The Second Treatise of the Great Seth

What it is

Christ speaks in the first person and says that it was not he who died: another drank the gall and vinegar, another carried the cross on his shoulder, and he himself was above, laughing at their ignorance.

Why it lasted

The fullest surviving statement of the substitution theory Irenaeus attributed to Basilides, and the sharpest evidence of how differently the cross could be understood inside second- and third-century Christianity.

Scripture it works from

Where to read it

Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.

• Christian Classics Ethereal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Internet Archive

These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.