity including orthodoxy. And (maybe?) not describing original Paulinism, which is more Stoic and Aristotelian than Platonic, but is still also Platonic, but is Platonic only because the Jewish intellectualism it inherited was already Platonic. So the reality is way too complicated and messy for this over-simplifying definition to be useful.

Again, better to just describe each sect and its multiple influences (Valentinianism is clearly an evolution of Marcionism, but as such is not identical to Marcionism), rather than try to create a grouping of sects that didn’t exist and isn’t interpretively useful.

Thanks again for your reply. I think your position is perfectly reasonable, but, like Dylan Burns, I still am not persuaded by it. I am familiar with the scholarship you refer to. I approach the problem particularly from the point of view of philosophical theology. My arguments are presented in a recent (2025) article in Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies, but very briefly:

I think that early Christianity is, in theological terms, fundamentally a result of the collision between Judaism and Platonism. I also think that there are ultimately only two possible ways of reconciling these two traditions in a reasonably stable and coherent manner. One of these approaches came to its completed form in what is traditionally called “classic Gnosticism” (i.e, Valentinianism, Sethianism, and related schools), and the other one came to its completed form in the aftermath of Nicaea, particularly with Augustine. What label we give to these two distinct intellectual streams aimed at reconciling Judaism with Platonism is ultimately immaterial, but I think that “Gnosticism” and “orthodoxy” are appropriate. Also I don’t think that the theological dialectic of early Christianity can be understood without some terms with these basic meanings.

Regarding the alleged difficulty with a definition, I give a precise definition of Gnosticism in the paper, which I haven’t seen anyone point out any flaws in it (yet). In particular, it clearly demarcates Gnosticism from Marcionism, which seems to be one of your major issues. Here is my definition:

A movement is Gnostic in the narrow sense (sensu stricto) if it has all three of the following characteristics:

(1) The belief that the creator of humans as physical beings is an inferior deity, not the first principle of reality, who is ignorant and/or malevolent.
(2) The identification of this inferior deity with both the God of the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh (even if not by that name), and the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus.
(3) This inferior deity is contextualized within a broader metaphysical system which is recognizably Platonic.

Note that Marcionism is excluded because it fails criterion (3). Paul fails all three criteria.

As regards Paul, I think the problem here is with trying to apply terms that are perfectly applicable in one period of time, to an earlier period of time. “Gnosticism”, in the classic sense as defined above, did not exist until the second century CE. Similarly, “orthodoxy” did not exist until Nicaea. So it is quite inappropriate to call Paul either Gnostic or orthodox. His beliefs do not represent a coherent final phase in the development of early Christian thought, and can be seen as an origin point for both of the later developments. He is both proto-Gnostic and proto-orthodox. I do not actually think this view conflicts much with your own. My interpretation of Paul is slightly different from yours (I am a “Jesus sceptic” rather than a “Jesus mythicist” – that is, I think Jesus was probably historical but also think we can know very little if anything about him), but everything I have said here is perfectly compatible with your view and with the mythicist interpretation of Paul. My view on the chronology of the New Testament writings is also very similar to yours.

Anyway, that is why I think the term “Gnostic” is still important and useful. Without it, an important philosophical stance aimed at reconciling Judaism and Platonism gets swept under the carpet, or treated as bizarre and ridiculous and not worthy of serious philosophical consideration. Whereas I think that it is both significant and worthy of analysis in its own right.

“many Christians and other” — and other. In other words, the target is Christians siding with the Platonists he is opposing, and he is lumping them all together. It is not a sect of Christians. And Plotinus never named them Gnostics. Neither is Porphyry. Who is also talking about anyone (not just Christians) who pushes the opposed doctrines. And he is describing them. Not naming them.

This is why none of Plontinus’s arguments relate to Christian arguments against any Christian adopting these views. His arguments are solely against the Platonists adopting these views, regardless of whether they are Christians.

The term “Neoplatonism” is not found in any ancient author but is a 19th century invention. It would be odd, though, for someone to claim that “Neoplatonism did not exist”.

The difference is that modern scholars admit this. They say outright that this is their label, not an ancient one, to describe an over-arching phenomenon, and it reflects chronology not an absolute assignment of beliefs. And that chronological reality actually existed.

This is not what happened with Gnosticism. Scholars claimed this was an ancient category (even, for example, mistranslating Irenaeus to invent evidence for that claim). When the new scholarship realized that was false, and then asked whether even the phenomenon existed and thus the word could be rescued as a modern label, then they found a different result than for chronological markers like “Neoplatonism.” This is all discussed in the cited literature. Dozens of scholars went through this process and wrung their hands over whether the term could be rescued like this, and all concluded it can’t. So if you really want to understand this, follow the bibliography (I give a most up to date one in Obsolete Paradigm).

