The main questions that arise in regard to Basilides are two:  (1) Are the quotations supposed to be made by him really his? (2) Are they quotations from our Gospels?

The doubt as to the authorship of the quotations applies chiefly to those which occur in the ‘Refutation of the Heresies’ by Hippolytus.  This writer begins his account of the Basilidian tenets by saying, ’Let us see here how Basilides along with Isidore and his crew belie Matthias,’ [Endnote 191:1] &c.  He goes on using for the most part the singular [Greek:  phaesin], but sometimes inserting the plural [Greek:  kat’ autous].  Accordingly, it has been urged that quotations which are referred to the head of the school really belong to his later followers, and the attempt has further been made to prove that the doctrines described in this section of the work of Hippolytus are later in their general character than those attributed to Basilides himself.  This latter argument is very fine drawn, and will not bear any substantial weight.  It is, however, probably true that a confusion is sometimes found between the ‘eponymus,’ as it were, of a school and his followers.  Whether that has been the case here is a question that we have not sufficient data for deciding positively.  The presumption is against it, but it must be admitted to be possible.  It seems a forced and unnatural position to suppose that the disciples would go to one set of authorities and the master to another, and equally unnatural to think that a later critic, like Hippolytus, would confine himself to the works of these disciples and that in none of the passages in which quotations are introduced he has gone to the fountain head.  We may decline to dogmatise; but probability is in favour of the supposition that some at least of the quotations given by Hippolytus come directly from Basilides.

Some of the quotations discussed in ‘Supernatural Religion’ are expressly assigned to the school of Basilides.  Thus Clement of Alexandria, in stating the opinion which this school held on the subject of marriage, says that they referred to our Lord’s saying, ‘All men cannot receive this,’ &c.

Strom. iii.  I. 1.

[Greek:  Ou pantes chorousi ton logon touton, eisi gar eunouchoi oi men ek genetaes oi de ex anankaes.]

Matt. xix. 11, 12.

[Greek:  Ou pantes chorousi ton logon touton, all’ ois dedotai, eisin gar eunouchoi oitines ek kiolias maetros egennaethaesan outos, kai eisin eunouchoi oitines eunouchisthaesan hupo ton anthropon, k.t.l.]

The reference of this to St. Matthew is far from being so ‘preposterous’ [Endnote 192:1] as the critic imagines.  The use of the word [Greek:  chorein] in this sense is striking and peculiar:  it has no parallel in the New Testament, and but slight and few parallels, as it appears from the lexicons and commentators, in previous literature.  The whole phrase is a remarkable one and the verbal coincidence exact, the words that follow are an easy and natural abridgment.  On the same principles on which it is denied that this is a quotation from St. Matthew it would be easy to prove a priori that many of the quotations in Clement of Alexandria could not be taken from the canonical Gospels which, we know, are so taken.