Agrippa Castor
Agrippa Castor has been identified as "the earliest recorded writer against heresy, and apparently the only one who composed a book solely devoted to the refutation of Basilides" but of whom we know only what is told quite second-hand in the ancient recollections. No modern scholar appears to have devoted attention not merely to him but for his role in the history of anti-heretical literature.
Agrippa Castor was known by both Eusebius and Jerome exclusively as the one who provided that critique of Basilides (died c. 132) and his twenty-four books of "Exegetics," without any other datum by which Agrippa Castor himself might be remembered. Eusebius, by locating him within the narrative of early gnostic "succession" and schools, provides no more hint of his lifetime, while Jerome incorporates his remarks on Agrippa Castor between those on Quadratus and Aristidesboth at Athens, the first of the Christian "apologists", and those on Hegesippus, and Justin both at Rome, the latter of whose apologetic writings are sufficiently preserved to provide some kind of exact chronological placement.
From this limited evidence, it could be surmised that "Quadratus wrote when Hadrian visited Athens" in the winter of 124-125; "Aristides and Justin probably replied to the attack made by the rhetorician Fronto" who was consul suffectus in 143. Hegesippus is not included by modern scholarship among the "apologists," being known instead with Eusebius and Jerome as historian, who "went to Rome in the time of Anicetus, the tenth bishop after Peter, and continued there till the time of Eleutherius", which can be dated between circa 155 and 189. Of that "History," or those "Memoirs" with Eusebius, by Hegesippus, little remains beyond the several longer quotations included, which, according to Jerome, covered "all ecclesiastical events from the passion of our Lord down to his own period."
Within this framework and into this interval, Agrippa Castor belongs, and what he has to say about Basilides shows much of the same opposition to "idols" as does Hegesippus. "Agrippa accuses Basilides of teaching that it was a matter of no moral significance to taste food offered to idols", that one could "renounce without reservation the faith in times of persecution" and that "he imposed upon his followers a five years' silence after the manner of Pythagoras", but otherwise Agrippa Castor is recorded as having found in Basilides the same concern for the numerical significance of names, like "Abrasax" ascribed to "his most high God", otherwise found engraved on Greek magical gems or recorded in Greek magical papyri. Agrippa Castor must have been one of the first to "demonize" magic and sorcery in the ancient Christian world.
Clyde Curry Smith