The reason they concluded that way is that when we reclassify it as a modern label, it fails to have any consistent target, and produces too many mistaken conclusions. Every doctrine assumed to be Gnostic exists in Orthodoxy, just in a different way (e.g. Paul replaces the Demiurge with Satan, but otherwise his worldview is broadly identical). And when you define Gnostic as any conjunction of those things, then you end up with no generalizable category.

For example, it ends up in one mix with “Marcionites” and their subsequent subsects and later thinkers. Not “Gnostics.” So you may as well drop “Gnostic” and talk about “Marcionites.” Conversely, too many sects were being roped in with the label, e.g. some sect says one thing, which sounds “Gnostic,” and so scholars concluded that that sect believed other things that they (not any ancient author) attribute as “Gnostic,” producing false conclusions about what diverse sects believed.

This is why the label needs to be abandoned. It does too much damage to reliable understanding of the ancient world to be retainable. No such grouping existed in antiquity. No conjunction of criteria makes any sect Gnostic rather than, just, whatever it actually is (like Valentinian etc.). And no criteria for what is Gnostic distinguishes any sect from any other. For example, you can say “which sects adopted Demiurge theory” and the answer is “Marcionites and their successors,” not other sects that adopted any or all other components of the modern construct of Gnosticism (like Paulinism).

So the conclusion of modern scholars is to avoid Gnostic as an unhelpful and confusing term and just talk about individual sects and thought-leaders and what they taught, and not assume we can know what they did if we don’t have any evidence they did (so you can’t use Gnosticism to “guess” at unevidenced beliefs for a sect by spotting its adoption of a few or most things moderns attach to the word “Gnostic”). Moreover, “Gnosticism” distorts understanding the other way, too: e.g. that Irenaeus actually meant by gnostics everyone he disagreed with and that he was not attacking gnosis but false gnosis (while advocating for his own gnosis) completely changes how we understand ancient Christianity and its polemical literature.

That’s why the word “Gnosticism” is disinformative and needs to be abandoned. It does no useful work and in fact does a great deal of harm to a correct understanding of ancient Christianity and its literature.

Thanks for your reply Richard. I appreciate your comments. I’m not convinced by your interpretation of the titles of Enn. II.9 (which relates to Porphyry’s use of the term “Gnostic”, not Plotinus), but very briefly I would respond to some of the points you raise as follows:

In chapter 16 of the “Life of Plotinus”, Porphyry says “There were at this time many Christians and other, and sectarians who had abandoned the old philosophy …”, and goes on to mention Zostrianos (amongst other works) as being circulated amongst these people. He goes on to say that “Against the Gnostics” was written against these people, and then says, “Amelius went to forty volumes in writing against the book of Zostrianus”. According to Turner, “Indeed, Plotinus’ antignostic critique in Ennead II 9 [33], 10 seems actually to cite Zostrianos (Zost. NHC VIII 10.1–20), which raises the question of the extent to which the doctrines he read in these Sethian texts may have made positive contributions to his own metaphysical philosophy.” (Turner, J.D. (2017). Sethian Gnostic Appropriations of Plato. In Renaud, F., Baltzly, D., Layne, D. A., & Tarrant, H. (eds.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity (Vol. 13). BRILL. Footnote 4, page 294).

What you describe as “weird things” actually make perfect sense if read as a critique of the kind of Platonizing Sethianism found in Zostrianos and other works. Every detail matches. It is true that Zostrianos may be classed as pagan rather than Christian. However, it would be hard to deny its close relationship to specifically Christian (Sethian) texts such as the Secret Book of John, and Porphyry mentions Christians as noted above. It is true that Plotinus does not mention any specifically Christian doctrine in his critique. That is in part because Zostrianos is not Christian, but it also reflects the fact that Plotinus could care less about Christianity. He was a Platonist, and he was annoyed at what he saw as the misrepresentation and distortion of Platonism.

I would also make the following point. Even if the term “Gnostic” was never used in any ancient writing to denote a specific set of beliefs, as you argue, that does not mean that it cannot serve as a useful technical term for modern scholars. The term “Neoplatonism” is not found in any ancient author but is a 19th century invention. It would be odd, though, for someone to claim that “Neoplatonism did not exist”.

