(M. Vinzent, Christ's resurrection, p. 179)[Basilides] ha a positive opinion of the creator who can naturally be known, a knowledge that is unlimited beauty of an insurmontable creation. As a result, Basilides accepts marriage, and not only admits Jesus' baptism, like the Valentinians, but even celebrates it.
(p. 176)Melito of Sardis ... also sides with Justin against Marcion in accepting the Jewish scriptures.
(p. 102)Contrary to Marcion, Valentinus did not despise the created world. He admitted that the universe was not a perfect product, yet 'thye defect within the act of modeling' was remediated by God's name in men.
...On the other hand, Valentinus sided again with Marcion and tried to position his view of Christ' s bodily constitution between the extremes of pure docetism, according to which Jesus in his divinity could neither drink nor eat, and pure creationism, according to which jesus was nothing but a human being of lesh and bones.
(p. 122)Marcion seems to have suggested non just an angelic but also a glorious sun-like, astral and sideric nature of the Lord's body. Apelles added the gradual assumption of angelic matter during the descent and the discarding of it again during Christ's ascent.
(Author: Matti Myllykoski; Source: A Companion to Second-Century Christian 'Heretics', p. 231, my bold)The setting of Cerinthus’ proclamation is, as Charles E. Hill notes, “very different from, and arguably earlier than, that of Valentinianism”: he took Jesus as a natural offspring of Joseph and Mary.50 Hill proposes that Cerinthus was a predecessor of Cerdo and Marcion, who also taught that the God who made the world was not the highest God, who was proclaimed by Jesus, and that the Creator was ignorant of this supreme and only good God. The Christologies of Cerinthus and Marcion differ notably, but Hill assumes that the adoptionism of Cerinthus was a different component of his thought that was not taken up by Marcion. According to Hill, the theology of Cerinthus was a coherent mixture of different ideas.51 I have some difficulties in accepting this stimulating theory. It is not quite clear how the revolutionary idea of a highest and good God versus the ignorant Creator God would have reached Cerinthus in early second-century Asia. Since all the teachers that make this sort of distinction are later than Cerinthus, it is difficult to perceive where it came from.52 Furthermore, I find it difficult to imagine a process in which Cerinthus, as the first Christian teacher known to us, could have adopted a part of such drastic, novel and anti-Biblical worldview and made it a neat part of his own theology, which leaned on the primitive adoptionist Christology.
Note the contradiction in the words of last quote:
1) Cerinthus is not a proponent of gnostic marcionite dualism because Cerinthus comes before Marcion.
2) because Cerinthus leaned on the primitive adoptionist Christology.
3) but adoptionism is post-Marcion, not pre-Marcion.
I would say it is the exact contrary: adoptionism, as separationism, as incarnationalism, as ditheism, as monarchianism, as claims of be possessed by Christ (shared by Simon Magus and Mani, too), are all more or less timide or strong reactions against Marcion's alienus deus.
