Marcus
SECOND CENTURY. Gnostic.* Perhaps an Alexandrian, he taught in Asia Minor. Irenaeus and Hippolytus described him as a charlatan who deceived women by magical devices to become his prophetesses. He developed the ideas of Valentinus* in a one-sided fashion. A characteristic feature is “number-symbolism”; from the numerical values of divine names he sought to discover the nature and order of the aeons, and the mode by which the world came into being. His followers, Marcosians, flourished in the Rhone valley in the mid-second century. They stood right outside the church with their own institutions and special baptismal rites. As scriptures they used the Acts of Thomas and other apocryphal books. They lingered into the fourth century.