I accept that many scholars are in agreement with you on this issue. However, I just want to end by demonstrating that the scholarship is not one-sided on this issue. Let me quote Dylan Burns:

“Anglophone scholarship now fruitfully investigates sources formerly known as “Gnostic” without recourse to some modern construction of “Gnosticism,” but to other aspects of their ancient social and intellectual environments … While acknowledging that much has been learned by studying “Gnostic” sources without reference to some category of “Gnosticism,” the present contribution argues that some connotation of the term “Gnosticism” remains useful—even necessary—to denote the philosophical presuppositions regarding creation and salvation that underlie the body of texts that Brakke rightfully associates with the “Gnostics” …” (Burns, Dylan M. 2016. “Providence, creation and Gnosticism according to the Gnostics.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24: 55–79. Quotes from pages 55-57.

First, Ennead 2.9 isn’t about Christians, but a pagan school of Platonists, disputing whether evil comes from matter or the soul (they say soul, Plotinus says matter). So, already, we’re done. This isn’t a Christian sect or anything to do with any Christian teaching.

Second, that chapter never mentions that school being called “Gnostics.” So it can’t be cited as doing so. The description “Against Those Who Say That the Universe and Its Maker Are Evil” is Plotinus’s title for that chapter. He never names his opponents.

Third, Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 5.33 reads Πρὸς τοὺς γνωστικούς and then gives the first line of the text, which relates to the first chapter of 2.9 (2.9.1–4) which is about theory of knowledge and why and how God has knowledge and his opponents don’t. The line thus should read “Against those [claiming] to understand,” in reference to the people claiming divinely correct knowledge of the soul, which Plotinus denies his disputants have.

Porophyry likely gets this from the central thesis which appears in 2.9.13, “What, after all, is there so terrible in these Spheres with which it is sought to frighten people unaccustomed to reasoning, never trained in an instructive and coherent gnosis?” Thus Plotinus (like Irenaeus) is for gnosis, not against it. His opponents merely falsely claim to have it. Hence when Porphyry says he writes against “the knowers” this means those of false knowledge, not those of knowledge.

Plotinus covers a lot of weird things these false knowers claim, among which just happens to be the idea that the creator is evil and the whole world is evil, which is being described at 24 by quoting Plotinus’s actual title, as there Porphyry says the second ennead “following the more strictly ethical First” ennead “is physical, containing the disquisitions on the world and all that belongs to the world,” and thus he there describes the Ennead-Tractate 2.9 as being on the physics of evil rather than, as its opening part, the question of who really knows what. Earlier he merely emphasizes that earlier part and its theme across the rest of the chapter, thus emphasizing its epistemology rather than its physics.

So Porphyry’s brief line is not the “name” of Plotinus’s opponents, but a description of them: they are being described as knowing things they don’t. Just like Irenaeus did. And their false knowledge ranges widely, only just happening to include the question of malogenesis and its attribution to a separate Creator that Plotinus denies exists (their “Demiurge” theory). This is what led modern scholars to misread this in light of their invention of a Gnostic sect of Christians.

For example:

They tell us they can free themselves of diseases. But if they meant, by temperate living and an appropriate regime, they would be right and in accordance with all sound knowledge. But they assert diseases to be Spirit-Beings and boast of being able to expel them by formula: this pretension may enhance their importance with the crowd, gaping upon the powers of magicians; but they can never persuade the intelligent that disease arises otherwise than from such causes as overstrain, excess, deficiency, putrid decay; in a word, some variation whether from within or from without.

Notice the emphasis on true vs. false knowledge being the actual distinction between Plotinus and these “false” Platonists he is attacking.

And:

Their error is that they know nothing good here: all they care for is something else to which they will at some future time apply themselves: yet, this world, to those that have known it once, must be the starting-point of the pursuit: arrived here from out of the divine nature, they must inaugurate their effort by some earthly correction. The understanding of beauty is not given except to a nature scorning the delight of the body, and those that have no part in well-doing can make no step towards the Supernal. This school, in fact, is convicted by its neglect of all mention of virtue: any discussion of such matters is missing utterly:

So, again, not Christians (who certainly discoursed endlessly on virtues), but rival Platonists; and the dispute is over their claiming to know things they don’t. Which ranges beyond Demiurge theory and includes all sorts of peculiar Pseudo-Platonist notions that Plotinus is annoyed with.

This is also why none of Plotinus’s arguments against them are what their own peers (orthodox Christians) use to refute and denounce them, and he draws none of those arguments in here—because these aren’t Christians, but fellow Platonists.

Certainly many Christian factions adopted Platonism, and thus some (e.g. Marcion) adopted this faction of Platonism Plotinus is refuting. But that is not what Plotinus is talking about (nor what Porphyry ever says or assumed he was talking about either). It was modern scholars who came up with that idea and turned it into a dogma, until a recent “re-look” convinced scholars now that that was an error.