Apuleius tells us of his own popularity as a writer, and yet both the literary and the material records are silent about his works for almost one hundred and fifty years after his death. Various attempts to identify allusions to his works before Lactantius and other fourth-century authors have proven unconvincing. This article suggests that there is a clear allusion to the Metamorphoses in Tertullian's treatise Aduersus Valentinianos (beginning of the third century). Tertullian uses Apuleius to denigrate the Valentinians and to assimilate the name of one of their gods to the braying of an ass.

Gnostic studies mainly depended on the Church Fathers' approach to heresies until the discovery of the Coptic Nag Hammadi codices in 1945. As we are slowly moving away from this patristic approach to Gnosticism, docetism is still defined as a tendency to regard Jesus' body as an appearance, and not as a real incarnate body. Irenaeus' refutation of all heresies presents the Valentinian and Basilidian Christologies as clearly docetist. A comparison of direct Valentinian sources such as the Extracts of Theodotus with Valentinian tractates from Nag Hammadi shows on the contrary that Valentinians had a clear notion of the incarnation. As for the Basilidians, the Elenchos of Ps.-Hippolytus, the Second Logos of the Great Seth and the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter can be used to demonstrate that docetism is not the proper category to interpret Basilidian Christology and Soteriology because the purification of the real body of the Saviour lies at the heart of that system.