Little is known about Apelles. He was a disciple of Marcion, probably at Rome, but left (or was expelled from) the Marcionite society. Tertullian tells us (De praescriptione haereticorum 30) that this was because he had become intimate with a woman named Philumena who claimed to be possessed by an angel, who gave her 'revelations' which Apelles read out in public. Marcion of Sinope (ca. ... Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, anglicized as Tertullian, (b. ...
He then went to Alexandria, where he developed his doctrine, a modified Marcionism, which (according to Tertullian) admitted that Christ possessed true human flesh but continued to deny the nativity (Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem III.1.1).
Apelles wrote a book entitled Syllogisms -- 'reasonings' -- though the word itself suggests that Apelles may have intended to oppose Marcion's 'Antitheses', which set the Old Testament and the New Testament against each other. The Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures (also called the Hebrew Bible) constitutes the first major part of the Bible according to Christianity. ... The New Testament, sometimes called the Greek Scriptures, is the name given to the part of the Christian Bible that was written after the birth of Jesus. ...
He is last heard of in Rome in the last portion of the second century (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History).
His followers, the 'Apelliacos' or Apelleasts, are likewise unknown. Tertullian wrote a tract against them which has not survived. Ambrose of Milan in the 4th century directs some of his comments in his 'De paradiso' (On the Garden of Eden) against this sect, but whether the sect was still active or whether Ambrose had merely copied another now lost work of Tertullian on the same subject is unknown.
Tertullian mentions a teaching of this sect that flesh was constructed for seduced souls by a certain 'fiery prince of evil' (De Carne Christi 8 and De Anima 23). This seems related to the sort of gnostic ideas held by Basilides or Valentinus. Later Marcionite ideas described by the Armenian Eznik (or Yeznik Koghbatsi) seem similar to this.
Tertullian, De carne Christi, introduction by Ernest Evans, 1956 (http://www.tertullian.org/articles/evans_carn/evans_carn_02intro.htm)
Gnostics were "people who knew", and their knowledge at once constituted them a superior class of beings, whose present and future status was essentially different from that of those who, for whatever reason, did not know.
The Gnostics, it is true, borrowed their terminology almost entirely from existing religions, but they only used it to illustrate their great idea of the essential evil of this present existence and the duty to escape it by the help of magic spells and a superhuman Saviour.
The Gnostics seem also to have used oil sacramentally for the healing of the sick, and even the dead were anointed by them to be rendered safe and invisible in their transit through the realms of the archons.
Apelles is first encountered as a younger man in Rome under the influence of the teacher Marcion (d.
Apelles disagreed with the tenets of Marcion's thought, being instead convinced of the unity of the unbegotten God and of a Christ in the flesh, and was forced to leave his mentor.
Apelles continued to give credence to the continuation of the prophetic movement, and came under the influence of "a certain Philumene," so that he "wrote a book containing her teaching, with the title Phanerôseis," to which Tertullian and others pay testimony (Lawlor 1928: 170).
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