When one opens Bentley Layton's book, The Gnostic Scriptures, one finds that the section on" Valentinian Gnosticism" is entitled," The School of Valentinus." l Layton writes," Thus the Valentinian movement had the character of a philosophical school, or network of schools, rather than a distinct religious sect.,, 2 I can only agree emphatically with Layton in accepting this widely held judgment which goes back in its essentials to the heresiologists of the early church and has long been a point of agreement in the notoriously splintered scholarship on Gnosticism. 3 It is all the more surprising that research has been done on" the Greek school" and the Nag Hammadi writings, 4 on the Christological" school" differences between" Valentinisme ltalien et Valentinisme oriental'" and, of course, on various aspects of the prosopography and doxography of individual members of the school and its alleged head, but (to my